If I were an Atheist

[Mister Agenda]

Mister Agenda,

After all I don't deny God exists either.

If you think that qualifies you to be an atheist, we can start referring to you as such.

No, if one doesn't deny God exists, it makes them a weak theist.

No, it doesn't. A weak theist believes there is some sort of God. You are a weak theist, apparently. Believing in some kind of god or God is the ONLY thing that makes someone ANY kind of theist.

"And that can't possibly be the explanation, because in that explanation, you're not the goal of existence."--Mister Agenda

It could be the possible explanation is anyone here going to make the case it is? Is anyone here going to site lines of evidence that supports that conclusion? I don't have disregard for that explanation, I just view it as second runner up.

On no other grounds than that it's not emotionally satisfying to you. The cosmological explanations have the advantage of being physically possible and based on observation of the universe as it is and was, and actually say how it could have happened in hypothetically testable ways. The theistic explanation has nothing at all but badly reasoned arguments, at best a God of the gaps presumption slated for further shrinkage when hypothetical tests become actual tests.

"How many times should we have to repeat what cosmologists have to say? And if it's not a false dichotomy, that should be easy for you to prove."

Do you mean the latest cosmological theories?

How late they are is irrelevant. And though I don't blame you for calling them 'theories', they're more properly 'hypotheses'. Yes, there are multiple naturalistic explanations for the origin of the universe which are as yet untestable. You should be familiar with their basics and we shouldn't have to educate you about them just because you like to say we aren't providing alternatives to 'God did it'. If you're already familiar with them, you shouldn't be complaining about a lack of naturalistic alternatives. The problem with the naturalistic alternatives isn't that they're implausible, it's that there are multiple ways it could have happened consistent with the laws of physics as we know them, and we are not yet in a position to test these hypotheses to eliminate any of them.

"The former explanations explain 'how'. The latter 'explanation' is 'God did it'."--Mister Agenda

Whether 'God did it' or 'mechanistic forces did it' we still seek explanations of how it works and functions. Does 'Egyptians did it' cause to not seek how the pyramids were built? However as with the pyramids we can also ask why they built them.

With the pyramids we can examine archaelogical evidence, records that indicate how they actually did the work, and so on. None of that is an option with 'God did it'. Unlike 'Egyptians did it', 'God did it' is the beginning and the end of the 'explanation'.

"There's no rhyme or reason why just the right God would exist to create this specific universe. Positing God as an answer to 'why is there a universe' begs the question of 'why is there a God?'."--Mister Agenda

So? I'm limiting my inquiry to why there is a universe and sentient beings.

How absolutely convenient for you.

"I don't believe God exists."

That wasn't so hard was it?

Shall I give you the post numbers for other times in this thread I have said the same thing, Sherlock?

If your lines of argument were sound, it would be global philosophical news. I have never seen you present anything that didn't rest on a logical fallacy or the assumption that you must be right. It's assumed that you find your own arguments convincing, but it's arrogance to assume that they are therefore sound. Do you make a lot of arguments which you then follow by announcing that you're right? Good arguments stand on their own, bad arguments exist to be destroyed."--Mister Agenda

Atheists will invariably respond with logical fallacy to any line of evidence that disagrees with their opinion.

And will identify the fallacy for you, too. We couldn't do that if you weren't actually making that fallacy, and if we did, you could easily prove that we were applying the fallacy incorrectly. An argument for God that actually didn't rest on presuppostion and contained no fallacy would be global philosophical news that Christians and Muslims would trumpet far and wide. The reason they make so many bad arguments is that they don't have a single good one. One good one would be more impressive than a thousand bad ones.

That is precisely why neither your opinion or mine matters in regards to our own arguments or counter arguments.

That your arguments are fallacious isn't an opinion, it's a provable fact.

The only fair judge of any debates or arguments are from impartial folks who are neither devout theists or atheists and whether you could convince them arguments I make are fallacious.

That an argument is fallacious is something that can actually be proven, beyond any reasonable doubt. That an argument is NOT fallacious is also something that can be proven, beyond any reasonable doubt. Remember that a fallacy is not only a statement that an argument is wrong, but an explanation for why it is wrong.

Of course you think so.

Which is the height of your rhetoric: that the only reason we disagree with your arguments is because we disagree with your position, which is clearly projection on your part.

