haqqaton said:
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.
Edit: Sorry for my poor English. It's not my first language.
|
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.
Yes. Yes you are. His arguments are fairly sound. Read the books and judge for yourself. I don't really know about any atheists converting to Christianity because of it. The only people I've seen claiming the arguments were unsound were people like Ben Stein who show that they have no understanding about of it, and are predisposed against evolution and towards a theistic god.
Regardless, if you say he is an agnostic, when he has defined his position quite clearly, you are misrepresenting him. If you don't know anything about him (or Turek for that matter) don't bring it up. If you want to talk about them, educate yourself first.
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.
No. You don't have to make a choice. Atheism is not a choice. It's a stance of, "I'll decide when evidence presented itself". There is no need to have an opinion on the origins of the universe. It's ok to not know.
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.
First off, reading the bible and putting it into action would do no good in proving god. Even if they bible was the best moral guide ever (it's not) and acting it out would lead me to a wonderful life, that would not have any bearing on whether or not it is real. Besides, the only really testable prediction it makes is what's going to happen when I die, and I'd rather not perform that experiment just yet. As it stands, nobody has been able to construct an experiment to prove god. When they have (in Dawkins book he describes an experiment used to determine whether prayers are effective in treating patients), there has been a negative result.
But, I don't have to do any of those things. I don't need to have any definitive position on god. I can simply say, "there is no evidence, and if it is provided, I'll believe". It doesn't take faith not to believe in god any more than it takes faith not to believe in Allah, Zeus, Mephisto, Spider-man, or big foot.
Faith is belief beyond evidence. Not believing something that has no evidence is not faith. It's logic. There is a difference between not believing and disbelieving. Think of a baby. A baby is born without a belief regarding Hercules. Does this mean the baby has 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.
Again, no. The scientific method doesn't require us to prove something doesn't exist. The scientific method is based on skepticism. We don't accept it until it is proven. Again, disbelief is not the same thing as not believing. We do not need to have faith in scientiests. We need to have a rigorous peer review systems, and we need experiments to have results that can be replicated.
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.
No. It is not by faith, it is by trust. Trust is an amount of belief that in someone, or an organization, that is consistent with the amount of evidence. There is enough evidence for Pluto, and enough evidence that the scientific community is generally accurate on such matter that an evaluation of the evidence would lead me to believe that Pluto is real with a very high degree of certainty. There is no evidence that is contrary to Pluto's existent. And of course, if I was truly doubtful and I REALLY cared to know for sure, I would be able to devise an experiment (look through a telescope) to confirm it.
If my best friend asks me to borrow a hundred dollars, and he has paid me back every time I have loaned him money in the past, then that is trust. If I get an email from a Nigerian prince and give him my bank account numbers so that he can give me his fortune, that is faith.
And no, I would not choose to believe she was having sex. I would make a logical conclusion, an evaluation. Maybe your mind works vastly different than mine, but even if I truly truly wished to believe my girlfriend and friend were loyal, I could not make a conscious choice to believe it if that wasn't consistent with the evidence. Of course, I could be wrong, but that really has nothing to do with whether I chose to believe it or not.
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.
If you are assisted by probabilities, how is that a choice? If I evaluate the evidence, and believe that there is a 99% chance something happens, then is that a choice? Wouldn't you automatically go with the 99%? That's how my mind works at least. I don't understand how you could choose to believe the 1% option. Either that or you have a vastly flawed idea of 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
Nope. If a fact is irrefutable, it is irrefutable. If I had irrefutable evidence of a miracle, one that could be proven 100% with evidence (hence irrefutable), then I would believe it. If there was a miracle that was as supported as Pluto is supported, I would believe it to a high degree of certainty. Because we don't have any irrefutable miracles to examine, I don't see how that claim can be made.
Advice: when you try to poison the well with "lol Daily Mail" you don't help the dicussion. Shame on you. ;)
Nah. The daily mail is shit, and I'll call it shit. Not sure why insulting the Daily Mail is a no-no, but insulting Dawkins is fine. And, if you'd read the ccomments of the article, you'd see it clearly explained why the article was shit.
TL:DR
If I said "I know that God doesn't exist for a fact" you could argue that is a faith based position. To say "I don't believe in a god because I have not seen evidence for it" is not a faith based position. Faith is belief without evidence. Belief based on evidence is either logical assessment (if we're talking about an event) or trust (if we're talking about a person). If you are suggesting that believing with a strong degree certainty in Pluto (which is supported by massive amounts of evidence and if untrue would involve a massive and utterly pointless conspiracy involving thousands of individuals) is the same as belief in a theistic god (which has no evidence, and in the case of a literal biblical god a great deal of counter-evidence), then that suggestion does not fall into the realm of reason.
