Challenge my Atheism

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

Regarding the existence of God (herein EoG), I’m instinctively atheistic, intellectually agnostic and philosophically secular humanist. I sense there are others of similar disposition here. So, I’m aware of the limits of my knowledge, and freely admit the insecurities of my beliefs regarding the non-EoG. That said, however, I feel strongly confident that my atheistic worldview is safe from challenge, largely since no theistic argument has (so far) satisfied me that it’s better- despite my resolve to keep an open mind with this stuff.

I don’t kid myself there’s any knockdown answer; in the end, I know it only comes down to the evidence of my personal experience against that of others. But I’d be keen to hear from anyone here who feels he might have compelling and rational reason for his belief (or non-belief) in the EoG, against which I might test mine.

TIA.

2

I suppose it takes a spark of interest however it comes for one to learn of God. One can’t be something (i.e. chemical engineer) unless they truly seek to be educated in that vein. Learning about something usually involves effort. Approaching a certain subject in a dilettante fashion will leave an ‘outside looking in’ point of reference in trying to make sense of a particular thing. If there is no true interest due to scepticism, then it appears pointless to the viewer.

3

That’s a very fair point, and one I’ve encountered before. The heart as well as the mind must apparently be open, and one must be willing to receive the answer to the question. However, it seems regrettable to me that one cannot know anything about God without knowing God.

4

That’s a very interesting point. Say you want to know what it’s like to experience everything. So you travel the world, try everything you can, etc… Even if in theory you could travel the universe, in both space and time, could you really experience everything? Could you then experience what it’s like to have never experienced all that in the first place? Can you compare the taste of two different wines without the order you drink them in to some degree affecting how each tastes? I think it’s a mildly delusional approach (we all share that to at least some degree I think), and Liteninbolt’s dilettante comment applies.

On the other hand I think your comment reveals something about the nature of this “God” - namely, that it is impossible to know something that is completely foreign to you. My own experience with Christian teachings is that they actually emphasize the split between the spiritual and the secular (lofty versus degraded, perfect versus sinner, etc.), rather than emphasizing the sacred nature of your own self. The sacred/profane split is a fabricated one in the first place of course (as is the belief in an independent “self”), but it has its uses.

5

You Are free to choose whatever you want to believe.
If you believe it, then you are right to yourself.
If you are insecure about what you believe then you really don’t believe it.
You have more to learn.

6

Maybe.

Perhaps I should have stated that, although my beliefs are now weakly atheist, I did in my past believe in the EoG and at that time I knew Him in the way it is often claimed one must know Him in order to know about Him. I therefore have some claim to know about God despite the fact that I do not believe in Him. For this reason, amongst others, the dilettante defence seems very shaky.

What say you believers of apostasy?

[edit messed up code]

7

So the question for me, then, is what is it exactly that you “knew”, and at the time called “God”?

8

The point I would make is learning about God is that the people who feign a relationship with Him with a possibility of being misguided hurts that premise. Discernment of knowing who is a true agent or representative of disseminating God’s Word is the crux of the problem.

Using the Christian point of view, walking the walk 24/7/365 isn’t the norm. They (me) after all are products of our environment and don’t toe that line constantly. I will say it takes a true yearning to extend one’s self over into being a believer. This doesn’t mean a person absolutlely has to be perfect in a spiritual sense, but it is probably preferred by God.

I advocate a spiritual relationship with God, but I also realize not everyone will feel that to be needed. Giving yourself doesn’t necessarily set yourself up for spiritual failure. Some believers of God often fall, then find themselves trying to rebound. Some people do not because they possibly have become jaded through misrepresentation from another or through the doctrine set up by a certain religious faith which countermands their reasoning of what they feel in their hearts. Knowing God is a struggle sometimes, but if we hang with Him, He will not spiritually abandon us.

9

Saying that a theistic arguement hasn’t convinced you, when you admit to being instinctly atheistic, is like saying that Usain Bolt has never beaten me at ping-pong. It doesn’t mean I’m the world ping-pong champion.

10

I think there are crippling flaws in every point of view that can be illustrated without reference to the polar opposite of that view.
I’m not sure if that makes sense.
The point is, atheism, theism, and all the other isms, are inconsistent on their own terms, and you don’t have to use capitalist arguments to defeat a socialist perspective, or theistic ones to defeat atheistic ones.

11

As others have pointed out, I basically feel it is a matter of faculty. I lack the faculty to believe in some spiritual realm. I’ve met others who feel the same. I had the luxury of being raised atheist – indeed, supernatural belief was denigrated in my household (at least by my mother, ironically, my father is substantially more open to it) because it is “counterrevolutionary”, for lack of a better word, in nature.

