He doesn’t need to meet many athiests; meeting one of them online in a forum & generalizing their argumentation & responses is all the evidence Max apparently needs.
Forgive me but you do not get it. I will be less subtle: There is no universally objective defintion of what constitutes benevolence.
No. The fallacy is to claim that you know for a fact what happened. Your witnesses may be wrong, or lying, or may have gone mad or whatever. There’s no logical necessity connecting what a witness says that happened and what really happened.
At least in the case of the Titanic the account of witnesses is a plausible story. However, what your ‘witnesses’ claim about revealed religion(s) is by no means plausible.
Well, I partially agree. I’m an agnostic so I don’t think that god’s existence can be proved…or disproved. I think atheism may be a bit of a stretch, but it’s not absurd. On the other hand the word “absurd” seems to be better suited to describe revealed religion/theism in my opinion…
Really? I don’t claim to be an expert, but the closest thing I’m aware of is Moses (or was that Charlton Heston?) seeing a burning shrub (FTR: I’ve seen those! But I attributed it to “garbage disposal”, “forest fire” or “fighting forest fires”, not “God”). Mohammed only claimed to talk with an “angel”, AFAIK.
You’ll find many residents of mental hospitals today who make much the same claims, and more - surely you don’t think they’re all credible?
As everybody above has been at great pains to point out to you, this is simply not true. Some - quite rightly - argue against the possibility that some particular conception of god doesn’t exist (such as the self-contradictory Judeo-Christian one - that’s why some posters keep asking what you mean by “God”), but nobody argues against the possibility of evidence per se.
I have specifically defined the atheist ideology to which I am referring. If that definition does not describe you then it doesn’t describe you. If you are not convinced by the evidence that is a reasonable position. To say that there can not be evidence because God is an impossibility is absurd.
If you agree its possible that God may exist and you are just lacking sufficient evidence then I wouldn’t describe you as an atheist.
You consistently fail to keep up with the debate. I have provided a common definition of God.
Human observation is evidence. We use human observation all the time and sometimes as the primary evidence for explaining what happened. So if you see little elves then it is not unreasonable to question the credibility of the witness. Questioning the credibility of the witnesses by itself is not necessarily sufficient evidence to say you didnt see an elf. What if ten million credible people claimed to see the elf? Would mass human observation of an event have no evidentiary value as to the possibility the event occurred? Which is not to say that witnesses are perfect or always the best source of evidence but to say that human observation is not evidence is unfounded.
Again, to say you don’t believe the witnesses is a reasonable position. To say that what they are saying is impossible is absurd.
No one has come to the defense of the atheist ideology that God can not exist. I have not seen any response to my original arguement. In fact what we see is the atheists backpedalling and whining about definitions of God and claiming that I don’t understand what atheism is even after I explicitly defined it and what I am discussing.
Until you prove your claim, you are a liar, my friend. The Burden of Proof is upon you.
There is no evidence => it is not reasonable.
Even if there were evidence for “a god”, it doesn’t apply to most believers. Most believers don’t just “believe in a god”, they KNOW who that god wants them to blow up, conquer or outlaw.
I have not met such atheists. As a promoter of reason, I would have to say such ‘atheists’ are irrational.
You act like the only possible answers to the god question are “we don’t know yet” and “yes”. There’s also “No”, if the god in question is sufficiently well defined.
A god which is defined by his promise of always providing what you ask of him is surely falsified by him failing to keep that promise.
There is no such thing as an “atheist” movement. The modern Dawkins/Harris/etc movement calls itself atheistic but it’s actually rationalistic.
They don’t exult the virtues of blind nonbelief, they exult the virtues of rational thought, of analysing evidence and accepting the conclusions no matter how they affect you. A rationalist can be a theist or an atheist, depending on the evidence.
Since there is no convincing evidence (fallacies are not evidence) to prove god(s) exist, especially the falsified gods of the holy books, rationalists are atheists.
Not all atheists are rationalists, though. Stalin was probably an atheist, and a commie. Feudalism was all religion (divine right, anyone?).Europe began to get out of the dark ages when the monopoly of the RCC subsided and that gave way to the enlightenment thinkers (many of which were atheists). The term “deist” is thrown around a lot in relation to the Founding Fathers. To the theists of the time, deism was just another form of atheism. That’s how I see it too: they believe in some prime mover, but that prime mover doesn’t tell them how to act or what to do.
It doesn’t describe anyone; that’s the whole point - you’re using a false defintion of “atheist”.
I could say I define “Christian” as someone who worships the ancient Greek gods, and then go on posting drivel about how silly Christians are for believing in Zeus…but since nobody who defines himself as “Christian” actually does believe in the ancient Greek gods, I’d look like an idiot if I did that, right? That’s exactly what you’re doing!
