A question for agnostics.

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shh! he's not talking about his unsupportable claim about the universe, he's applying it to you.

i love it when it comes down to what we "believe" started existence. personally, i don't know exactly how the universe started. i don't think it too likely that what we think of as our universe is everything that exists but i don't have solid reasons for thinking that.

when it comes to this, though..... this is just stupid. "atheists believe that everything came from nothing!" well.... i think that, if this is the case, it's somewhat more complicated than that. but.... if not....... why can't existence have always existed? it's stupid to reject both of those ideas while holding the position that either god came from nothing or god always existed.

go ahead though, 91, just pretend that doesn't apply to you.

My two cents -

in the days when I self described as atheist alternating with agnostic [about equal percent of the time:

Agnostic was the prime default position. A logical skeptic cannot simply believe X does not exist - there is only not believe it does exist. One can say, I believe the priest is a charlatan, the prophet nuts, the congregation deluded - there can be evidence supporting that. But that proves nothing about the existence of a divine entity.

When I described as atheist, it was not that I believed no divine entity exists. Rather, in that state I argued, if there were a divine entity, evidence is he / she / it / they would have characteristics I would rather were not linked to an Übermensch. I preferred, that is, no divine entity SHOULD exist, more than having certainty none COULD exist.

While certainty is not possible, I suspect most atheists are also preferential. Unless someone has figured how to prove a nonexistence.

If believe x, I think x is true. I wouldn't believe it if I didn't think it was true.

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Last edited by you_are_what_you_is on 03 Feb 2011, 1:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Whoops. There was supposed to be a 'not' there. I'll have to edit that.

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That takes me back. Anybody else know Kapliwatsky's Arabic course? Designed to teach Arabic to Israelis [I met it in an English version], it was not likely to increase Mideast understanding. Sample excercise sentence:

"Thy elephant [speaking to a woman] is in my garden."

I do not believe there is a high probability there is a pachyderm owned by a damsel in any of our gardens.

Well, that explains the Rosetta Stone software. Haven't seen many boys sitting on airplane wings either.

There was a Twilight Zone episode where somebody - I think a child though I am unsure of gender - was on the wing of a plane in flight

fiiluki fii bustaanii, if you need to say it to your female veterinarian neighbour.

I believe you're referring to the classic episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", where William Shatner played a man who was trying to get over a fear of flying by getting on an airplane-- and then, when the plane was in flight, he kept seeing a gremlin on the wing, trying to dismantle the plane's engines. Whenever he would try to alert somebody else on board, though, the gremlin would disappear, so everyone thought he was crazy.

Anyway, as for the subject at hand, I consider myself an agnostic. I cannot conclusively prove in the positive or the negative that a God exists, and I make no pretense that I can. For me to believe something, there must be empirical data. I see no point in trying to make the judgment call from a position of ambiguity.

Prove it.

He is equating knowledge with strong belief a mistake but it does allow him to not bother with silly things like proof.

So let me see:

No Cause - God - Universe

is better than?

No Cause - Universe

Besides, every argument about the origin of the universe will end in infinite recursion. I don't think the "Big Bang" was the first event, multiverse theories are starting to look likely, but ultimately evidence and not wildly guessing will reveal the truth.

If he wants to attack agnostics, I'd like to see him do something more than misrepresent the agnostic viewpoint as if he's some kind of moron who doesn't really understand what agnostic means.

I'm an atheist on the subject of specific dieties. Traditional religions are too childish and transparent to be true in my view. They are just bronze age babble or later reinterpretations of bronze age babble.

But on the subject of what is actually happening, I have no idea. Why something rather than nothing? I have no idea. The bible doesnt even address that. The brain of a hairless ape which evolved to hunt and gather resources may not be well suited to understanding the nature of the ultimate cause or cycle of causes.

We know everyday understanding of causality and time break down at extreme scales. Extreme size or extreme speed or mass. Who is to say what rules apply for the ultimate extreme environment? So could intelligence be involved on some level in there? Maybe not as first cause but somewhere further down the track? I don't now.

It's a mystery. I'm fine with that.

"Agnostics- Atheists without Balls"
-Stephen Colbert
Made me laugh regardless of accuracy

For an omnipotent being, that exists out of sheer necessity, the creation of a universe does not seem logically impossible. For a universe to spontaneously create itself from nothng and by nothing is the definition of logically impossible.

@Walter

That is actually, how do I say it, quite open minded for an atheist. I am legitimately impressed. When one considers the implications of that statement in relation to the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Argument from Contingency. Most atheists, in my experience, tend to blatantly assert that the universe either came from nothing and by nothing or that it is eternal (despite most of modern cosmology).

I see no difference. Neither of us knows how the universe came to be, but one of us thinks he does.



The only time I've heard the Universe described as eternal is when people postulate a multiverse, for which there is no evidence (except mathematical elegance, which is an indicator but not a proof) but no blatant contradiction to astrology.