[Nailo]

Finally, consider your life a job and do it honestly. Don't worry about supervision.

I completely disagree with this.
We need to question things, doesn't matter if it's politics/religion/life/etc .Getting sucked into it and forgetting about your life is different.

Yes, knowledge is important. But this is like Egg first or Chicken. You are welcome to disagree with it.

Much like the ending of Inception the movie.

Spoiler:

It isn't shown if the top falls or not, and the camera moves to the happy family reunion. Nor was Leonardo interested in knowing, because it didn't matter if it was real or not.

Wait I now can't agree or disagree with your post, I haven't watched Inception yet...

Blasphemy!!!

[Frooxius]

I'm a Christian myself, and I used to question God like you cannot imagine, there's not a damn bit of proof for his existence, but in the end, I just had faith that's all.

First let me say: I respect your right to have any beliefs you want and that's not an issue for me (some people think that when people disagree or challenge someone's belief, they don't respect that right, so I want to say that up front) and also thank you for your response.

But I would like to ask: If there's no proof for existence, why believe it at all? I myself care if my beliefs are as close to the truth and reality as possible, which is why I look for sufficient evidence to prove they're true.

Believing something on faith like that is essentially believing without reason, without knowing with any degree of certainty that the belief is true.

You can "justify" believing absolutely anything on faith. Person could say that he has faith that universe was made by a transcendental coughing potato. Or some could even say they believe on faith that we should kill all blond haired kids at age 5 to be rewarded by that coughing potato with endless wealth (I'm not implying that your case is anything like that of course, I am just demonstrating why I think believing something on faith is not a good reason to believe).

But with logic, reasoning and evidence, we can find out that such behavior is harmful to people and to the whole society and that it doesn't have anything to support it and we can justify this and forbid any such actions.

Here's the thing about science that I've noticed; it gives people some sort of insignificant proof to grasp and use for themselves (not saying Atheists do this specifically). For people who support abortion (completely disagree) , they've looked to science to tell them that yeah the baby isn't technically born, so you're not technically killing it. But here's the thing, take a step back; if you didn't kill the child it might do something great.

I think your view of science is quite distorted. It's quite the contrary - science finds very significant evidence to support certain position and it accumulates more over time and keeps perfecting its positions as new ideas and data come in - at any time it provides the best possible explanations for our observations.

Abortion is a bit different topic. There are atheists who are against it even. I'm not necessarily against it - of course we should try to do it as little as possible, but if the person isn't ready for a kid or doesn't want one, or her life is even in danger, then I think she should have the right to decide to stop it - that is before its remotely human.

You can't really argue with "It might do something great". There's potential for anything anywhere - we just don't know, so it's not useful to base any decisions on. For example one might as well argue that the kid would grow up to be a murderer or thief and do terrible things to other people and abortion prevented that.

Plus you could use the same kind of argument for even ridiculous claims: for example someone could argue that at any moment, if you conceived a child, he might grew up to do something incredible and yet you're wasting time with something else. So you should be conceiving children every single moment, because by not doing that, you're preventing from many possible new Einsteins being born.

Abortion doesn't stop from children being born completely. It is just in cases where the person for some reason doesn't want to / can't have children - but other people will keep having children all around the world, many of them possible "new Einsteins".

There's possibilities for anything everywhere, so stopping or preventing some of them happening - either by action or inaction doesn't really matter, because the amount of possibilities is overwhelming.

And you don't even know in advance what kind of child would it grow up to be, so arguing with what it can grow into doesn't carry much weight.

But abortion is up to individuals, science only tells us how the child develops and how it transforms into human, when the nervous system starts developing and working. It describes the world, the decisions made upon this description are completely up to people making them.

The closer you look, the less you see. Not to say you shouldn't go into detail and learn, but you've got to get the whole picture first. Science pretty much goes into so much detail that they often miss the point. Scientists finding that at a certain age the baby ain't alive, is pretty much useless information. I don't care if the heart's beatin' or not, at one point it could've been, and they could've done something great. But the scientist said it wasn't technically alive...

I don't think science really misses the point, but rather that you miss the point of science. Like I said above, science is rather descriptive. It might say it's not "alive" (in the sense of not having any brain and perceptions), but it doesn't tell you if you should abort it or not (it can tell you risks of both decisions though), but the decision is up to the individual - and if you don't want abortion, then don't have it.

And like I said, you could very well argue that it would grow into a thief, murderer or rapist and by aborting it before it's even alive, you prevent that from happening without absolutely any pain, because there was no person yet at all!

