Mistakes Atheists Make

Then I would give them the same response I give to Atheists. In the absence of evidence any position other than "I don't know" is belief. So I don't buy the claim you simply don't believe.

I don't believe, but I'm not selling it, so it does not matter if someone doesn't buy it.

Do you consider the possibility there are gods to be equal to the possibility there aren't?
 
I suspect that the word that I would use to describe my belief system is "unconvinced". If the truth be known, I would also add, "probably inconvincible". One should not be confused by my beliefs. I am not an Agnostic. I am an Atheist.
 
I suspect that the word that I would use to describe my belief system is "unconvinced". If the truth be known, I would also add, "probably inconvincible". One should not be confused by my beliefs. I am not an Agnostic. I am an Atheist.

I would say you are not unconvinced since you have indicated you have taken a side despite a total lack of evidence. Will you agree that a conclusion made with no objective support of any kind is a belief? It certainly isn't knowledge.

I am an Agnostic.
 
Then I would give them the same response I give to Atheists. In the absence of evidence any position other than "I don't know" is belief. So I don't buy the claim you simply don't believe.
Can you even support the statement: "I don't know"?

In the OP I quoted Wittgenstein: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”

I don't think the idea is hard to understand. People who say "I doubt everything" really aren't. They don't doubt the necessity of doubting! lol

This kind of skepticism is self-defeating.
 
Then I would give them the same response I give to Atheists. In the absence of evidence any position other than "I don't know" is belief. So I don't buy the claim you simply don't believe.
Can you even support the statement: "I don't know"?

In the OP I quoted Wittgenstein: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”

I don't think the idea is hard to understand. People who say "I doubt everything" really aren't. They don't doubt the necessity of doubting! lol

This kind of skepticism is self-defeating.

Yes, I can certainly support the statement "I don't know." I don't doubt everything, but I knowledge requires evidence and there is no evidence when it comes to God.
 
or burn in hell
C.S. Lewis said that the door to hell is locked - from the inside. For Christians we put ourselves in Hell (in this world and the next) when we choose selfishness and hate rather than forgiveness and kindness. God hopes we don't make that choice, but He respects our freedom.

Science has investigated what god(s) really are. They are something we invented in our brains when we were very primitive frightened superstitious but also imaginative creatures.
Some of those supposed primitives: 50 Nobel Laureates and Other Great Scientists Who Believe in God

A god or something might have made our universe
So you don't know at all.

but so far no signs indicate that is true.
God of the gaps is what that's called.
Actually the fine tuning argument is the opposite of a God of the gaps argument.

Instead of lurking in some amateurish hate site sealybobo why not open your mind and examine the facts?
Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God by Peter Kreeft Ronald K. Tacelli

Please explain #1 to me. So what a woman didn't always start off being 5'2? Was god a baby at one time? You can't have this argument both ways. Why can god break this rule?

#2. What caused God? If we had to have a cause, so does he, right?

I'm sorry but I can't read anymore. When I go to this site and read Why there is no god it all makes sense. The stuff I'm reading from your link is confusing and nonsensical.

The Teleological argument [2], or Argument from Design, is a non sequitur. Complexity does not imply design and does not prove the existence of a god. Even if design could be established we cannot conclude anything about the nature of the designer (Aliens?). Furthermore, many biological systems have obvious defects consistent with the predictions of evolution by means of natural selection.

The appearance of complexity and order in the universe is the result of spontaneous self-organisation and pattern formation, caused by chaotic feedback between simple physical laws and rules. All the complexity of the universe, all its apparent richness, even life itself, arises from simple, mindless rules repeated over and over again for billions of years. Current scientific theories are able to clearly explain how complexity and order arise in physical systems. Any lack of understanding does not immediately imply ‘god’.
 
