The Case for Atheism

[Esquilax]

Sorry I didn’t intend to arrogantly tell you what you believe. Apologies for any misunderstanding on that account.

It's fine, it just happens a whole lot in religious debates.

You’re arguing you ‘don't have to assume anything in order to come to conclusions about the world. You just have to critically examine all the claims that come in…’

From a Bayesian perspective there’s always a prior belief – no one comes to the data without prior knowledge. These prior beliefs are then tested and updated in the light of the data we observe.

Well, of course. But beliefs that change in accordance with new evidence aren't assumptions, they're just... beliefs. It's impossible to come to any claim as a totally blank slate, but the idea is to accept new claims if they come with a certain degree of evidence and support, and they don't hinge on logical fallacies to function. It's unfortunate for the theistic side, but every one of the arguments they make, including yours, are either fallacious or not supported to the extent that they should be believed.

Again, this isn't a presumption of naturalism, however. If you could show me a repeatable miracle with a reliable result and I could rule out cheating through natural means, then I'd give equal chances to supernatural origins as anything else. But I would be comfortable in just saying I don't know what caused it until we actually found a cause, too.

What is a flat prior (all weight in the analysis of evidence given to the data and no or minimal prior assumptions) in the context of our discussion? If you want to make no prior assumptions then mathematically you express this by parametising metaphysical naturalism and theism as equally probably explanations of the world. Whether you hold that assumption to be true or not, if you want your interpretation of the evidence to be determined by the data mathematically you have to make that assumption.

I agree. It's just too bad for your side that the more evidence we gather that requires no gods, often to the contrary of what various religious books claim, the probability of a natural universe increases.

However, if I’m fairly stating your position that the burden of proof is on theism then by definition you don’t have a flat prior (I think you are saying they’re not equally probably explanations of the world).

The burden of proof exists for all ontologically possible claims. Both "there definitely is a supernatural world featuring a god," and "there definitely is only a natural world without any gods," would entail the same burden of proof. However, my position is "I don't know what this universe is yet," and thus doesn't have a burden at all. That's why I- and most of the others in this thread, if I recall- are agnostic atheists and not gnostic ones; the purely gnostic naturalist claim overstresses its case just as much as a theistic one does.

The anostic atheist position, however, doesn't prevent us from finding fault with any given argument that comes in.

If I’m being true to your position, this is in Bayesian terms technically called an informed prior – which means you have a view about what explanation is more likely. It would be for you to tell me how much more likely you think metaphysical naturalism is compared with theism. But obviously the more likely you think it is- the greater weight is given to this prior belief and less weight to the data when evaluating the evidence.

Well, I have no experience with the supernatural at all, and plenty with the natural. That's why, say, when there's a storm I'm more willing to accept a claim that it's happening in line with natural meteorological patterns, than that it was created wholecloth by magic. I don't know that there is magic, after all. I do know that storms naturally occur.

Now, if the person with the magic claim can demonstrate the spell, then... fine. Methodological naturalism, not metaphysical naturalism.

What I’m saying is there are at least two opposing informed priors about which explanation is a better understanding of the world. This is quite a common situation – so how do Bayesian analyses take this into account when examining the data? Generally, they analyse the data comparing conclusions using different priors. At a minimum they look at the impact of using each of the opposing priors as well as flat priors. Which is to say the burden of proof argument for me is simplistic and in many senses misleading way of interpreting the evidence.

Only if you're under the impression that the burden of proof only lies on your claim. But it lies on every positive claim made: it's just having evidence for a thing, really. This is simpler than you're making it.

If we can’t really agree about what prior beliefs we’re factoring in and what weight they have in our interpretation of the analysis – then in my view there’s not much common ground to discuss the issues. We end up talking past each other.

I provided very brief responses as I’m sure you’re aware to discuss even one of these issues in any detail takes time. If we can’t really agree on a starting point why would we take the time to argue these points in detail?

My starting point is "I don't know," but that doesn't mean I can't see a shitty argument when it's put in front of me. And I'm sorry, even if I had a completely biased starting point, the arguments you listed are all logically invalid, regardless of where you hang your soteriological hat.

