| Akvod said: I don't because I like to make as few assumptions as possible, and because I like simplicity. One can go all nihilist and say that reality itself can't be proven, since observation itself is in question. Okay then, but I'm sure both religious and non-religious people aren't nihilist. I'm sure we all don't believe that we're in some kind of matrix. So we all assume the existence of the world, and that our observations are reliable. That's the axiom we all live off of in my opinion, our one big assumption. From this axiom (that the world exists and our observations are reliable) we can do inductive and deductive reasoning. We can induce the fundamental rules and laws of our reality (inducing the law of gravity by seeing an apple fall, or dropping two objects of different mass from a building), and then use those laws to deduce things that we might not be able to see or observe. That's science in my opinion, and in my opinion everyone's a scientist. We all accept reality for what it is, we remember what reality is, and we make predictions based on that memory. So the thing is, why don't we bring a god into our big picture? A)To explain the unexplainable. B) To explain the origin of reality Simply saying that goddit isn't an explanation. In fact, that's just a more complicated answer. Here's how it looks in my mind: ?->God exists->Reality exists vs Reality exists
Even if we go with: God always existed->Reality exists vs Reality exists That's 2 things vs 1.
It's the same reason why I don't believe that little people live in my fridge, and hide when I open the door anymore. It's why I don't believe that everytime I go back to my car, someone may have replaced it with an exactly same looking car. It's simply unneeded to believe such a thing. Nothing changes, and it's just unnecessary. Also, to me god is just the same as replacing one unknown with another unknown, as Thuderf00t says it. ?->God->Universe ?->Universe Why do we need a middle man? Why believe in one extra, unnecessary thing? |
I haven't gone through the entire thread yet, but I was just going to add some stuff here. First off, the simplicity argument is probably the strongest one for atheism right now, and Dawkins is the most famous proponent of it right now. He sets it forth in "The God Delusion", but theists also use Ockham's razor to argue for the existence of God.
1. This is just a small note, but we actually infer the law of gravity. We do not induce it. Induction would be like, "I've dropped four objects from a building and they all accelerate at the rate of 9.8m/s2, therefore the next object I drop will fall at the rate of 9.8m/s2. In order to get to the law of gravity, someone has to look for the cause of objects falling at 9.8m/s2 and determine that the law of gravity is the best explanation for the phenomena. We do use induction to get to the law of gravity, but inference allows us to go from things falling at a uniform rate to a gravitational law.
2. The simplicity argument is easier to understand when looking at the origin of the universe. The question is simply, "what is the simplest cause for the beginning of the universe?" Theologians will say God while atheists will say chance is the better explanation. Atheists will say God is infinitely complex because of God's omniscience, so God is the most complex explanation possible. Therefore, it is eliminated by Ockham's razor.
However, theologians will argue that God, being nothing but a mind, is the simplest being imaginable. This idea is quite hard to explain, but the idea is that God is a single substance, and the facets and aspects of the universe can be derived from this single substance.
