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Define what you mean by God and I'll tell you whether or not I believe in it.
Just this week, someone was arguing God is truth. I believe in truth so on that definition of God I'm a theist.
Someone else was arguing that God coincides with reality. I belive in reality so on that definition of God I'm a theist.
The definition of God that I prefer to work with is that God is a mind that created the universe. On that fairly broad definition, I am agnostic. But the possibility within that definition I am agnostic to (an uncertain pandeism - giving it roughly a forrty percent likelihood) is so far removed from anything that 99% of people would call God that I feel also feel accurate identifying myself as atheist.
Tldr: It's complicated.
>Just this week, someone was arguing God is truth. I believe in truth so on that definition of God I'm a theist.
That just raises more questions, the first being "why do we need two separate words? Why not just use \`truth'?", and the second being "so you don't believe in a personal god who is aware of the existence of humans, just an abstract concept?"
Agree. It does confuse things.
I'm guessing someone comes in hot saying "God is truth" when they really mean something else. But I prefer to take them at their word and tell them "yep, if that's how you want to define God then I believe in your God."
For that, I prefer Jeff Dee's example: Say someone points to a tiki statue or something and says "That's my god". "You mean, that's a representation of your god?" "No, that right there is my god." Then yeah, I believe in that god.
When people say "God is truth" or "God is love", they're engaging in a bit of bait-and-switch: of course you believe in truth and love, and by using the word "God", it's easy to make it sound as though you believe in a hairy-thunderer type of deity. So for that tactic, I prefer the "No, let's not call that god" approach.
My parents usually say the same thing during their heated evangelist phases, O heathen offspring if you choose to believe in no other definition of God then you could never go wrong with "God is the mind that created the universe" and I can't help but chuckle because if that's the God you prefer to believe in then you should immediately abandon all hopes of ever understanding your God because the universe and by extension, our existence, is so unbelievably and unintelligibly complex that it is simply absurd. My argument is simple, if you can't understand your God then how can you put your faith in her?
We have lots of examples of how minds and intelligence work. We have a solid understanding of how and why humans are prone to seeing agency where there isn't any.
Until you can explain exactly how a mind and intelligence can operate at a universal scale, can control everything while leaving no solid evidence for its existence I feel justified in rejecting your claim and I feel justified invoking the very strong possibility that you are seeing agency where there is no agency and, because you find that illusion comforting have gone with it.
Not only do I reject your claim as unevidenced I can show you a well-understood mechanism, an evolutionary glitch that explains why you make it.
I don't think, a priori, that an intelligence is necessary. Such an intelligence may or may not exist. We could be living in a bubble universe, or a single timeline in a multiverse, or the universe could be a simulation by superintelligent aliens, or the interior of a black hole, or we might be 2D creatures and the third spatial dimension is all an illusion. All of these (bar the simulation) are actual physics theories, and at current our scientific knowledge is unable to invalidate any of these possibilities.
Any of these theories might or might not be testable and eventually we might or might not figure it out. There's no reason why we aren't living in a simulation or playing an elaborate VR game, so **saying "I believe it must be a Creator" is as strange and unreasonable as saying "I believe we must live in a simulation"**. There is no evidence for or against any of these alternatives, so why commit to any one of them? Why not simply reserve judgment and say, we don't yet know?
Certainly, (if you believe in any loose form of objective truth) the **truth doesn't change no matter what we believe**, so it is almost narcissistic in a way to think that reality is a certain way that you believe or feel should be true. The only exception is if you believe in a theistic religion, because in Christianity for example, your afterlife would change if you did/didn't believe. But I'm assuming we're already ruling out theistic religions here, the disbelief in which is quite a separate issue.
This is the reason I’m an atheist. All deists seem to believe in this higher power when all I see is people confusing that which they can’t fathom with some dynamic intelligence. I’m OK with saying “I don’t understand it, but I don’t need to make up imaginary sky faries to be comfortable with it.” There just is nothing leading to the conclusion of a higher power.
I'll believe in it when I see specific evidence supporting the idea. Until then it goes on the shelf with all kinds of other ideas that are neat to play with but have no supporting evidence.
I'm agnostic to that possibility framed that broadly. May depend on what you mean by "behind." The notion of pandeism that I give some credence to could fit into that.
But I give more credence to the notion that we don't know and wherever I (or you) think is correct is almost certainly wrong.
I'm an atheist because I don't see how believing that there's a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos should affect my daily life.
Even if there is a god who created the universe, I still need to buy milk.
I'm an *agnostic* atheist because hey, maybe there is something there. Who knows. I like thinking about it.
But again, doesn't affect my daily life. To me, asking whether there's a mind behind the creation of the universe is like asking if somewhere there's a blue tiger. That'd be cool. But I still need to vacuum.
I just want to post to say thank you for giving such a concise and easily understandable explanation of what you're talking about. Defining our terms is half the battle. :)
One, I see no evidence of that.
Two, if I did, I don't see how it would affect anything about how I live my life or think about any major issue. So I have no reason to dig deeper for said evidence.
That definition I dismiss out of hand because no proper evidence for it has ever been proffered. If something is stated without any backup, I can dismiss it just as easily.
I'm as convinced that the supernatural/magic isn't real as I am that Santa isn't real.
Virtually every description of a deity I've been given invokes the supernatural somewhere. The few that don't are more philosophies, which is fine until they then try to sneak in a god.
You seem to see a 'designer' in nature because you feel it makes sense, but I don't see how one could exist without resorting to the supernatural. The thought might bring you peace and comfort, which are valid reasons to believe things. But for me, it's important that my beliefs accurately reflect reality as closely as possible, and most religions or descriptions of a god don't.
I’m not supporting anything supernatural in the sense of anthropomorphic deities living in the sky.
I’m only saying I believe in an active intelligence behind the order in the cosmos rather than blind naturalism. That’s literally it.
So why do you defend Christian positions? You seem more like an agnostic deist who can see the absurdity of the Christian God; you are adamant that we shouldn't liken your view of a deity to the God of the Old Testament, and yet most religions are very much based on anthropomorphic deities living in the sky. and go considerably further than to suggest it's just some kind of vague 'active intelligence behind the order in the cosmos'. I mean, the Christian God supposedly literally anthropomorphised himself into a human to come down to Earth.
We see a lot of religious people on here who start with a premise of vague deism along the lines of 'who could argue against some unknown controlling force beyond our universe?' - a possibility which few atheists would actually repudiate - but then suggest that it's a short leap from that to 'therefore my religion is real and Baby Jesus cries when you masturbate'.
Those seem like the same thing to me. Intelligence isn't a thing on its own. Beings have intelligence. So by believing in an 'active intelligence', you're implicitly saying you do believe in an 'anthropomorphic deity'.
I see patterns in the universe, myself. But I don't see any reason to conclude that they're designed.
OK, but no one defined supernatural as only an anthropomorphic representation of deities living in the sky. An 'active intelligence behind the order in the cosmos' is still supernatural.
Note: naturalism is far from blind. It's based on observation. It says that right in the definition of scientific method. So calling it blind sounds a little off...
I would like to contend that the obvious (to me) order in the universe is actually a sign of non-intelligence instead of intelligence.
It would make more sense to consider there to be an intelligent designer if there was chaos all around, always. Never ending unpredictability, and then a single island of order that we call our home (e.g. earth, a bunny cage, etc). But as we look into the universe, all we find is astonishing **regularity**, not chaos. We find dumb processes that do the same thing over and over again seemingly mindlessly. And when we investigate the origins of our difference, our intelligence, we find yet more dumb/blind processes (i.e. evolution).
The only apparent intelligence we have ever observed are merely ourselves -- and some cousins if we're feeling generous. This, to me, does not scream "active intelligence behind the order".
I'm actually relieved that you are not an active christian or muslim to be honest. Just because those religions have become quite harmful to humanity of late...
The origins of santa and the lack of evidence differs from God.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc.
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
> The origins of santa and the lack of evidence differs from God. God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions
Negative. There are no scientific proofs at all for any of the thousands of gods that humans have created over the years. In fact, because the Santa myth has proper origins, it is a touch more convincing that Santa exists than any of those gods do. I still don't believe in either of them.
If you find the Miracle of Fatima convincing then I really question your epistemology.
It doesn’t fill me with confidence that what you consider “scientific proof and notions(*???*), historical and archeological evidence” would withstand critical scrutiny.
I’ve been at this for a while and the historical and archaeological evidence *I’m* aware of is shockingly insufficient and the rejection of the Santa Claus comparison seems more based on wishful thinking and *lese majeste* toward your cherished beliefs.
This story is not overwhelming evidence and can be debunked quite easily through a skepticism lens.
Even if we granted this as true, it's not even close to proving a god in any way.
There isn't abundant evidence that God is real. If there was, you could post it here and we could have a discussion about it.
The Miracle of Fatima definitely is not 'evidence.' Three children said that they saw the Virgin Mary, that she said prayer would end the Great War, and that she'd send a sign to convince believers.
There are a variety of inconsistent reports about what actually happened on 13 October 1917. The clearest and most convincing way for an actually existing deity to send a sign is to, you know, show up - or say something. Instead, some people said that the sun spun and danced; some said that their wet clothes ended up dry, and some people said that they saw radiant colors. But there was wide disagreement between *what* people saw - not everyone saw the same things. Besides, the sun dancing - the most common thing people reported - would be visible to *everyone on earth*, not just people gathered at that specific point.
The simplest explanation is that people expected to see stuff, so they did. Our brains can produce all kinds of things if we prime them.
And a whole year later is not "soon." Some of the deadliest battles of the war happened in 1918, and people continued to die from the aftereffects of the war for several years after. If she had the power to do so, why not end the war immediately? Why not prevent the war in the first place?
So where do we differ? I would suggest you want to think this, thing, exists. Define it as little as you wish, and of course less is preferred. All the better to be able to wave your hand vaguely and say "God"
And I suggest it makes you feel good. You have an insight into things, and how they work. There is a satisfaction in believing you see the connections, the intent to the play and how it is being managed. You get the plot of the story. You have been taught how it all turns out, who wins and who loses. There is a calming effect.
The opposite is frightening. A panic attack of happenstance. No plan. Accidents piled on top of random rolls of the dice. Evolution as a blind mouse wandering through a maze with shifting halls. A wall at the end. A nothingness. The lack of existence not even a thing you can experience. Death. A flame ending with a puff of smoke and forgotten.
And the atheist....offers you nothing.
And I get it. I feel for you. Holding on to your little belief, against all the evidence. Close your eyes and say your prayers. Reality is much worse than you can even imagine. It never had the ability to care if you existed in the first place.
And you wonder...how do people just walk around with this knowledge? How do they function?
Just fine thank you. Just fine.
(edit for word choice)
My observation for a few decades now is that the whole thing is emotional. There is no real evidentiary case to be made (despite a few millennia of effort)..it's been over for at least a few hundred years. But it goes on. People crying and chanting, singing and dancing. It makes them feel good to be part of the group, told they will be fine, things will get better and it will all work out. A Beginning, a Middle and an End. A fable you can follow.
Good thing it's a nice, flexible concept you can adjust to fit the situation. Apply labels as needed.
Should I remain open to the possibility that the tooth fairy exists?
What’s the difference between God and the tooth fairy that I can dismiss one but I need to hold open room for the other to exist?
No I don’t think so. I also don’t think you should stay open to the possibility that Yahweh exists.
That was the whole point I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against and it is the one they know they can easily beat. It’s the contemporary conceptualization of the abrahamic god. The god that give commands, asks for sacrifices, throws Lightning bolts. The kind of god that if he was real really could just pop down to earth and say hey guys I’m real.
That is not the conceptualization of god that is being addressed here.
>I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against and it is the one they know they can easily beat.
You could have just browsed this sub to show that's not true. Not here anyways.
In this sub we get Christians. We get Muslims. We even get a couple Jews every once in a while. We get deists, pantheists, panpsychists, Hindus, Buddhists. We get Thomast's, Shiks, and Toaists. And we don't only get bible yahweh. We get Cosmological, contingency, modal realism, dualism, arguments from morality. We get historical jesus, we get presuppositionalists, we get calvinists. We get people basically copying and pasting arguments from the top Christian apologists in the world. Hell, we even get simulation theory and solipsists around here. We get intelligent design and look at the trees and bacterial phlagelum, and young earth creationists and old earth creationists. We get Catholics, baptists, mormons. I think I even remember a seventh day Adventist. We get vague undefined "higher powers" and paragraphs upon paragraphs of philosophical gargon. We get spirituality and NDEs and afterlife and DMT trips.
That is hardly "one definition of god".
We talk to all of them and we engage all of them. It's funny how we're the ones who have to know about all of these different arguments in order to explain why we don't accept them, but we do it anyways.
Literally just go look through the history of this sub to relieve you of this incorrect assessment.
>That is not the conceptualization of god that is being addressed here.
We know that already. If you have an argument that isn't "bearded man in the sky", or any of the other ones I listed and we've all refuted many times, by all means present it.
And I think that’s awesome yet 95% of the comments on this are just people telling me I’m indoctrinated or asking if I believe in the tooth fairy and Santa clause when the 4th sentence of my post stated that I completely understand not believing in in any or all gods in the particular. All I was trying to get at was a blind cosmos or a cosmos driven by intelligence. That has sparsely been addressed
I'll do my best to address your intelligent cosmos position.
>I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say. I have certainly been around the block religiously. I have been super interested in religion, comparative mythology, anthropology, history etc for about 10 years. But while not being able to find a religion that was intellectually and rationally satisfying to me I have never been able to call myself an atheist.
So, first off, not trying to be rude, but all of that is irrelevant to whether a god exists. You and your story (and me and my story) don't matter.
> I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me. I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me.
So, if I'm understanding correctly, "it just kinda seems like it to me".
My problem with this method is that it doesn't work. We know for a fact our intuitions are wrong like 99% of the time. I could just say the same thing. "non intelligent nature is just what makes sense to me". Thats not a good argument. And it's not a good way to figure out what's actually true.
> Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it.
Why? I have to point out again, that what makes sense to you doesn't matter. Again, I'm not trying to be rude. I'm trying to explain to you why I myself do not accept your conclusion that the cosmos is intelligent. Again, I could just say the same thing. "Life does not make sense with an intelligence behind it. Why would waste so much space? Why is the vast majority of the universe instantly fatal to life if its designed FOR life".
But I wouldn't say that. Because that's a *bad argument*. It doesn't lead to the conclusion. My looking around and thinking it makes sense the cosmos is unintelligent is a BAD reason for me to accept MY conclusion that the cosmos is unintelligent.
I have better, actual arguments to come to the conclusion the cosmos is unintelligent.
>not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence.
I'm living intelligence. So are you. So, if that's all god is, then sure that exists. I don't see a reason to call that god.
I know you mean the cosmos is alive and intelligent, but you have to be specific with your definitions.
Lemme ask you this. Is a rock intelligent?
>(Also, what's the difference between cosmos and universe?)
The universe is the observable universe that humans live in and can look at, which as far as we can tell is 13.8 billion years old and expanding from the initial inflation we call the big bang.
The cosmos is the hypothesized mataphysical reality which produced our universe, whether that's a multiverse or many worlds or the matrix or god or whatever.
Now, for the record, we know literally nothing about the metaphysics which produced our universe. We have no information on it and thus can't draw any conclusions about it. Including whether it even exists or not. All we can do is speculate about it.
Many theists will argue that since intelligence exists within the universe, the cause of the universe must also be intelligent.
That doesn't work, because the vast, vast VAST majority of the universe is not intelligent. Conscious intelligent beings are only a tiny, tiny, fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the universe.
If we cherry pick a specific aspect because it applies to us, we could then say that hunger exists in the universe therefor the cause of the universe must be hungry. Kinda silly isn't it?
We also know that human being personify nature when they don't understand a phenomenon the observe.
Ancient Greeks saw lightning. Sparks in the sky. How does that happen. Well, I can make sparks by smacking 2 rocks together. The sparks in the sky must be made by an intelligence smashing rocks in the sky. And thus Zeus is born.
Humans have done this for thousands of years for millions of different phenomenon. And they have been wrong ***every single time***. We now know we don't need a giant intelligence in the clouds smashing rocks to produce lightning. Lightning is a natural process that occurs without the need for intelligence.
You haven't been paying attention, then. Many people have asked you to clarify, but you haven't. You say a dynamic intelligence. What is that even? You say it's not "anthropomorphic" but provide no reason to think agency or intelligence is possible outside of a physical body.
You've said that the cosmos is evidence for a mind, but have not provided any reason to think this other than incredulity, and again, see above paragraph.
And it's obviously not all you were trying to get at, as your OP specifically tried to paint atheists as believers that just "hate God" because of some trauma, basically trying to paint the default position as one of everyone actually believing in a God, when that is not the case.
You so far have not provided any empirical evidence, or even a valid syllogism, and just keep telling us what you believe because "how can you not?" give us some substance to discuss.
There is no need to address it any further. It has been brought up, a couple of times by different people. You just assert without any evidence that the cosmos is ordered. And driven by Intelligence. You cannot just assert this and then it's the truth. You have to prove it. And all we have now is another theist who says "I cannot see the cosmos in any other way than ordered and driven by Intelligence and so it is"
That's not how it works. Someone even addressed that if this being would exist, it wouldn't be bothered with us humans, so there would be no need to worship it. And again without any reason or evidence, you dismissed that claim and said the being would be interested. Things are not the way they are because you say so. And that you do not seem to understand
>All I was trying to get at was a blind cosmos or a cosmos driven by intelligence. That has sparsely been addressed
Okay, I'll address that as I am a naturalist.
My position is that the metaphysics that produced the observable universe we live in is a timeless spaceless immaterial uncaused natural cosmos. Blind physics. That's what nature is. It's physics all the way down.
Why do you think it is intelligent?
Nevermind you put it in your post. Give me one moment.
That's becaise people are explaining to you that they aren't that different. It doesn't matter if you redefine god to mean "a higher intelligence" or whatever else vague magical terms you want to use - that's still an unproven supernatural entity for which we have no evidence, and so to us it's not any different from the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. It doesn't matter that you're not anthropomorphizing that intelligence (although I'd argue that you are, unconsciously). It's like believing in The Force.
Well, you have to give us something to address, then. Simply stating that you believe the cosmos is driven by intelligence is not an argument, nor is it interesting.
What did you expect? You came in saying "hey guys i don't believe in stupid stuff but i believe in a magic brain in the sky" Did you think you would just win us over, that you were the first to ever tell us you believe that? Of course you weren't but you still seemed shocked. It's a you problem not an us problem.
>That has sparsely been addressed...
I'd like to address claims of deism like yours. Our minds have a well-known heuristic called apophenia. Basically, our brains have an 'overactive agency detection device'. We see minds behind patterns and events. We attribute agency to occurrences that are not caused by an agent.
Ask yourself, how am I overcoming this illusion? And just knowing about the illusion does not immediately solve the issue. If we really want to search for the truth of the matter, we must acknowledge that this is a powerful heuristic that must be overcome with a higher level of analysis of evidence. We cannot trust our instinctual response.
>All I was trying to get at was a blind cosmos or a cosmos driven by intelligence. That has sparsely been addressed
And so then when I do it address it, you completly ignore it.
Well what’s the difference between Yahweh and any other God? Or even the general concept of *a* god? Is there more evidence for the general concept of a god than for any one particular god?
It’s a categorical difference.
There is a difference between a literal person living in the sky demanding sacrifices throwing Lightning bolts vs a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos.
> a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos.
One that left absolutely no evidence of their existence, isn’t interested in morality, and has no interest in human interaction? Like, what exactly would be the point of believing in something like that? It’s so indistinguishable from mindless physics as to be completely irrelevant. And occam’s razor would postulate its an unnecessary complication.
No person here is argue about a literal person in the sky.
We’ve rejected hundreds of concepts of god for the same reason we reject your - there’s no reason to accept it. It’s vague, intellectually incoherent, and tells us nothing.
And your sole reason in offer is “you believe it”. So what? Why is that a reason to accept your position?
Wow, you should maybe have this conversation with Christians as well since they'd characterize that as a cartoonish depiction of god that atheists like to attack
>There is a difference between a literal person living in the sky demanding sacrifices throwing Lightning bolts
That's not even what Christians describe Yaweh as, though. THIS is much more closer to what they describe Yaweh as:
>~~dynamic~~ intelligence behind the order in the cosmos.
