Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Has any atheist reading this ever received evidence of any sort that gave you pause about your atheism? If so, what was it? What did you appreciate about it?
No.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sylvianfisher
If not, have you heard of any other atheists who spoke of encountering evidence that paused them?
No. Actually Nozz's post above explaining what evidence is and isn't is good in this regard. What I have observed once in a great while is an atheist who is tempted, not by evidence, but by something like the non-evidential process Nozz laid out, where some kind of association is made that appeals to the confirmation bias and/or wishful thinking that resides within everyone and which is the basic driver behind the failed epistemology of religious faith. Deconverts especially may lapse under pressure into old thought-habits like that. But that isn't a response to evidence, it is a response to operant conditioning.
Has any atheist reading this ever received evidence of any sort that gave you pause about your atheism? If so, what was it? What did you appreciate about it?
For me not really no. There have been things that have given me pause in that I think to myself "Ok I can not just dismiss this I have to look into it as far and as deeply as I can".
Things such as the sheer number of people in our species who subscribe to theistic thought, or report having theistic experiences. Or things like when people I respect and agree with on just about every topic I know of.... are also theists.
Things like that make me think "Ok I can not just dismiss the claim there is a god, I need to look long and hard at the issue and seek what evidence might be there".
But in 20 or so years of such seeking and asking I have found precisely nothing. Not just a little. But nothing. There is NO arguments, evidence, data or reasoning I have found or been shown that lends ANY credence at all to the claim our universe was created and/or is being maintained by a non-human intentional intelligent agency.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sylvianfisher
If not, have you heard of any other atheists who spoke of encountering evidence that paused them?
A few people, like Richard Dawkins too, were paused by the Watchmaker argument. Until they learned about evolution. Because without evolution there was no way they could explain the APPEARANCE of design in our world without a designer. But with evolution we have learned how even the most simple process algorithm can produce the most complicated results.... some of which do look very much designed for a purpose.
Still others, like Christopher Hitchens, found pause in the "Why is there something rather than nothing" question until they thought a little deeper on it and realized it was not really that valid a question, let alone an evidence.
But I think the majority of atheists who I have heard been given any pause do so by some personal experience that they can not immediately find a rational explanation for. But usually they recover from that quickly. Our species is, alas, very very prone indeed to parsing random experience through certain filters and narratives that quite often make them seem miraculous or supernatural.
But no I genuinely personally can not find or think of a single reason to believe there is a god entity. And unfortunately when I ask theists on places like this forum what might constitute credible support for the idea..... they either run away.... or construct some narrative where I am somehow ill or in error.... or feeding some kind of agenda or hatred..... merely for asking the question and not just ACCEPTING that there is one.
Behavior which, I am afraid, serves only to entrench many people in their atheistic positions. But they do not appear to notice. Or care.
Hey, everybody, let me turn this around by asking a different question, and maybe the car will get out of the ditch and back on the road...
Has any atheist reading this ever received evidence of any sort that gave you pause about your atheism? If so, what was it? What did you appreciate about it?
Could we ask the same about believers in a particular religion?
But anyway, no. Initially I was kinda open to the idea but waiting for a good reason to accept it. The more I looked, the less sense religion made, at least as a body of truthful claims about reality. But look at it as a set of political organizations trying to maintain power and things make a lot more sense.
Has any atheist reading this ever received evidence of any sort that gave you pause about your atheism?
Whenever I hear claims about miracles, answered prayers, life after death, God sightings, etc. (of which there are many, of course), I have a certain "pause" in the sense that I give it due consideration. But rarely does it lead to much more than that.
By the way, I'm not a complete atheist. I still think it's possible that some being or intelligence created our universe. However, even if it existed, I think it's very unlikely that it would care about humans or have anything to do with humans. We are insignificant, except to ourselves and to other life on this planet that is affected by us.
First of all, please let me say that I am honored that you took the time to write for me the many thoughtful and intelligent things that you have said. Frankly, it conveys to me that you may consider me a peer of sorts to warrant your effort here, and that is a compliment. Thank you.
Upon reflection, perhaps when I transcribed the phrase "Thou shall have no other gods before me", it was the inclusion of the word "other" that incorrectly implied in my theory that atheists claim a peership with gods? I didn’t mean to imply that.
I get what you say about levels of higher power. Interesting what I didn’t realize I was skipping over. I wonder if I had used capitalization to have shown it as Higher Power, would that have caused you to zero in that I meant it as a synonym for deity and not for any of the higher powers that you mentioned.
The OP did make the effort to form his/her post as an actual request. It seemed sincere. Sometimes, I might want to think, "Okay, maybe s/he’s really making a statement indirectly, disguised as a question, and no reply is being requested." But other times, I exercise my option to consider such requests as bona fide requests.
Your expression tickles my intellect, especially when you wrote, "atheism is simply a more parsimonious approach to unknowns". You know, I’ve been able to talk to fellow Christians about what we know versus what we don’t know, but I wonder if the same candor is held back from an atheist. It makes me think of this thing that people do when they talk to someone whom they perceive as contrary, where they anticipate where they think the other party is headed in a discussion and they do not want to be cornered so they say pre-emptive things to the other party, things that may not really best represent what they truly believe at the current point in the discussion, but are things said to attempt to prevent the other party from prevailing on a point not yet arrived at in the discussion. These pre-emptive comments are less sincere when they are devices in the discussion. So the entire exchange shifts into artificial posturing and pretense and both parties are aware of it but neither can break free from it, having committed themselves down that road. To avoid that road, at times I have risked myself to get slaughtered yet there is a certain freedom in laying down the lightsaber.