Or think of the mother - is her life worthless? What if having baby changes her life in a way (or even threatens her life) that she spends it taking care of the baby and turns town possibility that she could do something great. Therefore by not aborting the baby, you prevented a person from doing something great - and this person's heart and brain were already working and well developed.

You can't just argue this way, with what "might" be, because at any moment, there "might" be a lot of things. I think it should be up to individual person - if they don't want to have abortion, then don't have it, nobody forces you. If you can't have child at the moment or don't want to (because you wouldn't be able to take care of it for example), then you can abort it. You can always have child later, that can grow up into even a better person than the first one would. But you just can't know that.

The field of science practically has an entire community trying to disprove that there was ever a God. Faith is believing even though you have no reason to.

This is not true at all though, I think you've been exposed to (not by any fault of your own) quite distorted religious view of science, that doesn't actually apply to reality. You're confusing the burden of proof here. In science, you don't work to "disprove something", you work by forming a hypothesis and then performing an experiment to verify it: simply put, you make a claim and then you gather evidence to support that claim.

Working the other way is flawed and doesn't lead to you anywhere. Believing things on faith without reason is not a good reason to believe something, because you essentially don't care if it's true or not.

We can postulate infinite number of mutually exclusive unprovable claims - how can you then decide which one to believe and which one not to?

For example, let's say there is a god, who wrote the Bible exactly the way it is. But his actual intention was to see if people will "fall for it" and believe what he written there and he'll send actually these people to hell and reward these who think about it and reject the claim on the grounds that there's not sufficient evidence.

In other words, his intention is to find what people will fall for the religion and believe it even if there's no reason to believe in him so he can punish them and reward these who use solid evidence to base their evidence on. Sort of a huge universal "intelligence/rationality" test. :-)

You can't tell a difference between god that wants you to believe in him and god that makes it look like he wants you to believe in him, but actually doesn't (but doesn't tell you that, because he wants you to figure it out yourself).

Rational thing is to just reject any claims until there's sufficient evidence and proof to support them, which means rejecting both gods, since there's not really any reason to believe in either one of them.

Of course again - you have right to believe whatever you want, but my question is: Do you care if what you believe is actually true?

To apply faith to something I know quite well... Faith is like losing a football (american) 21-0 in the 4th quarter, going 3 and out every drive, but still believing that you can do something with the ball with 2 minutes left. You have no reason to believe that you can do anything, but you've got faith. If you sat there and looked at the stats and decided it was "simply impossible" you're pretty much just giving up. You've missed the point and by now you've lost the game.

That's different kind of faith. Before you talked about faith as in believing something without a reason, but now you talk about faith more in sense of hope and self motivation, which is quite a different thing.

This is a bit problematic when debating faith with people - they tend to clump various meanings of faith into one.

I don't understand the analogy very well since I don't know almost anything about american football, but generally: self motivation and hope is okay, but it should also be based on some grounds.

If you don't base your motivation and hopes on any solid ground, anything you build on top of that can crumble catastrophically.

Believing "I can still win the game" isn't really the same as "I believe there's a god". And even if the game is not-winnable (which is what I think your scenario implies) and you can't really reasonably change the result, then believing that you still have chance of changing it is not very reasonable and you're rather deluding yourself.

But that doesn't mean you stop trying to the last minute, there are plenty of reasons: So you can have chance to at least do some last score, even if it doesn't help you win, but makes you look a bit better, so you don't look like a quitter, so you can have sense of self satisfaction that you at least gave it your best.

However I'm not saying that faith can't help people cope and give them hope - but that doesn't mean that it's actually true. People can be simply deluding themselves to feel better and I personally rather base my hopes and expectations on reality as much as I can, because that way I can actually do the best I could and have reasonable expectations of what might happen.

The point is you don't need faith for any of this. You can look at the facts and find plenty of other reasons to motivate yourself and find hope - and you build it on much more stable and solid grounds.

In my opinion, we can do our best if we fully open our eyes to the world, instead of making up things that feel comfortable, but we don't know if they're true or not (or even if we know they're not true and people believe them anyway).

It's like if you're in a burning building and your only way is to jump out of a window: You can just jump without looking and have faith that the window you choose has garbage container under it that will cushion your fall - but you don't know, because you haven't looked. It might be there and cushion your fall, but it might be under completely different window and you hit the ground.

But if you actually take a moment to look if it's there, you will know under which window it is and where it's the safest to jump out. There might be no garbage can at all, in which case you can find another strategy - for example trying to climb from the ledge or even start yelling for help or find some rope and prevent any serious injury.

