format_quote Originally Posted by
tango92
do you believe there was nothing before the big bang?
I neither believe nor disbelieve. I have insufficient data to render a judgement about what might or might not have existed for the big bang, so I refrain from judging it, and simply say "I don't know". I'm comfortable with not knowing... especially since I, and many other people, are working on filling in that gap in our knowledge. :)
how can you make an absolute statement about god not existing? something about which you have no idea. if athiesm is lack of belief then you cannot say you believe god doesnt exist.
There are some people who insist that 'atheism' means one thing, and others that it means something not quite the same, about the differences between atheism and agnosticism, and there are whole reams of arguments about the difference between lack of belief and active disbelief. It's getting to the point where I sometimes try to avoid the term altogether, and use terms that are better-defined for a particular context, such as 'rationalist' or 'secular humanist'.
As for stating that God doesn't exist, here, as simply as I can manage, are my thought processes leading to that statement.
1) We have some good ideas about how the universe works: chemistry, geology, astronomy, biology, neurology, psychology, sociology, mathematics, mathematics-based game theory, game-theory-based ethics, and so on.
2) There does not seem to be any reliable evidence that anything we call "supernatural" exists. There is, in fact, sufficient lack of evidence to describe such lack as evidence for the non-existence of the supernatural. Some references I use to help describe this lack:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html ,
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html ,
http://whatstheharm.net/ ,
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ .
3) The God of Abraham, sometimes referred to as Allah, requires a specific set of
leaps of faith to exist: that the supernatural exists, that supernatural beings exist, that such beings have consciousness, that at least one such being is eternal, that at least one such being is capable of creating something from nothing, that such a being is capable of miracles, that it is all-knowing, that it is all-powerful, and that it is all-loving. (Some faiths add additional criteria.)
4) Applying #2 to #3 implies that the very first such leap of faith is questionable, and needs to be addressed before any of the others are even considered.
5) The principle of
Russell's teapot implies that even if God exists, but He does so in a way that is indistinguishable from a universe in which He does not exist (that is, that His existence is a matter of unsubstantiated faith rather than knowledge based on evidence), then it is both reasonable and rational to act /as if/ He does not exist; and it is further reasonable and rational to /conclude/ that He does not exist. (The differences between these two latter conclusions are basically the same as the ones between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.)
With all that said, I do not say that there is a 100% certainty that God exists. (Thanks to Bayes' theorem, and even just the simpler form of Laplace's sunrise formula, one cannot truly say that there is a 100% certainty of /anything/.) What I /do/ say is that, based on the evidence available to me, it is /highly unlikely/ He exists as described, that unlikelihood being so great that it is reasonable both for me to act as if He does not exist (in much the same way it is reasonable for me to act as if I'm not going to win the lottery), and it is also reasonable for me to conclude that He does not exist (in much the same way that I have concluded that invisible pink unicorns do not exist).
And with /that/ said, I do not rule out the possibility that, at some point in the future, I will encounter evidence which will convince me of His existence. But, based on past experience, I predict that it is unlikely that I will encounter such evidence; and based on the principles of rationalism and logic, such evidence would have to meet certain standards. For just one example of a piece of evidence that would convince me to reconsider my stance on the supernatural, we could take that site I listed above,
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ ; if I were to witness the spontaneous regrowth of a limb, under circumstances that ruled out ordinary fraud, sleight-of-hand illusion, medical intervention, and other mundane causes, then that would be highly interesting. One way to help rule out such mundane causes would be for me to grow a limb - and since I'd rather avoid going through the trouble of losing one first, one of the suggestions I've made to theists in the past is that a miracle that would be sufficient for me to reconsider my atheism would be for me to grow a new limb from scratch, such as a nice, long tail. No, I'm not joking or kidding about that - from what has been described of Allah's powers, miraculously causing a true tail to appear on a human is within His powers; and it is one example of something that would lead to my ceasing to be an atheist.
I finish with something an acquaintance of mine once said, along the lines of, "God's omniscient and omnipotent, so He knows what it would take to make me believe in Him, and has the power to do so. The only reasonable conclusion from the fact that I /don't/ believe in Him is that He doesn't /want/ me to believe in Him."
Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat
lu .iacu'i ma krinu lo du'u .ei mi krici la'e di'u li'u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti