The Great Faith Debate

[Bak]

are you agnostic about the existence unicorns too? grow some balls

[Falcoknight]

So you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny than?

 

I !@#$%^&*umed that we're making the ridiculously idiotic generalizations that all Agnostics can't make up their mind about all fictional characters and that people of faith believe in every single fictional character.

 

Good, sound, logical argument though, Bak.

[Bak]

nononono you misunderstood! So agnostics typical take on the issue (tell me if I'm wrong) is that there's no evidence for or against God, so they don't know if He exists. But this argument can be applied to unicorns or any fictional character. I was hoping to compare the absurdity of being agnostic towards unicorns (because there's no evidence for or against their existence) to the absurdity of being agnostic towards God (because there's no evidence for or against His existence).

 

Of course religious people don't believe in unicorns. Why not? There's no evidence they exist.

 

Can we apply the same argument to God? Why not? Is there any evidence God exists?

[all_shall_perish]

I don't think the motivation behind agnosticism is really from a lack of evidence but rather that the current evidence which exists isn't convincing enough to believe either way definitively.

 

So essentially, agnostics simply aren't convinced. Believing in something due to a lack of evidence is reserved for the theists and atheists.

[Bak]

what sort of evidence would make you definitively become an atheist?

[SeVeR]

I am agnostic about the existence of unicorns, santa and the easter bunny. I don't see how one couldn't be; there is no proof that they don't exist. There is simply not alot of evidence to evaluate when it comes to these characters, and thus, the question of their existence does not require alot of attention. One can look at the roots of the myth; often these characters arise from fictional stories, proving that the question of their existence is trival and a waste of time.

 

Furthermore, what definition of the word unicorn would satisfy your idea of a unicorn's physical representation. It is entirrely possible that life developed in this way at some point, maybe not on this world, but on another.

[SeVeR]

what sort of evidence would make you definitively become an atheist?

This is an important question. The definition of God makes any test of his non-existence almost impossible to carry out. For as long as there are unknowns there will always be a God to fill the gaps. This doesn't make me any less anti-christian, i'm simply being logical. Ask yourself: Does an all-powerful, invisible, timeless en!@#$%^&*y exist? How could you ever say no with confidence.

[Bak]

It would seem like you can't say no with any confidence.

 

But in a similar way, how can you know any external truths? All of our experience comes from our fallible senses (people can and do hallucinate at times). How do you know the sky is blue? Because you see it? Perhaps you were hallucinating. How can you claim, with confidence, that you were not hallucinating, or that your entire life is a hallucination (or in the matrix, if you prefer)? Any test of this is subject to our possibly hallucinating senses and is impossible to carry out.

 

I'm ready to admit that I don't believe I'm experiencing a hallucination in the same way I'm ready to admit I don't believe anything supernatural exists.

[all_shall_perish]

At some point social constructs are important because otherwise human interaction and communication would be tedious and useless. At some point we all have to agree the gr!@#$%^&* is green and the sky is blue, regardless of what the reality of the matter is.

 

As long as we can agree on that fact, we can then make statements and arguments about the gr!@#$%^&* and the sky and interact on that basis more readily. The practicality of agreeing on which fairy tale to believe or which invisible man lives in the sky is not nearly as important because our ability to agree or disagree on such topics does not change the fact that it doesn't effect us.

[SeVeR]

It seems that for you, agnostic means 50/50. The probability that the sky is blue and we're not hallucinating is not 50/50, we can almost be certain the sky is blue. Of course there is still some minute possibility that it isn't, and that must be acknowledged for the purpose of dispelling certainty. However, i do not acknowledge this in my every day life, since it is irrelevent and inconsequential.

 

God, once devoid of all anthro-religious symbolism has no evidence for his existence one way or the other. This en!@#$%^&*y must be 50/50.

 

I may not be saying "no" with confidence, and i am quite happy to do that. I am however saying "no" to "no" with every confidence.

[Bak]

That seems reasonable. Although I don't see how you can say that "God, once devoid of all anthro-religious symbolism has no evidence for his existence one way or the other," and is therefore 50/50, whereas there is also no evidence that you are or are not hallucinating (let me know if there is), and yet that's not 50/50?

[ThunderJam]

No indication that a God might exist outside of symbolism? Meh..

 

Two summers ago I met a family in mexico with a child who was about 4 at the time. About 3 years previously, when the child was still a baby, it was found that he had a terminal illness. I can not remember now what it was, but I feel like it was some odd form of cancer (in hindsight ive found myself doubting if i remember that correctly). They were very poor, and had recently moved onto a christian orphanage where they worked as elementary school level teachers for the kids. They had managed to get like 1/2 the money for the procedure to cure there child, and planned they would have to pay the other half back later on a loan (and it was an absurd amount of money for someone of their monetary status). They had been praying for healing and for the condition to improve and for God to provide money, the money at least which, had become partially provided. The day of the procedure they went to take one final MRI/xray/whatever it was (the last one they had was like 1-2 weeks before) because they wanted the most exact image of what they were going after. The testing they took that day, showed that the kid was perfectly healthy. No sign of any problems, and even blood tests that should have contained leftover chemicals indicating the condition had previously existed, came out clean.

 

These things do happen, not often, but there are things that happen out there still that are just unexplainable. Explanation? My opinion would be God, but I guess we will never know until after we die.

[SeVeR]

Bak, there is evidence i am not hallucinating. As a human being i define myself as existing in a conscious reality, and i can therefore discern between reality and hallucinatory experiences to some finite level of accuracy. Therefore my perception of my experiences is evidence. You might say that my entire life could be a hallucination. This could be true, but then hallucinations would cons!@#$%^&*ute my reality, and from that definition of reality i would have to define my hallucinations as something different (it's all relative).

 

On the subject of God, let me elaborate on my comments: When i say "devoid of all anthro-religious symbolism" i am implying the God's of the Bible/Qu'ran/etc can be dis-creditted by having direct links to humanity. They are defined in ways that cater to our needs, and are subject to our history; we even give them human emotions. In a way i'm saying the Bible, by being flawed and subject to the human culture of the time, makes the Christian God less likely to exist. The same goes for any other "Earthly" God.

 

If we are talking about a God who's only deed is the creation of the Big Bang (the oldest known cause and the last refuge of religion), then we cannot assign any degree of likelihood to it's existence. We have no idea what happened before the Big Bang.

 

To say otherwise is to be emotionally and irrationally anti-religious, or what i like to call atheism. It's like saying there is definitely no such thing as anti-gravity or magnetic monopoles. Until we discover them, we just don't know.

[SeVeR]

TJ: When people cannot explain things, they fill the gap by believing what they want to believe. People want to believe there is a God out there helping them. To give in to such urges is to give into temptation (another religious hypocrisy), it compromises one's rationality.

 

Who's to say whether we'll know after we die. Death could be yet another plain of existence in which God doesn't reveal himself to us. We could just cease to be, and then we still wouldn't know, since there would be no mind to comprehend such a question.

[Bak]

if you define reality by what you experience, then I define God by interfering with our realm of existence. No interference, no God. I think most people would say that reality is what is actually going on, not what one thinks is going on.

 

Atheists aren't defined by anti-religious sentiments. Simply put, Atheists don't believe anything supernatural exists. In your metaphor, I don't see what the issue is of someone believing magnetic monopoles don't exist (at least, until they have evidence of them).

[SeVeR]

Are you saying that a God needs to have given evidence for his existence in order for humans to postulate he exists? That's not a bad proposition. A God who's only deed is the Big Bang has given no such evidence, whereas the Christian God has apparently given us plenty of evidence to evaluate. You are right in a way. I would reword it to say: A God that has given no evidence of his existence is unimportant, but we may postulate all we like. If Atheism were to define "God" in a way that makes it possible to believe he doesn't exist, then i would be all for it. The key point is, it's impossible to believe in the non-existence of an en!@#$%^&*y that gives no evidence of it's existence, and although any debate on the subject would be a pointless endevour, atheism needs to make a distinction. I was happy to learn that Carl Sagan is with me on this one, as would be any self-respecting scientist.

 

Simply put, Atheists don't believe anything supernatural exists.

Then i am not an atheist. I'm anti-religious. How anyone who understands logic and probability can rationally say that supernatural en!@#$%^&*ies do no exist, is beyond me.