But I’ve met people raised in classically religious environments who have felt the same. Sure, they were raised Catholic (the most common example I find – they do tend to be less extreme. Sorry, I know you are British so that has to burn) or whatever but they never really bought into it.

I imagine you were the same. You may have gone through some of the motions because, well, why not? But You never bought into them either.

For others it isn’t an empty exercise. I get that. I love happy hardcore, a type of music that pretty much everybody agrees is terrible. Even people who really like techno have nothing but terrible things to say about my favorite genre of music. To me, it just sings to my soul, it makes me feel happy (d’uh) and whole. I imagine that a belief in some deity provides a similar feeling.

If you can put on some headphones and dance to it – or better yet, go crazy at a rave, where is the harm? If those headphones are kneeling at one’s bedside and the rave is a church, who am I to judge?

Everything is a matter of taste and tasting.

Now, Mencius believed that one could create a dish that would appeal to all tastes. Major food conglomerates agree with that sentiment and seek to capitalize on it. They’ve had a great deal of success in that field as well. Personally, I’d rather have a home-cooked dinner as opposed to a microwave dinner. But, once again, I’m in the minority.

In none of these cases am I right. Indeed, it could easily be said that I am deficient. After all, my taste leads me in a direction in which I find little agreement with others. So it would be easy to conclude that I am a pervert, that in some way my taste is warped.

If we accept the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice, it is easy to conclude that a god does exist and I am immune to its presence for the same reason I deviate so drastically from the mean on a variety of other issues.

12

Hello “Coatless”

I usually would pass over this, but today it is snowing heavily and I have nothing better to do. So I’ll challenge your atheism. But please, don’t get me wrong. I am doing this on a very superficial manner for the entretainment value of it and not because I believe in my own argument…I am just presenting a case for the opposition without passion or prejudice.

First off, I question the use of this. As you say: “I’m instinctively atheistic”, so what is an argument going to do to change what nature has determined? The same declaration is often made by theists, and possibly rightly so, so again, what would be the value of debate? But I guess I’ll have to agree with Plato and presuppose that reason is stronger than nature…

I would like to know what you mean here; “no theistic argument has (so far) satisfied me”. Why have the failed and which ones in specific do you even know off? More importanly, DO you actually believe that an argument can satisfy you? I am approaching this from a legal perspective, but as you know, Law takes certain propositions as granted. One of them that argument can show beyond reasonable doubt the G or non-G of a person. Also for that matter, what sort of theistic argument are you refering to? theism can be divided between belief in god, gods and even in just a principle of nature, as in Buddhist religion or in Plato’s Forms. Even if you don’t believe in god, or gods, that doesn’t mean that you cannot be categorized as “theist”, at least by me, so we have to come to an agreement here about what all these terms actually will mean in our argument.

I’ll tell you my position:
I believe that only a god can kill a god. That only a superstition can destry superstition. That only belief in something can supplant belief in something else. I believe that “progress” runs in circles and that nature itself necessitates irrational belief for the existence of rational inquiry. As far as whether atheism is a more reasonable starting point, the question is ancient as to why there IS something instead of nothing. You can say that the universe always was and will be, or that it had a date of creation billions of years ago and that prior to that nothing…no time, nothing. So why or how did that change? Some say that the universe always was. What I find common is the need to believe and this suppositions as mythologies in themselves based on presuppositions we believe in with almost religious fervor, or not, but normal because we need such myths to even reason, to even raise the question that so far exceeds our scope of comprehension. Theism is the most tenable position, so I’ll argue, because reason, a natural quality of man and on which this discussion is predicated and thus HAS TO be presupposed, is the inquiry into the mind of EoG- what that “EoG” is the key, but “EoG” is in the eye of the beholder and so it is all things for all people and is expressed AS IF in contrast to something else while it is only ITSELF in another guise, in another eye. You take away the “bells and whistles” of a narration and what you have is very similar. And why? Because WE ARE very similar. Theism, is then, not a mistake of a few or many, but simply a manifestation of our reason, our rationality, our humanity.

13

Coatless;

Do you want to believe in EoG?
I’m not asking about your cognitive.
I’m asking about your sense.
Intuitively, when you abstractly place the icon of the concepts in your minds eye, do you feel compelled to step into them with embrace at all?

14

Thank you all for your thoughts.

Smears, what you say rings true. The theistic arguments for the EoG may be examined in theistic terms and found lacking- you don’t have to view them with atheistic eyes- and the same is true of atheistic arguments against the EoG. My problem is that I only have atheistic eyes to see with, so it’s interesting to discover how things look through theistic eyes.