Thanks for listening.
I'm all for laying sown the lightsaber as Mordants implied. It is inescapable tat, when you disregard a gd, either through disbelief or through having concluded that it doesn't intervene, then we are left with human intellect as all we have. You will not that humanism obtains whether one is an atheist, Deist or pantheist. And there are some humanist Christians too, so I gather, since they prefer a social system without supposed God -rules. Clearly it is unfair to regard preferring humanist social rules to a theocracy as some kind of arrogance or hubris.
It is even arguable that belief in a divine social system of riules makes humans Special or even those of a particular belief, special, and always right because, they are divinely guided by their Faith to always get it right, despite incidental slips and errors,of course.
But as Mordant says, that doesn't matter, so long as everyone has room. It doesn't bother me too much that some here may be convinced that I am looking at an eternity of torment. It does bother me if they think that they have a duty to have the government dominated by religious rules to force me to convert and conform to save me from this fate, whether I believe it or not.
Humanism,whether by disbelievers of believers, aims at keeping such influence out of society - even if there are a lot of the religious still around. It is true that we have to aim at a majority vote, or you can't take your eyes off the the Churchgoers for a second.
We have one or two here who seem to believe that telling them that it is our mission to stop them imposing their belief -based rules on anyone else, even if they don't agree with them, is persecuting them. Most, however seem to be reasonable, even if they don't trust the unbelievers on allowing them to practice their religion by themselves.
Hey, everybody, let me turn this around by asking a different question, and maybe the car will get out of the ditch and back on the road...
Has any atheist reading this ever received evidence of any sort that gave you pause about your atheism? If so, what was it? What did you appreciate about it?
If not, have you heard of any other atheists who spoke of encountering evidence that paused them?
Yes. Let me think. The T Rex soft tissue was a shaker that looked like it might be a case for a YE after all. In the event it wasn't but, it was a shaker. Apart from that...no. The others are at best alternative hypotheses about unknowns. Like cosmic origins, the origins of like or the unique consciousness of man.
What happened is that more and more evidence had closed these gaps for God - Ontological arguments, the argument for a resurrection, prophecy, OT and new, Miracles (Fatima notably) The Goldilocks zone, all have gone down the tube.
Same with the universe it's also alive & expanding. Science & religion can co-exist!
Except that it is a category error. The universe contains life but that does not make it alive.
When I die my body will be full of billions of living things, mostly bacteria and viruses and prions and the like. But that will not change the fact that "I" will be dead. In fact some of those living things will be joined by other living things, to consume my body unless steps are taken to prevent that.
Hey, everybody, let me turn this around by asking a different question, and maybe the car will get out of the ditch and back on the road...
Has any atheist reading this ever received evidence of any sort that gave you pause about your atheism? If so, what was it? What did you appreciate about it?
If not, have you heard of any other atheists who spoke of encountering evidence that paused them?
what are you calling God. Omni-dudes only or anything more complex that we may be part of?
what is your definition of atheist? Deity only?
Could we ask the same about believers in a particular religion?
Well, you could ask me. I label myself a Christian but, to label myself beyond that, I’ve been pretty loose in that I’ve gone to Christian churches of different flavors, or to none. Yes, I have had doubts, here and there, now and then. Not about the existence of a Higher Power, but of the coherence of the things stated here and there in the Christian Bible. I notice, for instance, my own tendency to not delve into the apparent illogic of stories of the Old Testament, consoling myself that I am not supposed to be bound by the OT anyway but by the New Testament. Do they call me an a-la-carte Christian? And why does everybody have to argue about the Bible anyway? None of us were there, for crying out loud! I can let my imagination take me far. At some point, I'll stop and say, I don't know it all and neither does anyone else.
Hope this is not a digression: When I went in for my first colonoscopy, I chose to get knocked out during the 45-minute procedure. Before the procedure begins, I'm laying on a table in the gown in the operating room, an IV stuck into the back of my hand, listening to nice background music and the small talk of the doctor to his assistants, all of them standing behind me and out of view, never noticing when he casually reaches down and turns the stopcock and send the knock-out juice into my body. All I know is that I am listening to music one moment and, in the wink of an eye, I am sitting up in the recovery room with a nurse who wants me to break wind for her. It was that fast and that, uh, mentally unsettling. Different than when I sleep at night, which I usually see coming, ha.
Where was I for 45 minutes? I didn't even know I was not conscious until I woke up. The world moved on during those 45 minutes of my nothingness. I thought about this and got obsessed with imagining if there is no afterlife, was my 45-minutes of nothingness a taste of what it's like when I'm dead? I mean, at least after the 45 minutes I got to wake up and that is the only way I knew I had lived prior. But, once I die, if I remain nothingness forever, if I won't ever know that I ever had lived, then what is the point of all of this universe of complexity if it serves only... itself? What does it need me for? I mean, sh*t, I figure if it was just nature alone that evolved the sexual orgasm into a highly pleasurable thing in order to entice people and animals to even bother slamming into each other to reproduce, why does nature even care to bother? Seems to me nature could have let sex start off as, or become, a dull and boring piece of stinky grunt work that people and animals had no incentive to promote. Let us die off. Who cares?
Hey man, I admit it, I need to believe there is something more than the here and now. Luckily for me, I fell backwards into a belief for reincarnation which I decided is a model that fits a number of otherwise incongruent things for me, including personal experiences.
Last edited by sylvianfisher; 06-07-2016 at 07:04 PM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
