... yeah, what almostatheist said. I have yet to hear someone have an idea of God that sounds plausible or reasonable. I won't entirely rule out something bigger than what we have now, but I don't think of whatever it may be as "God" in the sense of a supreme being who knows and sees all.
Agnostic or Athiest--which makes more sense?
by whyizit 33 Replies latest jw friends
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Carmel
Having been an agnostic for several years, for the exact reasons you stated, I've always said it was the only honest route to take. I could neither prove or disprove the existence of a "creator". It took many years and a major paradigm shift to come to a "belief" in a Supreme Being again, but then the definition of that essence was so dissimilar to the biblical (especially the OT) God.
carmel
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The wanderer
Agnostic who leaves open the door for
either of the two possibilities.
Respectfully,
The Wanderer -
whyizit
Borgia asked what made me change my mind from being agnostic to a believer.
I was a believer in the evolution theory. After all, it was taught as fact my whole life. Look at a first grader's science book. How many times do you find a sentence that says "Millions of years ago..." and then goes on to state the information as some kind of proven fact, which it is not. It is a theory. We don't know anyone who was alive back then, so there is no way we can say that we know for a fact anything about what was or was not going on millions of years ago.
I think it was Hitler who said that if you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, eventually people will believe it. That is kind of how I feel about evolution. It's been taught long and loud as a scientific fact. It has been a doctrine taught in the public school system from the time kids are 5 years old, so doesn't it make sense that a lot of people doubt the Biblical account of creation? In comparison, one sounded like a fairy tale and the other sounded like a very intelligent, well-thought out and researched fact.
That was my dilema. How does Noah's Ark, etc.... fit into evolution? It just doesn't go together. My brain was stuck on fitting Biblical accounts into evolution. But it never did add up in my mind. The I had the opportunity to see Dr. Kent Hovind speak at a creation science seminar. In two hours, the wall that kept me from believing in God was knocked to ground in a pile of rubble! When the truth finally sets in that you have believed and been taught a bunch of nonsense, it is very freeing. Although I was disappointed in myself, because I felt like such a fool for believing a lie for so long. The Biblical account of creation makes much more sense than evolution. Science supports and proves it. Evolution is more of a fairy tale, when you examine it from both sides. THAT was what changed things for me.
Because of THAT, I have always made sure to research things from both sides. Not to just trust something at face value, because it seems to sound good at the moment and I like the people who are doing the talking. THAT is why I am HERE! I found JWD when searching for answers about the WTS.
Also, I should probably mention that I do believe the Bible. I believe in God. I know from reading the Bible that God is not about "doing", He is about "relationships". I am not "religious". Jesus spoke out against the religious leaders of his day all the time. They were always studying, but never understanding. Reading the Scriptures, but not seeing that they testified about Jesus! Reading the NT, then reading the OT was real eye opener. You can see how the OT is pointing to Jesus all the way through, if you read the NT first. It is so cool. It serves to confirm to me that no one human could come up with a book like the Bible, let alone a group of people over such a large stretch of time. It is beyond human capabilities. I can't take it out on God, just because some overly religious Pharisees have represented Him in a poor manner. The Bible explains Who He is and what He wants perfectly. He wants relationships. We become righteous by accepting Christ first, THEN we are justified to be children of God. The result is being able to accomplish good things from that righteousness. Not the other way around: Do good, earn righteousness, then God accepts you. We can never be that good, no matter how hard we try! Romans 8:8-9 and Gal. 4 clenched it all for me.
That is my story. That is why I am no longer agnostic. It just doesn't make sense.
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parakeet
jwfacts: ***It can not be proven that there is no God, so being an Athiest takes faith.***
It's up to the person making the assertion ("God exists") to prove the assertion. In the absence of proof, the argument fails. I could assert that dinosaurs still live today on a remote island somewhere. Your failing to prove that my assertion is wrong doesn't mean I'm correct. It would be up to me to prove my assertion to your satisfaction before you would be expected to accept it.
It doesn't take faith to be an atheist -- it takes a lack of evidence. -
lonelysheep
Parakeet--I am with you on that 100% .
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Midget-Sasquatch
Would anyone have believed in radio waves 200 years before Marconi? Rationally, according to what was knowable at the time, the answer would have been no. Yet neutron stars have been emitting them for millions of years. They weren't even known until astronomers began scanning the sky for radio signals.
So much of what we've learned about external reality depends on a combination of imagination to try to extend the boundaries of the known (like LittleToe mentioned), as well as technological innovations that make it possible. If God is spiritual (non-material) then we simply cannot use our current technology. There's no way of gaining any knowledge about the spiritual and God for now. But that doesn't necessarily mean that because we don't have the equipment to reach out to God that there isn't a God that could reach out to us in some way. Now I know there's a heck of alot of questions that argue for the absence of God, but I think there's some rational reason to keep the possibility there.