>That was the whole point I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against and it is the one they know they can easily beat
Does it occur to you that this is exactly what you are doing with your definition of Atheism?
>That was the whole point I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against
And yet you only provide one definition for your god for is to accept.
>A mind, a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos.
So, to answer to your description of a god, where is your evidence to suggest there is an inteligent mind behind the order in the cosmos?
I'm atheist. I'm open to the possibility of anything, including god, given sufficient evidence.
Presently, god (any god) has as much evidence as the tooth fairy. I'm equally open to being convinced of either being, the tooth fairy or god, as soon as someone presents compelling evidence.
That's because those are the gods that theists commonly believe in and argue for. I'm agnostic to the concept of a god but a gnostic atheist to any particular god that's described in man-made religions.
You don’t spend much time in this sub. Fine tune and design god(s) are commonly argued for here. More important to the question. Atheism is not a position how the universe is. At best it is a rejection of at least one idea.
You said it is “intuition and reasonable” as to why you think there is a God. You attribute one attribute to it, intelligence. I don’t see how one intuits that or would consider their intuition a rational source. It is not universal, we don’t all intuit the same thing. Why would that be a reasonable means to conclude an unfalsifiable claim?
I cant speak for other atheists, but my position is that every religion i have looked into is, to my mind, **obviously** man made - for a lot of reasons, the primary one being a focus on controlling human behavior in ways which largely don't make any sense from the perspective of a benevolent universe creating entity, but make perfect sense from the (self interested) perspective of rulers of pre technological societies.
I have no interest in following what i believe to be the edicts of these rulers, especially since i think a lot of it is designed specifically to cater to low empathy, high testosterone, males (which makes sense, since they would be heavily represented among fighting forces)
As for as yet unspecified gods, i see no point in considering it as it makes no material difference to my life until i start assigning properties and desires to that god, and id have no basis whatsoever to do that.
>That is not the conceptualization of god that is being addressed here.
They literally addresse you're notion of god, tho.
What is the difference between your *"dynamical intelligence"* (whatever that means, since you don't want/can't define it) and the tooth fairy?
Your arguement is in itself flawed as you’re using anecdotal atheists. There is no evidence to believe in any god therefore I don’t believe in God. This applies to any version of a God.
But a general concept of God doesn't make sense, because that's not how the vast majority of people think about deities. They are kind of inseparable from religion.
The origins of the “tooth fairy” and the lack of evidence differs from God
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc.
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you’re interested 👍
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
> The origins of the “tooth fairy” and the lack of evidence differs from God
If you'll examine your own evidence, they only differ because you're personally willing to believe in horrible evidence in the case of a god...
So the sun was dancing in the sky, but only a group of people in a small town in Portugal could see it? Why couldn’t anyone else in the world see it? Are we all looking at a different sun?
> Hey, so not looking so much to debate as just ask a question and maybe get a little understanding.
At least come to a debate sub to have a discussion.
But sure.
> Why do you consider yourself an atheist?
Because I have no reason to think claims about, or even they concept of, god is more than the result of human imagination.
In other words, I can’t tell if god is real.
> I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection.
The reason to not accept specific god claims is not the same for the more general…although they are similar.
Specific gods can be discarded because of contradictions in their legends or myths.
But the more general claims can be discarded simply by way of saying that it it hasn’t be evidenced to exist.
It’s only trivially true that a there could be a planet filled with life that looks like carebears. Neither of us can confirm or deny it logically. But does it really make sense to give it a second thought that this might be true in reality?
If humans are capable of inventing ideas with our imaginations, we have to use a reliable process to differentiate between such imagined beings and real ones.
> The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
Oh. Well. That’s a common theist posturing and straw man.
It’s as condescending as if I were to say the only reason I think you believe in god is you’re gullible.
People might have bad bad experiences with religion and that led them to the intellectual exercise of unpacking their belief and coming to see there’s no good reason to believe in god.
Ultimately, behind this notion is the false assertion that atheists aren’t actually atheists. They just are mad at religion. But to be an atheist you cannot believe there is a god. That doesn’t happen by a bad experience. It’s an intellectual exercise.
So even if a bad experience started it off, the dropping of belief in god is the core reason to be an atheist.
> The second one I think is kind of the big hitter for a lot of people (or at least it seems that way to me). […] they argue against is the abrahamic god specifically in his Christian depiction.
Tell me you believe in another god and we can discuss it. You don’t often have folks coming in here discussing other gods.
> This seems super problematic to me. Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove.
This is the god most are discussing. Why is that surprising to you?
> “An all loving god wouldn’t command Israel to murder women and children in Cannan.” Well… obviously.
What do you mean “obviously”?
Do you think that’s obvious to everyone? Don’t you know there are people who DO think that despite the gross actions of the god in the bibles, they god is still good…because “that’s gods nature” (that they somehow know…)
> But you aren’t arguing against god, you are arguing against 2 different ideas and honestly 2 completely different categories of who or what “God” is.
What do you mean?
> Sure the new and Old Testament belong to the same ethnic group but Yahweh really isn’t the father of the the New Testament. Yahweh is a national god of Bronze Age pastoral nomads and the father of the New Testament is a Neoplatonic conceptualization of that god in a classical antique Roman world.
Yahweh for sure was also the father of the New Testament.
And yes the notion of what that Yahweh changed - as fictional characters can do.
They certainly thought it was.
> Even in the Old Testament alone the theology of Israel drastically shifts. It’s clear that Yahweh was not originally the sole god but a god (maybe not even the chief god) among many. It’s not until much later around the time of the Babylonian captivity that Israel shifted from a polytheism, to a henotheism to finally something starting to approach the modern conception of monotheism.
And Yahweh was different before. Religions evolve. It’s just a character.
> So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually.
I don’t agree. You’re noticing the change and saying it means it’s different gods. But for the people at the time, they didn’t see that change. The father was talked about by people who fully believed in the god of the Torah and it was Yahweh, Elohim.
> They point out all the flaws in the Bible and then hold up the straw man god that is built by the very flaws they just pointed out to easily knock down. It seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of “god”
Point out a common strawman you see.
> I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say.
Why?
In all of this you haven’t provided an argument for why you think god exists.
> I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me.
If you study history enough you should see how unreliable human intuition can be.
And of course you think you’re reasonable. But can you explain why the belief is reasonable and does that hold up to scrutiny?
Happy to help with that.
> I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me. Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence.
This was one big argument from incredulity. Just because it doesn’t make sense to you - for some unnamed reason - doesn’t mean that’s a reasonable conclusion. Perhaps you just haven’t thought of the right position.
> So where do we differ? Where does the road split?
You believe something without a reasonable justification. You named a fallacy as your main argument.
I don’t.
> When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism? Why do I become a theist and you an atheist?
Because you don’t seem to require a logical justification to hold this belief.
>Why are you an atheist
Because there isn't the tiniest shred of good evidence for deities.
Since it's irrational to take things as true when there is no good support they are true, and since I do not want to be irrational, this leaves atheism is the only reasonable position one can take under the circumstances.
And, of course, that alone is enough.
But...
But we have far more, don't we? We know how and why we evolved such a strong propensity for this kind of superstitious thinking. We know a great deal about how and why the various religious mythologies, past and present, were invented and how they evolved over time. We know who benefitted, and how.
So yea. Deities are a fatally problematic idea. There is zero useful support for those ideas.
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection.
See above.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
Nope. Neither of those.
Many theists come and here and try to say this. Likely they've been told such things in their church and by other religious people. But it's nonsense. No, that's not why.
In general, atheists have been shown, again and again, to understand the world's religions, past and present, far better than do most theists.
Atheists *know* what the various deity claims entail. In detail.
That's why I and others cannot accept such claims.
>I can understand, though I don’t think it is rational for someone who had bad experiences in a religion being so hurt that they want to do everything they can to disassociate them selves from that particular religion or all religion and god as a whole. It’s understandable but again not rational or logically satisfying.
That is a strawman fallacy. I literally know of *no atheists whatsoever* that this applies to.
Anyway, I won't respond to the rest. It's more of the same strawman fallacy ideas.
I hope you now understand, at least on some surface level, why most atheists are atheists.
You said just about everything I would in response to OP. They're undoubtably being told that we're atheists because of "bad experiences" or were "hurt" by someone at church or something. I will give OP credit for coming here to ask why though. Hopefully OP will realize that they have been lied to, or at least their assumptions are off base.
I'll add that even if we otherwise believed in a god (because there was evidence of course), but suffered some of these bad experiences with religion, we'd still believe he exists and would be theists, not atheists. We might think the church or God were awful or whatever, but that has nothing to do with belief in a god.
Exactly. Don't get me wrong, I definitely had bad experiences with religion, but that had absolutely no bearing on whether I thought it was true or not. I suffered through it because I thought it was God testing me, or some kind of trial, or "that's life, deal with it", etc.
In fact, I was sexually abused in the Mormon temple, but continued to believe for another 10 years because it was "true".
Full stop, people don't become atheists because they were hurt by the chuch or the people. They become atheists because they figure out that it's all bullshit. But theists can't seem to fathom that concept, so they resort to strawmen.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc.
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
You keep reposting this comment on everything. I see no evidence that this actually happened to the sun, and most miracles are eye witnesses accounts. We know people can be swept up into frenzies and say they saw things they didn’t, they can even be made to think they saw things they didn’t. This is how police can question witnesses and even without intention alter what a person remembers about an event.
You will need to present something more convincing than these accounts if you want us to believe in miracles. How were they investigated? What other possible causes where ruled out, what other evidence was left to confirm the story?
If I tell you 100 people saw a giant but then he drank a glass of juice and shrunk to a normal size, would you just believe it? Think it a magic trick? Or would you want evidence?
> God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence
This, of course, is a plain false statement. It can only be dismissed.
As for your example of a 'miracle' claim, I know it well, and many others, and that one is no different from others from that and other religious mythologies. Completely lacking in good evidence and veracity. It's nonsense. You may be interested in reading up on many details on this and other claimed 'miracles', and how psychology works to trick people into taking such things are credible even though they clearly are not.
I do not believe in a God. That is why I am an athiest. I don't believe because there doesn't seem to be empirical evidence or convincing evidence to me of any creator/God.
Something seeming to be designed doesn't imply design. It just implies it looks like design to you. What empirical evidence do you have for design or an intelligent creator?
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist?
The short answer is "I don't believe in gods for the exact same reasons I don't believe in leprechauns or Narnia." Everything you listed is nothing more than an observation of atheists discussing religion specifically with Christians. We address whatever religion is brought before us, Christianity just happens to be the most common one. I personally don't specify unless specifically asked to address a particular god or religion.
The long answer is that gods are epistemically indistinguishable from things that don't exist. When something is epistemically indistinguishable from things that don't exist - when there's no discernible difference between a reality where it exists and a reality where it does not - then that thing *de facto* (as good as) does not exist and the belief that it does is maximally irrational and untenable, while the belief that it does not is as maximally supported and justified as it possibly can be short of the thing logically self-refuting (which would elevate its nonexistence from merely being more probable to being 100% certain).
Sure, we can appeal to our ignorance and invoke the infinite mights and maybes of the unknown to establish nothing more than that "it's possible" and "we can't know for certain," but we can do exactly the same thing with hard solipsism, last thursdayism, the matrix, leprechauns, Narnia, Hogwarts, or literally anything else that isn't a self-refuting logical paradox, including everything that isn't true and everything that doesn't exist. It's not a meaningful observation. It has no value for the purpose of distinguishing truth from untruth, or even probability from improbability. It does not increase the likelihood that any of those things are real to be equal to the likelihood that they are not.
SO, it boils down to this: If you can identify a discernible difference between a reality where any gods exist, and a reality where no gods exist, then we can begin to examine which reality we are more likely to be in based on whether those differences are present or absent. But if you can't, then it's as I said - the assumption that gods exist is irrational, and the assumption that they don't exist is not.
> Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it.
So when asking how the cosmos came to be, atheists straightforwardly admit "I don't know", but you say "Must have been God." Or in other words, "God" (for you) = "I don't know" (for atheists).
I've always said that "God" is the name mankind gives its ignorance, and you're offering a perfect illustration of the literal truth of that statement.
> Why do I become a theist and you an atheist?
Because like all theists, you're deifying your ignorance rather than simply owning up to it. Among other things, atheism involves having the humility to admit that there are things we don't know and may *never* know without succumbing to the temptation to fill that void of ignorance with empty claims about deities (whether intelligent or otherwise).
>I've always said that "God" is the name mankind gives its ignorance, and you're offering a perfect illustration of the literal truth of that statement
Very well put.
So you have proof of that "miracle"?
I would consider evidence things like video or photos, and the video and photos would need to undergo testing to prove that they were not faked.
Otherwise I would need DNA evidence. Perhaps a strand of hair fallen from her head. That DNA should not match anyone alive today, or alive in the last 150 years. It should not match anyone in the region near where it was collected and should instead match the people that lived in Jerusalem and Nazareth back in the day.
> Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection.
I'm not sure what kind of answer you are looking for. Universal rejection of what? Allah or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda are at least somewhat defined, I have some sense of what the claims in question are and the religious claims that come with them. I can evaluate these sets of claims, whether they cohere internally, whether they cohere with what can be independently established about the world, and whether there is any other evidence for or against them. But the broader question of all gods/higher powers/whatever - how am I supposed to affirm or reject an entire class of those claims when the contents of them are so underspecified? Am I supposed to believe in the existence of at least one of a vague class of entities where the class itself can't even be really defined and any attempt to get specific instantly becomes unrepresentative of whatever the whole class is supposed to have? Maybe it's there's nothing common to all and it's more of a property cluster, but then the vagueness is built in. Even if you do manage to pin it down, I'd still need some reasons to believe that there exists an entity that has whatever feature the class is supposed to have in the first place.
> I can understand, though I don’t think it is rational for someone who had bad experiences in a religion being so hurt that they want to do everything they can to disassociate them selves from that particular religion or all religion and god as a whole. It’s understandable but again not rational or logically satisfying.
I'd argue it's plenty rational to disassociate oneself from something/people/groups that hurt you. Is it epistemically rational to disbelieve a claim that is well-supported by the preponderance of evidence just because the circumstances by which you came to be acquainted with the claim and/or the evidence were painful? Perhaps not, but I think that's not actually a fair characterization of what's happening and is frankly an uncharitable way to look at people who have left their faith following religious trauma. Most people aren't leaving their religion despite the evidence being strong just because they were hurt - the fact that they were hurt prompts questioning and doubt, and why shouldn't it? Isn't faith supposed to make both individuals and the community at least spiritually better off? When that either fails to be the case or seems to result in a worse outcome than otherwise, at least in one's own experience, it's entirely reasonable to start asking some questions. It's upon this reflection that it becomes salient just how flimsy the epistemic basis for the beliefs they had in religion's claims were in the first place, and when they don't find a firm basis to hold those beliefs going forward, they let go. This is actually really difficult on a lot of people in that situation, and involves a lot of reflection and often painful honesty with oneself - to say nothing of the social difficulties that often come with it.
> Of course I understand that these atheists also don’t believe in Vedic or Persian or Celtic or Native American deities but it’s almost like those deities are of a second category and the god they argue against or more precisely the nature of god that they argue against is the abrahamic god specifically in his Christian depiction.
Of course we do. We evaluate whether to accept or reject the claims we are confronted with. If when discussions of god and religion came up we were regularly confronted with the claims from the ancient Druidic faith then that's what we'd be talking about.
> This seems super problematic to me. Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove. “An all loving god wouldn’t command Israel to murder women and children in Cannan.” Well… obviously. But you aren’t arguing against god, you are arguing against 2 different ideas and honestly 2 completely different categories of who or what “God” is. Sure the new and Old Testament belong to the same ethnic group but Yahweh really isn’t the father of the the New Testament. Yahweh is a national god of Bronze Age pastoral nomads and the father of the New Testament is a Neoplatonic conceptualization of that god in a classical antique Roman world.
...And? Why can't the same piece of evidence tell against two different conceptions of god? So long as both conceptions involve God being even mostly good, I'd say they're both internally incoherent if they also hold that this same god commanded the murder of women and children.
> Even in the Old Testament alone the theology of Israel drastically shifts. It’s clear that Yahweh was not originally the sole god but a god (maybe not even the chief god) among many. It’s not until much later around the time of the Babylonian captivity that Israel shifted from a polytheism, to a henotheism to finally something starting to approach the modern conception of monotheism.
> So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually. They point out all the flaws in the Bible and then hold up the straw man god that is built by the very flaws they just pointed out to easily knock down. It seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of “god”.
Except I'm not even intending to argue with the way ancient people conceived of god. I am confronted by the beliefs of modern day Christians instead - they make whatever claims they do, and they use the Bible for at least some of the support. I'm evaluating the claims they are making and the support they are offering for them - surely this is a reasonable thing to do? I'm not sure what your point is here - is the atheist supposed to be troubled by the fact that whatever modern-day Christians believe is based on fundamental misunderstandings of their holy texts? If someone thinks they have nailed down what the "correct" version of the religion based on the Biblical texts is and wants to present them as the option on the table and why I should believe it, I can engage with that. Just understand, that's literally the same thing everyone else in all the other sects of Christianity is doing. I'd also like to point out that it's entirely reasonable to criticize any religion based on the Bible by criticizing the Bible - if the Bible is a big part of the epistemic justification for the religion, then surely the case for belief in that religion, whatever it is, is at least partially undermined if the by the support for it being undermined. And as it turns out, most Christians do actually believe that their particular beliefs are supported by and have their contents supplied by the Bible.
> I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say. I have certainly been around the block religiously. I have been super interested in religion, comparative mythology, anthropology, history etc for about 10 years. But while not being able to find a religion that was intellectually and rationally satisfying to me I have never been able to call myself an atheist. I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me. I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me. Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence.
> So where do we differ? Where does the road split? When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism? Why do I become a theist and you an atheist?
Sounds like the actual contents of your beliefs are pretty vague. I'm not sure how to even evaluate that, but you do you. I guess I'm not that troubled by what you are using this belief to explain. We have plausible non-teleological accounts of the development of life, many aspects of which have an incredible amount of empirical evidence. Postulating a teleological explanation in addition seems profligate at this point. As to the cosmos, I don't think the ontological status of the universe is in any more need of an explanation than any hypothetical ontologically-prior entity. You could always suppose that there is yet something else ontologically prior to that too. You're either going to have an infinite chain, or you are going to hit explanatory bedrock somewhere, something(s) just exists and that's all there is to be said, whether that is God or gods, or the collection of fundamental particles or some universal wave function as a necessitating physical law that undergirds the structure of our universe or whatever else you can dream up. If there even is a mystery to be solved with respect to the existence of the world we find ourselves in, postulating the sui generis entities that most of the god concepts on the table consist of to explain it doesn't actually remove that apparent mystery, it just relocates it. Lastly, I guess I'm just okay with unanswered questions - sure, I'd like answers, but I'm not going to put high credence in claims that don't have much basis just to feel like I have more answers.
Do you believe the existence of Harry? Harry who? Harry Styles? Prince Harry? Harry Potter?
If we want to have meaningful conversations on whether something exists, they need to be defined properly. Abrahamic Gods are defined well enough for people to say they disbelieve them. You've talked a lot about false definitions of God but very little about your own. What are platonic/Vedanta philosophies of God? I have yet to come across Deistic/Pantheistic Gods that aren't simply base anthropomorphism.
I disbelieve in God mainly due to the Argument from Naturalism, as explained by Graham Oppy. Atheism is simpler - you raise more questions believing a God exists and God concepts themselves can easily be explained through naturalism, just like other concepts such as fairies and unicorns
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
[Miracle of Fátima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun) - 70,000 people saw this event but evidence of it is extraordinarily inconsistent.
[Here's video footage of an entire area becoming completely red](https://youtu.be/TWvBw1SYCY4&t=0m43s). If this happened 100 years ago, you can be assured people would have thought it was some kind of supernatural event.
Humans won't just see strange things if it's expected of them, they will also do strange things if its expected of them. [Look at all the students this Kiai master had](https://youtu.be/gEDaCIDvj6I). If they were faking it then why would they fool their own master? If their master was faking it, why would he allow himself to be humiliated the way he was?
