Why You Should Be Atheist

[Esquilax]

I'm not looking to convert you. I don't even think I could. Like they say, you can lead an atheist to water, but you can't make him think.

It doesn't matter whether you're looking to convert me or not; evidence would do so if you had it to present. Like most things Ray Comfort says, that line of yours is willfully inaccurate, designed to make theists feel better over the failure of their position, rather than reflecting something accurate about atheists.

If you can't prove yourself right, just attack those who can, right?

But I don't think knowledgeable atheists run around saying there are no reasons or evidence to justify religious belief. I'm sorry, but such a view is not representative of the position of educated atheists who are familiar with the various works and claims. Educated people are much more tentative (see what Carl Sagan believed).

And I shouldn't really need to remind people that when I speak, I'm just doing it on my behalf; I'm a guy, not some atheist meta-consciousness. When I look, I don't find evidence so much as I do rationalizations and circumstantial fragments of data that don't point to anything directly, but are used by theist to confirm the religion they already have.

If you guys want to believe based on that, or on personal revelation or what have you, then great. I don't.

For instance, intelligent atheists would recognize that evidence (defined narrowly) is not wholly relevant. Peter Higgs predicted the Higgs Boson mathematically before we had a shred of physical evidence. He used applied logic (theoretical physics, ie the application of mathematics to physics). If Higgs' work justified serious consideration of the hypothesized God particle in the absence of evidence, then theism can rightfully claim the same consideration.

Two key differences; one is that the Higgs Boson wasn't declared to be real by healthy chunks of the population until the experimental evidence confirmed it. The proponents of the Higgs Boson hadn't had thousands of years- since before the advent of the modern day scientific method- to find this evidence, they managed to do so in something like fifty years.

The other key difference is that Higgs went through the scientific community in order to gain acceptance of his theory; he had his papers published, a theoretical framework and experimental standard was set up, complete with falsifiability, which were executed on and found to be accurate. Where are the same for god?

I fully agree; your god hypothesis should be held to the same standards, and if any of the multitude of theists in the world would care to take the same methodology, go through the same channels, and develop a method by which god can be tested, then they should. It should happen, and should merit the same level of scrutiny and thought as any other claim. But are you aware of this happening? Can you think of a single example of god coming under the same microscope the Higgs Boson did?

There are religious organizations with the money to fund things like this, no matter how expensive, they just don't. Instead, they litigate their science in through the back door, or create their own journals instead of going through peer review like any other theory would.

If you've got a problem with the level of honest attention the god hypothesis is receiving, then the people you should be complaining to are the creationists who won't put it up to the same scrutiny.

Of course, speaking of evidence is itself a silly thing. Do you expect to find physical evidence of a non-physical entity? Does a lack of direct physical evidence necessarily justify a lack of belief, such as when your eyes are closed and you lack visual evidence that your girlfriend is lying next to you?

If god interacts with the physical world, the effects can be tested. If they can't, if there's no way to detect him from a human perspective, then how can anyone be justified in believing it?

Philosophy is great for some things, but you can't use it to prove something to exist without corroboration, because on its own its just thoughts. And the works in theoretical mathematics and so on are also worthwhile of thought, but they certainly don't justify the operating assumption that god is real that the religious edifice has.

It's weird; I agree with some of what you're saying, but the spirit behind your thinking and the actual reality that we atheists are experiencing and dealing with on a daily basis reveals the problem with it; you are right that all ideas should be given the same investigative rigor, the weird part is that you're addressing this to the wrong group of people.