(January 31, 2015 at 9:42 pm)Blackout Wrote: 7 - Everyone is an atheist to most gods, some of us take it one step further ---> This is not really an argument in the first place, but it's a little meaningless since it equates atheism with theism, as if not believing in other gods makes theists very similar to atheists.I think it's a useful point to make, though. Especially in those cases where a theist is using an argument built around the premise that "you can't prove (my) god doesn't exist." There are a great many gods that they cannot prove do not exist, yet they reject them all the same. If we do not apply presuppositions or special pleading, nothing separates their god from the many gods that have come and gone during human history.
There actually is a fairly simple and honest answer to that argument, which is that since they believe in their particular god and that their holy book shows that their god is the only one, they can reject all others on that basis. But then they get back to having to prove that their god is real, and avoiding that is why they went with the "you can't prove he isn't" argument in the first place, IMO.
"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