Looking at the facts and evidence allows you to work with the reality much better, rather than believing that things are the way you hope and in many cases hitting the ground hard.

[Frooxius]

What does the word "atheist" even mean?
I'm just a normal person who didn't choose to believe in something imaginary people or groups of people created.

In the simplest form it means lack of belief or rejection of the claims for existence of god. Simply put if you answer to "There is a god?" anything but "yes" (or some other form of agreement) you fit the definition.

There are many other terms that help to clarify your exact position, for example I am strong agnostic atheist, also anti-theist and many other things.

Perhaps it has little in relation to the topic, but I'd take this opportunity to say something about agnostics.
I'm an agnostic. I'm all ears.

I'm actually agnostic too! (A)gnosticism and (a)theism deal with different questions and they're not mutually exclusive. Although there's somewhat common idea that "agnostic" is something in the middle between theist and atheist, that's not really true (I thought that myself for some time, until I looked into it more). Let me clarify:

(A)gnosticism deals with knowledge (gnōsis - knowledge in ancient greek) that if it's possible to know if something is true or not.

(A)theism deals with belief in deity (but also often refers to other supernatural claims) or lack of that belief.

Belief and knowledge are a bit different things, but they also go hand in hand. There are actually 4 main groups of people:

Gnostic theist - person who believes there's a god and claims to know there is a god.
Agnostic theist - person who believes in god, but thinks that it's not possible to know if she exists or not
Gnostic atheist - person who doesn't believe in god and claims to know there's no god
Agnostic atheist - person who doesn't believe in god, but thinks that's it's not possible to know if she exists or not.

So you can be agnostic and still believe in god (but from what you wrote you sound more like agnostic atheist).

I think it is the most rational position (although it depends on the god - we can show with fair certainty that some kinds of gods just don't exist), since there's no solid reason/evidence to believe in a deity, but there still could be one.

Like I said in my previous post - the right approach is to make a claim and then support it with evidence. Otherwise we can make any number of claims and believe in them just because they weren't disproven. And you can even (and that's what many apologists do) keep making excuses why the claim still wasn't disproven.

Some claims can be true, but until we have evidence, we just don't know and in some cases we can't even know (such as transcendental gods that have no effect on our universe - they're indistinguishable from our viewpoint from something that doesn't exist). Therefore we can't claim to know that there's absolutely no kind of god, but neither there's reason to believe in one.

Of course, if some solid evidence was found, then it would be reasonable to believe in the kind of deity that given evidence supports, but until then, you can't distinguish that claim from any others that have no supporting proof.

While I don't believe religion or Gods or things those books tell me, believing in a greater good (faith) helps calm your mind. It's not something to rely on imo, but I believe in truth because it helps me be good and do good regardless of anything which may come.

Yes, it can be calming, but that doesn't necessarily make it true. The validity and truth of claims isn't judged by emotional appeal (although that's a logical fallacy / manipulation tactic used by a lot of people to make others believe their claims), but by evidence.

Think about it: Lie can be comforting as well, but it doesn't make it true, does it?

The idea of a supreme being doesn't matter to me because it shouldn't.
For me if there is a God he would never help you, because then you'll stop relying on self.
He couldn't care less if he is being prayed to or not, if he is really good then he won't like the attention.
If there is a God he would never let the world know of his existence, so it doesn't really matter there is one or not.

Finally, consider your life a job and do it honestly. Don't worry about supervision.

Yeah, it doesn't really matter and I think people should definitely rely on themselves and on evidence when making decisions. Because the more you know about the world, the better your decisions can be.

My problem is that a lot of people don't behave that way and in many cases they force irrational beliefs to others: I'm fine if they have their beliefs, I'm fine if they discuss them in public forum (I don't mean necessarily on the internet - anywhere in public), the same way I do.

But the moment they start pushing it on people via legislations or forcing other people to behave in accordance with their own believes, it becomes a big problem.

Even if they didn't force others though, I would continue promoting reasonable thought and science and push people to think about what they believe and why, the same way they can push me. It's of course their free choice to believe what they want, but I can still be there, offering my view and perhaps help some people to change the way they think and don't fall for someone's mind tricks :-)

That's the thing about free speech - we can discuss our beliefs and positions freely, without forcing anyone anything and change our minds when we see fit.

[unnamed]

I believe being a gnostic theist/atheist is foolish.
Nobody can know with certainty.