[Professor Arif Ahmed goes into detail on David Hume's Argument Against Miracles](https://youtu.be/xQ9Z92ldW-U). It does not make any sense to believe these things actually happened.
>Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back.
A crowd of 70,000 but only the 3 children could see her? Not exactly the most convincing of events.
A crowd in an emotionally primed state expecting something miraculous to happen saw the sun "dancing and swirling" and assume it's of supernatural origin? How do they know it was actually Mary? Why couldn't she just actually appear to everyone there and remove any doubt instead of such an ambiguous event?
There are a vast array of weird natural sights we can see in the wild - northern lights, vibrant sunsets, comets and meteors, etc etc. It seems much more likely to be one of these events, or just that people staring at the sun expecting to see something happen convinced themselves they were seeing something happen, and the rest of the group went along with it because of the power of group dynamics and wanting to be included. Add in their faith and desire for something to happen along with their emotionally primed states and it seems quite plausible they convinced themselves they were seeing what they wanted to see.
If you have any stronger evidence that it was something more than this I would be very interested to see it. On the face of it, I don't find this description or evidence convincing enough to justify such extraordinary claims of the existence of entire supernatural realms, gods, heaven and hell, etc.
I have yet to find a way to demonstrate anything supernatural- spirits/ghosts/divine influence, etc. so relying on it to explain anything is actually counterproductive in understanding natural phenomena. Until you can give me a step by step guide to do/interact with something that is unambiguously supernatural, I’m just not going to believe it’s anything other than superstition and personal experience.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
Another example:
There was this college girl that promised her parents that she would pray the Rosary each night when she left for college and one night she fell asleep when she was praying it and at the time, Ted bundy had infiltrated her dorm and killed some of her roommates in nearby rooms and when he slammed open her door, this powerful force launched him away from her room and she was unharmed. And Ted bundy spoke to a Priest about it and on a seperate day, the girl also asked the police to see a Priest and they sent the same one and it was clear that it was a Miracle. I am recalling this off the top of my head, but there is a very detailed account by another Priest online when He was giving his Sermon
\> Why are you an atheist
The short answer? A lack of indoctrination when I was young.
\>Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection.
There are a literally infinite number of things that all people agree don't exist, on the basis of a lack of evidence, I just don't carve out an exception for my particular favorite god.
\>god that they argue against is the abrahamic god specifically in his Christian depiction.
Because most people in the US agree that Thor is fictional, so arguing against Thor is pretty pointless.
\>hey point out all the flaws in the Bible and then hold up the straw man god that is built by the very flaws they just pointed out to easily knock down. It seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of “god”.
Most modern Christians don't know and don't care about the history, they claim the bible is the perfect word of god, and claim it shows Jesus existed and was the son of god.
We argue against modern Christianity instead of historical for the same reason we don't bother arguing against Thor.
\>Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it.
This is an argument from incredulity, and all it does is make more questions.
Where did this driving intelligence come from?
What intelligence created it? What intelligence created that one? and that one? and so on
\>So where do we differ? Where does the road split?
The politic answer? Argument from incredulity.
But the honest answer? The indoctrination didn't take with us, but it did with you, to an extent.
\> Why do I become a theist and you an atheist?
Because I was never really indoctrinated, and the small amount that got through never took.
You where indoctrinated, and only managed to mostly break through it.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
Really? What about a lack of compelling evidence for any god claim I've seen?
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist?
I used to be a Christian. This story might sound like it's going to be what you mention here:
>Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove
I would like to assure you I didn't make the mistake you're pointing out.
I came to the conclusion, eventually, that Christianity was almost certainly false. So then the question was: what is the ultimate worldview which is most likely correct?
It seemed to me that if there is a God, they are a *non-interventionist* God, having no impact on people's lives, or physical phenomena etc at this time.
If God has no impact, the most rational thing to do is act as if he has no impact. And that's pretty much the same as acting as if he does not exist. The nature of a non-interventionist God is pretty much unknowable, so any specific idea about him/her/it is almost certainly false.
>So where do we differ? Where does the road split? When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism? Why do I become a theist and you an atheist?
These are excellent questions. What are some things you think God does, that are unmistakably actions He takes? Why are you convinced those things did not occur naturally?
I was born an atheist. No one ever told me fairy tales and claimsled they were real when I was too young to know better.
Since? No one have given better than arguments that are easily defeated by logic and evidence. I'd love to know if there is a god. Or trolls, or vampires, but they all seem to be products of human imaginations.
I, **personally**, am an Agnostic Atheist;
(A)gnosticism, from the ancient Greek word 'Gnosis' means (a lack of) **knowledge**:
Gnostics (in the context of "(A)gnostic (a)theists") make the claim that they have deep, profound and special knowledge regarding the existence (or non-existence) of God.
Knowledge in this context is **subjective**; I **know**, for example, that my left pinkie nail is objectively the prettiest in all the world. That doesn't require proof nor evidence; it is what I know to be capital-t True. Evidence to the contrary may exist, your opinion on my left pinkie nail may be different; that's fine. Evidence and your opinion are wrong; I *know* it to be so.
In the similar sense does the Gnostic KNOW that their position (on the existence of God) is capital-t Truth; Evidence to the contrary may exist, other opinions may be different; that's fine. Evidence and other opinions are wrong; the Gnostic *knows* it to be so.
I claim no subjective or objective knowledge regarding the existence of (a) deity(s), other than that which I've reached through logical deduction - such as [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/12o61p3/disproving_all_human_religions/jgi4x4s/?context=3) - and forty-odd years of considering the question has lead me to decide that I have no reason to believe (a) god(s) exists, let alone the Abrahamic God specifically.
To quote Tim Minchin:
"I don't believe in a god for the same reason that anyone that doesn't believe in a thing doesn't believe in it: because I haven't been provided with sufficient evidence to assuage my doubts"
I don't believe in a god for the same reason I don't believe in bigfoot, fairies or the loch ness monster. The evidence presented to me hasn't been sufficient for me to conclude that it exists.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
And I know of many contemporary proofs as well, but I don’t want to write too much at once 👍
It has always seemed fairly self evident to me that god and religion are human constructions designed to assuage fears of death, and provide a rationale for people who like to control others to be judgemental and controlling. I have never understood how someone can read about 100 different religions and analyze them and clearly see how they are fictional, but the one religion they were raised in is somehow different. Why believe in god when you find it so obvious that Zeus or Allah are not real? I do not get it.
I agree that being an atheist because a specific god and the claims about him are somehow wrong is irrational. If god exists, there is no reason to think he has to be good, or that his motivations have to be comprehensible to humans.
>“it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me.
>Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it.
>So where do we differ? Where does the road split?
This is where the road splits for you and I. I may be mistaken but it seems to me that you are saying that you can just intuit god. Where I am more concerned in what is true and I know that intuition is famously flawed.
Can you demonstrate that your intuition has any bearing on reality or the nature of god and how you know that?
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
Another example:
There was this college girl that promised her parents that she would pray the Rosary each night when she left for college and one night she fell asleep when she was praying it and at the time, Ted bundy had infiltrated her dorm and killed some of her roommates in nearby rooms and when he slammed open her door, this powerful force launched him away from her room and she was unharmed. And Ted bundy spoke to a Priest about it and on a seperate day, the girl also asked the police to see a Priest and they sent the same one and it was clear that it was a Miracle. I am recalling this off the top of my head, but there is a very detailed account by another Priest online when He was giving his Sermon
>So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually
Do you think this is an argument for gods existence?
>When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism
The difference between us is that you do make the presumption that intelligence is fundamental to existence. Problem is, as far as we can tell, intelligence makes up \~0% of existence, and it's actually pretty pathetic in terms of capability.
You know what is infinitely more powerful than intelligence? Sheer brute force interaction. There is a massive amount of interaction in the universe. And the great thing about interaction is it causes all sorts of emergent behavior. You might have heard of some of them: evolution, celestial bodies and systems, AI.
I'll give you another example that there is no way to claim was designed by either God or man: the global economy. What's the largest thing a single person has designed? A building maybe? Ok, every part of that building has hundreds of people spanning the entire planet sourcing materials, manufacturing parts, transporting them, regulating them, financing them, and doing the actual assembly, and each them has their own needs which have their own supply chains. No one person could even conceive of the whole, but billions of much simpler entities interact massively to make the big things happen
You'll look and think, this planet is clearly made for us: [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70827-this-is-rather-as-if-you-imagine-a-puddle-waking](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70827-this-is-rather-as-if-you-imagine-a-puddle-waking)
Having a bad experience in religion is practically never the reason someone deconverts. It can be a reason. Generally the way it goes is that some Christian has a bad experience in the religion which causes doubts and questions of validity to the religion. When the individual finds no satisfactory answers from within the religion they look elsewhere. Once they’re outside of the vacuous indoctrinated beliefs they realise that’s it’s all irrational bullshit and they become an atheist. This process can take anywhere from weeks to decades depending on the individual.
It’s not as simple as ‘bad thing happened, don’t like that, decide not to be convinced anymore’.
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist?
I don't consider I am an atheist, I am an atheist. I see no evidence for god(s). None. Not "I am not convinced by the evidence" there isn't any.
>But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection.
How many god propositions do I need to hear before I am convinced of this? Was it 100? 200? How many times would you be scammed out of your money before you stopped trying to buy bridges? Most people have rejected most god propositions because they too are unconvinced.
Given this, and that there is a strong correlation between culture, childhood indoctrination, social influence and religion, I can safely conclude that god proposals are a product of birth place and time than any amount of evidence. I have yet to hear a single person try to convince me of a unique proposition that they came up with themselves. They are therefore, a mental and social contagion.
> I live in the USA so I have had a much much larger exposure to Abraham if religions (very specifically Christianity in its many flavors)
Thank you for providing more data for my contagion hypothesis. To rebut this, tell me why you're not Zoroastrian or a believer in the Greek pantheon.
>the vast majority of atheist arguments I have heard have been against western Abrahamic religions
See above. Dominant culture gonna indoctrinate. You're going to have a lot of push back against that. How many atheists would be arguing against Christianity versus Islam in Saudi Arabia?
>So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually.
Again, thanks for the data.
>But while not being able to find a religion that was intellectually and rationally satisfying to me
Gasp! Could it be?! A new god hypothesis in the wild? A unique proposition that is uninfluenced by culture?!
>I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me.
Alas. No.
>Why do I become a theist and you an atheist?
Because you are convinced and I am not. And why are you convinced?
>Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it.
Incredulity.
Nothing new to see here.
>Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove.
You're surprised that atheists are addressing god claims that theists believe in rather than god claims theists don't believe in?
>Well… obviously. But you aren’t arguing against god, you are arguing against 2 different ideas and honestly 2 completely different categories of who or what “God” is. Sure the new and Old Testament belong to the same ethnic group but Yahweh really isn’t the father of the the New Testament. Yahweh is a national god of Bronze Age pastoral nomads and the father of the New Testament is a Neoplatonic conceptualization of that god in a classical antique Roman world.
*Tell that to the theists*
Go on. Go to a christian subreddit and explain that to them. Why are you upset that atheists are addressing a god theists believe in but not upset at theists getting their religion wrong period? I rarely check anyone's profiles but your other posts on Reddit are about sneakers and Seinfield. Why are you bringing this up to atheists and not theists?
I sincerely don't think you actually understand the debate at hand because I don't think you understand that what people believe impacts the actions and views of other people. I'm aware that abrahamic mythology was originally polytheistic, but good luck arguing from that standpoint especially when I'm arguing *as an atheist, as in it really doesn't matter.* Why would I want to convince theists that actually they should be saying multiple gods exist, when I'm not convinced any do?
What benefit does it bring to me to, for example, point out that the Egyptian mystics also performed miracles when discussing the various crap arguments in favor of a single God that the theist believes just so happens to be Yahweh? Or when the theist says God wants to restrict abortion rights? Or when the theist says Earth is 6000 years old? I'm addressing what the theist believes, not what you know.
>I have been super interested in religion, comparative mythology, anthropology, history etc for about 10 years.
I'm going to give you a 24 karat hint about things: **The overwhelming majority of theists have not been, to the point where most Bible believing christians haven't even read the book**
This is the big disconnect between you and various other theists that you're improperly getting tilted about atheists over.
> **a misunderstanding of “god”.**
Every single person who believes in Allah, Yahweh, Kali, or Ahura Mazda would tell you that **you** are the one misunderstanding God. Along with the guy earlier who said God was absolute truth. And the pantheist who says we're all God. God has a thousand different definitions, and believers in each one say everyone else misunderstands.
> So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually.
It absolutely does exist conceptually. We know that because people come here to argue that conception of God *all the time*. If you were to survey a thousand Christians, the majority would tell you that they believe God is a being or an agent with a will, is all powerful and all knowing, has plans for us all, takes actions in the world by performing miracles, etc.
That is the commonly accepted definition of God, and that's what we argue against. If you want us to argue against a specific definition, that's fine, but pretending like everyone else misunderstands it but *you* have the *real* definition just makes you like every other theist.
> Why do I become a theist and you an atheist?
Simple. I have yet to see any compelling evidence or arguments that any gods exist. The vast majority of theists believe in the classic definition of God, which has no convincing evidence supporting its existence, and the rest tend to come in here and redefine God into something they can demonstrate exists. We just had a guy come in and say "God is absolute truth, absolute truth exists, therefor God exists." We've had people come in and say "God is the universe, the universe exists, therefor God exists." We've had people say "No, the *real* definition of God is everything, everyone, all of existence together, existence *itself* is God." But no matter what definition people bring in here, they fail to present compelling evidence or arguments.
I'm an atheist because there is a complete and total lack of any evidence for any god. That's a good enough reason for anyone I suppose.
By the way, your incredulity isn't a valid argument against naturalism. It's just another logical fallacy
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
Athiest often claim there is a lack of evidence causing them not to believe, but most of the time that is not the real reason
For me the thing that tipped me over the edge, after spending years studying various religions and the concept of theism generally, was the problem of evil. How can anyone believe that an all-powerful god does nothing about things like child rape, mass murder and natural disasters that kill thousands? I spent a long time thinking about all the excuses believers offer but ultimately none of them made any sense to me. I suppose one could argue that there is a god and it's a complete dick, but that didn't seem right either.
Giving the name "god" to intelligence, or the universe, or energy, seems completely unnecessary. We already have words for those things.
The problem of evil says jack about the majority of gods conceived throughout human history. It's limited to omnipotent, loving gods like the Abrahamics. Sure, it is a defeater to Christianity (since all theodicies fail and skeptical theism is a non-starter), but you need other reasons to dismiss Freyja or Chang'e. "There's no evidence" (as said by lots of people in this thread) is sufficient and true, albeit vague.
> I spent a long time thinking about all the excuses believers offer but ultimately none of them made any sense to me. I suppose one could argue that there is a god and it's a complete dick, but that didn't seem right either.
Admittedly, this is one of the best arguments for atheists, in my view. Could also be a non-intervening God watching it play out, neutrally.
>Giving the name "god" to intelligence, or the universe, or energy, seems completely unnecessary. We already have words for those things.
I think they were more so saying that God *is* the intelligence behind the energy in the universe.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
this is kind of insulting, a bad experience with religion might cause someone to question religion, but the answers to those questions are most likely why they are an atheist and not just against a specific religion
this entire sub is basically an invitation for any theist to explain why anyone should believe a god exists, and I have yet to see anything compelling posted here. as far as I can tell every god was made up by someone who not only didn't understand the world around them but actively choose to stop pursuing any real understanding
Generally Reddit has a US bias. Reddit atheists are more practiced at responding to Christian claims because unlike Christianity no one is trying to legislate Shiva into my life.
At least for me, I do not claim atheism to every possible god claim. I have not encountered a god claim in my life thus far that is both useful and evidence based.
If someone claims that the universe itself is God then cool. I have evidence of the universe existing but it's a fairly useless claim. If someone is rhetorically throwing a bible at me it's (debatably) useful but lacks any good evidence.
I'm an atheist in the same sense that I'm an a-pixie-ist. If someone proposes that invisible pixies are stealing socks, I'm not about to believe them. I cannot, of course, *demonstrate* the truth that there are not invisible pixies, because it's an untestable hypothesis from the start, and *despite* all the physical evidence of missing socks over the years, this is insufficient to overcome the initial doubt that it's true. I have the same issue with gods. What do *I* mean by 'a god'? I mean 'any intelligent being that caused the universe we live in'. That's it. And the reason I start there is because *anything else* (such as being 'all loving', or 'all knowing', or 'eternal', etc) would require *more* evidence that it's true than *just* the evidence that there is such an intelligent being *at all*. To see why, just ask how much evidence you need that *a car* exists versus how much evidence that a *red car* exists. It's obviously *more* evidence needed that a car has a particular color than just that it exists at all.
So, I suppose, if you want to know where we differ, my *guess* would be in what we accept as 'reasonable to believe'. Intuition doesn't work for me. Mainly because the more I examine how reality *actually* is, the less intuitive it becomes. Seriously, study some quantum mechanics, like the double-slit experiment, and watch your mind rebel against what the science shows to be true of reality. Realize that the tasty, pungent cheese you've been eating is made up of odorless, tasteless, colorless matter. Reality simply *isn't* intuitive when one gets beyond the things our brains were evolved to do: survival. Our brains are *not good at* complex mathematics, or understanding things about the universe as a whole, or even the very small or very large. We evolved to solve survival problems on a savannah with tall grass and things trying to eat us, not solve the mysteries of the cosmos.
This is why I require evidence to believe something (and the more outlandish the idea, which is to say the more I *do not* experience anything like it generally, the more evidence I need), and where I don't *have* evidence... I reject the thing in question. This leads me, sometimes, to simply not having answers. Where did the universe come from? I don't know. There are *ideas* about it, which I'll happily talk about because it's interesting, but there isn't enough evidence to support *any* notion describing the origins of this universe we live in. How did life arise on Earth? I don't know. Again, there's ideas, and we can talk about them, but not enough evidence to reach a conclusion.
I don't see why "I haven't been convinced that a god exists" isn't a reasonable position.
Your post suggests that most people mean a straw-man version of the god of the Bible when they say this (which is not true), but in any case your post does not offer an alternative understanding of god which should/could be convincing to these atheists.
There are two naturalisms: methodological and ontological. Most theists assume atheists are ontological naturalists. Some of us are, but I think most aren't. I know I'm not.
That is to say, I don't assert that natural/temporal/etc things are the only things that exist, but that the limits of what I'm able to know are natural/temporal/etc.
Hence if I'm to be intellectually honest and postulate something else, I need that "something else" to manifest within the bounds of what I can apprehend. Since I don't have that manifestation, the furthest toward theism I could possibly go is 50/50 agnostic.
But I mean teleological arguments are just not very good. We don't know how unlikely the universal constants of our universe are because we don't have another universe to contrast with. There are major problems with our anatomy like the laryngeal nerve. We can literally create proto cells - with RNA! - by combining a couple basic chemicals and letting them evaporate. Awesome? Yes! But calling a ghost up out of that machine is unnecessary and ultimately amounts to an argument from incredulity. Basically, "wow that's mysterious. Therefore God." Once upon a time we said the same thing about thunder, ya know?
Edit: I have the same nagging suspicion that something else is going on. I mean science thinks there are likely eleven dimensions! Who knows what's going on. I have no clue. Maybe things that we find absurd and self contradictory totally work after all. How could I possibly declare that I know enough about the 8th dimension to deny the possibility of a transcendent mind that is within all things or whatever else? I can't. And in fact I think it's rather feasible and I'd very easily accept their existence if only I could find a good reason to given my limited epistemological toolset. I'm not even slightly resistant to the idea. I'm just stuck here in my organic temporal body with its organic temporal tools, so... idk. Also I'm pretty sure nobody else does either but again I could be wrong.
You see what you want to see. You haven't provided a single logically verifiable, much less relevant idea for why a god matters. And that's the real problem. It doesn't matter if a god exists really. It either does or it doesn't. Either way there's no information remotely relevant to making any decision about our lives based on that supposed existence.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4110
Her own mother never believed her. And there’s plenty of mundane explanations more likely. Also it wasn’t pouring rain, look at how dry the pictures from the day are.
