(June 23, 2019 at 2:35 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: This question is, sadly, found in google autofill... well... "who started atheism"... a much worse, much more ignorant version of the question. I'm hoping it's mostly children who return from Sunday school with this sort of question. But I bet the sad truth is, it's asked by adults for the most part... adults with really skewed visions of the world.
(June 23, 2019 at 1:47 pm)no one Wrote: Atheism predates religion. Humans learned believe in the nonsense that is religion.
As an interesting aside, this brings up the question if disbelief can predate the proposal that said thing exists. If it can, that would mean that you categorize nonbelief as a kind of "default." But doing this creates all kinds of problems.
It would mean that you "disbelieve" every future scientific theory that will be proposed. Who would assess their attitude concerning future scientific theories and come to this conclusion? Not me. I think that some future scientific theories will be correct, others will be incorrect. I'd have to hear/read about the theory first before I determine a potential belief status. Taking this way of thinking about it into mind, the "first" atheist would be the first caveman who disbelieved a "God story" after having heard it.
I’m not sure I agree with you here.
Atheism doesn’t mandate that you disbelieve something.
Only that you don’t believe it. Which I don’t think is actually the same.
You may not actively disbelieve every future scientific theory, but
you certainly don’t believe them either. You can’t possibly believe in
a theory that hasn’t been made up yet. So, I would say atheism,
at least agnostic atheism, has existed since the existence of mankind.
Please ignore the annoying spacing. I’m on my phone and I’m tired, so
I’m just being lazy and hitting enter every time the words get to the edge
of my screen so that I can see what I’m typing.