You didn’t, you just said “the Judeo-Christian God”, the precise properties of which Jews and Christians can’t all agree on, let alone the rest of us; but whatever they do agree on is logically contradictory. Therefore that god can’t exist. Is the argument over now?
The number of christian sects tells the story on how well-defined this “god” really is. Dan Barker used this as an argument against the “Judeo-Christian” god: his followers can’t agree on his properties and as we all [should] know, inconsistency => false (T & F → F)
If human observation of something does not qualify as evidence of something happening or existing then there are very few things in history that you can say definitively have occurred.
Atheists like yourself refuse to acknowledge human observation and experience as evidence.
So for you it is a question of what constitutes evidence. So answer the simple question. Is human observation and experience a form of evidence in determining whether something exists or an event happened? If the answer is yes, then there is lots of testimonial evidence for the existence of God. If the answer is no, then virtually everything you have been taught about history should be considered a myth because the vast majority of information about historical events is dependent on eye-witness evidence.
Since you appear to be the expert on the definition of an atheist, why don’t you take this opportunity to define it. I defined it out of the Websters dictionary.
You are saying that atheists don’t define there position as that there is no God?
The lack of knowledge or lack of agreement on all aspects of something is not evidence it doesn’t exist. It is only evidence that the understanding of it is limited.
Lots of scientists disagree about various theories or conditions in the universe, that doesn’t make any particular theory an impossibility. The atheist ideology doesn’t examine things logically but based on emotional anti-religion response. The existence of God is no different than the existence of anything else. The same logic and reason must be followed and the same open examination of evidence as well. This includes human observation and experiences.
We have the scientific method for a reason: personal experience is a TERRIBLE way to determine reality.
If we believed personal experience, we’d still believe in fairies, ghosts, nessie, yeti, god, ra, zeus, thor, zalmoxis, saturn, the great spirit, uri geller, etc.
This is the WHOLE POINT of the rational skeptic movement (think Carl Sagan, QuackWatch, James Randi): human beings LOVE to deceive themselves and are terrible at discerning what’s true from what’s false.
There is a whole science devoted to analysing the quirks of the human mind in an experimental fashion: Social Psychology, and it has shown that one should never trust what one sees/thinks/imagines without first testing it in a scientific manner.
Science is just another word for “knowing by proving yourself wrong and avoiding self-deception”, not a “dogma”.
People don’t believe the earth is round because Gagarin saw it.
People don’t “believe” in the electromagnetic theory because Maxwell did some math back in the 19’th century.
If you fail to grasp the difference between a hypothesis (such as god) and the massive research and experimentation done to back-up scientific theories, then don’t accuse us of not “getting it”.
If your god is so real as you claim he is, then why should he be immune to scientific inquiry? Why should we have to settle with personal anecdotes which don’t matter much to social scientists who EXPECT humans to deceve themselves?
Please, by all means, formulate falsifiable theories that make testable predictions, based on evidence. We’re all gladly waiting to add a new field to the wonderful world of rational inquiry!
I think what we’re all patiently waiting for is you to provide the source of this ‘atheistic doctrine’ from whence you derive your definition of what it is to be an atheist.
Or you can just keep whining because nobody choses to attack your strawman.
Either way it doesn’t much matter to me, all you’re doing is reinforcing my original opinion on the direction this thread would take.
If you are willing to say that all human observation and experience is by definition false then your claim would be consistent. However, you can not say that human observation and experience can be used for instance in criminal cases but can not be trusted in anything related to science. Either human observation and experience can be evidence or it can not. That does not say that all human observation is correct. Humans can make mistakes or misinterpert events.
Virtually all information about human history is based on humans telling the story of what happened. Your arguement suggests that nothing humans say happened is sufficient evidence for it having happened. If you consistently apply your arguement then there is almost no possible way to convict people of crimes or to record historical events. Everything basically by your definition becomes a myth.
It doesn’t describe anyone. And god is just as much an impossibility as a square circle is (and for the same reason conceptually). To believe otherwise is absurd.
Why ? Actually, to believe in miracles and impossible things is absurd. And there’s evidence which seems to suggest that revealed religion is a scam used to politically control people - something libertarians don’t like much ?
The answer is “it depends”. People sometimes experience hallucinations, for instance. Do you think that hallucinations prove that imaginary things are real ?
You consistently fail to keep up with the debate; the judeo-christian god’s definition relies on fallacies and logical impossibilities.
So if that is all you have, then clearly you have lost. If you wish to change the definition, then you need to do so.
Then since I observe the elf on my shoulder, it exists. QED.
Want to keep throwing out fallacy after fallacy? I don’t even break a sweat (metaphorically) in catching them.
A billion Chinese can’t be wrong, eh?
Do you have ANYTHING that isn’t fallacious?