(June 18, 2014 at 5:45 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: I believe there is no God. Atheism is usually not stated this way, to avoid the burden of proof, and granted that is a fair point I see no reason to shudder the burden.I treat god the same way I treat a lot of things I do not believe in-- I don't go to any lengths to disprove something that I spent decades searching for and never found, so I live my life as if there are no gods. If someone claims to have found god that's fine. If he can show me this god, that'd be great. If he says god can't be demonstrated that way, then I shrug my shoulders and wonder if there's any peanut butter in the fridge. As long as that guy isn't telling me I have to live by his god's rules, we're good.
We will never disprove god in the sense of being able to search everywhere and say "see? Nothing here!" This past week I watched The Inexplicable Universe with Neil deGrasse Tyson and one of the points he makes repeatedly is that there is a great deal about the universe we simply do not know, and there is a lot we know we don't know, and there is a lot we know we won't know for some time and that we may never know. So there will always be spaces for believers to tuck god into and keep him out of the reach of everyone else.
And if one of those gods finally comes out of hiding, I'll become a theist again.
"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