[unnamed]

@Frooxius So if I start believing in unicorns or in any imagination that comforts my life without any evidence, does that make you a "aunicornist" or something?
Damn the list would be endless.

[Frooxius]

@Ergo Proxy: I would definitely agree (with the addition of agnostic theist, because they still believe something without evidence). The idea of absolute certainty is just nonsensical. We can't know a lot of things with absolute certainty, although we can have reasonable certainty.

My own position is a bit more complicated, because regarding certain deities, I am quite certain that they do not exist. It's not 100 % certainty and I can't claim that, but their existence is extremely improbable, given all the contradictions and what we know about how the beliefs and the religion came into existence.

My exact position depends on the specific deity claim, although I don't believe in any of them (the ones I encountered at least).

The thing is that given what we already know about the universe, there's just no reason to believe there has to be any god involved. In fact physics even has some understanding how the universe could (they don't know for certain, but there seem to be possible mechanisms) came from nothing and galaxies, solar systems, planets and life developed completely naturally, following simple laws of physics.

Any deity would be superfluous. In fact, problem with deities that are used as explanations is that they actually don't explain anything, but just add more questions. Science has shown how can complexity arise from simplicity. Proposing a god (as in some super intelligent being) only adds more questions - you can't answer a question with even a bigger question. If we trace the universe back, we're getting to higher and higher simplicity, yet someone claims that outside of this simplicity exists something that's even more complex than us?

You're (not you, but people who make these claims) trying to explain complexity with even bigger complexity. Where did this complexity come from? How can we know anything about it.

@Ergo Proxy (second message): Sure. I require sufficient evidence for any claim (or at least, significant claim). If someone said they believe unicorns exist (as in, actual animals) then I would like to see some evidence to believe that claim, so you could technically call me "aunicornist".

I don't see the reason to make a list - I don't work by thinking of all possible things I can that I don't believe, I evaluate each claim that I come by. And there's finite amount of claims.

Some of the claims are more significant and some are less. There's very little people who believe in unicorns and it's not an issue in the society, so I wouldn't normally call myself "aunicornist".

However if large chunk of the world population (or at least area where I live) believed in unicorns and even based their decisions or even laws on that belief, I would definitely be active "aunicornist" and more like "anti-unicornist", that is against people making irrational decisions based on given belief without evidence and even manipulating others.

I would still also be skeptic and rationalist and science enthusiast (and my atheism stems from that), which are more positive positions (as in not rejection of some claim, but active philosophy and way of working with information and interacting with the world).

[unnamed]

@Ergo Proxy (second message): Sure. I require sufficient evidence for any claim (or at least, significant claim). If someone said they believe unicorns exist (as in, actual animals) then I would like to see some evidence to believe that claim, so you could technically call me "aunicornist".

Evidence about theism/god... none.

[Coder-san]

There are more "evidence" and sightings of UFOs than God. So statistically at least, aliens have a better chance to exist than Gods.

[Frooxius]

@Coder-san: Yes. That's also a thing, all the people who allegedly witnessed things that are in the Bible are long dead, while many people who report being kidnapped by UFO's and so on are alive and you can ask them. Yet many more people believe the former than the latter (although both are quite insane ).

The thing about our brains is that they can be surprisingly easily tricked and deceived into believing something, which isn't actually true. Our minds can be deluded in many ways and make up crazy explanations/connections, which was also demonstrated in various experiments (not just on humans, but other animals as well) - I recommend reading about the skinner box experiment which demonstrates how brains find nonexistent "connections" in random phenomena - which also explains a lot of religious behavior.

However I would point out that there's a difference between claiming that aliens exist and that aliens visit Earth in the flying saucers and kidnap people.

Given what we know about the universe and life on Earth and the huge size of the universe, we can say that it's probable that life has developed elsewhere as well by similar processes as here on Earth - doesn't have to be necessarily intelligent life though.

Life if very rare thing that requires combination of several conditions. But like one physicist said: Universe is huge and rare things happen all the time.

Probabilities are one of the things which human mind notoriously underestimates or doesn't work well with. For example consider something that has chance of happening 1 to million. Seems quite rare doesn't it? But multiply it by the number of people on Earth and statistically it will happen to a few dozen thousands of people every day.

I would say that it's quite probable that life exists somewhere else in the universe, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe the aliens actually visit Earth, that's just bunk.

Although in principle, I wouldn't say that statistically it makes something more believable. What is very significant is also the quality of evidence and just because a lot of people report certain things doesn't mean that it's sufficient to make conclusions on the number of reports alone.