 

Do we conclude that magnetic monopoles do not exist? They may be out there awaiting our discovery. To conclude they don't exist would be to stop looking for them. You don't look for something that you know doesn't exist.

 

I don't see what the issue is of someone believing magnetic monopoles don't exist (at least, until they have evidence of them).

Belief is a strange word. Someone might think/theorise that magnetic monopoles don't exist, but believing it? No. If you believe something without evidence for it, then you are irrational.

[Bak]

Aha that's a very interesting point. It doesn't apply just to a God though. Imagine a natural cause for the big bang is figured out. God could still be an invisible en!@#$%^&*y that doesn't and never has interacted with this universe. In fact, anything that is truly invisible to this universe has, by definition, no evidence for or against its existence.

 

If the question is does anything invisible exist, then I suppose I can't really conclude either way. It's sort of inconsequential if they are truly invisible.

 

To conclude they don't exist would be to stop looking for them. You don't look for something that you know doesn't exist.

It's not that you know God doesn't exist, it's that you don't believe he does. I mean if evidence was presented contrary, my beliefs would change.

 

Newton believed his laws of motion were correct, but turns out relativity says they're not exactly correct. Belief isn't irreversible.

[SeVeR]

The key word here is belief, what does it mean? For me a belief is to think you know something with certainty. I'm not sure if that's what you think it means.

 

In my opinion Newton believed in his laws of motion with certainty. The difference between Atheists and Newton is that all the evidence confirmed Newton's findings. (in fact Newton's laws are still very nearly accurate for small relative velocities, and this is afterall the realm in which Newton did his experiments). Newton, if alive today, would probably alter his beliefs, as would you if God proved his own existence. The difference is you have no evidence to support your belief that God doesn't exist. Newton had a wealth of evidence for his laws.

 

I don't think you or any Atheist has reason to believe God, as an invisible, non-interacting en!@#$%^&*y, doesn't exist. The reason is that it's impossible to have evidence against an en!@#$%^&*y such as this. Although as you rightly mention, it's inconsequential.

 

I looked into atheism a little more. Some people define atheism as an absence of belief in Gods, but this would include agnostics. Others call a belief in the non-existence of God, strong atheism, while weak atheism is an absence of belief in Gods. By this definition weak atheism would include agnostics. There seems to be an overlap.

 

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/intro.html

[Bak]

I don't think beliefs are with certainty; dictionary.com's first definition for believe is "1. to have confidence in the truth, the existence, or the reliability of something, although without absolute proof that one is right in doing so." Having confidence in the truth of something is different than knowing something with certainty (the old adage that knowledge is true, justified, belief comes into play here; if you know something it must be true, and justified, whereas you can believe something that is false without any justification).

 

Yeah I think weak-atheism includes agnosticism but I'm still for strong-atheism, at least with respect to an interacting God (a non-interacting God is inconsequential, as you mentioned).

 

Going back to the Newton analogy, I would say that Newton did not believe in relativity because there was no evidence for it at the time.

[all_shall_perish]

"A terminally ill child getting better appears to be unexplainable: therefore God"

 

I was briefly considering unicorns but after further thought I'm going to say it was leprechauns.

 

Unfortunately, all of these conclusions are equally valid.

[FMBI]

I hate to be !@#$%^&*y, especially on a totally ancient thread like this, but why did you leave out Orthodox Christian (the most unique major branch), Shinto (somewhat an invented religion to help the Japanese government, but still), Baha'i (which is a growing "faith", if you want to call it that), Chinese Buddhism (which is quite a different thing from Tibetan Buddhism), Animism (followed by hundreds of millions of Africans, currently one of the points of contention in Sudan and Nigeria), and "mul!@#$%^&*heism" in general? There are a surprising amount of people who actually believe in things like the Norse and Egyptian gods (this is in contrast to teenagers who just decided they could be cooler if they picked something random to believe in.)

[Bak]

perhaps it was because hundreds of millions of Africans don't visit this forum?

[jacob hunter!]

Bak and sever, two very intelligent beings indeed in my opinion

[JDS]

or perhaps you are just ignorant and simply in awe of there seeming intelligence?

[webgoat]

i believe in the great webgoat