Is Atheism a Form of Blind Faith? (page 12)

AllTimeJeff

Here's the real gaff for atheists, THEIR PREMISE REQUIRES DELUSIONS OF OMNIPOTENCE in order to try and make the premise work for them. It also requires the discrediting of Christian testimony.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Born again Christians live a life of total testing out God. When I do X or, follow Y path, God responds thusly or doesn't respond thusly. They are able to prove (through testable and repeatable scenarios) to themselves what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

You are acting like a self righteous ass Perry. And your conclusions are wrong. Have a wonderful, born again day. I am going back to work so that I can further pad my delusion of omnipotence.

passwordprotected

Password - I respectfully repeat my request for some examples of the evidence you referred to in your last answer to me

The fantastic intricacy of evolutionary threads could point to absolute randomness. Or it could point to an incredibly intelligent and complex supernatural being called God.

Unlike others on this forum, I'm not from a scientific background, but I thought this statement summed up what I'm trying to get across;

You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same.

Spook

The bad argument for personal experiences goes like this:

1. A person has a profound, transcendant feeling.

2. They have a theology in mind.

3. They attribute the feeling within the theology.

An outsider can tell that WHICH theology the experience is applied to by the individual is entirely corelated to whatever they were doing at the time by an astounding margin. My father had such a charasmatic experience and became a JW after decades of resistance. I understand he had a nervous breakdown after the stock market collapse and reached for family connections as a means to cope. Nothing supernatural there.

The claims of personal experiences are severely weakened by three objective facts:

1) The experiences have a high degree of uniformity across diverse and contradictory theologies.

2) Categorically, these kinds of experiences have been studied scientifically and are strongly correlated to specific brain structures.

3) Psychologically, the character profile and current life experiences of those who experience such situations have innumerable natural causal factors in common.

So, these claims of evidence are weakened by numerous explanatory natural elements and observations.

It is impossible to falsify an individual claim, but it is simple to greatly weaken the value of the entire line of evidence.

daniel-p

I don't have faith that god does or does not exist. Is it so hard to imagine a life that suspends conclusive belief? What's so intellectually hard about not knowing, and not needing to know, the existence of a Creator?

besty

Password - I respectfully repeat my request for some examples of the evidence you referred to in your last answer to me.

The fantastic intricacy of evolutionary threads could point to absolute randomness. Or it could point to an incredibly intelligent and complex supernatural being called God.

And my unsubtle argument is that inserting a creator god into the equation adds complexity, whereas Occams Razor indicates removal of unnecessary variables will tend to provide the correct answer.

Therefore, as we don't know how the universe or life came to be, the most probable answer is "it just did".

WRT to evolutionary intricacy, science provides a compelling set of facts and resorting to the blunt instrument of Occams Razor is not required.

JWoods

Atheism is sort of like animal rights. Many hunters belong to such groups as Ducks Unlimited, which are all for expanding wetland preservation to protect migrant birds.

PETA, on the other hand, is something far different. And far more radical by orders of magnitude.

And so you will find quiet, non-combative atheists in surprising numbers (even some who go to a church for social reasons). Many of these might more properly be called agnostics.

And so you will find the real toolcase full of wingnuts: Running into a catholic church dressed as nuns in drag, disrupting mass, and so on. I know a self-avowed atheist who actually joined in with Scientology for a long while - and saw no great conflict of interest, as his main agenda was a hatred of conventional christianity.

passwordprotected

What's so intellectually hard about not knowing, and not needing to know, the existence of a Creator?

Please refer to the OP. I'm not suggesting it's intellectually hard. I'm surprised you've decided to use a strawman.

passwordprotected

Therefore, as we don't know how the universe or life came to be, the most probable answer is "it just did".

Would I be churlish to suggest this is absolute reductionism? We've to accept evolution is the ultimate answer until we reach the end of evolution (in reality, the start of evolution), then we're presented with even bigger questions as to how life itself began but we've then to accept "it just did" as the answer? Have we to accept that as the answer because science has no other?

Of course, going back to the OP, if we take Gould at his word, science can't be used to prove or disprove God. Therefore I'd suggest that atheism is a faith and a blind one.

Perry

Is it so hard to imagine a life that suspends conclusive belief?

for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Heb. 11: 6a

That might seem like a safe position. But God's habit many times is to simply give people what they really want, thereby allowing a participation in your own destiny.

besty

Mark you are happy with Jesus and I'm happy with I don't know, but most probably not.

Perry on the other hand appears to be ducking my Afghanistan question - like every other born again I have asked it of.

Is Atheism a Form of Blind Faith?

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