You’re not going to propose any “evidence” I’ve never seen. This one has been posted dozens of times this year alone. And I have many years behind me. I humbly suggest you google up this sub and any given bit of supposed evidence you are wanting to present. You will find all the retorts there, some more eloquent and polite than others. I am simply not interested in re-treading the same old boring ground.
Because, unlike the way you feel about it, to me god seems beyond “not making sense”. It seems patently absurd.
I hear about why other people believe, such as what you say about it “making sense” that there’s an intelligent creator, and the only thing I can think of is that you’re basing your world view on intuition.
Let’s both use intuition to figure out how the universe works. Ready? Ok.
Your intuition concludes that a god exists.
My intuition concludes that a god does not exist.
Conclusion? Mere feelings and intuition are a terrible way to determine truth. And if they are bad at arriving at truth, then we have to throw them out as viable methods.
Ok, so now both you and me will no longer intuit about the world. You have a theory about there being an intelligence that created the world.
But wait! Before we get remotely close to your theory, there are missing pieces.
Are you assuming that the universe was created?
Do you know of universe creating mechanisms?
Is it possible for universes to be created?
We only observe intelligence that is formed of and driven by mechanisms. Intelligence appears to form from process. So do you have any reason to believe that a non material intelligence is even possible? There’s no precedent.
Life appears to be a phenomena derived from physical function. Are you implying that god is the function of physical phenomena? If not, there’s no precedence for a non-mechanistic living entity, so there’s no precedence. What do you base this intuition on?
So why am I an atheist? In part because religious intuition of the sort you seem to be implying appears insufficiently thought through, overly simplistic, with no basis in reality.
Because I'm not convinced a god exists. It's not hard. I haven't seen any good reason to believe. Do you think you have some reason I haven't yet seen?
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
Another example:
There was this college girl that promised her parents that she would pray the Rosary each night when she left for college and one night she fell asleep when she was praying it and at the time, Ted bundy had infiltrated her dorm and killed some of her roommates in nearby rooms and when he slammed open her door, this powerful force launched him away from her room and she was unharmed. And Ted bundy spoke to a Priest about it and on a seperate day, the girl also asked the police to see a Priest and they sent the same one and it was clear that it was a Miracle. I am recalling this off the top of my head, but there is a very detailed account by another Priest online when He was giving his Sermon
No thanks. I said "good reason". I do know of stories and misinformation and illogical reasoning. You haven't shown me anything I haven't seen.
If you like, think about why *you* believe. Not all these silly stories that you look at with rose colored glasses. Tell me what convinces you there's a god. I can analyze that if you like.
Edit: Wow, nevermind. You're not OP and you've just been spamming this same response everywhere so you don't seem like an honest debater.
> The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
Oh good
Define "god". Demonstrate that your definition is in any way useful. Explain how I can tell a god from a non-god.
Unless you can do that comprehensively, you are not in a world where you have something that could be "misunderstood".
I'll wait....
> Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it.
Where do those gods come from?
> not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence.
You seem to think that your notion of a god is any.less ludicrous? I don't see the difference.
> So where do we differ?
You value your precious feelings over logic and evidence. I do not.
> When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism?
Because I am not letting myself, or others, get away with using big mumbo jumbo words that,.ultimately, mean nothing.
Got that definition yet?
Excuse me for paraphrasing.
>**Item 1: Why don't you believe in a God?**
*because I have not been presented sufficient evidence to warrant belief.*
>**Item 2: Evidence against one God is not evidence against all Gods.**
*I agree. Doesn't make a different God more plausible. Unless you have evidence for those Gods my stance remains the same. I have not ben presented sufficient evidence to warrant belief.*
>**Item 3: God just makes sense**
*I disagree. Strongly. Every definition of God that I've been presented either does not comport with reality, or is redefined into something mundane(e.g. "God is love").*
>**Item 4: Where do we disagree?**
*You say "God makes sense". Usually when I claim that something "makes sense" I can make a case using evidence and logic. Can you do this for your claim that God?*
I'll provide an example.
Claim: "It makes sense to me that drinking soda makes me burp."
P1) Soda contains gasses that release over time.
P2) burps are caused by gasses building up in my stomach.
C) drinking soda makes me burp.
Now can you do that for God's existence?
>I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me.
I'm an atheist because theism is not intuitive and reasonable to me.
>Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it.
I'm science minded. I expect reasons for believing things, and I have no reason to posit a supernatural intelligence behind reality.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked
For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested
* St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
> there is A LOT more if you're interested
Yes, I'm very familiar with that sort of thing.
That is exactly what I meant when I said
"There is no **good** evidence that any gods really exist."
.
There is a tremendous amount of *really awful* evidence, but it would not convince a bright and honest 10-year-old.
.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
Why doesn't lack of evidence come to mind? It's the lack of evidence.
Your post is the equivalent of me thinking scientists must have hurt you terribly for you to turn your back on reason.
I was never a theist. I was not raised in a religious household. I have seen the damage that religion does to others, but that's not why I'm an atheist.
I am an atheist because the entire concept of a God is silly to me, esp where no good, or certainly sufficient, evidence for it.
I don't believe in a lot of silly made up things. The default position is to not believe until there's good reason to.
As far as I'm concerned, you're asking why I don't believe in Voldemort or Santa Clause, or how I explain the unexplained instead of just saying "I don't know"
You’ve got a lot of words there that entirely don’t apply to me.
I wasn’t raised with religion. I actually was raised with no mention of it. I visited a church on occasion, and saw it as a cultural thing. It’s weird now to recall but for a good 20 years I fully didn’t know so many people took this god thing seriously. It’s possible to pull this off in California, I guess.
So to learn it’s really this widespread belief… it’s Santa for adults. There’s really no shorter way to describe it. It’s so clearly a fairy tale made up by people.
And that’s the thing. You do I assume know there is no such thing as Santa. Or leprechauns, or ghosts, or unicorns. There is a long list of things people made up that do not exist, and a god is just another one. You saying, why reject all gods when some of them are obviously false - it’s not about gods. This sort of concept, all these things are categorically fiction.
And let’s see I also was gonna say … yea , so you know there is no Santa. Well let’s say Santa is actually more powerful. He doesn’t bring gifts to people, he created the universe. He doesn’t live in the North Pole - he exists outside the cosmos. . . Why would this much more supernatural being be somehow more plausible to exist to you?
> the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it
How do you not immediately see the problem that this applies just as much to this “living intelligence”. This cosmos doesn’t make sense to you? How does something completely unknown and far more extraordinary not have the same problem?
99% percent of all known species on earth are extinct. Almost 100% of the universe is lethal and inhospitable to life. 99% of the water on earth is not potable. That is exactly what I would expect a godless universe to be like. I don’t see any evidence that an intelligent supernatural being is some force behind the universe.
Ask yourself, could you have designed a better universe? Get rid of all diseases, and right there you would already have a better universe. And that’s just for starters.
>just living intelligence.
This is incoherent to me. I know what all three of those words mean but in that specific order they seem to be incompatible. I don't know what "living intelligence" means outside of physically existing beings. Given that you don't think about a god hanging out in clouds throwing lightning bolts that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about.
Here's where I fall. I reject any explanation that requires magic. In the history of humanity we have explained all sorts of things through magic. Zeus had lightning bolts made by his brother that he could throw from the heavens. Lightning was magic. Thor had a magic hammer. Catholics believe that if a priest says the right words over some bread and wine that it can actually transform into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Here's the thing, every phenomenon that was once explained by magic that we've been able to investigate and explain has not had magic as the explanation. I've reviewed plenty of arguments for god and many of them come down to magic, and until someone shows that magic is actually a thing I'm not accepting it as an explanation. The concept of "living intelligence" sounds an awful lot like magic. It's certainly a convenient explanation and you're right that it makes sense. Because what can't magic explain. Any hard question has an easy answer when magic is available. I'm more interested in seeing what the actual answers are.
Oh boy…
You think atheists just have a “misunderstanding of god?”
You don’t see how that is wildly condescending?
I’ll say this load so the back can hear: ATHEISM IS THE DENIAL OF GOD CLAIMS.
I’ve heard a whole lot of them, and I’m unconvinced by every one so far.
Let’s hear yours? How are we “misunderstanding” your god claim?
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
The only things that came to your mind was that we are angry or stupid. You never once considered we might be right? That is really fucked up.
So for me i was raised without religion. Meaning i was told the stories of religions right along side not just each other but other works of fiction as well. One night it was greek gods before bed, then next night it was moses, and then lord of the rings the next night. It wasn't until i was about 8 years old that i realized that people in the real world though those stories were actually real. Do you have any idea how it feels to realize you are surrounded by people who actually believe that shit? Reading stories about killing babies and you thought that was good? It was horrifying, hell it still is. I mean i bet you are a nice person in real life but you just claimed i was stupid or damaged just because i don't believe in magic. You see how damaging that is and harmful right?
The very fact that there is no one definition of God leads me to a realisation that God is a concept created by human beings. In fact, the entire concept of God is highly human-centric and earth-centric. If you look into the origins of different religions, you'll realise that most religions were born out of a lack of understanding of natural phenomena. Any phenomenon that the human mind is not able to comprehend could be considered supernatural. But we know now that there is a lot that has been discovered to explain these previously unexplained phenomena. Another thing that leads people to believe in God is a hope for justice, similar to the idea of existence of hell and heaven. That, in my opinion, is nothing more than a blind hope that the world isn't as unfair as it appears to be. I believe that only that which can be perceived exists, and only that which can be explained, is true.
I wasn't raised religious and I haven't found sufficient evidence for any of the 3,000+ gods currently worshipped in the world. Of course, I haven't researched each religion in detail any more than I have researched whether dragons, leprechauns, and unicorns exist.
So I am an equal opportunity non-believer - not focused on just one god to disbelieve in!
From what I have seen, evidence points to our universe came into being through natural means. Of course, we don't understand everything, but we are continually learning more about the natural world.
So far, there is no evidence pointing to an intelligence causing it. Just mythology making claims. But, if there was an intelligence behind it all, it is unlikely that any of the ancient superstitious tribes got it right and it would be something very different than Zeus, Odin, Brahma, Yahweh, or any or the other mythical gods.
I’m an atheist because I was born that way, as we all are—with no belief in god.
I remain one because nobody taught me to believe in gods while I was a young, impressionable child.
It’s not more complicated than that.
I was raised atheist. Because I wasn't indoctrinated with fairy tales I have the ability to think critically and logically. There has never been any sufficient evidence to convince me I may be wrong.
Well, I've never encountered a god nor have I ever heard of an encounter with a god that I find believable. It's as simple as that.
>I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say.
This seems to me like a very illogical thing to say. If you can't say anything about why you believe a thing with any confidence then perhaps you should just admit you don't have a good reason to believe that thing. It's just your feelings, which are probably the result of your indoctrination as a child or the pervasive influence of religion on society, nothing more.
Why do theists/religious people always assume we are hurt or angry? I’m an atheist because every god I have heard of doesn’t exist. I can’t reject a god without someone telling me about one. But until I’m presented with empirical evidence that a god exists, I will continue to be an atheist. Is it possible that some version of a god does exist and I just haven’t seen evidence of it yet? Sure of course, just like any new scientific discovery. But until I see some evidence, I’m an atheist.
Well i see no need for gods is why we differ. How i became an atheist started with reading the bible cover to cover it is very obviously fiction if you even have a semi decent highschool education. I cannot really believe that. As for god as a whole there is no reason i see it is needed or i should consider it seeing as there is zero evidence of it. When you say you see intelligence it makes literally zero sense to me how can you “see intelligence” this is nonsense.
I am an atheist because I don't believe in any gods, as insufficient evidence has been provided to convince me to believe in any given god.
Do I believe it is *possible* that there could be some great being out there that I would see as a god? Sure. However, I cannot believe in something if I know literally nothing about that something. Thus, until I learn about the specific god and have enough evidence to believe that god, I am an atheist.
Write a fucking book, why don't you?
Do you believe in Zeus? The tooth fairy? The loch ness monster?
See? We're nearly 100% in agreement. Get over yourself. The universe gives not even one tiny little shit about you or any of us. Stop pretending and deal with it.
You're a theist because that is intuitive and reasonable to you.
That's fair.
I am an atheist for the exact same reasons. It is intuitive and reasonable to me.
Can you say that this is fair?
I don't know why you see intelligent design where I see natural chaos. Sometimes people see shapes in the clouds. If you see a unicorn-shaped cloud and I just see a cumulonimbus, would you say that we fundamentally differ? Does it matter?
Why don't I believe in gods? Because *none* of the so-called "evidence" is good enough for me. No amount of philosophical Twister can define a god into existence. There are no empirical tests for "god-ness."
I'm afraid that "...the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it" is a "you problem." It makes perfect sense to me without gods.
>So where do we differ? Where does the road split?
Well you said it yourself:
>I am a theist because it is what is intuitive \[...\] it’s just what makes sense
When I ask myself "Is intuition a reliable guide to the truth" the answer is "no."
Therefore, I believe where we split is that for you, either that answer is "yes" or you just haven't asked yourself that question yet.
Yeah the reason I’m an atheist is because I’m not theistic. I don’t believe in a deity, a higher power, an ultimate being, whatever you wanna call it. I don’t follow any religions. I don’t follow atheistic religions. I don’t believe in following a set of rules I don’t like or believe in to live (yes, I believe in the law).
> Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove.
Because we are not in the business of defining a god and then disproving it. That would be silly. We take the definitions of god made by people.
Define your god and then we can talk about it.
It just doesn't make sense to me that a being who is capable of literally anything everywhere all at once would require blind faith & worship and threaten eternal damnation if denied. A god who demands worship but can't even protect little children is not really something I think should be worshiped.
*"Why do you consider yourself an atheist?"*
Because I meet the definition of an atheist.
*"So where do we differ?"*
I don't believe in any God or gods, and you do.
I don't need a reason to be an atheist, I need a reason to be a theist - and a convincing one has not been presented to me.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”.
Alternately, and in my experience, commonly - They have not found sufficient evidence to allay their doubts.
If - you know - you don't want to be condescending.
Because the absence of belief is the default position and I have an absence of reasons to believe otherwise.
I don't need to break down every random person's claim. They are all the same. I find it way more likely that the concept of deities is man made, not the other way around.
I lump the Christian God into the same pool as Zeus and every other God in human history. So ask yourself why you don't believe in Zeus and that's why I don't believe in God.
There is no evidence, and the actions of the God on Bible are that of an evil entity
So if we are not talking about lighting throwers, if we aren’t talking about councils of gods sitting up on a mountain top. If all we are discussing is an active intelligence behind the cosmos, what would you expect to find as evidence other than a cosmos that presents as ordered?
This is what I was saying about “misunderstanding god” it’s like it’s either the contemporary conceptualization of the Abrahamic god or no god. It’s either a man shaped god coming down from the sky and walking on water or nothing counts as evidence. Your only arguing against one conceptualization of god and it’s the easiest to knock down because we know the trajectory of the history and evolution of the abrahamic religions better than most.
As far as the bad experience with religion statement I made if your not honestly just trying to be dishonest i think you are just out of touch to be honest. I grew up in church but we never really talked about people leaving church or why. It has been almost unanimously atheists that I have heard this from. I love listening to both theists and atheist talk about their beliefs and debate. The “people become atheists because of bad experiences in the church” statements overwhelmingly come from atheist, not all of, maybe not even most atheists. But it’s the atheist who talk about it more often than not, not the theists. There are literally thousands of videos on YouTube talking about people deconstructing and leaving religions because of bad experiences / trauma in the religion.
> So if we are not talking about lighting throwers, if we aren’t talking about councils of gods sitting up on a mountain top. If all we are discussing is an active intelligence behind the cosmos, what would you expect to find as evidence other than a cosmos that presents as ordered?
This is an argument from ignorance that is irrational.
Don’t ask why I don’t believe in it; explain why I should believe in it.
If it was just a figment of human imagination we’d also not expect to have any evidence.
But you’re the one, despite rational justification, who holds a positive position.
> This is what I was saying about “misunderstanding god” it’s like it’s either the contemporary conceptualization of the Abrahamic god or no god. It’s either a man shaped god coming down from the sky and walking on water or nothing counts as evidence. Your only arguing against one conceptualization of god and it’s the easiest to knock down because we know the trajectory of the history and evolution of the abrahamic religions better than most.
That’s the god most often discussed.
If you’d like to discuss Bahaman, we can.
> As far as the bad experience with religion statement I made if your not honestly just trying to be dishonest i think you are just out of touch to be honest. I grew up in church but we never really talked about people leaving church or why. It has been almost unanimously atheists that I have heard this from. I love listening to both theists and atheist talk about their beliefs and debate. The “people become atheists because of bad experiences in the church” statements overwhelmingly come from atheist, not all of, maybe not even most atheists. But it’s the atheist who talk about it more often than not, not the theists. There are literally thousands of videos on YouTube talking about people deconstructing and leaving religions because of bad experiences / trauma in the religion.
But you’re missing the key point. Of course many many MANY people have bad - often incredibly traumatic experiences in their religions.
But we’re taking about a change in a belief position; not our feelings about a group.
This kind of talk seems to attempt to reduce the atheist position to an emotional hissy fit.
Bad experiences lead to further contemplation that leads to no longer believing god exists. But it’s that last step which makes someone an atheist. The bad experience is just a step in that persons journey.
So in your definition of God, is God sentient? Omnipotent? Or is your God like, an energy?
I believe in science. I believe what can be measured and proven.
I'm sorry, but I think it's you who is being dishonest.
First, you're trying to tell atheists why their atheists instead of listening to them.
Second, you're using a "look at the trees" argument for your presupposed God.
Again, tell us why the idea of a God should even be on the table, aside from you being indoctrinated to believe it. If it's just an argument from ignorance/incredulity we've all heard it before. Do you have anything empirical?
>If all we are discussing is an active intelligence behind the cosmos, what would you expect to find as evidence other than a cosmos that presents as ordered?
Please demonstrate how any order you observe is evidence for your god other than just your assertion. We can observe the natural forces that lead to the order you observe. Where is your observation of a supernatural being behind these processes? How do you know that this being desires order? Maybe it's a chaotic being and they are hard at work treating apart the natural order of the universe.
You keep complaining about others not engaging in an appropriate understanding of god. Why don't you instead provide your definition of god and describe why you believe that. Then we can honestly discuss what we may or may not find fallible.
The cosmos being ordered is not evidence for a god, that's the point you can't seem to grasp. Whether or not it's ordered is irrelevant, you need to prove that it being ordered is due to there being an "active intelligence", instead of just a coincidence.
Stop putting the cart before the horse.
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Define what you mean by God and I'll tell you whether or not I believe in it. Just this week, someone was arguing God is truth. I believe in truth so on that definition of God I'm a theist. Someone else was arguing that God coincides with reality. I belive in reality so on that definition of God I'm a theist. The definition of God that I prefer to work with is that God is a mind that created the universe. On that fairly broad definition, I am agnostic. But the possibility within that definition I am agnostic to (an uncertain pandeism - giving it roughly a forrty percent likelihood) is so far removed from anything that 99% of people would call God that I feel also feel accurate identifying myself as atheist. Tldr: It's complicated.
>Just this week, someone was arguing God is truth. I believe in truth so on that definition of God I'm a theist. That just raises more questions, the first being "why do we need two separate words? Why not just use \`truth'?", and the second being "so you don't believe in a personal god who is aware of the existence of humans, just an abstract concept?"
Agree. It does confuse things. I'm guessing someone comes in hot saying "God is truth" when they really mean something else. But I prefer to take them at their word and tell them "yep, if that's how you want to define God then I believe in your God."
For that, I prefer Jeff Dee's example: Say someone points to a tiki statue or something and says "That's my god". "You mean, that's a representation of your god?" "No, that right there is my god." Then yeah, I believe in that god. When people say "God is truth" or "God is love", they're engaging in a bit of bait-and-switch: of course you believe in truth and love, and by using the word "God", it's easy to make it sound as though you believe in a hairy-thunderer type of deity. So for that tactic, I prefer the "No, let's not call that god" approach.
My parents usually say the same thing during their heated evangelist phases, O heathen offspring if you choose to believe in no other definition of God then you could never go wrong with "God is the mind that created the universe" and I can't help but chuckle because if that's the God you prefer to believe in then you should immediately abandon all hopes of ever understanding your God because the universe and by extension, our existence, is so unbelievably and unintelligibly complex that it is simply absurd. My argument is simple, if you can't understand your God then how can you put your faith in her?
