Stop conflating human scientific achievement with atheism.
Um, im not.
Boy that was easy.
This seems confusing to me.
As far as I am concerned, âatheismâ and âtheismâ are words that describe how people live their lives. I donât see them as hypotheses. Theists are not spending their lives testing an hypothesis.
If those terms refer to ways of life, then it doesnât make a lot of sense to say that theism is true or that atheism is true.
That science is systematic in its exploring the world.
But why do people live their lives that way? Because that think their worldview is true. How do you determine that? By looking at the evidence and determining which view best explains that evidence. It makes sense to refer to them as hypotheses in that instance. Every worldview has multiple sides. On Theism you have a spiritual side and an intellectual side. Atheism you have an intellectual side and then the way you live because you think atheism is true.
I was thinking more along the lines of the order of the universe that makes systematic observation and experimentation possible. Why is it the way it is? What best explains an orderly universe?
The âweakâ atheist may well make an argument against the existence of capital-G God. Thatâs a different question than arguing âno gods existâ. As a âweakâ atheist who doesnât assert that âno gods existâ, Iâll happily say that âI believe God doesnât existâ.
I think itâs worth pointing out that words most often become defined through usage. People who donât believe in gods refer to themselves as atheists in most cases, and this is probably the most common usage of the word. The needs of philosophy are a separate context, for which a more precise definition may be desirable, but that wonât automatically trump all ordinary usage of the word.
People are a lot more complicated than that.
As best I can tell, the order that we see in the universe is the order that results from the way that we have systematized our interactions with the universe.
Dawkins states that God could exist, but before you said that an atheist must believe that God does not exist. This seems contradictory to me.
A weird place is the best place to be. Our journey through life should always bring us challenges and new experiences.
Part of my worldview is that I and other humans are fallible. That kind of throws a wrench into the whole Truth with a capital âTâ idea. One doesnât have to believe that gods donât exist in order to conclude that theists have yet to make a compelling case for the existence of gods.
Not at all. When I was an atheist I believed God did not exist because I felt like the balance of evidence made Godâs existence improbable. But I still believed God could exist. The evidence just didnât suggest it to me at the time.
This is what you said before:
âWorst definition in the history of the world. I hated it as an atheist and I hate it now. Really it seems to be a definition designed to avoid atheismâs burden of proof. Atheism is a positive claim that there are no gods.â
Dawkins makes no such positive claim that gods do not exist, and yet you still call him an atheist. How is that not contradictory?
I look at these types of questions through Bayesian colored glasses. My approach is very similar to Draper and Swinburne. All about priors and updating beliefs accordingly when new evidence comes to be
Have you ever read any of his work? He constantly makes arguments against God. Thatâs making a case for atheism and not merely denying Theism because of a lack of evidence for it
He contradicts himself
Fair enough. This seems to be the approach that most atheists take.
I think there is a difference between pointing to contradictions and problems within a specific theological system and arguing against the existence of any god or gods.
That can be true. There can be arguments for naturalism that really arenât against Theism and arguments against Theism that arenât really arguments for naturalism. And some can be both