RE: If I were an Atheist
April 6, 2015 at 3:29 pm
(This post was last modified: April 6, 2015 at 3:35 pm by Mister Agenda.)
(April 6, 2015 at 1:50 pm)Drew_2013 Wrote: Does that describe the attribute you have in regards to how our existence is the result of natural causes?
Not at all. Do you read with your eyes closed? Because that's the kindest explanation for you coming up with that. I have said, repeatedly, that whether our universe was created or arose naturally is unknowable at this time. Someone who claims to know for sure is likely ignorant of their own ignorance. Faith is not a virtue. One's belief in something should be proportionate to the evidence for it. As I've pointed out before, natural forces demonstrably actually exist, which is a point in their favor as an explanation; but I'm in no position to know if that's actually the case. No one is, even your supposed Creator can't escape from the possibilty that it was created by a higher power that erased evidence of its existence. We could be in some kind of simulation within a naturally occurring or supernaturally created universe (or within another simulation, for that matter) or a good old-fashioned six-day creation story with all the evidence omnipotently erased. Most theistic notions have been carefully crafted to be unfalsifiable (in order to avoid the problem of there being no evidence that they are true), which also makes them unverifiable barring some unmistakable intervention by some version of the Creator. The main problem with an unfalsifiable Creator is not that it is impossible, but that the notion is utterly indistinguishable from a flight of imagination and utterly useless for any practical purpose other than manipulating others if you can convince them it's real. You might be right, but if you are, it's completely coincidental to anything you've offered as a reason to think you're anywhere remotely close to the actual truth.
It's too bad you didn't look up 'fallacy of incredulity' along with the dictionary defintions of the relevant words. You might have saved yourself some time and embarassment if you understood that the fallacy is in presenting your incredulity as support for your argument. There's nothing wrong with being incredulous, particularly if you understand that actually articulating why you're so incredulous is what you should be sharing, instead of whinging about the unbelievableness of some position. In your case, only rarely the position the person to whom you're talking actually holds.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.