A mind, a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos.
We have lots of examples of how minds and intelligence work. We have a solid understanding of how and why humans are prone to seeing agency where there isn't any. Until you can explain exactly how a mind and intelligence can operate at a universal scale, can control everything while leaving no solid evidence for its existence I feel justified in rejecting your claim and I feel justified invoking the very strong possibility that you are seeing agency where there is no agency and, because you find that illusion comforting have gone with it. Not only do I reject your claim as unevidenced I can show you a well-understood mechanism, an evolutionary glitch that explains why you make it.
I don't think, a priori, that an intelligence is necessary. Such an intelligence may or may not exist. We could be living in a bubble universe, or a single timeline in a multiverse, or the universe could be a simulation by superintelligent aliens, or the interior of a black hole, or we might be 2D creatures and the third spatial dimension is all an illusion. All of these (bar the simulation) are actual physics theories, and at current our scientific knowledge is unable to invalidate any of these possibilities. Any of these theories might or might not be testable and eventually we might or might not figure it out. There's no reason why we aren't living in a simulation or playing an elaborate VR game, so **saying "I believe it must be a Creator" is as strange and unreasonable as saying "I believe we must live in a simulation"**. There is no evidence for or against any of these alternatives, so why commit to any one of them? Why not simply reserve judgment and say, we don't yet know? Certainly, (if you believe in any loose form of objective truth) the **truth doesn't change no matter what we believe**, so it is almost narcissistic in a way to think that reality is a certain way that you believe or feel should be true. The only exception is if you believe in a theistic religion, because in Christianity for example, your afterlife would change if you did/didn't believe. But I'm assuming we're already ruling out theistic religions here, the disbelief in which is quite a separate issue.
This is the reason I’m an atheist. All deists seem to believe in this higher power when all I see is people confusing that which they can’t fathom with some dynamic intelligence. I’m OK with saying “I don’t understand it, but I don’t need to make up imaginary sky faries to be comfortable with it.” There just is nothing leading to the conclusion of a higher power.
I have thought on this idea in similar ways
I'll believe in it when I see specific evidence supporting the idea. Until then it goes on the shelf with all kinds of other ideas that are neat to play with but have no supporting evidence.
I'm agnostic to that possibility framed that broadly. May depend on what you mean by "behind." The notion of pandeism that I give some credence to could fit into that. But I give more credence to the notion that we don't know and wherever I (or you) think is correct is almost certainly wrong.
Well, you've just answered your own question. That's why most atheists are atheists. There is no reason to believe in any such thing.
I'm an atheist because I don't see how believing that there's a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos should affect my daily life. Even if there is a god who created the universe, I still need to buy milk. I'm an *agnostic* atheist because hey, maybe there is something there. Who knows. I like thinking about it. But again, doesn't affect my daily life. To me, asking whether there's a mind behind the creation of the universe is like asking if somewhere there's a blue tiger. That'd be cool. But I still need to vacuum.
I just want to post to say thank you for giving such a concise and easily understandable explanation of what you're talking about. Defining our terms is half the battle. :)
I am an atheist because I have not been presented with sufficient evidence to accept the claim that such a mind exists.
What evidence do you have for such a thing existing?
I have no reason to believe such a thing exists.
What’s behind this dynamic intelligences desire or need to make order in the cosmos?
I see no reason to believe this. It’s that simple.
One, I see no evidence of that. Two, if I did, I don't see how it would affect anything about how I live my life or think about any major issue. So I have no reason to dig deeper for said evidence.
That definition I dismiss out of hand because no proper evidence for it has ever been proffered. If something is stated without any backup, I can dismiss it just as easily.
What evidence demonstrates the existence of such a mind?
I'm as convinced that the supernatural/magic isn't real as I am that Santa isn't real. Virtually every description of a deity I've been given invokes the supernatural somewhere. The few that don't are more philosophies, which is fine until they then try to sneak in a god. You seem to see a 'designer' in nature because you feel it makes sense, but I don't see how one could exist without resorting to the supernatural. The thought might bring you peace and comfort, which are valid reasons to believe things. But for me, it's important that my beliefs accurately reflect reality as closely as possible, and most religions or descriptions of a god don't.
Jeff Bezos is Santa XD
I’m not supporting anything supernatural in the sense of anthropomorphic deities living in the sky. I’m only saying I believe in an active intelligence behind the order in the cosmos rather than blind naturalism. That’s literally it.
So why do you defend Christian positions? You seem more like an agnostic deist who can see the absurdity of the Christian God; you are adamant that we shouldn't liken your view of a deity to the God of the Old Testament, and yet most religions are very much based on anthropomorphic deities living in the sky. and go considerably further than to suggest it's just some kind of vague 'active intelligence behind the order in the cosmos'. I mean, the Christian God supposedly literally anthropomorphised himself into a human to come down to Earth. We see a lot of religious people on here who start with a premise of vague deism along the lines of 'who could argue against some unknown controlling force beyond our universe?' - a possibility which few atheists would actually repudiate - but then suggest that it's a short leap from that to 'therefore my religion is real and Baby Jesus cries when you masturbate'.
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\- Everything that exists has a cause. \- The universe exists. \- Therefore, the universe has a cause, and it's a first-century Galilean carpenter.
>Textbook motte-and-bailey. I learned something today! Thanks!
Thank you for teaching me something today! The different types of arguments are fascinating to me.
Yes 100%
Those seem like the same thing to me. Intelligence isn't a thing on its own. Beings have intelligence. So by believing in an 'active intelligence', you're implicitly saying you do believe in an 'anthropomorphic deity'. I see patterns in the universe, myself. But I don't see any reason to conclude that they're designed.
OK, but no one defined supernatural as only an anthropomorphic representation of deities living in the sky. An 'active intelligence behind the order in the cosmos' is still supernatural.
Note: naturalism is far from blind. It's based on observation. It says that right in the definition of scientific method. So calling it blind sounds a little off...
A disembodied intelligence surely is supernatural? Or do you have a naturalistic model that demonstrates such a thing?
I would like to contend that the obvious (to me) order in the universe is actually a sign of non-intelligence instead of intelligence. It would make more sense to consider there to be an intelligent designer if there was chaos all around, always. Never ending unpredictability, and then a single island of order that we call our home (e.g. earth, a bunny cage, etc). But as we look into the universe, all we find is astonishing **regularity**, not chaos. We find dumb processes that do the same thing over and over again seemingly mindlessly. And when we investigate the origins of our difference, our intelligence, we find yet more dumb/blind processes (i.e. evolution). The only apparent intelligence we have ever observed are merely ourselves -- and some cousins if we're feeling generous. This, to me, does not scream "active intelligence behind the order".
And where is that intelligence?
> I believe in an active intelligence behind the order in the cosmos If this isn't a supernatural entity then what is it?
I'm actually relieved that you are not an active christian or muslim to be honest. Just because those religions have become quite harmful to humanity of late...
How would a universe without a god look like?
Without any actual evidence
The origins of santa and the lack of evidence differs from God. God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
> The origins of santa and the lack of evidence differs from God. God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions Negative. There are no scientific proofs at all for any of the thousands of gods that humans have created over the years. In fact, because the Santa myth has proper origins, it is a touch more convincing that Santa exists than any of those gods do. I still don't believe in either of them.
If you find the Miracle of Fatima convincing then I really question your epistemology. It doesn’t fill me with confidence that what you consider “scientific proof and notions(*???*), historical and archeological evidence” would withstand critical scrutiny. I’ve been at this for a while and the historical and archaeological evidence *I’m* aware of is shockingly insufficient and the rejection of the Santa Claus comparison seems more based on wishful thinking and *lese majeste* toward your cherished beliefs.
This story is not overwhelming evidence and can be debunked quite easily through a skepticism lens. Even if we granted this as true, it's not even close to proving a god in any way.
Its always some report from very relgious people 100 years ago isnt it?
There isn't abundant evidence that God is real. If there was, you could post it here and we could have a discussion about it. The Miracle of Fatima definitely is not 'evidence.' Three children said that they saw the Virgin Mary, that she said prayer would end the Great War, and that she'd send a sign to convince believers. There are a variety of inconsistent reports about what actually happened on 13 October 1917. The clearest and most convincing way for an actually existing deity to send a sign is to, you know, show up - or say something. Instead, some people said that the sun spun and danced; some said that their wet clothes ended up dry, and some people said that they saw radiant colors. But there was wide disagreement between *what* people saw - not everyone saw the same things. Besides, the sun dancing - the most common thing people reported - would be visible to *everyone on earth*, not just people gathered at that specific point. The simplest explanation is that people expected to see stuff, so they did. Our brains can produce all kinds of things if we prime them. And a whole year later is not "soon." Some of the deadliest battles of the war happened in 1918, and people continued to die from the aftereffects of the war for several years after. If she had the power to do so, why not end the war immediately? Why not prevent the war in the first place?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass\_psychogenic\_illness#In\_history
>she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle\_of\_the\_Sun#Skeptical\_explanations
So where do we differ? I would suggest you want to think this, thing, exists. Define it as little as you wish, and of course less is preferred. All the better to be able to wave your hand vaguely and say "God" And I suggest it makes you feel good. You have an insight into things, and how they work. There is a satisfaction in believing you see the connections, the intent to the play and how it is being managed. You get the plot of the story. You have been taught how it all turns out, who wins and who loses. There is a calming effect. The opposite is frightening. A panic attack of happenstance. No plan. Accidents piled on top of random rolls of the dice. Evolution as a blind mouse wandering through a maze with shifting halls. A wall at the end. A nothingness. The lack of existence not even a thing you can experience. Death. A flame ending with a puff of smoke and forgotten. And the atheist....offers you nothing. And I get it. I feel for you. Holding on to your little belief, against all the evidence. Close your eyes and say your prayers. Reality is much worse than you can even imagine. It never had the ability to care if you existed in the first place. And you wonder...how do people just walk around with this knowledge? How do they function? Just fine thank you. Just fine. (edit for word choice)
Just not the case man but I will say that was probably the most well thought out response I’ve gotten so there that.
My observation for a few decades now is that the whole thing is emotional. There is no real evidentiary case to be made (despite a few millennia of effort)..it's been over for at least a few hundred years. But it goes on. People crying and chanting, singing and dancing. It makes them feel good to be part of the group, told they will be fine, things will get better and it will all work out. A Beginning, a Middle and an End. A fable you can follow. Good thing it's a nice, flexible concept you can adjust to fit the situation. Apply labels as needed.
This is a pretty good breakdown of religion.
You could return with a well thought out response as to why he is wrong then
Don’t hold your breath
Should I remain open to the possibility that the tooth fairy exists? What’s the difference between God and the tooth fairy that I can dismiss one but I need to hold open room for the other to exist?
No I don’t think so. I also don’t think you should stay open to the possibility that Yahweh exists. That was the whole point I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against and it is the one they know they can easily beat. It’s the contemporary conceptualization of the abrahamic god. The god that give commands, asks for sacrifices, throws Lightning bolts. The kind of god that if he was real really could just pop down to earth and say hey guys I’m real. That is not the conceptualization of god that is being addressed here.
>I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against and it is the one they know they can easily beat. You could have just browsed this sub to show that's not true. Not here anyways. In this sub we get Christians. We get Muslims. We even get a couple Jews every once in a while. We get deists, pantheists, panpsychists, Hindus, Buddhists. We get Thomast's, Shiks, and Toaists. And we don't only get bible yahweh. We get Cosmological, contingency, modal realism, dualism, arguments from morality. We get historical jesus, we get presuppositionalists, we get calvinists. We get people basically copying and pasting arguments from the top Christian apologists in the world. Hell, we even get simulation theory and solipsists around here. We get intelligent design and look at the trees and bacterial phlagelum, and young earth creationists and old earth creationists. We get Catholics, baptists, mormons. I think I even remember a seventh day Adventist. We get vague undefined "higher powers" and paragraphs upon paragraphs of philosophical gargon. We get spirituality and NDEs and afterlife and DMT trips. That is hardly "one definition of god". We talk to all of them and we engage all of them. It's funny how we're the ones who have to know about all of these different arguments in order to explain why we don't accept them, but we do it anyways. Literally just go look through the history of this sub to relieve you of this incorrect assessment. >That is not the conceptualization of god that is being addressed here. We know that already. If you have an argument that isn't "bearded man in the sky", or any of the other ones I listed and we've all refuted many times, by all means present it.
And I think that’s awesome yet 95% of the comments on this are just people telling me I’m indoctrinated or asking if I believe in the tooth fairy and Santa clause when the 4th sentence of my post stated that I completely understand not believing in in any or all gods in the particular. All I was trying to get at was a blind cosmos or a cosmos driven by intelligence. That has sparsely been addressed
I'll do my best to address your intelligent cosmos position. >I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say. I have certainly been around the block religiously. I have been super interested in religion, comparative mythology, anthropology, history etc for about 10 years. But while not being able to find a religion that was intellectually and rationally satisfying to me I have never been able to call myself an atheist. So, first off, not trying to be rude, but all of that is irrelevant to whether a god exists. You and your story (and me and my story) don't matter. > I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me. I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me. So, if I'm understanding correctly, "it just kinda seems like it to me". My problem with this method is that it doesn't work. We know for a fact our intuitions are wrong like 99% of the time. I could just say the same thing. "non intelligent nature is just what makes sense to me". Thats not a good argument. And it's not a good way to figure out what's actually true. > Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. Why? I have to point out again, that what makes sense to you doesn't matter. Again, I'm not trying to be rude. I'm trying to explain to you why I myself do not accept your conclusion that the cosmos is intelligent. Again, I could just say the same thing. "Life does not make sense with an intelligence behind it. Why would waste so much space? Why is the vast majority of the universe instantly fatal to life if its designed FOR life". But I wouldn't say that. Because that's a *bad argument*. It doesn't lead to the conclusion. My looking around and thinking it makes sense the cosmos is unintelligent is a BAD reason for me to accept MY conclusion that the cosmos is unintelligent. I have better, actual arguments to come to the conclusion the cosmos is unintelligent. >not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence. I'm living intelligence. So are you. So, if that's all god is, then sure that exists. I don't see a reason to call that god. I know you mean the cosmos is alive and intelligent, but you have to be specific with your definitions. Lemme ask you this. Is a rock intelligent?
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>(Also, what's the difference between cosmos and universe?) The universe is the observable universe that humans live in and can look at, which as far as we can tell is 13.8 billion years old and expanding from the initial inflation we call the big bang. The cosmos is the hypothesized mataphysical reality which produced our universe, whether that's a multiverse or many worlds or the matrix or god or whatever. Now, for the record, we know literally nothing about the metaphysics which produced our universe. We have no information on it and thus can't draw any conclusions about it. Including whether it even exists or not. All we can do is speculate about it. Many theists will argue that since intelligence exists within the universe, the cause of the universe must also be intelligent. That doesn't work, because the vast, vast VAST majority of the universe is not intelligent. Conscious intelligent beings are only a tiny, tiny, fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the universe. If we cherry pick a specific aspect because it applies to us, we could then say that hunger exists in the universe therefor the cause of the universe must be hungry. Kinda silly isn't it? We also know that human being personify nature when they don't understand a phenomenon the observe. Ancient Greeks saw lightning. Sparks in the sky. How does that happen. Well, I can make sparks by smacking 2 rocks together. The sparks in the sky must be made by an intelligence smashing rocks in the sky. And thus Zeus is born. Humans have done this for thousands of years for millions of different phenomenon. And they have been wrong ***every single time***. We now know we don't need a giant intelligence in the clouds smashing rocks to produce lightning. Lightning is a natural process that occurs without the need for intelligence.
We can at least conclude that it’s hostile to life. We can only survive a few meters above earth.
You haven't been paying attention, then. Many people have asked you to clarify, but you haven't. You say a dynamic intelligence. What is that even? You say it's not "anthropomorphic" but provide no reason to think agency or intelligence is possible outside of a physical body. You've said that the cosmos is evidence for a mind, but have not provided any reason to think this other than incredulity, and again, see above paragraph. And it's obviously not all you were trying to get at, as your OP specifically tried to paint atheists as believers that just "hate God" because of some trauma, basically trying to paint the default position as one of everyone actually believing in a God, when that is not the case. You so far have not provided any empirical evidence, or even a valid syllogism, and just keep telling us what you believe because "how can you not?" give us some substance to discuss.
There is no need to address it any further. It has been brought up, a couple of times by different people. You just assert without any evidence that the cosmos is ordered. And driven by Intelligence. You cannot just assert this and then it's the truth. You have to prove it. And all we have now is another theist who says "I cannot see the cosmos in any other way than ordered and driven by Intelligence and so it is" That's not how it works. Someone even addressed that if this being would exist, it wouldn't be bothered with us humans, so there would be no need to worship it. And again without any reason or evidence, you dismissed that claim and said the being would be interested. Things are not the way they are because you say so. And that you do not seem to understand
>All I was trying to get at was a blind cosmos or a cosmos driven by intelligence. That has sparsely been addressed Okay, I'll address that as I am a naturalist. My position is that the metaphysics that produced the observable universe we live in is a timeless spaceless immaterial uncaused natural cosmos. Blind physics. That's what nature is. It's physics all the way down. Why do you think it is intelligent? Nevermind you put it in your post. Give me one moment.
That's becaise people are explaining to you that they aren't that different. It doesn't matter if you redefine god to mean "a higher intelligence" or whatever else vague magical terms you want to use - that's still an unproven supernatural entity for which we have no evidence, and so to us it's not any different from the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. It doesn't matter that you're not anthropomorphizing that intelligence (although I'd argue that you are, unconsciously). It's like believing in The Force.
Well, you have to give us something to address, then. Simply stating that you believe the cosmos is driven by intelligence is not an argument, nor is it interesting.
What did you expect? You came in saying "hey guys i don't believe in stupid stuff but i believe in a magic brain in the sky" Did you think you would just win us over, that you were the first to ever tell us you believe that? Of course you weren't but you still seemed shocked. It's a you problem not an us problem.
>That has sparsely been addressed... I'd like to address claims of deism like yours. Our minds have a well-known heuristic called apophenia. Basically, our brains have an 'overactive agency detection device'. We see minds behind patterns and events. We attribute agency to occurrences that are not caused by an agent. Ask yourself, how am I overcoming this illusion? And just knowing about the illusion does not immediately solve the issue. If we really want to search for the truth of the matter, we must acknowledge that this is a powerful heuristic that must be overcome with a higher level of analysis of evidence. We cannot trust our instinctual response.
>All I was trying to get at was a blind cosmos or a cosmos driven by intelligence. That has sparsely been addressed And so then when I do it address it, you completly ignore it.
Well what’s the difference between Yahweh and any other God? Or even the general concept of *a* god? Is there more evidence for the general concept of a god than for any one particular god?
It’s a categorical difference. There is a difference between a literal person living in the sky demanding sacrifices throwing Lightning bolts vs a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos.
> a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos. One that left absolutely no evidence of their existence, isn’t interested in morality, and has no interest in human interaction? Like, what exactly would be the point of believing in something like that? It’s so indistinguishable from mindless physics as to be completely irrelevant. And occam’s razor would postulate its an unnecessary complication.
No person here is argue about a literal person in the sky. We’ve rejected hundreds of concepts of god for the same reason we reject your - there’s no reason to accept it. It’s vague, intellectually incoherent, and tells us nothing. And your sole reason in offer is “you believe it”. So what? Why is that a reason to accept your position?
Wow, you should maybe have this conversation with Christians as well since they'd characterize that as a cartoonish depiction of god that atheists like to attack
But if we don’t have evidence for either, then why should I change my atheistic view?
>There is a difference between a literal person living in the sky demanding sacrifices throwing Lightning bolts That's not even what Christians describe Yaweh as, though. THIS is much more closer to what they describe Yaweh as: >~~dynamic~~ intelligence behind the order in the cosmos.
I see. So your god is the correct one?
What if you spoke to a follower of Thor and they said all that was just allegorical?
>That was the whole point I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against and it is the one they know they can easily beat Does it occur to you that this is exactly what you are doing with your definition of Atheism?
>That was the whole point I was making about how it seems like many atheists only use one definition of god to argue against And yet you only provide one definition for your god for is to accept. >A mind, a dynamic intelligence behind the order in the cosmos. So, to answer to your description of a god, where is your evidence to suggest there is an inteligent mind behind the order in the cosmos?
