My issues with Atheism, Lets talk :)

[Eilonnwy]

I've always felt a very spiritual presence in my life - in the eyes of woman, the outdoors, the moon, the rain, mountains, deep meditation, writing music (not the analytical type). In other words you could say I'm agnostic, or an atheist or an agnostic atheist (what the hell am I? haha). I've NEVER believed in 1 or 100 gods, but I've always believed that god was everything - I worship nature, I can FEEL nature, and human connection and that there is a larger power and force at work in the world.

If you don't believe in God then you're an atheist. If you believe god is nature, then you're probably not an atheist because you have a concept of God that you believe in, regardless of how utterly useless it is.

Definitions matter, so saying something like "God is nature" means nothing. It's the same as "God is love". Well I believe love exists but does that mean I believe in God? Of course not, because God is a substantive concept of a higher being whether the notion is personal or deistic. To slap on a definition like nature or love loses the significance of what we're arguing about.

I can't prove it... but you can't disprove it.

And this is the crux of the problem. WE don't have to disprove it. You make the claim, back it up. Of course if you want to believe something and keep it to yourself, that is entirely up to you. However, it's important to realize that just because someone can't disprove it, doesn't make it okay to believe it. Yeah we can't disprove it, but you can't prove it. You can make up whatever fantasy you want about what God is but it has no shred of validity versus the beliefs of other people, and there are people out there that will kill you based on those fantasies.

Your actions are determined by your beliefs, and while it may seem harmless to believe god is nature, it's not harmless to believe god wants you to kill gays or nonbelievers. They can't prove their beliefs anymore than you can.

Furthermore, when you put up certain propositions about a God concept it is possible to test those propositions as long as they are falsifiable, so in that capacity I think it can be possible to disprove something.

My problem with Atheism in its sole dependence on the scientific method. It is simply a tool to break things down into categories, but creating categories is really just created by humans, its a human process.

Atheism is not dependent on the scientific method. As stated previously it's just a lack of belief in God. Many atheists can hold other supernatural beliefs without belief in God. What you seem to be arguing against is more science and skepticism.

Anyway, the fact that science is a human construct doesn't invalidate the science itself. That's a fallacy. The reason why we know it works is it provides results. Of course we can't know anything, and people who adhere to skepticism will be the first to tell you, but the scientific method has proven to be the best method by which we can understand the world. As human process goes, it's fucking awesome.

In other words, we, as human beings, created EVERYTHING that can actually explain anything.

Of course we did, because that's all we have.

The basis of Atheism seems to be, I'll believe only that which is proven with logic or experiments.

No, that's skepticism, but many atheists arrive at their atheism through a process like this.

But in actually proving anything, your using tools that humans designed. The scientific method was designed by us, just like the bible.

The difference being the Bible was a book written by ignorant people that demands acceptance uncritically and the scientific method was developed to understand the world and it thrives on criticism. If the hypothesis doesn't fit the results, the hypothesis goes away, not the results. With believing in something like the Bible, the opposite is true. It's not the fact that these things are human inventions, it's the inventions themselves.

Even words are a tool that we designed ourselves... the fact that I read that my soul is created by a firing of neurons, or that love is a chemical reaction... neurons and chemical reactions are really just a matter focusing on one part of a bigger picture and labeling it. A neuron is just a word describing a part of you that YOU are focusing on right now at this moment. Not seeing the forest for the trees, or in other words, not seeing the soul or love for the neurons and chemical reactions...

Definitions are useful for comprehension and understanding each other. So you can't just switch one word for another because it's convenient. Regardless of how the words got their meaning, they have them now and they are useful in how we communicate.

If you want to use a figure of speech and say that love comes from the soul, awesome. If you want to tell me that there is something inside me that exists outside my brain and will continue living after I'm dead, prove it.

Science in general is really just breaking things down and breaking them down again, and labeling this and categorizing that...

No, I'm think you don't understand what science is. It's about understanding the observable world around us. The labels and categorizations are so we can effectively communicate the observations. I don't think you have any clue how fascinating and absolutely wonderful science is.

It seems like Atheism is based on a million illusions that we created ourselves to try and understand ourselves. But my FEELING of the divine, of spirituality, of ONE with the EARTH and the stars and universe... I can be the universe or I could be a single cell at the same time, its just how I am perceiving it in that moment (is this how Quantum Theory works in a sense too? I'm not all too familiar with it) F**k I'm confused

You can feel all you want. The human brain has an amazing capacity for hallucinations and illusions. There's actually a specific part of your brain that accounts for the feeling that you are in your body and if you chemically alter it, then you have an "out of body" experience.

You have no idea what Quantum theory is. Most people who get into pseudoscience love to throw "quantum" around. Quantum Mechanics deals with matter and energy on an atomic scale, not how you feel about the universe. It is such a complicated subject that most people have no idea what "quantum" really means so they can just say, "Hey, it's Quantum physics" and people will nod mindlessly, because they don't really know what it is.

I mean seriously, look at this:


It's fucking amazing and science is the reason we know anything about it. I don't need to think God did it to make it seem anymore fucking amazing. Because of science we know about galaxies and the universe, we understand planets and stars. By your insistence, science is just an illusion we give ourselves. What are we living in some sort of Matrix unable to tell the difference between reality and illusion? It's absurd. and it's useless to assume this is some illusion.

Isn't Atheism just believing in the scientific method which was created by us. Is Atheism giving humans too much credit? Isn't reality just our consciousness and what we are focusing on at the moment... I mean to me, Atheism can't disprove god either. You can say, "how could god allow such a messed up world." But that would assume that god has human traits and morality. Atheism just seems to be too simplistic for me, its rooted in too many man made concepts. I need a beer my brain hurts.

No, atheism is not.

You seem to complain that atheists are somehow arrogant because we believe we can understand the world. I don't think you give humans and human intellect enough credit. I would say it's arrogant to assume that there is a supreme being and you somehow have some special access to that supreme being who loves and cares for you. That somehow closing your eyes and believing what you want to be true is somehow just as valid or better than the scientific method. The scientific method brings the goods. It has results to back it up. Do you even know what the scientific method is? It's not guessing, it's not deciding based on feelings. It's testing a hypothesis with rigorous standards before accepting something is true.

Whenever someone wants to question the scientific method I want to tell them to stop using their computer. Obviously it doesn't work, because science is just a useless human invention. e.e

Come on, give humans credit. We are doing the best we can with what we have to understand the world around us. Just because something is "human" doesn't make it bad. It's almost like it's a dirty word.

No wonder why you're confused, I don't think you really understand what you're saying.

I'm not trying to be insulting, but I'll I've seen here is a spewing half understood concepts and consistent misunderstanding of what science is and what atheism is.