Xunzian, I agree these things are a matter of taste. Thus, my asking you if this curry tastes good is nonsensical: I have to taste it for myself and make my own mind up. Like you, I am happy enough to defend my taste for what it is even if it qualifies me as perverted. But it’s always good to see how others taste the world too.

TheStumps, I cannot honestly say that I want to believe in the EoG, any more than I want Harry Potter’s magic to be for real. Although I find Pascal’s Wager reasonable enough, I don’t find myself wishfully thinking. But you’re quite right- it would be lovely to be able to comfort myself with a genuine belief in a big, kind, loving sky daddy who’ll make everything better for eternity. Therein lies the popularity of religion, I guess.

15

No…

I meant simply this: Do you feel something divine out beyond?
Or, Do you not?

There’s no thinking or wishing, or back patting, or popularities…just that one simple question:

Do you feel something divine out beyond?

16

Completely off topic here, but a little part of me died inside when I read this. :cry:

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Ditto on the first two, inevitablist on the third.

18

At least I have the sense to recognize that it is terrible.

As an atheist, I have to say that I enjoy that same degree of unabashed honesty from the Christian side of the bench. Not hiding behind some thin veil of post-hoc rationalism or misapplied skepticism but rather grounded in faith. “I believe in Jesus Christ. Born, not made. Consubstantial but distinct from the Father, yada-yada-herna-herna.” Philosophically speaking, if I am dealing with a theist of any stripe, really, as long as they are honest about their grounding I will most certainly disagree with them but I see no reason to argue with them. We’re both approaching the issue with honestly stated perspectives that are sufficiently at odds with each other so the whole conversation becomes a non-issue. We can then go on to agree and disagree about more interesting matters where we actually have a chance of meaningfully influencing each other.

Overt missionary work (and with the New Atheists out there, that includes atheists now) makes liars of us all. Far better for us to focus on other, more meaningful things, and hope that in the process we switch the other party.

While I’ve been greatly influenced by the ILP community as a whole, I have to say that if I were to create a “Top 5 most influential posters on Xunzian’s thought”, two of them would be dyed-in-the-wool Fundamentalist Christians. Granted, neither of them are YEC literalists, the ideal of a mean where we can discuss ideas still applies and that would be a bridge too far. With at least one of those, I am fairly confident that I am influencing as well as influenced. Personally, I think I got the better deal out of the trade and was more influenced than influencing, but the back-and-forth exchange is there, and that is what keeps these sorts of discussions interesting.

Within that sphere, we’ve never once tried to convince each other of anything. One time we did try to talk to each other about politics – it ended badly. Granted, that is because when it comes to politics, I am right. I even have data to back it up! Granted, the opposition also has data, but that data is all bad and from horrifically biased sources :slight_smile:

In matters of both politics and religion, I think we both have a secret desire to see the other accept and embrace our views. In his heart-of-hearts, I am sure he’d like me to embrace Christianity. After all, we respect each other and I imagine he’d hate to see me spend eternity in Hell. In my heart-of-hearts, I’d love for him to abandon his false belief and get to the business of using that beautiful brain of his to solve real philosophical problems. In his heart-of-hearts, I’d like to think that he wants me to listen to a variety of political sources so that I might draw the best conclusion. In my heart-of-hearts, I think this dude needs to stop being such a fucking counter-revolutionary and embrace the inevitable future.

He is more polite, while being no less clear than I am on those issues where we disagree and the passions are unevenly distributed. But all-in-all, I think that ours’ is a dynamic worth considering!

As for music, I also really like punk rock. If we want to be all classy about it, I’m also a sucker for Romantic composers (Orff fucking rocks my world) as well as Barock (the Harpsichord is an under-valued instrument!).

Who am I kidding? My taste in music is indefensibly terrible. I’m sorry. That is just the way I roll.

www.di.fm

Has some good stuff, come on. Try. The Swedish Candy Show? What isn’t to like?

Oh, a lot. OK. I agree. :slight_smile:

19

I’m not sure I fully understand the question. When you say ‘feel’, I assume you don’t mean to detect by the sense of physical touch (as in, I can feel my wife’s thigh), but in the sense of imagining. My answer, in that case, is yes- indeed I can easily imagine a flying spaghetti monster having a cup of tea poured from an orbiting teapot with His invisible pink unicorn friend, ordering the cosmos with His omnimax powers. But somehow I don’t think you mean that either.

20

The fact that God does not exist forms no obstacle whatever to His existence.

-WL

PS: Dear reader, for what it is worth, you have my apologies and assurances that this is no joke or pithy phrase.