Last edited Sun Jan 13, 2019, 01:39 PM - Edit history (1)

Non-believers may refute an issue if some religious doctrine with a plethora of FACTS and SCIENCE, but presenting facts and science is not proselytizing...

See the difference?

I thought not!

He's free to do as he pleases, however, just as are the religionists who threaten Hell for non-believers. Why should an atheist not provide a counter message to that?

He is not the "leader" of atheism. He's an individual atheist, just as we all are.

And you don't have to have a formal leader for your belief system to be proselytizing for it.

In fact, it is exactly not that.

Since one can't "prove" anything about an infinite diety in any way, it is a conclusion made in the absence of proof. i.e. a belief.

Show me proof that a god exists otherwise it doesn't exist. One cannot prove a negative and your logic is seriously flawed.

But, to each their own.

That's the point, and what makes it a belief.

At one time, I believed in Santa Claus. At age five, I stopped believing in Santa Claus, and never believed that children's belief again. I required no proof either when I believed, nor when I stopped believing.

However, I was no longer able to believe in the existence of the jolly old elf. So, I didn't.

I did not believe that Santa didn't exist. I simply did not believe that he did.

Same with deities. I don't believe they exist, since there is zero evidence that they do.

You do believe there is no deity. Again, what is being discussed is belief, i.e. conclusion in the absence of proof.

I do not believe in the concept of deities. I do not believe in imaginary things.

It may seem to you to be a fine distinction, but it is not belief. It is disbelief. It is the absence of belief. It is the opposite of belief.

I have no belief in deities or anything else that is imagined by the human mind. I have no belief in anything that is not physically sensible.

If it was not a belief, you'd merely state that you know nothing of dieties. But quite the opposite, you go further and state that you know that there are none. Conclusion in the absence of proof.

A bit like aliens. I don't know if there are aliens, especially ones capable of interstellar travel. So if someone asks me if they exist, the answer is "I don't know". There is about as much evidence of aliens as there are of gods. However, if one asks me if I believe they exist, I'd probably answer that there was a very good possibility.

If you don't know what those two dots mean, ask guillaumeb.

leprechauns are, but not only do not have an affirmative belief in their existence, I have a high enough confidence in their nonexistence to state is as a fact.

Am I open to being proved otherwise? Certainly; but absent that proof, i believe the total lack of evidence for them makes declaring their nonexistence reasonable.

As I said below:

Atheism is the same thing, when we say "no god", we are saying "while it is impossible to disprove the existence of an ephemeral entity, the evidence proffered thus far is so lacking as to render a decision against the affirmative claim".

But it's really a pain saying that every time, especially since it shouldn't have to be explained.

Some atheists actually merely state that they know nothing of a god and see no proof thereof. However, the vast majority actually assert the knowledge of the LACK of existence of one.

I cannot prove that there's no teapot orbiting Mars, but the total lack of evidence for one, combined with the lack of a mechanism for putting one there, makes it a logical conclusion to say "there isn't a teapot orbiting Mars".

Again, equating that type of conclusion with religious faith is dishonest nonsense.


Disclaimer: given that Elon Musk may have put a teapot in the trunk of his Tesla, this version of the argument may become obsolete. The logic still holds, however.

It would be silly for anyone to assert there is no teapot orbiting Mars because we'd virtually have no way of knowing. It's why science often uses the expression "known", as in "How many KNOWN planets are in the solar system".

The accurate statement is there are no "known" teapots orbiting Mars. There's alot of junk out there. For example.

And MineralMan is quite correct; atheism requires no affirmative belief. It is simply the lack of belief in a deity or deities.

While some atheists do hold affirmative beliefs related to that, those are not necessary components of atheism.

The type of belief we are discussing here is basically the same as faith.

To argue that the belief in a proposition based on evidence and rational argument is the same as belief in the absence of evidence are the same thing is ludicrous, but that is how such arguments go.

The tactic is to get the atheist to posit "belief" as the acceptance of a logical conclusion, and then attempt to equate that with religious faith.

It's inaccurate, and dishonest.

There are multiple meanings of belief. One of them is "2. trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something."
This is the version of belief being discussed. There is another kind that I suspect you mean which "I believe I'll have another" or "I believe what he said is true" or something of that nature. There are reasons or evidence for such things. But a conclusion drawn when it is impossible to have any actual knowledge is a belief of the faith variety.

What was being discussed was whether some athiests "believe" that they know there is no god. Many of them do.

...

our firewall is blocking all the images. So much for clarifying.

...it's not my problem.

Listen to the atheists who are telling you.

If someone proposes a brand new god, and you say "Hmm, nope, I don't see enough evidence to believe in that god" - do you now have an active belief system of disbelief in that god?

But if you say "There is no such god", you probably are expressing a belief.

If it's defined in an explicitly contradictory way, one can declare no such god exists.

But than you for admitting you were wrong, and clarifying what you meant.

Just curious.

That's all we've been telling you. If you want to switch back and defend your original claim, now you need to demonstrate how rejecting belief in previously defined gods like Yahweh or Allah is different than rejecting belief in a newly invented god.

Please proceed.

The OP was talking about folks to assert that there is no god.

You took issue with someone saying that atheism isn't a belief system.

Not every atheist asserts there is no god.

