RE: Attn: Theists - What would it take to prove you wrong?
August 8, 2013 at 9:08 pm
(This post was last modified: August 8, 2013 at 9:10 pm by apricot-and-a-coffee.)
There's no way to prove God doesn't exist; there's just common sense and probability. (I'm thinking of Dawkins' teacup illustration.) Yes, there's a slight possibility that there's a god, but it's really not probable. If scientific evidence indicated there was a god, I would change my mind accordingly. I might not be ecstatic about it, but I wouldn't try to live in denial.
In exploring atheism from a Christian background, I found it particularly helpful to focus not on the threat of hell or the sheer number of religions out there, but purely on the evidence for a god. I naturally found the idea of a god hard to believe, but I didn't want to base my worldview on my feelings or instinctual reaction. I've read a lot of good arguments for atheism, but most notable for me was the mathematical improbability of God's existence, as well as the fact that most of religious knowledge is based on holy books, not scientific discovery.
P.S. I'm not a theist, so you weren't exactly asking me, but I thought I'd share a bit of my thought process anyway. I never believed in a god, but I did go through a period of trying to give Christianity an open-minded evaluation and see if my atheism would hold up after that.
In exploring atheism from a Christian background, I found it particularly helpful to focus not on the threat of hell or the sheer number of religions out there, but purely on the evidence for a god. I naturally found the idea of a god hard to believe, but I didn't want to base my worldview on my feelings or instinctual reaction. I've read a lot of good arguments for atheism, but most notable for me was the mathematical improbability of God's existence, as well as the fact that most of religious knowledge is based on holy books, not scientific discovery.
P.S. I'm not a theist, so you weren't exactly asking me, but I thought I'd share a bit of my thought process anyway. I never believed in a god, but I did go through a period of trying to give Christianity an open-minded evaluation and see if my atheism would hold up after that.