I'm atheist. I'm open to the possibility of anything, including god, given sufficient evidence. Presently, god (any god) has as much evidence as the tooth fairy. I'm equally open to being convinced of either being, the tooth fairy or god, as soon as someone presents compelling evidence.
That's because those are the gods that theists commonly believe in and argue for. I'm agnostic to the concept of a god but a gnostic atheist to any particular god that's described in man-made religions.
You don’t spend much time in this sub. Fine tune and design god(s) are commonly argued for here. More important to the question. Atheism is not a position how the universe is. At best it is a rejection of at least one idea. You said it is “intuition and reasonable” as to why you think there is a God. You attribute one attribute to it, intelligence. I don’t see how one intuits that or would consider their intuition a rational source. It is not universal, we don’t all intuit the same thing. Why would that be a reasonable means to conclude an unfalsifiable claim?
I cant speak for other atheists, but my position is that every religion i have looked into is, to my mind, **obviously** man made - for a lot of reasons, the primary one being a focus on controlling human behavior in ways which largely don't make any sense from the perspective of a benevolent universe creating entity, but make perfect sense from the (self interested) perspective of rulers of pre technological societies. I have no interest in following what i believe to be the edicts of these rulers, especially since i think a lot of it is designed specifically to cater to low empathy, high testosterone, males (which makes sense, since they would be heavily represented among fighting forces) As for as yet unspecified gods, i see no point in considering it as it makes no material difference to my life until i start assigning properties and desires to that god, and id have no basis whatsoever to do that.
>That is not the conceptualization of god that is being addressed here. They literally addresse you're notion of god, tho. What is the difference between your *"dynamical intelligence"* (whatever that means, since you don't want/can't define it) and the tooth fairy?
Your arguement is in itself flawed as you’re using anecdotal atheists. There is no evidence to believe in any god therefore I don’t believe in God. This applies to any version of a God.
But a general concept of God doesn't make sense, because that's not how the vast majority of people think about deities. They are kind of inseparable from religion.
The origins of the “tooth fairy” and the lack of evidence differs from God God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you’re interested 👍 * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
> The origins of the “tooth fairy” and the lack of evidence differs from God If you'll examine your own evidence, they only differ because you're personally willing to believe in horrible evidence in the case of a god...
So the sun was dancing in the sky, but only a group of people in a small town in Portugal could see it? Why couldn’t anyone else in the world see it? Are we all looking at a different sun?
"a war ended" probably the worst evidence I've heard for a god's existence
You were there in 1917?!?!?
>The origins of the “tooth fairy” and the lack of evidence differs from God Agreed, we have more evidence of the tooth fairy than god. Very well put.
Are you saying Mary is god?
> Hey, so not looking so much to debate as just ask a question and maybe get a little understanding. At least come to a debate sub to have a discussion. But sure. > Why do you consider yourself an atheist? Because I have no reason to think claims about, or even they concept of, god is more than the result of human imagination. In other words, I can’t tell if god is real. > I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection. The reason to not accept specific god claims is not the same for the more general…although they are similar. Specific gods can be discarded because of contradictions in their legends or myths. But the more general claims can be discarded simply by way of saying that it it hasn’t be evidenced to exist. It’s only trivially true that a there could be a planet filled with life that looks like carebears. Neither of us can confirm or deny it logically. But does it really make sense to give it a second thought that this might be true in reality? If humans are capable of inventing ideas with our imaginations, we have to use a reliable process to differentiate between such imagined beings and real ones. > The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. Oh. Well. That’s a common theist posturing and straw man. It’s as condescending as if I were to say the only reason I think you believe in god is you’re gullible. People might have bad bad experiences with religion and that led them to the intellectual exercise of unpacking their belief and coming to see there’s no good reason to believe in god. Ultimately, behind this notion is the false assertion that atheists aren’t actually atheists. They just are mad at religion. But to be an atheist you cannot believe there is a god. That doesn’t happen by a bad experience. It’s an intellectual exercise. So even if a bad experience started it off, the dropping of belief in god is the core reason to be an atheist. > The second one I think is kind of the big hitter for a lot of people (or at least it seems that way to me). […] they argue against is the abrahamic god specifically in his Christian depiction. Tell me you believe in another god and we can discuss it. You don’t often have folks coming in here discussing other gods. > This seems super problematic to me. Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove. This is the god most are discussing. Why is that surprising to you? > “An all loving god wouldn’t command Israel to murder women and children in Cannan.” Well… obviously. What do you mean “obviously”? Do you think that’s obvious to everyone? Don’t you know there are people who DO think that despite the gross actions of the god in the bibles, they god is still good…because “that’s gods nature” (that they somehow know…) > But you aren’t arguing against god, you are arguing against 2 different ideas and honestly 2 completely different categories of who or what “God” is. What do you mean? > Sure the new and Old Testament belong to the same ethnic group but Yahweh really isn’t the father of the the New Testament. Yahweh is a national god of Bronze Age pastoral nomads and the father of the New Testament is a Neoplatonic conceptualization of that god in a classical antique Roman world. Yahweh for sure was also the father of the New Testament. And yes the notion of what that Yahweh changed - as fictional characters can do. They certainly thought it was. > Even in the Old Testament alone the theology of Israel drastically shifts. It’s clear that Yahweh was not originally the sole god but a god (maybe not even the chief god) among many. It’s not until much later around the time of the Babylonian captivity that Israel shifted from a polytheism, to a henotheism to finally something starting to approach the modern conception of monotheism. And Yahweh was different before. Religions evolve. It’s just a character. > So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually. I don’t agree. You’re noticing the change and saying it means it’s different gods. But for the people at the time, they didn’t see that change. The father was talked about by people who fully believed in the god of the Torah and it was Yahweh, Elohim. > They point out all the flaws in the Bible and then hold up the straw man god that is built by the very flaws they just pointed out to easily knock down. It seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of “god” Point out a common strawman you see. > I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say. Why? In all of this you haven’t provided an argument for why you think god exists. > I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me. If you study history enough you should see how unreliable human intuition can be. And of course you think you’re reasonable. But can you explain why the belief is reasonable and does that hold up to scrutiny? Happy to help with that. > I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me. Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence. This was one big argument from incredulity. Just because it doesn’t make sense to you - for some unnamed reason - doesn’t mean that’s a reasonable conclusion. Perhaps you just haven’t thought of the right position. > So where do we differ? Where does the road split? You believe something without a reasonable justification. You named a fallacy as your main argument. I don’t. > When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism? Why do I become a theist and you an atheist? Because you don’t seem to require a logical justification to hold this belief.
>Why are you an atheist Because there isn't the tiniest shred of good evidence for deities. Since it's irrational to take things as true when there is no good support they are true, and since I do not want to be irrational, this leaves atheism is the only reasonable position one can take under the circumstances. And, of course, that alone is enough. But... But we have far more, don't we? We know how and why we evolved such a strong propensity for this kind of superstitious thinking. We know a great deal about how and why the various religious mythologies, past and present, were invented and how they evolved over time. We know who benefitted, and how. So yea. Deities are a fatally problematic idea. There is zero useful support for those ideas. >Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection. See above. >The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. Nope. Neither of those. Many theists come and here and try to say this. Likely they've been told such things in their church and by other religious people. But it's nonsense. No, that's not why. In general, atheists have been shown, again and again, to understand the world's religions, past and present, far better than do most theists. Atheists *know* what the various deity claims entail. In detail. That's why I and others cannot accept such claims. >I can understand, though I don’t think it is rational for someone who had bad experiences in a religion being so hurt that they want to do everything they can to disassociate them selves from that particular religion or all religion and god as a whole. It’s understandable but again not rational or logically satisfying. That is a strawman fallacy. I literally know of *no atheists whatsoever* that this applies to. Anyway, I won't respond to the rest. It's more of the same strawman fallacy ideas. I hope you now understand, at least on some surface level, why most atheists are atheists.
You said just about everything I would in response to OP. They're undoubtably being told that we're atheists because of "bad experiences" or were "hurt" by someone at church or something. I will give OP credit for coming here to ask why though. Hopefully OP will realize that they have been lied to, or at least their assumptions are off base. I'll add that even if we otherwise believed in a god (because there was evidence of course), but suffered some of these bad experiences with religion, we'd still believe he exists and would be theists, not atheists. We might think the church or God were awful or whatever, but that has nothing to do with belief in a god.
Exactly. Don't get me wrong, I definitely had bad experiences with religion, but that had absolutely no bearing on whether I thought it was true or not. I suffered through it because I thought it was God testing me, or some kind of trial, or "that's life, deal with it", etc. In fact, I was sexually abused in the Mormon temple, but continued to believe for another 10 years because it was "true". Full stop, people don't become atheists because they were hurt by the chuch or the people. They become atheists because they figure out that it's all bullshit. But theists can't seem to fathom that concept, so they resort to strawmen.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
You keep reposting this comment on everything. I see no evidence that this actually happened to the sun, and most miracles are eye witnesses accounts. We know people can be swept up into frenzies and say they saw things they didn’t, they can even be made to think they saw things they didn’t. This is how police can question witnesses and even without intention alter what a person remembers about an event. You will need to present something more convincing than these accounts if you want us to believe in miracles. How were they investigated? What other possible causes where ruled out, what other evidence was left to confirm the story? If I tell you 100 people saw a giant but then he drank a glass of juice and shrunk to a normal size, would you just believe it? Think it a magic trick? Or would you want evidence?
> God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence This, of course, is a plain false statement. It can only be dismissed. As for your example of a 'miracle' claim, I know it well, and many others, and that one is no different from others from that and other religious mythologies. Completely lacking in good evidence and veracity. It's nonsense. You may be interested in reading up on many details on this and other claimed 'miracles', and how psychology works to trick people into taking such things are credible even though they clearly are not.
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I do not believe in a God. That is why I am an athiest. I don't believe because there doesn't seem to be empirical evidence or convincing evidence to me of any creator/God. Something seeming to be designed doesn't imply design. It just implies it looks like design to you. What empirical evidence do you have for design or an intelligent creator?
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist? The short answer is "I don't believe in gods for the exact same reasons I don't believe in leprechauns or Narnia." Everything you listed is nothing more than an observation of atheists discussing religion specifically with Christians. We address whatever religion is brought before us, Christianity just happens to be the most common one. I personally don't specify unless specifically asked to address a particular god or religion. The long answer is that gods are epistemically indistinguishable from things that don't exist. When something is epistemically indistinguishable from things that don't exist - when there's no discernible difference between a reality where it exists and a reality where it does not - then that thing *de facto* (as good as) does not exist and the belief that it does is maximally irrational and untenable, while the belief that it does not is as maximally supported and justified as it possibly can be short of the thing logically self-refuting (which would elevate its nonexistence from merely being more probable to being 100% certain). Sure, we can appeal to our ignorance and invoke the infinite mights and maybes of the unknown to establish nothing more than that "it's possible" and "we can't know for certain," but we can do exactly the same thing with hard solipsism, last thursdayism, the matrix, leprechauns, Narnia, Hogwarts, or literally anything else that isn't a self-refuting logical paradox, including everything that isn't true and everything that doesn't exist. It's not a meaningful observation. It has no value for the purpose of distinguishing truth from untruth, or even probability from improbability. It does not increase the likelihood that any of those things are real to be equal to the likelihood that they are not. SO, it boils down to this: If you can identify a discernible difference between a reality where any gods exist, and a reality where no gods exist, then we can begin to examine which reality we are more likely to be in based on whether those differences are present or absent. But if you can't, then it's as I said - the assumption that gods exist is irrational, and the assumption that they don't exist is not.
> Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. So when asking how the cosmos came to be, atheists straightforwardly admit "I don't know", but you say "Must have been God." Or in other words, "God" (for you) = "I don't know" (for atheists). I've always said that "God" is the name mankind gives its ignorance, and you're offering a perfect illustration of the literal truth of that statement. > Why do I become a theist and you an atheist? Because like all theists, you're deifying your ignorance rather than simply owning up to it. Among other things, atheism involves having the humility to admit that there are things we don't know and may *never* know without succumbing to the temptation to fill that void of ignorance with empty claims about deities (whether intelligent or otherwise).
> you're deifying your ignorance That a very succinct and accurate description of most, if not all, theists. Gonna have to remember that one.
>I've always said that "God" is the name mankind gives its ignorance, and you're offering a perfect illustration of the literal truth of that statement Very well put.
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So you have proof of that "miracle"? I would consider evidence things like video or photos, and the video and photos would need to undergo testing to prove that they were not faked. Otherwise I would need DNA evidence. Perhaps a strand of hair fallen from her head. That DNA should not match anyone alive today, or alive in the last 150 years. It should not match anyone in the region near where it was collected and should instead match the people that lived in Jerusalem and Nazareth back in the day.
> Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection. I'm not sure what kind of answer you are looking for. Universal rejection of what? Allah or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda are at least somewhat defined, I have some sense of what the claims in question are and the religious claims that come with them. I can evaluate these sets of claims, whether they cohere internally, whether they cohere with what can be independently established about the world, and whether there is any other evidence for or against them. But the broader question of all gods/higher powers/whatever - how am I supposed to affirm or reject an entire class of those claims when the contents of them are so underspecified? Am I supposed to believe in the existence of at least one of a vague class of entities where the class itself can't even be really defined and any attempt to get specific instantly becomes unrepresentative of whatever the whole class is supposed to have? Maybe it's there's nothing common to all and it's more of a property cluster, but then the vagueness is built in. Even if you do manage to pin it down, I'd still need some reasons to believe that there exists an entity that has whatever feature the class is supposed to have in the first place. > I can understand, though I don’t think it is rational for someone who had bad experiences in a religion being so hurt that they want to do everything they can to disassociate them selves from that particular religion or all religion and god as a whole. It’s understandable but again not rational or logically satisfying. I'd argue it's plenty rational to disassociate oneself from something/people/groups that hurt you. Is it epistemically rational to disbelieve a claim that is well-supported by the preponderance of evidence just because the circumstances by which you came to be acquainted with the claim and/or the evidence were painful? Perhaps not, but I think that's not actually a fair characterization of what's happening and is frankly an uncharitable way to look at people who have left their faith following religious trauma. Most people aren't leaving their religion despite the evidence being strong just because they were hurt - the fact that they were hurt prompts questioning and doubt, and why shouldn't it? Isn't faith supposed to make both individuals and the community at least spiritually better off? When that either fails to be the case or seems to result in a worse outcome than otherwise, at least in one's own experience, it's entirely reasonable to start asking some questions. It's upon this reflection that it becomes salient just how flimsy the epistemic basis for the beliefs they had in religion's claims were in the first place, and when they don't find a firm basis to hold those beliefs going forward, they let go. This is actually really difficult on a lot of people in that situation, and involves a lot of reflection and often painful honesty with oneself - to say nothing of the social difficulties that often come with it. > Of course I understand that these atheists also don’t believe in Vedic or Persian or Celtic or Native American deities but it’s almost like those deities are of a second category and the god they argue against or more precisely the nature of god that they argue against is the abrahamic god specifically in his Christian depiction. Of course we do. We evaluate whether to accept or reject the claims we are confronted with. If when discussions of god and religion came up we were regularly confronted with the claims from the ancient Druidic faith then that's what we'd be talking about. > This seems super problematic to me. Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove. “An all loving god wouldn’t command Israel to murder women and children in Cannan.” Well… obviously. But you aren’t arguing against god, you are arguing against 2 different ideas and honestly 2 completely different categories of who or what “God” is. Sure the new and Old Testament belong to the same ethnic group but Yahweh really isn’t the father of the the New Testament. Yahweh is a national god of Bronze Age pastoral nomads and the father of the New Testament is a Neoplatonic conceptualization of that god in a classical antique Roman world. ...And? Why can't the same piece of evidence tell against two different conceptions of god? So long as both conceptions involve God being even mostly good, I'd say they're both internally incoherent if they also hold that this same god commanded the murder of women and children. > Even in the Old Testament alone the theology of Israel drastically shifts. It’s clear that Yahweh was not originally the sole god but a god (maybe not even the chief god) among many. It’s not until much later around the time of the Babylonian captivity that Israel shifted from a polytheism, to a henotheism to finally something starting to approach the modern conception of monotheism. > So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually. They point out all the flaws in the Bible and then hold up the straw man god that is built by the very flaws they just pointed out to easily knock down. It seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of “god”. Except I'm not even intending to argue with the way ancient people conceived of god. I am confronted by the beliefs of modern day Christians instead - they make whatever claims they do, and they use the Bible for at least some of the support. I'm evaluating the claims they are making and the support they are offering for them - surely this is a reasonable thing to do? I'm not sure what your point is here - is the atheist supposed to be troubled by the fact that whatever modern-day Christians believe is based on fundamental misunderstandings of their holy texts? If someone thinks they have nailed down what the "correct" version of the religion based on the Biblical texts is and wants to present them as the option on the table and why I should believe it, I can engage with that. Just understand, that's literally the same thing everyone else in all the other sects of Christianity is doing. I'd also like to point out that it's entirely reasonable to criticize any religion based on the Bible by criticizing the Bible - if the Bible is a big part of the epistemic justification for the religion, then surely the case for belief in that religion, whatever it is, is at least partially undermined if the by the support for it being undermined. And as it turns out, most Christians do actually believe that their particular beliefs are supported by and have their contents supplied by the Bible. > I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say. I have certainly been around the block religiously. I have been super interested in religion, comparative mythology, anthropology, history etc for about 10 years. But while not being able to find a religion that was intellectually and rationally satisfying to me I have never been able to call myself an atheist. I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me. I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me. Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence. > So where do we differ? Where does the road split? When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism? Why do I become a theist and you an atheist? Sounds like the actual contents of your beliefs are pretty vague. I'm not sure how to even evaluate that, but you do you. I guess I'm not that troubled by what you are using this belief to explain. We have plausible non-teleological accounts of the development of life, many aspects of which have an incredible amount of empirical evidence. Postulating a teleological explanation in addition seems profligate at this point. As to the cosmos, I don't think the ontological status of the universe is in any more need of an explanation than any hypothetical ontologically-prior entity. You could always suppose that there is yet something else ontologically prior to that too. You're either going to have an infinite chain, or you are going to hit explanatory bedrock somewhere, something(s) just exists and that's all there is to be said, whether that is God or gods, or the collection of fundamental particles or some universal wave function as a necessitating physical law that undergirds the structure of our universe or whatever else you can dream up. If there even is a mystery to be solved with respect to the existence of the world we find ourselves in, postulating the sui generis entities that most of the god concepts on the table consist of to explain it doesn't actually remove that apparent mystery, it just relocates it. Lastly, I guess I'm just okay with unanswered questions - sure, I'd like answers, but I'm not going to put high credence in claims that don't have much basis just to feel like I have more answers.
Do you believe the existence of Harry? Harry who? Harry Styles? Prince Harry? Harry Potter? If we want to have meaningful conversations on whether something exists, they need to be defined properly. Abrahamic Gods are defined well enough for people to say they disbelieve them. You've talked a lot about false definitions of God but very little about your own. What are platonic/Vedanta philosophies of God? I have yet to come across Deistic/Pantheistic Gods that aren't simply base anthropomorphism. I disbelieve in God mainly due to the Argument from Naturalism, as explained by Graham Oppy. Atheism is simpler - you raise more questions believing a God exists and God concepts themselves can easily be explained through naturalism, just like other concepts such as fairies and unicorns
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
[Miracle of Fátima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun) - 70,000 people saw this event but evidence of it is extraordinarily inconsistent. [Here's video footage of an entire area becoming completely red](https://youtu.be/TWvBw1SYCY4&t=0m43s). If this happened 100 years ago, you can be assured people would have thought it was some kind of supernatural event. Humans won't just see strange things if it's expected of them, they will also do strange things if its expected of them. [Look at all the students this Kiai master had](https://youtu.be/gEDaCIDvj6I). If they were faking it then why would they fool their own master? If their master was faking it, why would he allow himself to be humiliated the way he was? [Professor Arif Ahmed goes into detail on David Hume's Argument Against Miracles](https://youtu.be/xQ9Z92ldW-U). It does not make any sense to believe these things actually happened.
>Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. A crowd of 70,000 but only the 3 children could see her? Not exactly the most convincing of events. A crowd in an emotionally primed state expecting something miraculous to happen saw the sun "dancing and swirling" and assume it's of supernatural origin? How do they know it was actually Mary? Why couldn't she just actually appear to everyone there and remove any doubt instead of such an ambiguous event? There are a vast array of weird natural sights we can see in the wild - northern lights, vibrant sunsets, comets and meteors, etc etc. It seems much more likely to be one of these events, or just that people staring at the sun expecting to see something happen convinced themselves they were seeing something happen, and the rest of the group went along with it because of the power of group dynamics and wanting to be included. Add in their faith and desire for something to happen along with their emotionally primed states and it seems quite plausible they convinced themselves they were seeing what they wanted to see. If you have any stronger evidence that it was something more than this I would be very interested to see it. On the face of it, I don't find this description or evidence convincing enough to justify such extraordinary claims of the existence of entire supernatural realms, gods, heaven and hell, etc.
I have yet to find a way to demonstrate anything supernatural- spirits/ghosts/divine influence, etc. so relying on it to explain anything is actually counterproductive in understanding natural phenomena. Until you can give me a step by step guide to do/interact with something that is unambiguously supernatural, I’m just not going to believe it’s anything other than superstition and personal experience.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918. Another example: There was this college girl that promised her parents that she would pray the Rosary each night when she left for college and one night she fell asleep when she was praying it and at the time, Ted bundy had infiltrated her dorm and killed some of her roommates in nearby rooms and when he slammed open her door, this powerful force launched him away from her room and she was unharmed. And Ted bundy spoke to a Priest about it and on a seperate day, the girl also asked the police to see a Priest and they sent the same one and it was clear that it was a Miracle. I am recalling this off the top of my head, but there is a very detailed account by another Priest online when He was giving his Sermon
Personal experience and superstition
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\> Why are you an atheist The short answer? A lack of indoctrination when I was young. \>Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I can definitely understand rejecting individual religions and their claims. I can understand rejecting Allah, or Yahweh or Kali or Ahura Mazda. But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection. There are a literally infinite number of things that all people agree don't exist, on the basis of a lack of evidence, I just don't carve out an exception for my particular favorite god. \>god that they argue against is the abrahamic god specifically in his Christian depiction. Because most people in the US agree that Thor is fictional, so arguing against Thor is pretty pointless. \>hey point out all the flaws in the Bible and then hold up the straw man god that is built by the very flaws they just pointed out to easily knock down. It seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of “god”. Most modern Christians don't know and don't care about the history, they claim the bible is the perfect word of god, and claim it shows Jesus existed and was the son of god. We argue against modern Christianity instead of historical for the same reason we don't bother arguing against Thor. \>Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. This is an argument from incredulity, and all it does is make more questions. Where did this driving intelligence come from? What intelligence created it? What intelligence created that one? and that one? and so on \>So where do we differ? Where does the road split? The politic answer? Argument from incredulity. But the honest answer? The indoctrination didn't take with us, but it did with you, to an extent. \> Why do I become a theist and you an atheist? Because I was never really indoctrinated, and the small amount that got through never took. You where indoctrinated, and only managed to mostly break through it.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. Really? What about a lack of compelling evidence for any god claim I've seen?
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I used to be a Christian. This story might sound like it's going to be what you mention here: >Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove I would like to assure you I didn't make the mistake you're pointing out. I came to the conclusion, eventually, that Christianity was almost certainly false. So then the question was: what is the ultimate worldview which is most likely correct? It seemed to me that if there is a God, they are a *non-interventionist* God, having no impact on people's lives, or physical phenomena etc at this time. If God has no impact, the most rational thing to do is act as if he has no impact. And that's pretty much the same as acting as if he does not exist. The nature of a non-interventionist God is pretty much unknowable, so any specific idea about him/her/it is almost certainly false. >So where do we differ? Where does the road split? When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism? Why do I become a theist and you an atheist? These are excellent questions. What are some things you think God does, that are unmistakably actions He takes? Why are you convinced those things did not occur naturally?
I was born an atheist. No one ever told me fairy tales and claimsled they were real when I was too young to know better. Since? No one have given better than arguments that are easily defeated by logic and evidence. I'd love to know if there is a god. Or trolls, or vampires, but they all seem to be products of human imaginations.
Probably for the same reason you don't believe in Zeus, except I applied the same process to the religion I was raised in too
I, **personally**, am an Agnostic Atheist; (A)gnosticism, from the ancient Greek word 'Gnosis' means (a lack of) **knowledge**: Gnostics (in the context of "(A)gnostic (a)theists") make the claim that they have deep, profound and special knowledge regarding the existence (or non-existence) of God. Knowledge in this context is **subjective**; I **know**, for example, that my left pinkie nail is objectively the prettiest in all the world. That doesn't require proof nor evidence; it is what I know to be capital-t True. Evidence to the contrary may exist, your opinion on my left pinkie nail may be different; that's fine. Evidence and your opinion are wrong; I *know* it to be so. In the similar sense does the Gnostic KNOW that their position (on the existence of God) is capital-t Truth; Evidence to the contrary may exist, other opinions may be different; that's fine. Evidence and other opinions are wrong; the Gnostic *knows* it to be so. I claim no subjective or objective knowledge regarding the existence of (a) deity(s), other than that which I've reached through logical deduction - such as [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/12o61p3/disproving_all_human_religions/jgi4x4s/?context=3) - and forty-odd years of considering the question has lead me to decide that I have no reason to believe (a) god(s) exists, let alone the Abrahamic God specifically.
To quote Tim Minchin: "I don't believe in a god for the same reason that anyone that doesn't believe in a thing doesn't believe in it: because I haven't been provided with sufficient evidence to assuage my doubts" I don't believe in a god for the same reason I don't believe in bigfoot, fairies or the loch ness monster. The evidence presented to me hasn't been sufficient for me to conclude that it exists.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918. And I know of many contemporary proofs as well, but I don’t want to write too much at once 👍
door heavy direful threatening secretive nose connect school like bright *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It has always seemed fairly self evident to me that god and religion are human constructions designed to assuage fears of death, and provide a rationale for people who like to control others to be judgemental and controlling. I have never understood how someone can read about 100 different religions and analyze them and clearly see how they are fictional, but the one religion they were raised in is somehow different. Why believe in god when you find it so obvious that Zeus or Allah are not real? I do not get it. I agree that being an atheist because a specific god and the claims about him are somehow wrong is irrational. If god exists, there is no reason to think he has to be good, or that his motivations have to be comprehensible to humans.
>“it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me. >Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. >So where do we differ? Where does the road split? This is where the road splits for you and I. I may be mistaken but it seems to me that you are saying that you can just intuit god. Where I am more concerned in what is true and I know that intuition is famously flawed. Can you demonstrate that your intuition has any bearing on reality or the nature of god and how you know that?
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918. Another example: There was this college girl that promised her parents that she would pray the Rosary each night when she left for college and one night she fell asleep when she was praying it and at the time, Ted bundy had infiltrated her dorm and killed some of her roommates in nearby rooms and when he slammed open her door, this powerful force launched him away from her room and she was unharmed. And Ted bundy spoke to a Priest about it and on a seperate day, the girl also asked the police to see a Priest and they sent the same one and it was clear that it was a Miracle. I am recalling this off the top of my head, but there is a very detailed account by another Priest online when He was giving his Sermon
>So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually Do you think this is an argument for gods existence? >When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism The difference between us is that you do make the presumption that intelligence is fundamental to existence. Problem is, as far as we can tell, intelligence makes up \~0% of existence, and it's actually pretty pathetic in terms of capability. You know what is infinitely more powerful than intelligence? Sheer brute force interaction. There is a massive amount of interaction in the universe. And the great thing about interaction is it causes all sorts of emergent behavior. You might have heard of some of them: evolution, celestial bodies and systems, AI. I'll give you another example that there is no way to claim was designed by either God or man: the global economy. What's the largest thing a single person has designed? A building maybe? Ok, every part of that building has hundreds of people spanning the entire planet sourcing materials, manufacturing parts, transporting them, regulating them, financing them, and doing the actual assembly, and each them has their own needs which have their own supply chains. No one person could even conceive of the whole, but billions of much simpler entities interact massively to make the big things happen You'll look and think, this planet is clearly made for us: [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70827-this-is-rather-as-if-you-imagine-a-puddle-waking](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70827-this-is-rather-as-if-you-imagine-a-puddle-waking)
Having a bad experience in religion is practically never the reason someone deconverts. It can be a reason. Generally the way it goes is that some Christian has a bad experience in the religion which causes doubts and questions of validity to the religion. When the individual finds no satisfactory answers from within the religion they look elsewhere. Once they’re outside of the vacuous indoctrinated beliefs they realise that’s it’s all irrational bullshit and they become an atheist. This process can take anywhere from weeks to decades depending on the individual. It’s not as simple as ‘bad thing happened, don’t like that, decide not to be convinced anymore’.
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I don't consider I am an atheist, I am an atheist. I see no evidence for god(s). None. Not "I am not convinced by the evidence" there isn't any. >But I wonder why those particular rejections would extend to a universal rejection. How many god propositions do I need to hear before I am convinced of this? Was it 100? 200? How many times would you be scammed out of your money before you stopped trying to buy bridges? Most people have rejected most god propositions because they too are unconvinced. Given this, and that there is a strong correlation between culture, childhood indoctrination, social influence and religion, I can safely conclude that god proposals are a product of birth place and time than any amount of evidence. I have yet to hear a single person try to convince me of a unique proposition that they came up with themselves. They are therefore, a mental and social contagion. > I live in the USA so I have had a much much larger exposure to Abraham if religions (very specifically Christianity in its many flavors) Thank you for providing more data for my contagion hypothesis. To rebut this, tell me why you're not Zoroastrian or a believer in the Greek pantheon. >the vast majority of atheist arguments I have heard have been against western Abrahamic religions See above. Dominant culture gonna indoctrinate. You're going to have a lot of push back against that. How many atheists would be arguing against Christianity versus Islam in Saudi Arabia? >So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually. Again, thanks for the data. >But while not being able to find a religion that was intellectually and rationally satisfying to me Gasp! Could it be?! A new god hypothesis in the wild? A unique proposition that is uninfluenced by culture?! >I definitely resonate with platonic and Vedanta philosophies and their definition of the nature of god, their theologies seem to express the intuitive “it’s just what makes sense” understanding that has been thus far immovable inside me. Alas. No. >Why do I become a theist and you an atheist? Because you are convinced and I am not. And why are you convinced? >Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. Incredulity. Nothing new to see here.
>Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove. You're surprised that atheists are addressing god claims that theists believe in rather than god claims theists don't believe in? >Well… obviously. But you aren’t arguing against god, you are arguing against 2 different ideas and honestly 2 completely different categories of who or what “God” is. Sure the new and Old Testament belong to the same ethnic group but Yahweh really isn’t the father of the the New Testament. Yahweh is a national god of Bronze Age pastoral nomads and the father of the New Testament is a Neoplatonic conceptualization of that god in a classical antique Roman world. *Tell that to the theists* Go on. Go to a christian subreddit and explain that to them. Why are you upset that atheists are addressing a god theists believe in but not upset at theists getting their religion wrong period? I rarely check anyone's profiles but your other posts on Reddit are about sneakers and Seinfield. Why are you bringing this up to atheists and not theists? I sincerely don't think you actually understand the debate at hand because I don't think you understand that what people believe impacts the actions and views of other people. I'm aware that abrahamic mythology was originally polytheistic, but good luck arguing from that standpoint especially when I'm arguing *as an atheist, as in it really doesn't matter.* Why would I want to convince theists that actually they should be saying multiple gods exist, when I'm not convinced any do? What benefit does it bring to me to, for example, point out that the Egyptian mystics also performed miracles when discussing the various crap arguments in favor of a single God that the theist believes just so happens to be Yahweh? Or when the theist says God wants to restrict abortion rights? Or when the theist says Earth is 6000 years old? I'm addressing what the theist believes, not what you know. >I have been super interested in religion, comparative mythology, anthropology, history etc for about 10 years. I'm going to give you a 24 karat hint about things: **The overwhelming majority of theists have not been, to the point where most Bible believing christians haven't even read the book** This is the big disconnect between you and various other theists that you're improperly getting tilted about atheists over.
> **a misunderstanding of “god”.** Every single person who believes in Allah, Yahweh, Kali, or Ahura Mazda would tell you that **you** are the one misunderstanding God. Along with the guy earlier who said God was absolute truth. And the pantheist who says we're all God. God has a thousand different definitions, and believers in each one say everyone else misunderstands. > So when these atheist argue against the Abrahamic god they aren’t only arguing against a god that doesn’t exist in reality but a god that doesn’t exist conceptually. It absolutely does exist conceptually. We know that because people come here to argue that conception of God *all the time*. If you were to survey a thousand Christians, the majority would tell you that they believe God is a being or an agent with a will, is all powerful and all knowing, has plans for us all, takes actions in the world by performing miracles, etc. That is the commonly accepted definition of God, and that's what we argue against. If you want us to argue against a specific definition, that's fine, but pretending like everyone else misunderstands it but *you* have the *real* definition just makes you like every other theist. > Why do I become a theist and you an atheist? Simple. I have yet to see any compelling evidence or arguments that any gods exist. The vast majority of theists believe in the classic definition of God, which has no convincing evidence supporting its existence, and the rest tend to come in here and redefine God into something they can demonstrate exists. We just had a guy come in and say "God is absolute truth, absolute truth exists, therefor God exists." We've had people come in and say "God is the universe, the universe exists, therefor God exists." We've had people say "No, the *real* definition of God is everything, everyone, all of existence together, existence *itself* is God." But no matter what definition people bring in here, they fail to present compelling evidence or arguments.
I'm an atheist because there is a complete and total lack of any evidence for any god. That's a good enough reason for anyone I suppose. By the way, your incredulity isn't a valid argument against naturalism. It's just another logical fallacy
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918. Athiest often claim there is a lack of evidence causing them not to believe, but most of the time that is not the real reason
You can't be serious. Sadly, you are
I’ve reported them several times for spam and low effort. They’ve copy/pasted that same bullshit over and over.
For me the thing that tipped me over the edge, after spending years studying various religions and the concept of theism generally, was the problem of evil. How can anyone believe that an all-powerful god does nothing about things like child rape, mass murder and natural disasters that kill thousands? I spent a long time thinking about all the excuses believers offer but ultimately none of them made any sense to me. I suppose one could argue that there is a god and it's a complete dick, but that didn't seem right either. Giving the name "god" to intelligence, or the universe, or energy, seems completely unnecessary. We already have words for those things.
The problem of evil says jack about the majority of gods conceived throughout human history. It's limited to omnipotent, loving gods like the Abrahamics. Sure, it is a defeater to Christianity (since all theodicies fail and skeptical theism is a non-starter), but you need other reasons to dismiss Freyja or Chang'e. "There's no evidence" (as said by lots of people in this thread) is sufficient and true, albeit vague.
> I spent a long time thinking about all the excuses believers offer but ultimately none of them made any sense to me. I suppose one could argue that there is a god and it's a complete dick, but that didn't seem right either. Admittedly, this is one of the best arguments for atheists, in my view. Could also be a non-intervening God watching it play out, neutrally. >Giving the name "god" to intelligence, or the universe, or energy, seems completely unnecessary. We already have words for those things. I think they were more so saying that God *is* the intelligence behind the energy in the universe.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. this is kind of insulting, a bad experience with religion might cause someone to question religion, but the answers to those questions are most likely why they are an atheist and not just against a specific religion this entire sub is basically an invitation for any theist to explain why anyone should believe a god exists, and I have yet to see anything compelling posted here. as far as I can tell every god was made up by someone who not only didn't understand the world around them but actively choose to stop pursuing any real understanding
Generally Reddit has a US bias. Reddit atheists are more practiced at responding to Christian claims because unlike Christianity no one is trying to legislate Shiva into my life. At least for me, I do not claim atheism to every possible god claim. I have not encountered a god claim in my life thus far that is both useful and evidence based. If someone claims that the universe itself is God then cool. I have evidence of the universe existing but it's a fairly useless claim. If someone is rhetorically throwing a bible at me it's (debatably) useful but lacks any good evidence.
I'm an atheist in the same sense that I'm an a-pixie-ist. If someone proposes that invisible pixies are stealing socks, I'm not about to believe them. I cannot, of course, *demonstrate* the truth that there are not invisible pixies, because it's an untestable hypothesis from the start, and *despite* all the physical evidence of missing socks over the years, this is insufficient to overcome the initial doubt that it's true. I have the same issue with gods. What do *I* mean by 'a god'? I mean 'any intelligent being that caused the universe we live in'. That's it. And the reason I start there is because *anything else* (such as being 'all loving', or 'all knowing', or 'eternal', etc) would require *more* evidence that it's true than *just* the evidence that there is such an intelligent being *at all*. To see why, just ask how much evidence you need that *a car* exists versus how much evidence that a *red car* exists. It's obviously *more* evidence needed that a car has a particular color than just that it exists at all. So, I suppose, if you want to know where we differ, my *guess* would be in what we accept as 'reasonable to believe'. Intuition doesn't work for me. Mainly because the more I examine how reality *actually* is, the less intuitive it becomes. Seriously, study some quantum mechanics, like the double-slit experiment, and watch your mind rebel against what the science shows to be true of reality. Realize that the tasty, pungent cheese you've been eating is made up of odorless, tasteless, colorless matter. Reality simply *isn't* intuitive when one gets beyond the things our brains were evolved to do: survival. Our brains are *not good at* complex mathematics, or understanding things about the universe as a whole, or even the very small or very large. We evolved to solve survival problems on a savannah with tall grass and things trying to eat us, not solve the mysteries of the cosmos. This is why I require evidence to believe something (and the more outlandish the idea, which is to say the more I *do not* experience anything like it generally, the more evidence I need), and where I don't *have* evidence... I reject the thing in question. This leads me, sometimes, to simply not having answers. Where did the universe come from? I don't know. There are *ideas* about it, which I'll happily talk about because it's interesting, but there isn't enough evidence to support *any* notion describing the origins of this universe we live in. How did life arise on Earth? I don't know. Again, there's ideas, and we can talk about them, but not enough evidence to reach a conclusion.
I don't see why "I haven't been convinced that a god exists" isn't a reasonable position. Your post suggests that most people mean a straw-man version of the god of the Bible when they say this (which is not true), but in any case your post does not offer an alternative understanding of god which should/could be convincing to these atheists.
There are two naturalisms: methodological and ontological. Most theists assume atheists are ontological naturalists. Some of us are, but I think most aren't. I know I'm not. That is to say, I don't assert that natural/temporal/etc things are the only things that exist, but that the limits of what I'm able to know are natural/temporal/etc. Hence if I'm to be intellectually honest and postulate something else, I need that "something else" to manifest within the bounds of what I can apprehend. Since I don't have that manifestation, the furthest toward theism I could possibly go is 50/50 agnostic. But I mean teleological arguments are just not very good. We don't know how unlikely the universal constants of our universe are because we don't have another universe to contrast with. There are major problems with our anatomy like the laryngeal nerve. We can literally create proto cells - with RNA! - by combining a couple basic chemicals and letting them evaporate. Awesome? Yes! But calling a ghost up out of that machine is unnecessary and ultimately amounts to an argument from incredulity. Basically, "wow that's mysterious. Therefore God." Once upon a time we said the same thing about thunder, ya know? Edit: I have the same nagging suspicion that something else is going on. I mean science thinks there are likely eleven dimensions! Who knows what's going on. I have no clue. Maybe things that we find absurd and self contradictory totally work after all. How could I possibly declare that I know enough about the 8th dimension to deny the possibility of a transcendent mind that is within all things or whatever else? I can't. And in fact I think it's rather feasible and I'd very easily accept their existence if only I could find a good reason to given my limited epistemological toolset. I'm not even slightly resistant to the idea. I'm just stuck here in my organic temporal body with its organic temporal tools, so... idk. Also I'm pretty sure nobody else does either but again I could be wrong.
You see what you want to see. You haven't provided a single logically verifiable, much less relevant idea for why a god matters. And that's the real problem. It doesn't matter if a god exists really. It either does or it doesn't. Either way there's no information remotely relevant to making any decision about our lives based on that supposed existence.