"And you don't see any dichotomy between acknowledging the existence of a Creator is neither provable nor disprovable with being convinced that your arguments are sound? If they were sound, they would prove the existence of a Creator."--Mister Agenda

The arguments I made were used to justify an opinion, the belief we owe our existence to a Creator.

So is the issue that you don't actually know what a sound argument is? A sound argument has true premises and valid logic. If the premises are true, and the logic is valid, the conclusion must be true. Perhaps you should stop calling your arguments 'sound' and call them 'persuasive to me' instead, as that is apparently what you really mean when you say 'sound'.

As you mentioned before of course I think there sound. The real test would be whose arguments persuade the undecided.

A sound argument is persuasive to those convinced that the opposite is the case. At the least, they must admit that the conclusion follows from the premises. The soundness of arguments is irrelevant to crowd opinion, if a sound argument doesn't persuade the audience, it is necessarily due to a lack on the part of the audience.

Are your arguments against belief in God sound, if so do they prove God doesn't exist?

Yes, they are sound. No, they don't prove God doesn't exist. It is the nature of propositions that have been defined in such a way as to be unfalsifiable to be immune to disproof. That's what unfalsifiable means. It is also the nature of unfalsifiable propositions that they can't be proven true, unless whatever it is changes the beheavior that makes it unfalsifiable in the first place (leaves no evidence, can change memories, only reveals itself to people who already believe in it, etc.). Genesha has the same issues as God in this regard, if you don't believe in Ganesha, how do you justify your disbelief? I would go with: no good reason to think Ganesha is really real.

"We'll still be a small minority in the USA but demographic trends indicate we'll likely be twice the percentage of the American population that we are today. It's another example of the USA being 50 years behind Europe in cultural trends. The EU is about 20% atheist, which is where the USA will probably be in 50 years. Still a minority, but a significant one."--Mister Agenda

If belief in a Creator of the universe were anywhere near as absurd as many atheists paint it they should already be the majority belief.

It's not absurd to believe what you were indoctrinated to believe from the time you could talk. It's not even surprising. There is a vast social mechanism at work to make sure people believe. It's got a lot of inertia and there's no reason to expect it to change rapidly. It seems to have taken a combination of religious freedom, horrid behavior on the part of many believers in the name of their religion, and the internet to affect the beginning of a decline in theism in the USA.

If your arguments were sound wouldn't you persuade many more much faster?

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. People don't hold religious or superstitious beliefs for rational reasons, they hold them for emotional and psychological reasons.

What you don't seem to grasp is that we don't 'recruit' atheists.

Again theism is an opinion to the questions why is there something rather than nothing? Why does a universe exist? Why do we sentient humans beings exist? Are we ultimately the result of unplanned forces that somehow came into existence and unintentionally caused the conditions that allow our existence or are we the result of plan and engineering?

Theism is none of those things. It is the opinon that at least one god or God is real. It is an affirmative answer to the question 'do you believe in at least one god or God?'. You might describe yourself more aptly as a deist if the God you believe in accounts for all that. Yes, a deist is a type of theist, but the word conveys the information you seem to want 'theist' to convey. You seem to be a deistic theist.

You don't have to recruit anyone if you have a good solid case from evidence (something I'm always asked for) for believing the former.

We don't have to recruit anyone because we get an influx of new atheists without any effort on our part. Plus, there's nothing inherent in atheism that compels us to increase our numbers, just the human tendency to argue for the positon we hold. It's not like we've been convinced you'll burn in hell unless we make an atheist of you. You'll just have some unjustified beliefs that we don't have a particular beef with unless you use them to justify actions detrimental to society. We don't need to evangelize, send missionaries, fill pews, or save souls. Yet our numbers are gradually increasing anyway.

There in lies the problem and why atheists tend to attack theism because they don't have a compelling case.

That didn't even make sense. How is not having a compelling case a motivation to 'attack' (by which I presume you mean 'argue against') a position?

You can criticize the case I made for my belief in theism but at least I made a case and one from evidence.

You made a case 'based on evidence' in your own less-than-humble opinon. Watching theists trying to make such cases so poorly was a key component in my coming to the conclusion that belief in God is not rationally justified. Don't feel too bad, I've seen a professor of religon do just as poorly. If someone can make a good case for believing in God, I'd really like to see it. Lack of such a good case, on its own, is sufficient reason not to believe in God for someone who believes the reasons to believe something should be able to overcome the null hypothesis before believing in it is rationally justified.