Peh said:
I can understand why you are saying something like that. It's because you still don't understand atheism. And your post clearly shows it. If you do the same by debating or arguing with other atheists, then don't act surprised, that they don't take your position serious, because you simply lack the understanding and knowing of what atheism is and what atheists are.
"do you honestly believe that our scientific instrumentation and our senses are able to pick up all of the phenomena in existence?... dark matter all by itself disproves that idea if you do hold it" I wouldn't be surprised if something like that has been said 100 years ago and look where we are now and what we have found. In order to pick up all of the phenomena in existence, you have to know which do exist. If those are interacting with this world, we surely be able to locate them and probably also explain. If there are phenomena that exist, but don't interact with this world, then surely it will be the same as they don't exist in the first place. So why bother? And as I said above, you got a wrong idea about what we think about dark matter. Nevertheless, where do you place your God in all of this? Oh and.. our senses? No. But that's why we use "scientific instrumentation" in the first place. There is one particular thing I don't like about certain theists. And that's reverse engineering. You got and idea and a concept of God and try to work in order to proof that concept. That's the opposite what science is doing. That's also why Intelligent Design is not considered science. |
"beyond the unverified idea that there are no gods, atheism as a belief system has no other merit besides in my opinion unjustified arrogance... "
You lost the debate before it even started by misrepresenting the opposing position. "
well if you move on to saying its the lack of belief in gods the point i was making still holds, but regardless if that is your point, what then differentiates you from an agnostic person? since we can also make the argument that a lack of belief in gods is what defines an agnostic person in this context
"I wouldn't be surprised if something like that has been said 100 years ago and look where we are now and what we have found. In order to pick up all of the phenomena in existence"
yes, that was my point exactly, 100 years or so ago we did not understand radio waves and the electromagnetic spectrum and we would have considered a person using a cell phone to be a wizard presumably and now here we are in the present day taking these things for granted
" If those are interacting with this world, we surely be able to locate them and probably also explain."
why would you assume that? this is why i asked you if you believe our instruments are able to detect all phenomena that exist... and example that this is not the case is dark matter and black holes
your argument here is based on the assumption that right now we have reached the pinnacle of our understanding of the universe and don't have anything else to discover and its just not true
" If there are phenomena that exist, but don't interact with this world, then surely it will be the same as they don't exist in the first place."
the point i'm making is that phenomena exist that interact with our world that we have difficulty measuring and deciphering properly and apparently in some cases miss entirely
"Oh and.. our senses? No. But that's why we use "scientific instrumentation" in the first place."
we interpret the data instruments produce with our senses yes, and both instruments and our senses are fallible and we are even now in a constant process of refining and improving our instruments and scientific methodology and as we continue to do so we uncover more information about our environment
to give an example, the scientific community recently discovered gravity waves during some type of experiment... before hand they didn't have concrete evidence for the existence of the waves as far as i remember, but that changed with this test.... which demonstrates that there was was a phenomenon that was undetectable but over time with better instrumentation and methodology it was revealed
"There is one particular thing I don't like about certain theists. And that's reverse engineering. You got and idea and a concept of God and try to work in order to proof that concept. That's the opposite what science is doing."
actually that's exactly how the scientific method works, a hypothesis is proposed and tests are conducted to prove or disprove that hypothesis
i'll concede though that god is not testable, well at least not in any objective way i can think of
lastly i'm not a theist