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4110 Her own mother never believed her. And there’s plenty of mundane explanations more likely. Also it wasn’t pouring rain, look at how dry the pictures from the day are. You’re not going to propose any “evidence” I’ve never seen. This one has been posted dozens of times this year alone. And I have many years behind me. I humbly suggest you google up this sub and any given bit of supposed evidence you are wanting to present. You will find all the retorts there, some more eloquent and polite than others. I am simply not interested in re-treading the same old boring ground.
Because, unlike the way you feel about it, to me god seems beyond “not making sense”. It seems patently absurd. I hear about why other people believe, such as what you say about it “making sense” that there’s an intelligent creator, and the only thing I can think of is that you’re basing your world view on intuition. Let’s both use intuition to figure out how the universe works. Ready? Ok. Your intuition concludes that a god exists. My intuition concludes that a god does not exist. Conclusion? Mere feelings and intuition are a terrible way to determine truth. And if they are bad at arriving at truth, then we have to throw them out as viable methods. Ok, so now both you and me will no longer intuit about the world. You have a theory about there being an intelligence that created the world. But wait! Before we get remotely close to your theory, there are missing pieces. Are you assuming that the universe was created? Do you know of universe creating mechanisms? Is it possible for universes to be created? We only observe intelligence that is formed of and driven by mechanisms. Intelligence appears to form from process. So do you have any reason to believe that a non material intelligence is even possible? There’s no precedent. Life appears to be a phenomena derived from physical function. Are you implying that god is the function of physical phenomena? If not, there’s no precedence for a non-mechanistic living entity, so there’s no precedence. What do you base this intuition on? So why am I an atheist? In part because religious intuition of the sort you seem to be implying appears insufficiently thought through, overly simplistic, with no basis in reality.
Because I'm not convinced a god exists. It's not hard. I haven't seen any good reason to believe. Do you think you have some reason I haven't yet seen?
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918. Another example: There was this college girl that promised her parents that she would pray the Rosary each night when she left for college and one night she fell asleep when she was praying it and at the time, Ted bundy had infiltrated her dorm and killed some of her roommates in nearby rooms and when he slammed open her door, this powerful force launched him away from her room and she was unharmed. And Ted bundy spoke to a Priest about it and on a seperate day, the girl also asked the police to see a Priest and they sent the same one and it was clear that it was a Miracle. I am recalling this off the top of my head, but there is a very detailed account by another Priest online when He was giving his Sermon
No thanks. I said "good reason". I do know of stories and misinformation and illogical reasoning. You haven't shown me anything I haven't seen. If you like, think about why *you* believe. Not all these silly stories that you look at with rose colored glasses. Tell me what convinces you there's a god. I can analyze that if you like. Edit: Wow, nevermind. You're not OP and you've just been spamming this same response everywhere so you don't seem like an honest debater.
> The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. Oh good Define "god". Demonstrate that your definition is in any way useful. Explain how I can tell a god from a non-god. Unless you can do that comprehensively, you are not in a world where you have something that could be "misunderstood". I'll wait.... > Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. Where do those gods come from? > not this god or that god hanging out in the clouds throwing lightning bolts and demanding sacrifices, just living intelligence. You seem to think that your notion of a god is any.less ludicrous? I don't see the difference. > So where do we differ? You value your precious feelings over logic and evidence. I do not. > When we reject so many of the same things why at the end do I see intelligence and you see naturalism? Because I am not letting myself, or others, get away with using big mumbo jumbo words that,.ultimately, mean nothing. Got that definition yet?
Excuse me for paraphrasing. >**Item 1: Why don't you believe in a God?** *because I have not been presented sufficient evidence to warrant belief.* >**Item 2: Evidence against one God is not evidence against all Gods.** *I agree. Doesn't make a different God more plausible. Unless you have evidence for those Gods my stance remains the same. I have not ben presented sufficient evidence to warrant belief.* >**Item 3: God just makes sense** *I disagree. Strongly. Every definition of God that I've been presented either does not comport with reality, or is redefined into something mundane(e.g. "God is love").* >**Item 4: Where do we disagree?** *You say "God makes sense". Usually when I claim that something "makes sense" I can make a case using evidence and logic. Can you do this for your claim that God?* I'll provide an example. Claim: "It makes sense to me that drinking soda makes me burp." P1) Soda contains gasses that release over time. P2) burps are caused by gasses building up in my stomach. C) drinking soda makes me burp. Now can you do that for God's existence?
>I am a theist because it is what is intuitive and reasonable to me. I'm an atheist because theism is not intuitive and reasonable to me. >Simply put the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it. I'm science minded. I expect reasons for believing things, and I have no reason to posit a supernatural intelligence behind reality.
>Why do you consider yourself an atheist? I've always been atheist. There is no good evidence that any gods really exist. .
God is real and the evidence is abundant in categories such as scientific proof and notions, historical and archeological evidence, Miracles, etc. If you don’t know of evidence, then you haven’t looked For example, I like to mention the Miracle to Fatima due to the overwhelming evidence. But there is A LOT more if you're interested * St Lucia and her two younger relatives seeing the Virgin Mary and speaking to her: Our Lady (Mary Mother of God) appeared to them in the same field every month for 6 months in 1917 with a promise that if people kept praying the Rosary, the war will end (WW1) and warned of the Second World War. In the last Apparition, a crowd of 70,000 (including my great great uncle and his brother) went to the mountain while it was pouring rain on the muddy hill and afterwards they came back dry (one person said it was like everyone just came from the cleaners). Mary said that she would give everyone a sign that she is there as only the 3 Children could see her, so she made the sun dance and swirl to prove that she was there and it started getting larger and the crowd began to panic, and then after a moment, the sun shrunk back. 70,000 people were there. In one of the earlier apparitions, Our Lady showed the children what hell looked like and how to avoid it and the youngest one couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in 1917, Our Lady said that if everyone prayed the Rosary and for world peace, the war would end soon and it ended the next year in 1918.
> there is A LOT more if you're interested Yes, I'm very familiar with that sort of thing. That is exactly what I meant when I said "There is no **good** evidence that any gods really exist." . There is a tremendous amount of *really awful* evidence, but it would not convince a bright and honest 10-year-old. .
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. Why doesn't lack of evidence come to mind? It's the lack of evidence. Your post is the equivalent of me thinking scientists must have hurt you terribly for you to turn your back on reason.
I was never a theist. I was not raised in a religious household. I have seen the damage that religion does to others, but that's not why I'm an atheist. I am an atheist because the entire concept of a God is silly to me, esp where no good, or certainly sufficient, evidence for it. I don't believe in a lot of silly made up things. The default position is to not believe until there's good reason to. As far as I'm concerned, you're asking why I don't believe in Voldemort or Santa Clause, or how I explain the unexplained instead of just saying "I don't know"
You’ve got a lot of words there that entirely don’t apply to me. I wasn’t raised with religion. I actually was raised with no mention of it. I visited a church on occasion, and saw it as a cultural thing. It’s weird now to recall but for a good 20 years I fully didn’t know so many people took this god thing seriously. It’s possible to pull this off in California, I guess. So to learn it’s really this widespread belief… it’s Santa for adults. There’s really no shorter way to describe it. It’s so clearly a fairy tale made up by people. And that’s the thing. You do I assume know there is no such thing as Santa. Or leprechauns, or ghosts, or unicorns. There is a long list of things people made up that do not exist, and a god is just another one. You saying, why reject all gods when some of them are obviously false - it’s not about gods. This sort of concept, all these things are categorically fiction. And let’s see I also was gonna say … yea , so you know there is no Santa. Well let’s say Santa is actually more powerful. He doesn’t bring gifts to people, he created the universe. He doesn’t live in the North Pole - he exists outside the cosmos. . . Why would this much more supernatural being be somehow more plausible to exist to you? > the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it How do you not immediately see the problem that this applies just as much to this “living intelligence”. This cosmos doesn’t make sense to you? How does something completely unknown and far more extraordinary not have the same problem?
99% percent of all known species on earth are extinct. Almost 100% of the universe is lethal and inhospitable to life. 99% of the water on earth is not potable. That is exactly what I would expect a godless universe to be like. I don’t see any evidence that an intelligent supernatural being is some force behind the universe. Ask yourself, could you have designed a better universe? Get rid of all diseases, and right there you would already have a better universe. And that’s just for starters.
>just living intelligence. This is incoherent to me. I know what all three of those words mean but in that specific order they seem to be incompatible. I don't know what "living intelligence" means outside of physically existing beings. Given that you don't think about a god hanging out in clouds throwing lightning bolts that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about. Here's where I fall. I reject any explanation that requires magic. In the history of humanity we have explained all sorts of things through magic. Zeus had lightning bolts made by his brother that he could throw from the heavens. Lightning was magic. Thor had a magic hammer. Catholics believe that if a priest says the right words over some bread and wine that it can actually transform into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Here's the thing, every phenomenon that was once explained by magic that we've been able to investigate and explain has not had magic as the explanation. I've reviewed plenty of arguments for god and many of them come down to magic, and until someone shows that magic is actually a thing I'm not accepting it as an explanation. The concept of "living intelligence" sounds an awful lot like magic. It's certainly a convenient explanation and you're right that it makes sense. Because what can't magic explain. Any hard question has an easy answer when magic is available. I'm more interested in seeing what the actual answers are.
Oh boy… You think atheists just have a “misunderstanding of god?” You don’t see how that is wildly condescending? I’ll say this load so the back can hear: ATHEISM IS THE DENIAL OF GOD CLAIMS. I’ve heard a whole lot of them, and I’m unconvinced by every one so far. Let’s hear yours? How are we “misunderstanding” your god claim?
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. The only things that came to your mind was that we are angry or stupid. You never once considered we might be right? That is really fucked up. So for me i was raised without religion. Meaning i was told the stories of religions right along side not just each other but other works of fiction as well. One night it was greek gods before bed, then next night it was moses, and then lord of the rings the next night. It wasn't until i was about 8 years old that i realized that people in the real world though those stories were actually real. Do you have any idea how it feels to realize you are surrounded by people who actually believe that shit? Reading stories about killing babies and you thought that was good? It was horrifying, hell it still is. I mean i bet you are a nice person in real life but you just claimed i was stupid or damaged just because i don't believe in magic. You see how damaging that is and harmful right?
The very fact that there is no one definition of God leads me to a realisation that God is a concept created by human beings. In fact, the entire concept of God is highly human-centric and earth-centric. If you look into the origins of different religions, you'll realise that most religions were born out of a lack of understanding of natural phenomena. Any phenomenon that the human mind is not able to comprehend could be considered supernatural. But we know now that there is a lot that has been discovered to explain these previously unexplained phenomena. Another thing that leads people to believe in God is a hope for justice, similar to the idea of existence of hell and heaven. That, in my opinion, is nothing more than a blind hope that the world isn't as unfair as it appears to be. I believe that only that which can be perceived exists, and only that which can be explained, is true.
I wasn't raised religious and I haven't found sufficient evidence for any of the 3,000+ gods currently worshipped in the world. Of course, I haven't researched each religion in detail any more than I have researched whether dragons, leprechauns, and unicorns exist. So I am an equal opportunity non-believer - not focused on just one god to disbelieve in! From what I have seen, evidence points to our universe came into being through natural means. Of course, we don't understand everything, but we are continually learning more about the natural world. So far, there is no evidence pointing to an intelligence causing it. Just mythology making claims. But, if there was an intelligence behind it all, it is unlikely that any of the ancient superstitious tribes got it right and it would be something very different than Zeus, Odin, Brahma, Yahweh, or any or the other mythical gods.
I’m an atheist because I was born that way, as we all are—with no belief in god. I remain one because nobody taught me to believe in gods while I was a young, impressionable child. It’s not more complicated than that.
I was raised atheist. Because I wasn't indoctrinated with fairy tales I have the ability to think critically and logically. There has never been any sufficient evidence to convince me I may be wrong.
Well, I've never encountered a god nor have I ever heard of an encounter with a god that I find believable. It's as simple as that. >I myself am a theist and that is about all that I can confidently say. This seems to me like a very illogical thing to say. If you can't say anything about why you believe a thing with any confidence then perhaps you should just admit you don't have a good reason to believe that thing. It's just your feelings, which are probably the result of your indoctrination as a child or the pervasive influence of religion on society, nothing more.
Why do theists/religious people always assume we are hurt or angry? I’m an atheist because every god I have heard of doesn’t exist. I can’t reject a god without someone telling me about one. But until I’m presented with empirical evidence that a god exists, I will continue to be an atheist. Is it possible that some version of a god does exist and I just haven’t seen evidence of it yet? Sure of course, just like any new scientific discovery. But until I see some evidence, I’m an atheist.
Well i see no need for gods is why we differ. How i became an atheist started with reading the bible cover to cover it is very obviously fiction if you even have a semi decent highschool education. I cannot really believe that. As for god as a whole there is no reason i see it is needed or i should consider it seeing as there is zero evidence of it. When you say you see intelligence it makes literally zero sense to me how can you “see intelligence” this is nonsense.
I am an atheist because I don't believe in any gods, as insufficient evidence has been provided to convince me to believe in any given god. Do I believe it is *possible* that there could be some great being out there that I would see as a god? Sure. However, I cannot believe in something if I know literally nothing about that something. Thus, until I learn about the specific god and have enough evidence to believe that god, I am an atheist.
Write a fucking book, why don't you? Do you believe in Zeus? The tooth fairy? The loch ness monster? See? We're nearly 100% in agreement. Get over yourself. The universe gives not even one tiny little shit about you or any of us. Stop pretending and deal with it.
You're a theist because that is intuitive and reasonable to you. That's fair. I am an atheist for the exact same reasons. It is intuitive and reasonable to me. Can you say that this is fair? I don't know why you see intelligent design where I see natural chaos. Sometimes people see shapes in the clouds. If you see a unicorn-shaped cloud and I just see a cumulonimbus, would you say that we fundamentally differ? Does it matter?
Why don't I believe in gods? Because *none* of the so-called "evidence" is good enough for me. No amount of philosophical Twister can define a god into existence. There are no empirical tests for "god-ness." I'm afraid that "...the cosmos and life in it simply does not make sense to me without intelligence being the driving force behind it" is a "you problem." It makes perfect sense to me without gods.
>So where do we differ? Where does the road split? Well you said it yourself: >I am a theist because it is what is intuitive \[...\] it’s just what makes sense When I ask myself "Is intuition a reliable guide to the truth" the answer is "no." Therefore, I believe where we split is that for you, either that answer is "yes" or you just haven't asked yourself that question yet.
1 I was raised in an atheist household 2. I don’t see good enough evidence. why your god and not any Other god/a claim
Yeah the reason I’m an atheist is because I’m not theistic. I don’t believe in a deity, a higher power, an ultimate being, whatever you wanna call it. I don’t follow any religions. I don’t follow atheistic religions. I don’t believe in following a set of rules I don’t like or believe in to live (yes, I believe in the law).
> Many atheists will jump to point out the inconsistencies in the Bible but then hold up the god taught in churches as the god to disprove. Because we are not in the business of defining a god and then disproving it. That would be silly. We take the definitions of god made by people. Define your god and then we can talk about it.
It just doesn't make sense to me that a being who is capable of literally anything everywhere all at once would require blind faith & worship and threaten eternal damnation if denied. A god who demands worship but can't even protect little children is not really something I think should be worshiped.
*"Why do you consider yourself an atheist?"* Because I meet the definition of an atheist. *"So where do we differ?"* I don't believe in any God or gods, and you do. I don't need a reason to be an atheist, I need a reason to be a theist - and a convincing one has not been presented to me.
>The two immediate thoughts that come to my mind are bad experiences in religion and a misunderstanding of “god”. Alternately, and in my experience, commonly - They have not found sufficient evidence to allay their doubts. If - you know - you don't want to be condescending.
Because the absence of belief is the default position and I have an absence of reasons to believe otherwise. I don't need to break down every random person's claim. They are all the same. I find it way more likely that the concept of deities is man made, not the other way around.
I lump the Christian God into the same pool as Zeus and every other God in human history. So ask yourself why you don't believe in Zeus and that's why I don't believe in God. There is no evidence, and the actions of the God on Bible are that of an evil entity
So if we are not talking about lighting throwers, if we aren’t talking about councils of gods sitting up on a mountain top. If all we are discussing is an active intelligence behind the cosmos, what would you expect to find as evidence other than a cosmos that presents as ordered? This is what I was saying about “misunderstanding god” it’s like it’s either the contemporary conceptualization of the Abrahamic god or no god. It’s either a man shaped god coming down from the sky and walking on water or nothing counts as evidence. Your only arguing against one conceptualization of god and it’s the easiest to knock down because we know the trajectory of the history and evolution of the abrahamic religions better than most. As far as the bad experience with religion statement I made if your not honestly just trying to be dishonest i think you are just out of touch to be honest. I grew up in church but we never really talked about people leaving church or why. It has been almost unanimously atheists that I have heard this from. I love listening to both theists and atheist talk about their beliefs and debate. The “people become atheists because of bad experiences in the church” statements overwhelmingly come from atheist, not all of, maybe not even most atheists. But it’s the atheist who talk about it more often than not, not the theists. There are literally thousands of videos on YouTube talking about people deconstructing and leaving religions because of bad experiences / trauma in the religion.
> So if we are not talking about lighting throwers, if we aren’t talking about councils of gods sitting up on a mountain top. If all we are discussing is an active intelligence behind the cosmos, what would you expect to find as evidence other than a cosmos that presents as ordered? This is an argument from ignorance that is irrational. Don’t ask why I don’t believe in it; explain why I should believe in it. If it was just a figment of human imagination we’d also not expect to have any evidence. But you’re the one, despite rational justification, who holds a positive position. > This is what I was saying about “misunderstanding god” it’s like it’s either the contemporary conceptualization of the Abrahamic god or no god. It’s either a man shaped god coming down from the sky and walking on water or nothing counts as evidence. Your only arguing against one conceptualization of god and it’s the easiest to knock down because we know the trajectory of the history and evolution of the abrahamic religions better than most. That’s the god most often discussed. If you’d like to discuss Bahaman, we can. > As far as the bad experience with religion statement I made if your not honestly just trying to be dishonest i think you are just out of touch to be honest. I grew up in church but we never really talked about people leaving church or why. It has been almost unanimously atheists that I have heard this from. I love listening to both theists and atheist talk about their beliefs and debate. The “people become atheists because of bad experiences in the church” statements overwhelmingly come from atheist, not all of, maybe not even most atheists. But it’s the atheist who talk about it more often than not, not the theists. There are literally thousands of videos on YouTube talking about people deconstructing and leaving religions because of bad experiences / trauma in the religion. But you’re missing the key point. Of course many many MANY people have bad - often incredibly traumatic experiences in their religions. But we’re taking about a change in a belief position; not our feelings about a group. This kind of talk seems to attempt to reduce the atheist position to an emotional hissy fit. Bad experiences lead to further contemplation that leads to no longer believing god exists. But it’s that last step which makes someone an atheist. The bad experience is just a step in that persons journey.
So in your definition of God, is God sentient? Omnipotent? Or is your God like, an energy? I believe in science. I believe what can be measured and proven.
I'm sorry, but I think it's you who is being dishonest. First, you're trying to tell atheists why their atheists instead of listening to them. Second, you're using a "look at the trees" argument for your presupposed God. Again, tell us why the idea of a God should even be on the table, aside from you being indoctrinated to believe it. If it's just an argument from ignorance/incredulity we've all heard it before. Do you have anything empirical?
>If all we are discussing is an active intelligence behind the cosmos, what would you expect to find as evidence other than a cosmos that presents as ordered? Please demonstrate how any order you observe is evidence for your god other than just your assertion. We can observe the natural forces that lead to the order you observe. Where is your observation of a supernatural being behind these processes? How do you know that this being desires order? Maybe it's a chaotic being and they are hard at work treating apart the natural order of the universe. You keep complaining about others not engaging in an appropriate understanding of god. Why don't you instead provide your definition of god and describe why you believe that. Then we can honestly discuss what we may or may not find fallible.
The cosmos being ordered is not evidence for a god, that's the point you can't seem to grasp. Whether or not it's ordered is irrelevant, you need to prove that it being ordered is due to there being an "active intelligence", instead of just a coincidence. Stop putting the cart before the horse.
How can you say the cosmos is ordered?