Is belief or unbelief more reasonable?

[Tim]

Asked and answered @thoughtful

@Tim

“Belief” isn’t a single thing, it is a disparate group of often mutually-contradictory things. So it doesn’t make sense to ask “should I believe?” without first specifying what it is you are actually contemplating believing in. So we look at each belief individually .

Atheists are outsiders to all religion. Therefore it is not illogical that we assign a similar probability to each religion’s supernatural claims that any other outsider does.

You are an outsider to Islam. You assigned a zero probability to Muhammad splitting the Moon (and would likely do so to other Muslim supernatural claims that are not also Christian supernatural claims). Therefore it is not unreasonable that an atheist would also assign zero probability.

A Muslim is an outsider to Christianity. That Muslim would likely assign a zero probability to Christ’s ressurection. Therefore it is not unreasonable that an atheist would also assign zero probability.

And so on.

Addendum: this response was meant to be a reply to the thread as a whole, not @AlanFox’s post.

Further addendum:

I already thought that this conversation was getting nowhere on its previous thread. I also had a not-too-dissimilar (and equally unproductive) conversation with @Ashwin_s on https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/strident-atheist-atheists/

Maybe other unbelievers like @Faizal_Ali, @T_aquaticus or @Rumraket might be interested?