Why don't you believe in a god?

[Akvod]

Kamal said:

Akvod said:

Signalstar said:

The same reason I don't believe in Unicorns, wizards, witches, and hipporgriffs. I mean Gods do exist but only as creations of human minds.

What if your observations and senses were a creation of the human mind, or perhaps an evil demon?

Do you a  major in philosophy or have you studied it before? As firstly you mentioned how you love simplicity in which Swinebourne dictates in his theories, now Descartes meditation.

Here is the answer in the nutshell

In general it will follow from any state of thinking (e.g., imagining, sensing, feeling, reasoning) that I exist. While I can be deceived about the objective content of any thought, I cannot be deceived about the fact that I exist and that I seem to perceive objects with certain characteristics. (The famous statement of this from D.'s Discourse on Method is "Cogito ergo sum." or "I think, therefore I am.")

I only took 1 intro course of philosophy, so I don't fancy myself as being a philosopher. I just really loved my professor's explanation of simplicity and occam's razor.

I didn't question YOUR existence, only if your observations were reliable and can be used to prove the existence of an external world. What if we (or really, you) were just "spirits", or like the point in Flatland?

So I wasn't arguing for nihilism.

 

I just want to make the point that yes, we do make assumptions. We assume that our observations are reliable, and that the external world exists. We make that assumption for a lot of reasons (utility, nothing to be lost, etc).

I mean, you can't lose anything, if there truly is nothing. That's why I don't believe in nihilism.

But I'm arguing that the assumptions need to end there. You can't argue out of utility (life will be so depressing without a god) beyond the very basic in my opinion.