(August 30, 2013 at 11:20 pm)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: I do not understand why so many atheists simply fall back and say you can't prove there is no god,
I think it's pretty easy to understand. As you said yourself, it's a fallback position. If you can't prove that god exists but you want to believe it anyway, you can deflect inquiry by trying to turn the tables. As I pointed out to jstrodel, a child who believes in the Tooth Fairy has more evidence for his claim than the person who believes in a god that takes an active role in the lives of human beings.
Imagine if that child did not want to give up his belief in the Tooth Fairy? His parents could explain every step they took in creating the impression, but the child could easily reject them. He didn't see them take the tooth from under his pillow, and he may even consider it preposterous that they could move his pillow without waking him. He didn't see them placing money under the pillow. All he knows is that they told him what the Tooth Fairy does, and it happened exactly as they said... why are they changing their story now? And so on.
If you want to believe something badly enough, you'll grab on to any possibility, no matter how unlikely or even how absurd it may seem.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
