An opinion puff-piece from an idiot that doesn't even understand the topic is "obvious"?

The funny part is to what lengths various fundietards will go to in order to try and deny atheism. Here's a thought for you - if your faith wasn't so obviously weak and threatened with doubt, you'd ignore atheists and atheism as being meaningless and unimportant to you. Every time a fundietard puts for effort to combat the atheist, they expose their own lack of faith.

Really?

Aside from the author being completely wrong, wouldn't it be kind of foolish to keep believing something after you were proven wrong?

I also don't believe their is a pound of gold in my desk drawer and would love to be wrong about that.

Nope, no gold. But that doesn't mean someone didn't put some in while I was typing this.

...Now I don't know anyone who is a strong-sense atheist. Even Dawkins, as I recall, is a "70% probability" man

That guy should have a nice conversation with Penn Jillette sometime.

abscence of evidence is evidence of abscence. If you cannot deduce the existence of gods based on observation, then that is evidence of the non-existence of gods.

Science: Submitter is a moron.

I don't believe in God. That does not mean I think there is no chance of their being a god. Anything omnipotent could hide its existence just as easily as it could do anything else.

Agnostics withhold judgment, atheists don't. There's a chance unicorns could exist, but I'm not a unicorn agnostic because I am not 100% sure there are no unicorns.

If your definition of atheism is such that there is no one who fulfills it, odds are it is your definition which is the problem and not the atheists.

An atheist has absolute faith in the lack of the divine.

An agnostic believes that he doesn't know, or as Socrates put it, "I know that I know nothing".

The former is as much believing without evidence as any other form of faith. The latter is timeless wisdom.

Y'all can believe whatever you want as long as you leave me alone.

Obligatory:



Article fairly is correct. Subby is an idiot.

comslave:

If you cannot deduce the existence of gods based on observation, then that is evidence of the non-existence of gods.

John 14.6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me."

John 10.37 "If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; 38 but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father."

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~ Philip Dick

comslave: abscence of evidence is evidence of abscence. If you cannot deduce the existence of gods based on observation, then that is evidence of the non-existence of gods.

While I am an atheist your argument is invalid. Negatives can not be proven. Proof and staunch opinion are not the same thing. I would not go against your statement except that to let the statement go allows for more false arguments to be defended. It becomes a vicious cycle. And false information is the fertilizer of ignorance.

Pssst...EvilEgg -- You believe whatever Penn Jillette believes?



Really?

comslave: abscence of evidence is evidence of abscence. If you cannot deduce the existence of gods based on observation, then that is evidence of the non-existence of gods.


/thanks idsfa

Anybody who categorically says they're certain there is no higher form of intelligence than us can't back it up. It's difficult to prove negatives in general, and pretty much impossible when it involves an entity that could, if it wished, hide all evidence of its existence from us.

But of course, on the other hand, anyone who claims a belief had better have some strong evidence for it. 2000-year-old books by sheepherders that are true because they say they're true don't count.

I'm as sure that there is no Judeo-Christian-Muslim God as I am that there is no invisible elephant in my backyard.

Bevets: comslave:

If you cannot deduce the existence of gods based on observation, then that is evidence of the non-existence of gods.

John 14.6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me."

John 10.37 "If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; 38 but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father."

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~ Philip Dick

Lol, Hi Bevets.


Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~ Philip Dick

Let's see, we've got a trollish headline, an outspoken agnostic who claims that atheism means having absolute certainty, and Bevets thinking that quoting the Bible means something. Now all we need is somebody to think that he's cute for posting pictures of stormtroopers, and I think the thread has hit all of the points on the checklist. It's a party!

//Okay, I left out (P or Q) = (Q or P), but that hasn't shown up as much recently.

Martian_Astronomer:
Now all we need is somebody to think that he's cute for posting pictures of stormtroopers, and I think the thread has hit all of the points on the checklist. It's a party!.

You know who else liked stormtroopers?

Doctor Jan Itor: I'm as sure that there is no Judeo-Christian-Muslim God as I am that there is no invisible elephant in my backyard.

I'd extend that to any interventionist god.

NegativeNine:You know who else liked stormtroopers?

You're right, I forgot the inevitable Hitler/Stalin comparison. I'm sure we'll get there, though.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

That is all.

alaric3: While I am an atheist your argument is invalid. Negatives can not be proven. Proof and staunch opinion are not the same thing. I would not go against your statement except that to let the statement go allows for more false arguments to be defended. It becomes a vicious cycle. And false information is the fertilizer of ignorance.

QFT. I have yet to see an argument for deities that does not break down to "just because" when you keep asking how someone knows something is true. I would love to see a positive argument for religion to actually debate over, but every one I've seen has boiled down to circular logic and flawed fundamentals.

Feynman said it best when he stated that anyone trying to prove something should try as hard as they can to disprove it: if their original theory stands, then it is most likely true. I don't think religion has that level of intellectual integrity.

Martian_Astronomer: Let's see, we've got a trollish headline, an outspoken agnostic who claims that atheism means having absolute certainty, and Bevets thinking that quoting the Bible means something. Now all we need is somebody to think that he's cute for posting pictures of stormtroopers, and I think the thread has hit all of the points on the checklist. It's a party!

//Okay, I left out (P or Q) = (Q or P), but that hasn't shown up as much recently.

You're looking for GilRuiz1 and abb3w, respectively, but I'll see if I can't fill in.




We can prove God's nonexistence to the same degree we can prove that your brains are not made of cauliflower.

Racht: "Anybody who categorically says they're certain there is no higher form of intelligence than us can't back it up."

Exactly, the problem is that Christians seem to think this is the position of all atheists when it isn't the position of any atheist I've ever met. As it breaks into the mainstream I expect we'll see polls on where most atheists stand and it'll be really interesting.

Racht: "It's difficult to prove negatives in general, and pretty much impossible when it involves an entity that could, if it wished, hide all evidence of its existence from us."

Right, but if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, then it's a failed hypothesis in need of reformulation.

symbolset:
The former is as much believing without evidence as any other form of faith. The latter is timeless wisdom.


This is BS I hear from agnostics all the time, and a basic misunderstanding of how logic works.

You can't and don't need to disprove something to know it is false. Claiming so is a logical fallacy known as shifting the burden of proof.

You know that there is not a magical, pink, invisible unicorn next to you. You cannot prove that there is not one, but you know there's not. You also can't prove that you won't die if you don't eat, yet you continue to eat anyways, why? You can't prove or disprove that if you place your hand on the ground, you will explode, without actually trying it. Yet how many of you think there's even a chance that would happen and are afraid to do it?

The burden of proof is on the one making the claim, with no evidence at all, a claim cannot be true, and this is for good reason.

For instance, let's pretend that we didn't know what caused lightning. I can say that God did it, someone else can say that leprechauns did it, or Thor, or any other infinite number of things.

This means that your chance to randomly guess the correct answer is 0%. To find what causes lightning, you need to base your information on previous knowledge, knowledge obtained through observation.

The Dragon In My Garage
by Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.