How do atheists know there is zero chance of a divine creator? (preacher, atheist)
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Everyone has the right to own beliefs. Interested in hearing about atheism:
If the universe formation and life was purely accomplished through scientific explanation, then how do atheists know that a divine creator(s) didn't initiate the process? [By "creator" I am not implying the god of Abraham etc.] It is atheists' right to believe what they'd like. I'm curious to read the about atheists' thoughts. What makes atheists certain there is/was no divine being?
I am certain because if there was a divine being, it would have revealed itself to mankind in a clear and unambiguous way instead of keeping us for thousands of years guessing which of our ideas about God are correct, if any at all. We would have more reliable sources of knowledge about him than two-thousand-year-old books that supposedly describe how God revealed himself to a small and select number of people (like Moses and Jesus' disciples). And we would not have a thousand religions, cults and denominations all fighting against each other and all claiming to be true.
It is incredibly weird to me to hear Christians say things like: "I can feel God's love when I read the Bible". Feeling the love of some imaginary being you have never seen or experienced otherwise through a book? Come on.
Last edited by SiegendesLicht; 04-14-2015 at 06:59 AM..
In much of the Western world there is zero stigma about being an atheist (no one cares). It's the US and particularly some swathes of the country that is the outlier.
People in Western and Northern Europe generally seem to generate less heat on the topic of religion. Atheists do not make a big deal about their atheism, Christians do not try to force their Christianity down everyone's throat. Jehova's Witnesses who are heavy on evangelism are one of the few exceptions.
What makes atheists certain there is/was no divine being?
I'm not certain that there is no creator, in the loose, general sense of Intelligent Designer. I'd say my level of confidence is roughly the same as my confidence that the Vikings won't win the Super Bowl next year. I would love to see the Vikings win the Super Bowl, I have no particular reasons to believe that they will. I have some evidence to suggest that they probably wont. I'd like to find evidence of a creator, but I see no particular reason to believe in a creator, and I see several good reasons for not believing. Basically, I'm borderline atheist/agnostic on the loose/general concept of a creator, but I call myself atheist because, in my heart of hearts I just don't think that "Intelligent Design" of the world that I see around me is the least bit likely. I think that Reality-as-a-whole might, in some sense be an form of "Cosmic Mind," but I think it is highly unlikely that the physical world was "created by" a Cosmic Intelligence.
As for what makes me think that there is no Intelligent Designer, I could write many pages, but the basic idea is that the world simply does not appear "designed" to me - or, if it was designed, it was designed badly, from my point of view. In other words, if the world was designed, it was not designed by an careful or loving designer, but rather by an experimenter or a sadistic designer (maybe our world created by an advanced alien teenager doing a high school science fair project showing how to make Big Bangs occur). If the world was created by a Cosmic Mind, it was more like planting a seed to see WTF will grow rather that "designing" something.
BTW: If you were to ask specifically about the Biblical conception of God, then my answers would be more fully atheist. My level of confidence that the Biblical conception of God is a fairy tale is about the same as my level of confidence that Peter Pan is a fairy tale. My basic point is that terms like 'atheist' or 'agnostic' are relative to specific conceptions of 'God' or 'Creator' etc. My level of confidence varies from one conception to another.
[Atheists] don't. [Atheism] is faith-based, and they put a certain amount of faith in reason and probability, which leads them to believe it is near-zero.
Except that as soon as reason and probability based on actual data enter into consideration, by definition faith is not involved. Faith is the evidence of things NOT SEEN, the the substance of things HOPED FOR. Facts are SEEN and they are found things, not things one hopes to encounter someday.
So you are not only wrong but conflating two different senses of the word faith -- its actual formal definition as per the previous paragraph and its loose usage as a synonym for "trust". Yes, I trust reason and logic and probability because they have proven themselves to me as relatively accurate ways to describe and make predictions about reality. Whereas faith has proven to be utterly unpredictive and undescriptive of reality.
People in Western and Northern Europe generally seem to generate less heat on the topic of religion. Atheists do not make a big deal about their atheism, Christians do not try to force their Christianity down everyone's throat. Jehova's Witnesses who are heavy on evangelism are one of the few exceptions.
That's because western / northern Europe sent all its doctrine-obsessed nutters to settle America hundreds of years ago. In effect you sentenced them to 200-300 years of exile until they figured out how to behave properly in society. We're getting there. I think.
They don't. It is faith-based, and they put a certain amount of faith in reason and probability, which leads them to believe it is near-zero.
What about statistics and probability causes you to believe that they are not good tools for describing reality, so that faith is required? Be specific please, I am not talking about whether statistics can be used to lie - they can - but about whether there is something inherently faulty at the root.
There are many interlocking reasons why I became an atheist after being raised as a christian fundamentalist, but here's one that has nothing to do with reason or faith - why is it necessary to think that humans not only can know but already do know everything pertinent about the nature of the universe? It isn't scientists who claim that everything we need to know was written down some 3000 years ago.
They don't. It is faith-based, and they put a certain amount of faith in reason and probability, which leads them to believe it is near-zero.
I was just glancing over the thread and remarked to myself how respectful and pretty on-par everyone has been... and then I read this airball of a post.
Well, we almost had a really good, factual thread going!
There is no empirical evidence of a god. So until I am presented with that, I'm going with a no god policy. Just like I do with unicorns.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John13
I'm "firmly convinced" and I don't care what anyone else thinks about it either.
I'm an Ivory Soap atheist: 99 and 44/100ths percent sure there is no god.
As for the other 56/100ths, if there is some kind of god, I doubt the entity would have the human characteristics ascribed to it. The concept of God as religion puts forth is nothing more than humanity's projection of self.
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