The Case for Atheism

[Losty]

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Thanks for the response. I would happily respond to your questions and requests for further clarification but it just seems to me we're arguing past each other.

So I'm not sure whether we'll gain any further clarity if we can't really agree on a pretty foundational assumption. You've argued I have the burden of proof - I disagree. Its difficult to proceed from there.

Simply asserting your claim to be true without providing any evidence makes it pretty difficult to have a discussion. I can't understand the logic of you wanting me to present evidence for my claim whilst not being willing to do that for your claim.

Its been great fun discussing these issues but I think we've ended up just arguing in circles.

You do. Ontologically positive claims, such as "there exists at least one supernatural phenomenon," and "god is immaterial," carry with them burdens of proof of varying size and scope, depending on the claim.


Not at all. In fact, I don't think anyone here has said anything of the sort. What we have told you is that natural phenomena have the advantage of being detectable by everyone, and have a long track record of success when it comes to searching for the solutions to unanswered questions. We know that the natural world is there, which instantly makes it more probable an answer than a supernatural one that isn't detectable. After all, if something isn't detectable how does one know it exists?

That's not to say supernature is excluded, even as the answer we first investigate in a given issue, just that without the means to detect that it's there... we have no means to detect that it's there. In that case, its existence is indistinguishable from its non-existence.


Natural world= Obviously extant.

Supernatural world= Only ever revealed through conflicting subjective accounts with no verifiable accuracy nor objectively measurable phenomena.

That's why the natural is more plausible. Always.


Do you spend your entire life considering the infinity of other gods, supernatural entities and phenomena that might be affecting your day to day life? Probably not, right? You'd never get anything done if you did. Isn't that assuming your worldview is true until proven otherwise?

Or do you realize, with every other competing claim that presents no evidence, that a lack of evidence means you don't need to worry about that claim until such time as evidence is presented?

I'm honestly not sure why it's so hard for you to understand how "I shouldn't believe in something until I have a reason to believe in it," is a rational position to take.

Real quick: there is a demon constantly behind you, wherever you go, nibbling on your aura. Do you believe me? If not, why are you just assuming your demon-less worldview is true until someone proves otherwise?


Why do you assume we're not doing that? The supernatural is extremely implausible in the light of the current evidence. And I can't help but notice your religious views are labeled as "Christian": Isn't that assuming one worldview is right until it's proven wrong by the other?


Well, I was more talking about the purported effects god has on the world, but the other thing that comes to mind is, how did you determine that god doesn't have a cause?


As I've said, the natural world has the benefit of being detectable immediately. We know that it exists, whereas we don't know that the supernatural exists. That's a leg up, in terms of plausibility.

And again, you keep talking about assumptions, but why assume anything at all? I don't intend to be dragged down into the presuppositional mud with you; I'll wait for evidence of a thing. The one reason I'm more inclined to go with naturalistic explanations is because we at least have evidence that the natural world exists.


So far, no investigation of theistic assumptions has led to any positive result, ever. Just saying.


Oh, how disappointing.

So, you're saying that god shows himself to us, because a book for which we cannot verify the historicity thereof, that makes numerous demonstrably false claims, and further miraculous claims for which there is no evidence, asserts with no evidence that 500 people saw another man for whom we have no evidence rise from the dead, an event for which we have, you guessed it, no evidence.

I wrote a scene for a story of mine a few months back, where a thousand people witnessed an auction. Does that make it true? The mere assertion that X number of people saw a thing doesn't mean that assertion is true, especially when we can find no contemporary evidence that the man they purportedly saw even existed, let alone that he could actually accomplish the things he supposedly did. You're going to have to do much, much better than this: this claim is only persuasive if you already believe it before hearing it!


No, why on earth would it? Why would anyone take "an old book says a lot of people saw an event that's also in that old book only," seriously?


The Kalam Cosmological argument begins with a premise that is both unsupported and a fallacy of composition, continues into a second factually incorrect premise (the universe in its current state may have had a cause, but there's no indication that it needed one before that, or even if "before" makes sense in a point before spacetime) and follows through with a non-sequitur conclusion (not all causes are gods) that only gets you to a deistic god at best, and not your christian one, even if we were to accept the premises. It is not a compelling argument for anything other than William Lane Craig's willingness to play word games.


I don't need to counter with the multiverse, I simply have to point out that "fine tuning" is only a thing that matters if you presuppose that the universe as it is counts as a "success" state, from which all others are "failure" states. No matter how implausible a universe with life in it is, that implausibility is only significant if one can demonstrate that something was trying to reach this particular model and could have failed. You have to assume the conclusion for the argument to even be a thing.


The transcendental argument's first premise is an unsupported assertion which I reject out of hand, and Plantinga's nonsense conflates methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism just as much as you do.


I do disagree: every argument you posed there features no evidence and relies on unjustified assertions about the nature of the universe that they don't even attempt to support.


How very sad for you.


Neither of those arguments get to "christian god" even if they were true, and I've shown that they're not. They're just random assertions. Why would I take them seriously at all?


Are any of them less fallacious than the ones you've presented so far?


How do you intend to demonstrate that Jesus even existed, let alone that he was divine in nature?


Because the only claim I'm making is "have non-fallacious reasons for the things you believe." If any of your arguments above were, you know, functional, I would have accepted them. How is that assuming naturalism?


So you don't agree that every phenomena that used to be attributed to god in the past later turned out to have a natural cause? They used to say god caused rainbows, are you saying that didn't turn out to be light refraction off water molecules? God was the cause of lightning, are you saying that didn't turn out to be standard, mundane electrical discharge?

Name me one phenomena in the world that, when we discovered the cause for it, turned out to be god.


Look, I'm starting to get tired of this rude insistence you have. You don't get to jump into my head and tell me what I believe and think, okay? If I say I don't assume naturalism is true, you have absolutely no basis to be gainsaying me on that. Cut it out.


You don't think it's valid because you can't shoulder it. The only one assuming anything around here is you, and the fact that you're just sitting here and attempting to redefine everyone else's positions as being as poorly justified as your own, instead of just justifying your own, speaks volumes about the kinds of beliefs that you have.


The cause for every phenomena that we have ever discovered has turned out to be natural, and not supernatural. That is testament to the successes of methodological naturalism, after how many centuries of human inquiry.


Hate to pull the brakes on the Christ-train, but we have no contemporary evidence that the man even existed. That doesn't bode well for the claims that he was divine, which have even less evidence than that, but which are much more extraordinary claims.


I think you really, really need to think hard about those arguments, dude, because calling them arguments is unfair to real argumentation. What they really are is a bunch of assertions.

I don't take random assertions seriously, and I wonder why you do.

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I foresee that you and Stimbo will be great friends