Like, let's take Kalam for example. The premises aren't even valid; for one, can I just mention how utterly insane it is that this argument still has any traction? The initial cosmological argument ran into the pretty clear infinite regress problem because the first premise, "everything has a cause," is invalidated by the fact that therefore god would need one too. And so, without any new information being discovered or anything, the argument was just changed by definitional fiat with this "begins to exist" crap so that the contradiction no longer exists. That demonstrates, to me, how completely unconnected that argument is to reality: there's a problem with it, so just define the problem out of existence, despite nothing in the real world having changed.

Besides all that, the premises themselves don't work. "Everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist-" Whoa, stop right there! That doesn't make any sense. How can something begin to exist if the point before it began lacked any spacetime? You're just talking gibberish now. Not to mention, you haven't demonstrated that everything that begins to exist has a cause, you've just asserted it. It's a fallacy of composition to suggest that things true of the parts of a thing are also true of the whole.

Oh, and the conclusion? "Therefore, the universe has a cause." Okay, let's accept that, just as a hypothetical. How the hell did you get from "cause" to "christian god," or even "supernatural cause"? There's nothing in that conclusion that would get you to either of those things. At most it would get you to "cause." And yet you're here as a christian, using this as an argument for the existence of your god. That's the reason I have a problem, not because I have a different starting point. I have a problem because your arguments begin with flawed premises and use them to reach conclusions that don't even support the position you've taken up.

Maybe you missed my previous comment, I was saying Paul was referring to 500 witnesses – I wasn’t including Paul in that list.

So, you've got a guy, writing about an event he was never at, and had no method by which to observe the event. And this is evidence to you? It's the equivalent of "a friend of a friend saw..." It's hearsay, and it's hearsay from a man with a vested interest in promulgating it. Conmen use the same trick.

If you claimed 500 witnesses had seen an event and that most of them were still alive and that I could contact them – I think that’s a strong claim.

... Except that none of them are alive, and you can't contact them. Given that Paul didn't include a list of names or anything, you couldn't have contacted them even if you were alive when the event was purported to have happened. It's just a claim: "500 people saw this thing." So what? There are people living today, in far greater numbers, who claim to have been abducted by aliens. Do you believe them? So why does the story get any more reasonable to believe, on the claim alone, when we add in that all the supposed witnesses are dead and unnamed?

Paul makes a claim about Jesus resurrection based on a large number of eye witnesses – most of whom were still alive who people could check with. Why would he make such a claim if he was lying?

Maybe the entire thing was fabricated. Maybe a real, mundane event was embellished. Maybe he knew, since he never listed a single name of a witness, that they wouldn't or couldn't be checked. At any rate, the mere claim that a resurrection happened and 500 people witnessed it is not compelling merely because if you assume it was written based on a factual account then there would be no reason to lie. I mean, bloody toothpaste ads do that: do four out of five doctors really agree that Colgate whitens and prevents decay better than any other? Are these the same four out of five doctors who say the same about some other brand, or a different four out of five doctors?

Claims are claims. Stop mistaking them for evidence.

It would be very easy to refute – particularly as many who made claims for Jesus resurrection were killed - yet I don’t see any evidence that his claim was refuted. Do you consider all other eyewitness testimony of historical events beyond a 100 or so years ago invalid?

So you need evidence that a claim was refuted before you stop believing it? That's definitely a shifting of the burden of proof. And again, how was anyone supposed to refute it when Paul didn't see fit to list who these 500 witnesses were? What you're saying is, why would Paul write down such an easily refutable claim if he was lying? Except that you're skipping the point where his claim isn't easily refutable at all. I'd go so far as to say it was unfalsifiable even during the time it was written.

And I don't credit extraordinary claims as true based on the claim alone, even if that claim also contains within it a further claim that lots of people saw the details of the claim. I don't care if it happened ten thousand years ago or yesterday, the claim itself is not evidence of it happening.

Incidentally, where's the writings from these 500 people who saw this miracle? I guess they didn't think it was important enough to jot down.