| JWeinCom said: No, you don't have to have a lot of faith to be an atheist, and if this were the proper topic for it, I would shred every one of Turek's retarded arguments. Basically Turek completely misrepresents the atheist position. He assumes (like good ol' Bill O Reilly) that atheists believe that the universe came from nothing. Some atheists do in fact believe this (and some have reasonable evidence for it. See Universe from Nothing), but that is not inherent in the atheist position. The atheist position is that when there is evidence to support something, we will believe it, and when there is not, we won't. Edit: To clarify, you could say that it takes faith to believe that the universe came from nothing (although that depends on what you mean by nothing), and you might have a point. To say it takes faith to be an atheist doesn't make any more sense than saying "it takes faith not to believe in Zeus". BTW I don't use the word retarded lightly, but I honestly can't think of a better word here. Actually, I should take that back because it is unfair for retarded people to be associated with him. The man is incredibly dishonest, morally repugnant, and it's both funny and sad to see him do bizarre mental gymnastics like trying to justify children dying of cancer. He misrepresents scientists in an attempt to support his view (like you're doing with Dawkins) deliberately tries to conflate deism with theism and theism with christianity, and when presented with evidence that does not support him he changes the subject. If you're going to try to invoke an apologist, at least invoke one who is not a turd sandwich. And Richard Dawkins is agnostic. He is also an atheist. Those terms are not mutually exclusive. Agnostic vs gnostic is a position on whether or not we can know something is true with 100% certainty, and atheist vs theist is the view that there is a god or not a god. You can be an agnostic atheist, an agnostic theist, a gnostic theist, or a gnostic atheist. The daily mail has either ignorantly or intentionally misrepresented Dawkins views, because when you've got no evidence, you've got to use some rhetorical tricks. If I told you right now that I have a pink, invisible, microscopic unicorn in my bedreeom, you probably wouldn't believe me, but you could not completely disprove it. By the Daily Mail definition (lol Daily Mail) you would be agnostic in regards to my unicorn. And no it is not a choice. There is evidence, you evaluate it, and you make a decision. If you walk into your bedroom, find your best friend in bed with your girlfriend, both of them are sweaty, and there are condom wrappers lying around, you would believe they had just had sex. You could not, unless you're some kind of master of self delusion, choose to believe otherwise, because all of the evidence points to that conclusion. Of course, different people may interpret evidence differently, but how you interpret it is not a choice, it's just how your mind works. Don't mean to derail the thread, but ideas like that do have to be addressed. |
I don't want to derail the thread either so this will be my last post here... be happy, you'll have the last word.
I'm not mirespresenting Dawkins - at least I don't think so. I just found funny that his arguments are so bad that some atheists become christhians after reading his book. I have read nothing from Turek so I can't speak for him and I'm not invoking apologists here.. easy... If I wanted to, I would quote Chesterton, Lewis or Dostoievski, Pascal or Kierkgaard... Those guys knew how to think.
My point is: you, as human, need to have faith because your knowledge of almost everything is very limited. You can/should work with probabilities but, in the end, you need to make a choice. Even atheists need to make a choice by faith.
The scientific method says that you need to have an hypothesis, realize an experiment and then get to a conclusion. So to someone have a conclusion regarding something he needs to experiment it OR use his faith and believe in others who had experimented it.
Let's say you want to know if the christian god exists. What should you do? Talk with some christians, read the Bible and then try to put those teachings in action. If you don't end it believing what is your conclusion? "There's no God"? NO! You need the check your experiment looking for failures on procedures and rerun it. Eventually, after rounds of experiments you could say "There's no God" but still you'll have to have faith on it. Why? The "steps" of the experiment - described in Bible - are not scientifically verifiable. Maybe you did something wrong on your 999999th try. The same can't be said by searching for a teapot in space.
Do you believe that there's a cosmic object called Pluto? Is it by faith in others - in other words, you don't know it by your senses - or have you "seen" it? Regarding your bedroom example, sometimes you can only have evidences and no proof - you know that they are VERY different. It's highly probable that she was having sex with that guy but this is not a proof. You have to choose to believe that she was having sex - a easy choice, right, but you could be wrong.
In the end, for a lot of things, you have to make a choice; assisted by probabilities, if you want. So, as I already said, a person is atheist by choice.
"Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact" - The Brothers Karamazov
Advice: when you try to poison the well with "lol Daily Mail" you don't help the dicussion. Shame on you. ;)
Edit: Sorry for my poor English. It's not my first language.
