Mastodawn

platypus_plumba Aug 31, 2024

My problem with atheism

https://lemmy.world/post/19270285

My problem with atheism - Lemmy.World

First of all, I have more in common with atheists than religious people, so my intention isn’t to come here and attack, I just want to hear your opinions. Maybe I’m wrong, I’d like to hear from you if I am. I’m just expressing here my perception of the movement and not actually what I consider to be facts. My issue with atheism is that I think it establishes the lack of a God or gods as the truth. I do agree that the concept of a God is hard to believe logically, specially with all the incoherent arguments that religions have had in the past. But saying that there’s no god with certainty is something I’m just not comfortable with. Science has taught us that being wrong is part of the process of progress. We’re constantly learning things we didn’t know about, confirming theories that seemed insane in their time. I feel like being open to the possibilities is a healthier mindset, as we barely understand reality. In general, atheism feels too close minded, too attached to the current facts, which will probably be obsolete in a few centuries. I do agree with logical and rational thinking, but part of that is accepting how little we really know about reality, how what we considered truth in the past was wrong or more complex than we expected I usually don’t believe there is a god when the argument comes from religious people, because they have no evidence, but they could be right by chance.

Flying Squid Aug 31, 2024

My issue with atheism is that I think it establishes the lack of a God or gods as the truth.

Atheism is not about truth, it is about belief. Atheists do not believe there are gods.

If an atheist says that it is an absolute truth that there are no gods, they are an atheist, but also a gnostic. Gnostics claim to know essentially unknowable things as truths.

platypus_plumba Aug 31, 2024

OK, it still seems like taking sides to me when there’s no evidence one way or the other. I’d just say “I don’t know” and move on. No need to take sides on something that I’m clueless about what’s reality or its origins.

There is no end to things that may exist but are not provable. Where do you draw the line? There might be a toaster orbiting the sun.

platypus_plumba Sep 1, 2024

Based on our understanding of the universe, we KNOW that toasters were created on earth and that it is unlikely one is in orbit on the sun… This is based on knowledge.

Now, what do you know about the creation of the universe or the nature of reality?

bramkaandorp Sep 2, 2024

There is no precedence for the existence of deities.

For belief in deities, yes, but not for their existence.

That is all we need to say if we believe in the existence of deities; prior plausibility.

Staying in the middle ground of “maybe, we don’t know” makes no sense, because it puts the plausibility one step further towards “yes” than is warranted based on the evidence we have.

platypus_plumba Sep 4, 2024

“There is no precedence for the existence of deities”

What makes you think humans have the capacity to perceive or understand deities?

It feels like you guys are really not understanding my point. Please put human existence into perspective and tell me how much we really know. Now, how much is there to know?

It’s like a blind person saying color doesn’t exist because he can’t experience it. You see? Humans will live and die in the relative blink of an eye. Chances are we won’t really get to know what’s actually going on. Right now we don’t really know, so having any opinion about what’s happening based on lack of evidence is really pointless. We have no evidence for most things that are actually happening in the universe.

bramkaandorp Sep 15, 2024

Sorry for my very late response.

In your example of color, there are people who can, and people who can’t see colors.

Is there any analogy between that and god belief?

Not just belief, because anyone can believe anything. I mean knowledge, or sensory input.

If no one can sense (detect) deities, then how can anyone say that there is one?

And if we can’t say that there is one, why would it be unreasonable to conclude that there probably isn’t one?

That is all I as an atheist believe. That, lacking any evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that there probably aren’t any deities.

All this talk about it being beyond our understanding sound like begging the question if you can’t demonstrate it.

platypus_plumba Sep 15, 2024

My point is that human perception, intelligence and understanding of the universe is comparable to a blind person and colors. Just because a blind person doesn’t perceive colors or have evidence of its existence, doesn’t mean that colors don’t exist. Just because humans aren’t intellectually capable of understanding the origin of the universe and the existence of a creator, doesn’t mean a creator doesn’t exist.

This whole “there’s no evidence” isn’t an absolute statement, it’s more like “humans haven’t gathered the evidence”. Humans haven’t gathered evidence for most of the things that are actually happening in the universe, and they are happening. We’re miniscule. We’re so small that we’re trapped in the observable universe, which is probably miniscule itself.

Yet, we stand tall and say aloud “This probably doesn’t exist because we, humans, haven’t experienced it”.

bramkaandorp Sep 16, 2024

I personally never said that I think there definitely is no god, so that part is a straw man argument.

It is also not a requirement of atheism, as has been explained to you multiple times. Insisting that your definition is the correct one doesn’t make it so.

Also, why is it not begging the question to say that it is out of our reach?

