When an atheist says his non-belief is not a belief system, that his rejection of the God theory is not faith based, he is an idiot. The atheist believes the world causes itself (or some other mindless system causes it), he has simply replaced the theory that the cause of the world is mindful with the theory that the cause of the world is mindless.
I’d be interested to see if any atheists on this board can defend the idea that atheism is less faith based than theism.Let’s not talk particular Gods (assuming anyone is interested), just the concept of mindful creation versus mindless creation.
I don’t consider myself an atheist but I’ll take up your challenge.The problem is that we don’t have an adequate explanation for the universe. If we assert that an intelligent mind was necessary to create the universe then we have simply displaced the problem by one generation. For the question then becomes who created the intelligent mind? If we state that God [the intelligent mind] is eternal and therefore always existed, then we have provided no explanation whatsoever. An ever exiting God explains no more than an ever existing universe. Now you will notice that I am arguing that we do not know how the universe came to be. My argument is based on my understanding of the limits of human knowledge not on faith.
Your position reminds me of one I discussed on a thread entitled “Paul’s Great Ad Hom”. If your interested in what the similarity is, take a look at that thread.
To say “I don’t know how the universe began” is obviously less faith based then just making up an answer because you’re uncomfortable with your own ignorance. Atheists don’t just make up answers to scientific questions, that’s why it’s less faith based.
Faith, trust and belief in atheism are based on limited spectrums of things.
A religious person also has certain limits and certain favorites when believing and thinking.
Atheism is not a uniform ideology though, unlike orthadox religions which are specific uniform systems.
The burden of evidence, who does it rest upon, the atheist or the theist?
An interesting satire but do you notice the difference between a God botherer and an atheist?
Tis ever and so n’uncle. I just reiterated you point, but will anyone take it on board, to the believer all doubt is, is a chance to remove it from their minds.
Don’t get me wrong I have no problem with the faithful, the only problem I have is when they claim science is faith. Then I turn green and wake up in only my under crackers.
There’s a building in the middle of a field. Two Neanderthals happen by and stop to observe this thing. One imagines that some gods came by with that material already in their hands and put the building together and that means something awesome: some great entities care about him and made this building just for him.
The other imagines that “something” threw that material together in just that specific way and it means nothing, except now he can hole up in there instead of in the cave.
The moral of this story is that both Neanderthals enter the building and begin to use it as it was intended, neither being any better or worse for his belief in how it came about.
What does matter? It matters only that they take care of the building, and not begin to fight each other over who has the greater right to ownership because of how he believes it came about.
Personally, leaning towards common sense, I vote for some very sharp intelligence behind the creation/invention/maintenance of that which mankind calls his universe. Difficult to imagine all those things based on the Fibonacci series having just happened.
Sha Tara-- Welcome to the ILP Religion Forum. I appreciate your decision to affirm common sense, but common sense has proven over and over to be inadequate to understand the cosmos to say nothing of it’s origin. What common sense [e.g. Paley] attributed to design has been better explained through natural selection. Common sense doesn’t tell us that we are made of star-dust created and ejected into the Galaxy by the violence of earlier stars, including some supernovas that exploded before the solar system formed four and a half billion years ago and some that happened only a few million years ago. But science does.
Hypothesizing an ultimate mind as the source of complex natural patterns [like Fibonacci sequences] doesn’t explain them. Rather it moves the mystery back a generation. A “very sharp intelligence” itself would be a complex phenomenon in need of an explanation. There must be a very sharp intelligence behind a very sharp intelligence, right? And what’s behind that? We are in a spiral of infinite regression. The alternative, a very sharp intelligence that “just is” existing eternally with no beginning at all is not an explanation. It is tantamount to an admission that we have no explanation. To me God stands for the ultimate mystery of the universe which I cannot understand but I can participate in.
My point is that there is no more reason for believing that the world is a mindless creation than a mindful one, both ideas require faith …faith in the ability of mindless chance versus faith in the ability of conscious intent. Obviously conscious intent can produce such complex , balanced, systems so it is a good possible explanation, whereas
we don’t have the same proof that mindless chance can produce such systems. So even though we can not fully explain God, He is certainly a reasonable explanation…and we don’t have to fully explain an explanation for it to be reasonable.