So I'd say that agnosticism makes a bit more sense than atheism - although the latter group may very well be correct. :)
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AlanF
whyizit, you make a reasonable point with regard to what most people regard as "strong atheism", i.e., professing to know that there is no Christian God. However, exactly the same can be said about belief in any other gods -- Allah, Thor, Zeus, whatever. So this in itself is not evidence in favor of the existence of the Christian God.
In his recent book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins gives a list of seven milestones in the continuous probability spectrum of belief in some god, which he explains generally means the Christian God in his book, since that's the god most of his intended readers will be familiar with. This is in a discussion of what atheism and agnosticism mean in the context of "true believers in God". The last two milestones are:
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.'
7. Strong atheist. 'I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung "knows" there is one.'
Dawkins comments on this list: "I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7 -- I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden."
I'm completely with Dawkins on this. I'm in category 6 with respect to God, the supernatural in general, the paranormal, UFOs as conveyors of alien beings, and a lot more besides.
You commented that, upon hearing a lecture by the young-earth creationist Kent Hovind, you began believing in his style of creationism. I have to say that, if all it took was one lecture by this charlatan to flip from accepting solid science to accepting the myths of YECism, you're gullible indeed. You obviously had no real grounding in science.
Hovind actually teaches that Tyrannosaurs terrorized Europe until just a few hundred years ago. Indeed, the epic Germanic story of Beowulf describes the depredations of the monster Grendel, which was a Tyrannosaur, sez Hovind. Do you really believe this due to evidence, or just because Hovind says so?
You marvel at the abilities of the eye, and say that "something that magnificent had to have a creator." Yet you don't wonder about the creator of a creator who could create such things. Why is that?
I know why that is: you've fallen into the same believer's trap that so many do: you simply say, "Well, the buck stops with God. God had no creator but has always existed." Well of course, that's no kind of answer to the problem. It's just a thought stopping mechanism. If one claims that "life always comes from life", or that our universe just must have had a creator, then by the same logic, the creator of our universe must have had a creator. And so on ad infinitum. So claiming that the buck stops with the Christian God is just special pleading. On the other hand, if one allows that a Supreme Creator must have always existed, then one must also logically allow that the macrocosmic universe of which our local universe may be just an infinitesimal part must have also always existed. So either way, one runs smack into the problem of origins.
AlanF
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undercover
I have a friend who is a proclaimed atheist. Whenever it comes up and people hear that he's an atheist they almost always say, "You don't believe in God?" to which he always replys, "No, it's not that I don't believe in 'God', it's that I don't believe there is a 'God'".
From his point of view, he thinks agnostics are wishy washy. They can't decide; one day it's this, the next it's that. We have debated it some because I lean toward agnostic myself these days, but I have to admit he seems to have his shit together and has accepted that there is no God and he doesn't lose any sleep over it and lives life without fear or apprehension of "what if".
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nicolaou
We come up against this topic so many times so I've just 'cut & paste' a comment of mine from an earlier topic. Nic'
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Believers often say that atheism is just another faith position because, lacking any conclusive evidence of god's non-existence, faith is required to justify the belief. But faith is not always needed to span the gap between proof and belief. For a great many beliefs absolute proof is simply unavailable but that doesn't justify a suspension of belief in every case. Why?
Because even when there is not conclusive proof there can be overwhelming evidence or one explanation which is superior to the alternatives. It takes a great deal of faith to believe in the supernatural, god, the soul, prayer or life after death but nowhere near the same amount to disbelieve those things. That is because atheism is based on observation and logical argument. Atheists believe what they have good reason to and don't believe what they have little reason to.
Atheism is not a faith position because it believes nothing beyond what there is evidence for.
Consider the famous account of Christ's disciple, Thomas. He believed that Jesus had died because he had very compelling evidence to believe it. He was not ready to believe that Christ had returned from the dead because reason and experience counted overwhelmingly against it. He only believed when presented with the evidence! Now the scriptures advise; "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" - John 20:29 So Christianity advises you to believe what you have no evidence to believe - very convenient.
Faith cannot fill the gap between reasons to believe and proof, it merely props up beiefs that lack a secure foundation of evidence and reason. That is why 'Holy Men' and 'Sacred Books' tell us faith is not as easy as ordinary belief - or perhaps why atheists say that faith is foolish.
Agnosticism is a very weak position and one I find difficult to respect.
Nic'