Please present positive arguments why you think atheism is true

[Voltair]

You are spouting off typical telelogical and cosmological arguments. I am going to use another example:

You see a tree and say "It is so complex so God must have made it!"

I say, "False it was created by the letter A because the letter A is the first letter of our alphabet. You see the letter A has always existed but it was not officially recognized as existing until we invented our alphabet. Therefore A being the first letter and also being the first letter in the world Alpha which means first/dominant, A is the creator of the tree."

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Now prove to me that A did not create the tree. I will go ahead and tell you that you cannot PROVE beyond ANY DOUBT that A did not create the tree. NO MATTER WHAT you try I can keep ranting/redefining A until there is absolutely nothing you can do to prove/disprove anything about it.

If you can understand why you should NOT accept that the letter A created everything you will understand why the arguments for God's existence EXPLAIN NOTHING but are rather just statements. This is not about what you feel or the fact that you cannot explain something. This is about WHAT YOU CAN PROVE. You cannot prove God and you have already admitted this but you state that there reasonable reasons to believe in such an entity.

The problem is your statements of what makes God reasonable to believe in all stem from the same idea. You see something that you cannot think of another explanation for so you insert God in to fill the gap. I have never seen the ontological, cosmological, teleological, or moral arguments do ANYTHING besides say "LOOK AT THAT.... IT IS AMAZING!... GODDIDIT." The only difference is some make it sound a lot more articulate than that. If you do not have hard evidence for God then admit it and be intellectually honest.

There are people who believe in higher powers that openly admit they can't prove it to anyone. I may not agree with those people's ideas but at least they are not trying to dance around the issue. The problem with you asking for proof of naturalism is naturalism is an observation that has been made based on repeated experiences. You experience naturalism everyday and in fact you live your life under some assumptions of naturalism.

Here are a few examples of you living your life under the assumption of naturalistic principles:

1) YOU have to ingest water and other nutrients to survive
2) YOU have to respect the laws of gravity or get severely injured/die
3) YOU have to watch out for yourself around animals/other people or possibly endure harm/death
4) YOU have to ultimately take care of yourself or be taken care of by OTHER PEOPLE
::::

Now the difference is you assume that there is some "invisible hand" (for all you economics people out there) guiding the process. The problem is I don't see how you can prove the invisible hand's influence at all. Everyone can certainly see the NATURAL explanation for why those four points I mentioned are true. Whether or not there is something else other than what is proposed inside of naturalism is up for debate. However you live/operate under many naturalistic assumptions every single day.

If you don't think those four points are necessary then prove that you could survive by not doing any of the four things and just asking God to take care of it for you. The point is you HAVE to do things in this universe in order to survive or someone must do them for you. Any time God is claimed to work in our world it is either attribution OR someone else is doing something and claims/is told that God guided their actions. It is like a prayer I used to hear in church "God guide the hand of the doctors that are operating on so and so".

Naturalism is false? Then give up medicine, science, technology, food, breathing, and everything else that is a part of our "natural" world. Naturalism may not be COMPLETELY true but is demonstrability mostly true. Whether or not there is that invisible hand is again a topic of debate which will probably never be solved. You already accept most of naturalism, people who don't believe in God just go the rest of the way or assume that the percent of uncertainty is impossible to determine.

[downbeatplumb]

Not ONE convincing and well founded answer so far...... no surprise here....

I believe it was Tim Minchin who said, "every mystery ever solved turned out not to be magic" As you support the idea of a being who works outside of normal physics then magic seems to be an apt description of it.
And its worse because this supposed magical beings book made several predictions and statements that proved false.

[Jireh]

how could transformation, or evolution, of dead matter, happen to self conscience and thougt ?

Abiogenesis and evolution through natural selection.

what a amazing faith you must have.

Abiogenesis is a bankrupt hipotheses. And so, macro evolution through natural selection. Btw. you cannot declare yourself a weak atheist.......

Its simply not possible.

Mere assertion, dismissed as such.

Abiogenesis and evolution through natural selection is also a mere assertion, so i should dismiss it as well, right ?

There is no bridge from one thing to the other.

Self-replicating proteins, single-celled organisms, multi-celled organisms, organisms with brains, organisms with bigger brains, organisms with consciousness (including cetaceans, great apes, and elephants). Seems like a lot of bridges to get from inanimate matter to consciousness and thought.

you take that all on faith..... fact is, the hard scientific evidence leads us to believe, such a scenario is just science fiction, and wishful thinking, nothing else. BTW. could you explain where the information to produce the first self replicating protein came from ?

So by the very own existence of hability of thought, you can deduce logically God exists.

Even if everything you just said had been valid, 'therefore, God' would still be a non sequitur.

why ?

And we'll believe one of them (or some other hypothesis)

is there another one ?

when there is sufficient evidence to justify doing so. Currently they are merely hypothetical, possibilities that do not contradict math or known physics.

oh, so you believe, its phisically possible something to arise from absolutely nothing ?

And there's reason to think the 'absolute nothingness' you refer to is impossible:

i have not said that it would be impossible. But if that would have been, we would not be here today.

there likely never was 'absolutely nothing'.

thats not just likely, but absolutely certain.

To summarize: those aren't claims, they're possibilities. Here's a claim: there is insufficient evidence for anyone to reasonably claim they know the origin of our cosmos with certainty.

thats why i get bored, when atheists ask us, theists, for proofs .....

I don't disagree that it's likely our cosmos began to exist, but until you prove that actual infinities cannot exist, this line of argumentation can't prove the cosmos must have begun to exist.

i think the argument shows it without any doubt.

If I agree with you, then I MUST conclude that no entity could possibly have existed eternally without a beginning. Is that really where you want to go with this?.

the difference relies in, that God lived in a timeless dimension without successive addition of parts ( of time )

It equally supports the notion that prior to the cosmic inflation, the universe was in a very hot, dense state. Whether that came from quantum vacuum or always existed in some form is in the realm of hypothetical physics at this point.

there is overwhelming scientific support, that the universe had a beginning, and a non disputed fact today.

http://elshamah.heavenforum.org/t199-evi...-beginning

Alexander Vilenkin is Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of cosmology for 25 years, Vilenkin has written over 150 papers and is responsible for introducing the ideas of eternal inflation and quantum creation of the universe from nothing.

Vilenkin is blunt about the implications:

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning (Many Worlds in One [New York: Hill and Wang, 2006], p.176).

The proponent of the KCA thus finds himself comfortably seated in the midst of mainstream cosmology.

This is a delusion.

oh really ? why ?

We're in an eternal universe. It will suffer heat death, but it will never cease to exist. And if you're going to quote the laws of thermodynamics as applying to universes, remember the first one that says energy cannot be created or destroyed: if thermodynamics applies to universes, then energy/matter have existed eternally, since they cannot be created.

the physical lawsa apply within the universe, not beyond.....

we theists have it pretty easy to have faith in Gods existence.

Faith is easy. Thinking is hard work.

yes. faith is the result of thinking....

The evidence is obvious.

As obvious as the sun going around the earth.

said who ? certainly not the bible.

I don't believe you for pretty much the same reasons I don't believe people claiming to be UFO abductees were really kidnapped by aliens: I don't deny they had some kind of experience, but I doubt it was what they think it was.

your problem is, you base your belief system in a negative. You show well, how frustrating it is, to try to present positive, compelling reasons for strong atheism, and the naturalistic view to be true.

[Paul the Human]

That is the most intellectually dishonest pile of horseshit I have ever wasted my time reading. I don't even have a comment beyond saying that this Jireh joker is so full of shit I don't even have words to express it. I don't actually have anyone on ignore, but once I'm done posting this... I will.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

...

So by the very own existence of hability of thought, you can deduce logically God exists.

Even if everything you just said had been valid, 'therefore, God' would still be a non sequitur.

why ?

...

Cosmological arguments, assuming that their premisses aren't incorrect, can at most show that the universe had a cause. They haven't proven the cause to be an intelligent personal all-powerful God (Craig though tries to do this in his KCA but contradicts his own notion of time in the process). Theists resort to other arguments such as the design argument, fine-tuning arguments, moral arguments, etc., to establish the nature of the cause but those are much weaker arguments.

[Voltair]

Physical laws are limited to this universe.... so the universe could have been "caused" by something that is not limited to physical laws. So by admitting that you could argue things pop in and out of existence for no reason outside of the universe?

