Nothing can ever count as evidence for God or against atheism in the mind of the atheist. I established this last time I was posting here. The skeptical mind forces itself into a corner which eventually, through constant use in a skeptical mode, tricks the user into thinking he/she is making some big gain of insight but he/she is actually closing off the ability to take the necessary risks to step beyond that which is proven and extrapolate to a position of belief.
I am not saying all atheists always think this way. I'm just saying these tendencies that are brought by the skeptical habit of mind.
(1) the mentality to dobut as long as possible.
If any kind of doubt is possible, however slight the probability, the atheist must take it.
(2) Unless something is totally proven it cannot be given any kind of presumption no matter how rationally warranted or how strongly evidenced.
If God is not 100% proven God is 0% proven and though one may consider God 99% proven if it is not 100% then its nothing.
(3) The "no evidence" circle.
this is a form of question begging/circular reasoning that works like this
*there is no evidence for the existence of God because God is not absoltuely proven.
*Since there is no evidence there can be no evidence
*since there can be no evidence than anything presented as evidence must be wrong.
these are all just a large circle of reasoning based upon the false premise in no 1. There are probably corresponding problems that the faith habit of mind produces. But what this mens is that atheism is unverifiable/falsifiable. It's not an analytical position because it's not open proof or disproof.
This applies especially to atheist on message boards. I think atheist seek to gain preferences for their view. the dictum about extraordinary evidence proves this. why should religious experience be deemed "extraordinary?" when it includes 90% of the people in the world.? the assumption is that their assumptions should be the "default." That's why they are always trying to claim mass populations they are not intitleed to, like Buddhism or all new born babies.
The better paradigm would be:
(1) doubt as long as you have real doubts and be willing to assign prima facie to good arguments.
(2) rational warrant.
rational warrant is about all any world view can offer. belief in God is a world view. there is no reason to islaote it form other views or set the bar any higher for it than for any of them.
This is only to rich. I put this put on CARM atheist board. And this atheist is going to show me what's wrong with it. here are his responses:
Fixed:
*there is no evidence for the existence of God because we've for naturalistic explanations for almost everything we've ever studied.
*If the God hypothesis were correct, we'd have found evidence for it by now.
*Since there is no evidence yet, we can feel comfortable in assuming tentatively that there is no God. Taking this assumption will put us in a position where atheism may disproved by contradiction.
Is it possible to saything that would more clearly illustrate the points I just made?
If i may, you seem to be confusing atheism with some kind of alternate religion or world view. It is not.
ReplyDeleteAtheism is simply this, "the lack of belief in a god".
Thats it, nothing more. Now, many atheists have other beliefs, i certainly do, and some of these go very well with atheism, such as respect for the scientific method. But these beliefs are not atheism. They are seperate.
When you say we are not entitled to claim babies as atheists, you are clearly wrong. Babies do not have a belief in god, they are therefore atheists. This is also true of some buddhists (some forms of buddhism do have gods, although since i have not studied buddhism much i cannot comment as to their significance, if any in the religion).
Anyway, to your other points.
"(1) the mentality to dobut as long as possible"
Speaking as an atheist, i use Occams razor. This means that i doubt an explanation while a simpler explanation exists. Therefore i do not believe in UFO's until i have eliminated other aircraft, weather balloons, swamp gas, mental instability on the part of the observers, etc. It doesn't mean that i don't believe in the possibility of UFO's, just that there is usually a better explanation. Where there isn't a better explanation its a UFO, but only in its true meaning. It doesn't make it a flying saucer full of little green men.
"(2) Unless something is totally proven it cannot be given any kind of presumption no matter how rationally warranted or how strongly evidenced."
Occams razor again, for a miracle to be a miracle, it must be more unlikely than any other possible explanation.
As for your no evidence circle, i've never even seen something like this. the first and second point make no sense, the third point does interest me though.
"since there can be no evidence than anything presented as evidence must be wrong"
This is false, but similar to what many atheist hold as true. Evidence for a miracle or sign of god must be more miraclous than other explanations. Evidence offered for miracles is usually very lacking. Many theists seem to think revelation is good evidence, depsite their inability to show it to anyone else.
Now, you argue why evidence needs to be extraordinary when 90% of the world are believers. This is an arguement from popularity and you must know that this is a bad basis to argue from. 90% of the worlds population do not believe in the same thing. I'm sure the buddhists and shinto-ists will agree with me when i say that christianity is flat out wrong, and i'm sure the christians will agree with me when i say the Shinto-ists and pagans are wrong, and so on. Now its you claiming people to your cause that are unjustified.
If you want to argue from popularity then clearly Jesus in his own time was completely wrong (having only a very small group of followers) AND he had miracles to back him up.
Dear friend,
ReplyDeleteHere is why Gerald Schroeder is a Crank and Antony Flew is false:
http://philophil.blogspot.com/2008/01/antony-flew-richard-dawkins-and-gerald.html