Why You Should Be Atheist

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

"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. "

And thereby created a scientific hypotheis that later developed into a theory that may become a widely accepted theory as the results from the LHC come in.

God appears to be stuck at the hypothesis stage.

"Do you expect to find physical evidence of a non-physical entity? "

If that non-physical entity is credited with creating all that is physical then yes - we would expect to find evidence of that.

Also - although not really relevant to this thread but your signature:

"Which makes Richard Dawkins the intellectual equivalent of an amputee, furiously waving his stumps in the air, boasting that he has no hands.""

Or it shows evolution in progress. The old hard wiring in the brain is changing as it is evolutionarily advantageous that we stop allocating things we don't understand to magic and start trying to investigate and understand them through scientific method.

Its also not usually a good idea for a theist who believes in a miracle working God to bring up amputee's.

None of the reasoning in this post seems sound.

For example, the length of time a hypothesis remains a hypothesis says nothing about whether the hypothesis is true or false.

One could also have created the physical universe without leaving a calling card, signature or fingerprint. What would this kind of evidence even look like?

You've not done your homework on what you believe, evidently.

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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.

I appreciate that you're trying to make a substantial post, but you're trading on too much bad logic here.

I can't dispute that your limited exposure might have led you to conclude the work is all "rationalizations and circumstantial fragments of data" (I'm interested to know what you are referring to specifically).

But I can point out some very bad reasoning with your analysis of a theistic or deistic hypothesis. For instance, your trading on vague wording like "healthy chunks of the population".

And your mistaken impression that the amount of time a claim remains unproven is indicative of it's truth value.

Not to mention the implication that the truth of a claim depends on peer-reviewed scientific publication. I mean, do you disbelieve your memories, or something someone tells you because it isn't peer reviewed? This is simply terrible reasoning.

If there exists a deity, and this deity is immaterial, no physical science is going to be able to "discover" it. Your fallacy here is called the category error.

Moreover you assume testability is the mark of truth. But this view has been rejected by the scientific and philosophical community for about fifty years now (see the thread on brain-mind in which I point this out).

What about the claim that "If physical effects of an agent's intervention cannot be tested, there is no justification for believing that they exist(ed) (I add the -ed because of some interesting Deistic hypotheses I came across that suggest that God existed in the past but not anymore)? I don't think that stands up to rational scrutiny either.

Take a person named John who lived, say, 300 years ago. You can't test this agent's intervention in the world today- they've been dead for years. Does that mean they don't exist? Rubbish.

You're halfway rational in making some of your claims. I get the feeling you're just not scrutinizing them enough, however, to see where they go off the rails and how to correct them.

That being said, you're a mile ahead of most people on this forum, so I can't complain too hard.

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We're retreading old ground here.

That you think no evidence has been provided is reflective of your own ignorance, not of the work of theistic thinkers.

You need to familiarize yourself with the evidence.

So people are hard wired for faith. Being an atheist doesn't mean I don't have a lot of faith. But I do not express this faith in any organized religion. I have faith in myself and I have faith in the human species. Even though there are people like you, that say that my lack of faith means that I am an amputee, or at least your quote did, who are you to judge me? What do you know of my upbringing? My faith is that people will continue to create and discover more, and my hope is that someday all people will get along, even though at this time of war and oppression, that hope seems futile, I have faith that people will change, and see the wrong they enacted on humanity. So you see, faith is about believing in yourself and others, even though you're nothing, you're useless, you're stupid, you have faith that you're great.

Because being an atheist means having faith in the entire human species, it is actually a far more humanistic way of looking at life than any other religion has ever attempted. Religions disagree and fight over their imaginary beings, while I just have faith in the human species, something real, as one, all the humans that cover the earth, and faith in myself. But we must remember that humans are good and bad, and to encourage the good, so far as we understand, because every person is important.

I'm personally a bit tetchy about the meaning of faith myself. Even theists don't know how to define the word faith given the various ways in which the word is used in everyday locution.

It's more than likely that when two people are talking about faith, they are talking past each other because they don't use the same dictionary definition the other is using.

Sorry, nothing personal in not responding to the content of your post in more detail.

One thing we can agree on, however is that Zazzy's definition is something that religious people don't use. It's a fictional definition, sort of like Christians who react to the word "atheist" as if it means "baby-eater". Just stupid.