If that is true then how is the idea of God anymore likely then random particles just poofing into existence? You cannot throw out all the physical laws and still argue that cause and effect is necessary to begin the universe. I will agree with you on this though, there is no way that the universe IN ITS PRESENT FORM could have always existed.

However can it be proven that energy has not always existed? The law of the conservation of energy is a scientific law which is based in the physical universe so you could argue outside of the universe that it doesn't apply. I don't really see how that makes God anymore likely than some random chaotic quantum fluctuation though. The problem is you and I operate in a realm controlled by physical laws that don't allow for such things as gravity randomly not working on earth.

How do I know this? Have you ever jumped off something and floated up then down, then side to side, then up again? We operate in a universe which, for whatever reason, has consistent results with many physical laws such as gravity. That does not mean these laws are consistent in every corner of the universe but at least in this corner and many others it looks like it is.

I am also not one of those atheists who has studied out evolution enough to stake everything in it either. Is there some kind of deity that caused the universe? I think it is possible but again no more provable than a random quantum fluctuation at this point. That may change one day but for the present time whenever we start discussing "pre-universe" ideas we are participating in a delightful session of mental masturbation.

Everyone engaged in this part of the discussion can throw out abstract ideas and theories but we cannot prove anything about pre-universe right now. Unless I am missing something of course we are spitting out currently unprovable theories both on the atheistic side and theistic side. These discussions always end up in both sides screaming "WELL MY SIDE IS POSSIBLE AND I DON'T THINK YOURS IS!" Problem is.... PROOF.... I cannot PROVE that quantum fluctuations or some other random thing caused the universe anymore than someone can prove God did.

It is not something we can currently measure to the point of it really becoming a pointless back and forth that gets us no where. Do I accept that a quantum fluctuation started the universe? No I do not because I have not seen evidence that makes me think it is a certainty. Do I accept that a God started the universe? No I do not because I have not seen evidence that makes me think it is a certainty.

[The Grand Nudger]

Ero, "we don't know". We have ideas, we have opinions, we also have assholes. That being said, we don't have an established orthodoxy of what it is. That doesn't mean that we haven't ruled a great many things out. The wizard you would claim, by means of incanatations and magic that you feel is sufficient or accurate as an explanation, Jireh, is one of those things.

To give you an example. I don't personally know how telephones work, but I know that my aunt Edna isn't miracle-ing the telecom lines into existence.
(If for no other reason, btw, than that I do not have an Aunt Edna: this also applies to the god business you offer)

[Voltair]

Jireh, I think many of us if not all of us here would freely admit we do not know the cause of the universe. If any of us did know that we would be able to get a nobel prize and a whole lot of money.

A complete naturalistic worldview cannot be proven beyond 100% because deity itself cannot be disproven 100%. The problem isn't about what can't be disproven but rather what can be proven. It has been REPEATEDLY STATED in this thread that strong atheism cannot support its position to a 100% certainty.

However it has also been demonstrated THROUGH NUMEROUS examples on how strong atheists are not being unreasonable anymore than you are being unreasonable on your "atheism with unicorns" etc.

[The Grand Nudger]

I disagree, I can support my position 100%. I do not believe that the scraps of paper we refer to as accounts of gods have anything to do with anything more than the scraps of paper they were printed on and the minds of those who read/wrote them. Gods exist, in fairy tales, as a narrative device. I present the Bible, the Torah, Qu'ran, The BG, The Upanishads, The Ulster Cycle, and various scribblings on the innards of caves as my evidence. Their collective totality as my proof. This is what gods are, this can be demonstrated, this is what is known. End of. Feel free to propose anything beyond this that you wish, but in the end, a value or measure of truth can be assigned to my assertions that cannot be assigned to assertions beyond these.

I also concede that conjecture exists, conjecture does not make a god, it remains conjecture, and can be demonstrably shown to be a product of the same cause as all of the above. There is no philosophy in the god explanation, only ignorance and excuse.

[Voltair]

Fair enough, if it is reasonable to say you do not believe in fairies etc 100% than it can be equally reasonable to say you don't believe in a god 100%.

I am just still one of those Agnostic Atheist assholes