Atheism itself doesn’t explain anything, but it does require faith in the ability of unthinking chance to produce something far more balanced and complex than a v12 engine, ie, the world, and there is no evidence that the world(universe) is eternal, in fact current thinking is that it had a start .
If you believe the universe was caused by a mindless act of creation, or that it is infinite (ie, has no cause), then you have faith in a made up answer .
There is proof of the creative ability of mind (in terms of producing complex ,balanced ,systems), there is none for the creative ability of mindless chance.
There is more faith required for the belief that the world is caused by chance than the belief that it is the product of intent.We have proof of the ability of intent.
The difference between the atheist and the theist is that the theist thinks the world is here for us , whereas the atheist thinks we are just a chance product of it. The atheist position leads to an utterly different relationship with reality than the theist position.
I didn’t give an answer, so I didn’t make up one. Neither you nor I know how the universe was created. The difference is that you pretend you know. I don’t. I’m comfortable with the fact that I don’t know. It doesn’t tear me up inside to not know. It doesn’t tempt me to want to make up an answer just to get rid of that feeling of insecurity. There is no insecurity for me, that’s why I don’t make up an answer.
Why does it bother you so much that people don’t believe in god?
My position doesn’t seem to require faith, just an admission of our present state of knowledge. Our true epistemological situation with regard to the origin of the universe is one of ignorance. Furthermore, the situation is not likely to change any time soon. We may never know. The origin of everything may always be beyond human comprehension. It’s the great mystery.
Natural selection produces complex, balanced systems without conscious intent.
A God with a mind complex enough to create the universe hardly gets us closer to an explanation. For having to explain how a super intelligent being always existed without a beginning is a task no less arduous than explaining how a complex universe came to exist. You just pushed the problem back a generation.
Atheism may not explain anything, but neither have you. It doesn’t require faith to recognize that how the universe came to be is a mystery beyond human understanding. Our local universe seems to have started with a big bang, but it doesn’t follow from that that nothing existed before the big bang. Something coming from nothing is as impossible to understand as something having no beginning at all.
Agnosticism is an awful position philosophically. Rhetorically, it is nice. But that it all, it is a rhetorical, not philosophical, position.
As for atheists requiring faith, I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how metanarratives work here. A negation of a dominant metanarrative does not constitute a metanarrative. Atheism qua atheism doesn’t make sense and, thankfully, doesn’t exist. Instead atheism (like theism) exists within a broader philosophical network. Christians aren’t “theists” in the same way that most Hindus are “theists” in the same way that Pagans aren’t “theists”. All those positions involve and include various positions that are in varying degrees of conflict with one another. Likewise, atheists are a broad bunch. Generally when “atheist” is used as an identifier, what is meant is “New Atheists” in the same way that “theist” (when used in an English language context such as ILP) generally means “Christian” but in some cases can be expanded to include Muslims. As with any philosophy, you can’t abstract New Atheism down to one position (particularly a negative one!) and claim to understand it. Atheists don’t believe in god, God, or gods. But what do they believe in and why?
This is often a difficult perspective for members of an orthodox religion to understand. As the name implies, orthodoxy begins with belief and proceeds from there. In the case of Christianity, it is a belief that there is one God who made everything, that Jesus is begotten not made of the God the Father, that Jesus died for our sins and rose again, and in the Holy Spirit. That is the starting point. From that starting point, Christians are forced to conclude that gods like Pan or Amaterasu don’t exist. But that is a secondary factor, it procedes from the givens. Christians don’t have faith that Pan doesn’t exist. They have faith that their god does. Because of their givens, they conclude that Pan doesn’t exist.
Very true antagonists against faith would have had a hard time being agnostic, it is I agree a lazy position that is easy to keep to. But I do genuinely have doubts about all things. So at the same time it is a belief I have that evidence will out, maybe at some point…