You say it’s like blind people and colors, but that analogy doesn’t work, because there are people who have seen colors, and can explain how colors work. Do you have a similar example for gods? Are there people who have “seen” gods, so to speak?

platypus_plumba Sep 17, 2024

If you read where people said that not all atheists believe there is no god, you probably also read that I said “OK, I didn’t know there were different types of atheists, I’m only talking about the ones that believe there is no god”. Then, I’m not sure why you’d point that out now.

bramkaandorp Sep 17, 2024

“I believe there is a god” seems less likely, given the evidence. It only seems equally likely if you arbitrarily put god above everything else. Something someone only does if they think it is important to keep the idea alive.

platypus_plumba Sep 18, 2024

Again, we don’t really understand the nature of the universe. We barely understand some of its rules, probably in a very incomplete or scoped way. Whatever you choose to believe in this matter is just a guess.

One day we’ll probably understand the inner workings, we’ll probably be able to simulate the actual origin, we’ll be able to figure out all the interactions. Until that day arrives, if it ever does, we should just stop playing this guessing game and accept we just don’t know.

bramkaandorp Sep 18, 2024

Yes, it is.

If we don’t see evidence, then clinging onto the concept just because people have believed in it in the past doesn’t make sense.

Because if not for that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Because we wouldn’t have a concept of there possibly, maybe being a god in the first place.

platypus_plumba Sep 20, 2024

You have not seen evidence for most of the things that are happening in the universe.

bramkaandorp Sep 21, 2024

Does that translate to a 50/50 chance of gods existing?

Urist Sep 2, 2024

So there is actually a valid critisism of Russel’s teapot, or toaster in this case, that there could be a detectable causality that put the object in orbit even if the object itself cannot be observed (such as a rocket to deliver it). However, this (minor) flaw in a popularized analogy does nothing to reject what the analogy represents: A stupid idea that cannot really be falsified, even though it is false (see what I did there?).

Atheist do not carry any belief in not believing (this even sounds stupid). We simply have come to the conclusion that there is no basis for believing in any particular denomination, nor some unspecific general one for that matter.

platypus_plumba Sep 4, 2024

Yeah, I guess it really comes down to semantics.

Does “I don’t believe” mean “I believe there is no god” or “I don’t have a belief”? I think there is a very important distinction here. The first one says “based on my experience, I think it is unlikely there is a god”. The second one says “I really don’t believe anything about it, one way or the other”.

My point targets the first one. In your experience, which is minimal. Based on lack of evidence, when human evidence is minimal… This is my problem with this line of thought. “There is no evidence” doesn’t give any degree of confidence at all when it comes to this matter. There no evidence for most of the things that make reality exist, and yet here we are.

Urist Sep 4, 2024

Atheists mean by the second that they find as little material basis for believing in god as in [insert whack theory here (teapot, spaghettimonster, etc.)]. We do maje a judgement one way or the other, we say that our default position is not believing literally incredible things without proof.

The bar for what needs to be proven unless assumed false is higher the more that is claimed. Since god (especially tp monotheistic denominations) are by definition the highesr being claimed to exist, there is a huge burden on proof for believing in it. Since there exists none, we choose to assume that the statement is false.

The reason we make all these stupid analogies is to hammer through the point that we, like everyone else, make a lot of assumptions that unproven things are false. The question of god is not really special in this regard, except for the historical and biological conditions that makes people inclined to believe in the fairytale absent of any good objective reason.

platypus_plumba Sep 4, 2024

You used “not believing” in your explanation. Does that mean “I have no belief” or does it mean “I believe it is false”?

Urist Sep 4, 2024

If you want to make conclusions about matters humans can barely comprehend

We do not know everything about the universe, sure, but to say it is outside our scope of comprehension is a stretch that I would argue follows from religious dogma: “God works in mysterious ways” and all that. In fact, the developments of the last centuries have shown that most of the things we thought were mysterious, we could actually explain with science.

Most religious people claim to know more about the world than atheists: After all, they are the ones having some sort of relationship with some ethereal/omnipotent being.

platypus_plumba Sep 4, 2024

It’s not about God working in mysterious ways, it’s about us having very little understanding of what constitutes reality. Like you know, this thing we’re experiencing right now. We don’t really understand it, or do you understand what’s happening right now?

It is indeed a mystery because we have no idea how reality works. Even if God doesn’t exist, reality is a mystery. We understand some things, sure, but we don’t really understand the things that would let us answer “is there a creator?”.

Urist Sep 5, 2024

I am not claiming to have some deeper knowledge of metaphysical reality than anyone else. On the contrary, this is precisely what religious people do. I base my understanding of reality based on what I can observe and interact with: the material reality.

This does not mean I cannot do imaginative things: I have background in theoretical mathematics that does not really care about material reality other than the logical predicates that exist within it.

Actually, I am quite dumbfounded by the assumption of any symmetry of typical religious questions such as believing in a creator or not, because in my view any such kind of dichotomy presupposes an original creation in the first place: Why would there be? Because the bible or some other text written by humans says so?

If humanity never developed eyes, everything else remaining the same, we would never imagine seeing colors but we sure as hell would have religions. This is because as a tool for understanding the material world, and in my opinion of philosophy as well, religion is a creative and analytical show stopper.