Ergo, you were wrong.

I've acknowledged that not all atheists assert there is no god, but at the very least many, if not most.

It was that kind of atheism to which I alluded.

But whatever, you've backed off the claim anyway. That's fine by me - you save face however you'd like.

I presume that the OP is always the context.

but again, however you need to save face. You're always right, never wrong, never make mistakes, etc.

More a statement of trust in the people that told me the fairy tale to begin with, and then admit to the ruse.
Not to mention the kid across the street got more money that I did so the little fairy can stick it as far as I'm concerned.

If not, then you have an active belief that it doesn't.

Your logic.

Mostly because literally everyone that promulgated the myth to me has admitted to the acts attributed to the fairy.

So your non-belief in the tooth fairy is a belief system too.

Your logic.

What I wrote is often called "evidence". Strangely, one can also find this kind of evidence on line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_fairy

One finds a distinctly different discussion when search on "god".

That Wikipedia article was clearly written by an a-tooth-fairyist.

You can't disprove the tooth fairy by just declaring it so. The tooth fairy is beyond your understanding and science.

Your logic.

What you are suggesting is that it may not be possible to CONCLUSIVELY dispel the myth. Even within science this is often true which is why even things that are accepted as theories or laws still are tested as new tests are conceived.

You attempt to compare this to a situation in which there is NO evidence one way or another.

Helios was claimed to pull the sun across the sky in a chariot. We KNOW that is not true because we have direct evidence of how the earth moves around the sun.

Agree or disagree?

Will you allow people to say they believe Helios does not exist, or will you claim they are disbelieving "on faith" and there is no evidence either way?

You're right, that there are gods that can be "falsified". The whole "earth on the back of turtles" thing is another example.

It is actually one of the problems that many faiths deal with regularly, the falsification of various aspects of their deities. The Roman Catholic Church did battle with science for decades as various explanations of acts of god were shown to actually just be "acts" of nature. We still deal today with the crowd that insists that the earth is only 6000 years old. Many faithful have "learned" to stop trying to connect specific events or phenomenon to a deity because it actually makes their deity, or at least the "evidence" of existence, falsifiable. Even worse for the faithful was when "acts of god" could be "recreated" by knowledgeable men. It created the conflict of "does doing this make one a god?".

Almost in reaction to this reality, many concepts of deities have incorporated the concept of pure faith into them. i.e. it is the intent of the deity that they cannot be proven to exist such that faith alone must dictate the basis of belief. It's part of the concept behind the "doubting Thomas" story.

there IS evidence against many specific gods, and there IS evidence against the existence of the tooth fairy, and even though we might not be able to conclusively PROVE those entities don't exist, saying "I don't believe X exists" is a reasonable statement, open to the possibility of error, without having to claim someone is actually making a statement of faith?

I'm saying that one cannot make a blanket assertion of "no deities" on anything but belief since ultimately there is no way to prove one way or another that there is not one that does exist.

We can play this game all day, but the bottom line is you are making a special exception for gods that you do not make for any other entities or concepts.

That's all I wanted to clarify. Thanks.

You can't. You can make a strong case however since of course none have been seen, photographed, or fossils found. I've seen a Jackalope but I'm pretty sure it was a fake. But these things are falsifiable of course because there are certain assertions about how to detect them. Deities on the other hand...

And just about every theist makes definite assertions about their god(s).

So again, why the special exception? You haven't explained. I understand your investment in your position, but you haven't demonstrated why you think gods must be treated differently.

They make assertions, but frequently nothing that can be falsified. Actually, they've kinda learned to do that. It's the concept of "you can only know him through faith alone" feature. It won't be surprising to most of the faithful that there are no photographs. And there's a reason that Jesus rose from the dead and "left this earth". Yes, there are still people that make falsifiable assertions, that doesn't really bear on the assertion that there are none.

It doesn't change the fact that the same standard you use to dismiss all sorts of things isn't OK when someone else uses it to dismiss gods.

That's called a double standard.

Feel free to have the last word if you wish. I'm done.

Any discussion that involves only assertions that can't be verified either way fall into this category. "Good" art is another one.

I'm sorry this bothers you so.

or any deity has had ANY impact on the physical Universe. Evidence for that should exist. If not the claim of such an entity is not accepted.
If the physical Universe looks and acts exactly as it would whether any god exist, then that works against any claim a god exists.
If such entity has no impact on the Universe, why call it God?

We can't detect everything. Some things we've only been able to detect in the last couple of decades. Don't be surprised if we create ways to detect things going forward that today we don't even know exists today. Furthermore, many deity concepts consists of gods that unpredictably interfere in natural processes on an inconsistent basis. So "miracles" or whatever would appear to be otherwise natural events so there would be nothing to detect.

"Unexplained" events happen all the time. Tumors shrink for no apparent reasons. Fetuses stop growing and are reabsorbed almost without note. We in the scientific community offer natural hypotheses for why these things occur, but since they are generally based upon statistical probabilities, they have little relation to individual events. Most of us tend to accept them because they "seem" rational.

And as of yet I don't believe anyone has "detected" why the singularity occurred. (Although I think I read we're moving away from that hypothesis.)

that there is no evidence that any god exists, but they would be open if such is offered is the valid position.

The rest is simply a God of the Gaps argument.