question no. 17 for atheists

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imbatshitcrazy
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29 Aug 2010, 9:18 pm

Sand wrote:

The demand that atheists have total certainty there is no God is idiotic. I am not 100% certain there is no tyrannosaurus rex wandering the wilds of the Amazon jungle. We don't live on total certainties. We live on reasonable probabilities and it seems very reasonable there is no God and I structure my life on that. Religion in general strikes me as so unreasonable it cannot be taken seriously.

my opinons exactly

Vexcalibur
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29 Aug 2010, 11:20 pm

How do you know there isn't an invisible pink unicorn just in your house right now? Note that unicorns are very silent.

Edit: Ok, let me try to be serious. Yeah that's right, we have not proven "there exists no deity" yet. However, due to the lack of evidence we do not have to believe so. The existence of a god or many gods is not currently required to explain the universe or life.

More so, although the nonexistence of gods is not proven, what we can tell for sure is that the events described in the bible and the quram are at best not described accurately. We actually do have plenty of proof that the main religions were wrong about many things. In fact, we have enough evidence that it is perfectly valid to assume that the Christian/Muslim/Jewish gods are garbage. Some other being, a different god may exist. But we do not know anything about him/her and it is not necessary for him/her to exist.

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30 Aug 2010, 5:45 pm

danandlouie wrote:

thanks to all that have replied. as i agree with almost (there i go again) everything that has been written here, i seem to believe (BEEELIEVE) by most standards i should call myself an atheist. semantics.
.

I like Dawkins take on this with his scale 1 - 7 from absolute theism through to absolute atheism where he writes "I'd be surpised to meet many people in category 7 - I know there is no God with the same conviction Jung knows there is one - but I include it for symmetry with category 1 - Strong Theist:100 % probability of God. In the words of C.G Jung "I do not believe I know' - which is well populated."

He himself like I suspect many atheists puts himself in this category 6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable. and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there'

So really the questions should be to theists 'why do you believe with such certainty that God exists when there is zero scientific supporting evidence?' 'as adults we dismiss the fairy tales of our youth, why then does this one persist?'

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greenblue
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30 Aug 2010, 5:51 pm

ruveyn wrote:

t is like trying to PROVE that Unicorns don't exists.

Not sure if current technology is able to create unicorns or not.

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ruveyn
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30 Aug 2010, 6:11 pm

greenblue wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

t is like trying to PROVE that Unicorns don't exists.

Not sure if current technology is able to create unicorns or not.

Not this year. But one can not say for sure unicorns could not be bred.

ruveyn

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30 Aug 2010, 7:06 pm

Master_Pedant wrote:

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

Master_Pedant, you literally freaking made up those likelihood percentages.

By "made up" those confidence percentages, do you mean I attached percentage numbers to words ("atheist", "agnostic", "agnostic atheist", etc) in a manner that was contrary to consensus or that I displayed false precision?

By "made up", I mean that you "made up". That is that you provided answers that were false and likely not reached by any analytical process.

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30 Aug 2010, 9:15 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

By "made up", I mean that you "made up". That is that you provided answers that were false and likely not reached by any analytical process.

What the hell is "false" about my definitions? They seem pretty similar to Dawkin's own scale and most people would probably say that agnostics are "50-50" when it comes to God and most atheists - even strong atheists - would say they're less than 100% certain about God's existence.

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30 Aug 2010, 9:39 pm

Master_Pedant wrote:

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

By "made up", I mean that you "made up". That is that you provided answers that were false and likely not reached by any analytical process.

How about this:

Quote:

I'm 93% certain the chair I am sitting on won't vanish into thin air, for comparison

Seriously, 93%??? Come on, seriously, give me a method. Frankly, I am a lot more certain than 93%, given that I don't expect that the chair will disappear 7 times out of 100(A statistical average that logically follows). If I did, I would make sure I wasn't resting on the damned thing.

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30 Aug 2010, 10:07 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

Master_Pedant wrote:

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

By "made up", I mean that you "made up". That is that you provided answers that were false and likely not reached by any analytical process.

How about this:

Quote:

I'm 93% certain the chair I am sitting on won't vanish into thin air, for comparison

lol

Well, given the odds...

What little bit I've picked up here and there on QM and so-called new-physics, 93% might not be so far from the truth IF and ONLY IF the chair consists of specific particles that synchronously disappear. Given the frequent erratic quantum behavior of my socks from my bedroom floor or hamper, to the washer, to the dryer, and back into the basket when I wash PAIRS of socks and only get back odd numbers, there's very little about the physical world I WON'T believe.

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30 Aug 2010, 11:06 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

Master_Pedant wrote:

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

By "made up", I mean that you "made up". That is that you provided answers that were false and likely not reached by any analytical process.

How about this:

Quote:

I'm 93% certain the chair I am sitting on won't vanish into thin air, for comparison

I'm not using a frequentist interpretation, I'm using more of a Bayesian framework.

As I went through a few months in adolescence where the seeming irrefutability of solipsism caused a brief bout of solipsism syndrome, I'm much less confident of the real world than those who claim there's a 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% chance of it. As I also read of the problem of induction, I'm also a bit less certain of the uniformity of nature. Though, I'll admit, my sense of precision is false.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 30 Aug 2010, 11:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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30 Aug 2010, 11:16 pm

AngelRho wrote:

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

Master_Pedant wrote:

Awesomelyglorious wrote:

By "made up", I mean that you "made up". That is that you provided answers that were false and likely not reached by any analytical process.

How about this:

Quote:

I'm 93% certain the chair I am sitting on won't vanish into thin air, for comparison

I have a similar sock issue.

And I'd compound whatever probability physical theories give with the probability of the physical theory being wrong. I'm not quite sure how to do it, but my ideal epistemology would be coherentist - with probabilities "calculated" based on various beliefs and the "epistemic costs" of rewiring the web of beliefs.

Awesomelyglorious
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30 Aug 2010, 11:22 pm

Master_Pedant wrote:

I'm not using a frequentist interpretation, I'm more of a Bayesian framework.

Ok, but it still doesn't work. How could you even set the prior probability for something that doesn't happen, such as this? Many people end up claiming that zero is the number to plug given the non-existence of the past occurrences.

The_Lost
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31 Aug 2010, 11:28 pm

Just do what I did, say you're a deist, I believe there is a god who "started" the universe, then left it to it's own devices.

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31 Aug 2010, 11:55 pm

It seems like nobody knows what the word atheist means any more.
It simply means someone who is "without religious belief."

It doesn't mean that they know there is no god.

Agnosticism simply means that one cannot know for certain if there is a god or not. Anybody can be an Agnostic Atheist, or an Agnostic Theist.

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02 Sep 2010, 4:34 am

adifferentname wrote:

Atheists disbelieve the existence of deities -

atheists can therefore be said to believe that there are no gods.

Nope.

Notice the first is a lack of a positive belief, the second IS a positive belief.

You confuse general atheism with Gnostic atheism, respectively.

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Last edited by Bethie on 02 Sep 2010, 4:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

Bethie
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02 Sep 2010, 4:36 am

Ambrose_Rotten wrote:

It's funny how being accused of having semantic knowledge is an insult nowadays. Guess some of us have to take the heat reminding people what the words they throw around actually mean...

:roll:

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