(July 20, 2022 at 1:57 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Strange, I never found it akward at all. Lemme check again. Your god is imaginary. Nope, still not awkward. Did you know that people have been saying that on record, for thousands of years? I bet they didn't find it any more awkward then then I do now..but it was definitely a whole lot more dangerous. You lot get pissy about it in a big murderous way.
As to sophisticated excuses....? I don't have any excuses for your imaginary god, or for my position on it, that's your ao..though I've never seen you offer a sophisticated one.
It's a matter of fact that atheism in its modern sense wasn't widespread -to put it charitably- in the West before the Renaissance, and it was almost nonexistent in the Islamic world. The East was probably the only portion in the world who explicitly endorsed godless philosophies/religions (Buddhism, Jainism, ..), and even in these religions one finds many figures of gods and supernatural entities. Among ancient greek philosophers, one frequently encounters the name Epicurus as an important thinker in the history of atheism, the problem is that the guy did maintain that the gods existed.
It was awkward indeed to not believe in God before Darwin. Like seriously, the appearance of design is an overwhelming indication of God's existence, and some famous atheists today acknowledge that if there were no theory of evolution, they would believe in God or the first mover (Sean Caroll said that verbatim in his debate with WLC).
And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that evolution is actually irrelevant to God's existence, so Sean Caroll really should just believe in God, I guess.
So one might ask, what about the sincere atheists today? My personal take is that the corruption of christianity is the key reason for atheism in our era, here's why: people are naturally tilted to explain things teleologically and believe in a creator, but since deism is untenable because it's a hollow idea (you just believe an entity, that you know nothing about, exists), people turn to organized religion, and the leading organized religion happens to be christianity, which has many untenable beliefs like the Trinity/the Resurrection/the original sin, etc. And because of that, people reject belief altogether.
