Any theist around here?

[reggin_bolas]

Teeqoz said:

haqqaton said:

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.

Burden of proof lies with the one making the claim, not the ones that don't believe it, meaning that theists would be the ones that would have to provide proof for their claim of a God.

The existence of Pluto is provable, and even though you haven't seen Pluto yourself, there is plenty of evidence to prove the existence of Pluto. There is no evidence for the existence of a god however, presumably because there is none. Now I bet you're gonna pick apart the "presumably" part, saying "You have to have faith in that to assume ....etc." but that's only if you are gonna continue treating agnostic and atheist as two different things. I'm an atheist. I'm also an agnostic. I accept that there is no way to disprove a God, just as you can't disprove that there's an unvisible, undetectable, magical animal made of rice walking around in your house right now. Doesn't mean either of them exists though.

When you see your girlfriend naked in bed with another guy, you don't choose to think that she slept with him. It's just your first assumption, as it's the one that makes sense given the evidence in front of you. Same can be said for atheists.

So does the atheist who boldy claims there is no god. And you can't prove a ne gative so have fun with that one. There is plenty of "proofs" postulated by philosophers throughout the ages. Artistotle for example. The universe is a series of causes requiring an ultimate cause. The argument is sound. 

Also laws of physics are conceptual in nature and not physical themselves. Conceptual laws require agency. They can't create themselves or appear randomly.

I don't enjoy these debates, they are ultimately futile. There is virtue in defending one's beliefs though.