The Teleological argument, or Argument from Design, is a non sequitur. Complexity does not imply design and does not prove the existence of a god. Even if design could be established we cannot conclude anything about the nature of the designer (Aliens?). Furthermore, many biological systems have obvious defects consistent with the predictions of evolution by means of natural selection.

The appearance of complexity and order in the universe is the result of spontaneous self-organisation and pattern formation, caused by chaotic feedback between simple physical laws and rules. All the complexity of the universe, all its apparent richness, even life itself, arises from simple, mindless rules repeated over and over again for billions of years. Current scientific theories are able to clearly explain how complexity and order arise in physical systems. Any lack of understanding does not immediately imply ‘god’.
 
Miracles have not been demonstrated to occur. The existence of a miracle would pose logical problems for belief in a god which can supposedly see the future and began the universe with a set of predefined laws. Even if a ‘miracle’ could be demonstrated it would not immediately imply the existence of a god, much less any particular one, as unknown natural processes or agents could still be at work.

Most alleged miracles can be explained as statistically unlikely occurrences. For example, one child surviving a plane crash that kills two hundred others is not a miracle, just as one person winning the lottery is not. In the absence of any empirical evidence, all other claims can be dismissed as the result of magical thinking, misattribution, credulity, hearsay and anecdote. Eye-witness testimony and anecdotal accounts are, by themselves, not reliable or definitive forms of proof for such extraordinary claims.

Divine intervention claims most often concern systems and events for which we have poor predictive capabilities, for example, weather, sports, health and social/economic interactions. Such claims are rarely made in relation to those things we can accurately predict and test e.g. the motion of celestial bodies, boiling point of water and pull of gravity. If a god is constantly intervening in the universe it supposedly created, then it is with such ambiguity as to appear completely indistinguishable from normal background chance.

Note: Theists often fail to adequately apportion blame when claims of their particular god’s ‘infinite mercy’ or ‘omnibenevolence’ involve sparing a few lives in a disaster, or recovery from a debilitating disease – all of which their god would ultimately be responsible for inflicting if it existed. See also: Euthyphro dilemma, Confirmation bias, Cherry Picking.
 
Some arguments for the existence Of God:
Teleological arguments
  • What is the fine-tuning of the universe and how does it serve as a pointer to God BioLogos
  • Why is the universe so beautiful? If you don't believe in Design you think the universe is a random mess, and how can a random mess be beautiful?
  • Why can the physical world be described by elegant equations? Here's John Polkinghorne: "We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos."
Cosmological argument

Other
Why should we discard the testimony of billions who pray and think they have encountered God?


The Teleological argument [2], or Argument from Design, is a non sequitur. Complexity does not imply design and does not prove the existence of a god. Even if design could be established we cannot conclude anything about the nature of the designer (Aliens?). Furthermore, many biological systems have obvious defects consistent with the predictions of evolution by means of natural selection.

The appearance of complexity and order in the universe is the result of spontaneous self-organisation and pattern formation, caused by chaotic feedback between simple physical laws and rules. All the complexity of the universe, all its apparent richness, even life itself, arises from simple, mindless rules repeated over and over again for billions of years. Current scientific theories are able to clearly explain how complexity and order arise in physical systems. Any lack of understanding does not immediately imply ‘god’.

Crystallisation is one example of how matter can readily self-organise into complex, ordered shapes and structures.
 
“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.” - Douglas Adams
 
The universe is extremely hostile to life. Extinction level events have nearly eliminated complex life on Earth on five separate occasions. Of all the species that have ever lived 99.9% are now extinct. Furthermore, normal matter like stars and planets occupy less than 0.0000000000000000000042 percent of the observable universe. Life constitutes an even smaller fraction of that matter again. If the universe is fine-tuned for anything it is for the creation of black holes [2] and empty space.

There is nothing to suggest that human life, our planet or our universe are uniquely privileged nor intended. On the contrary, the sheer scale of the universe in both space and time and our understanding of its development indicate we are non-central to the scheme of things; mere products of chance, physical laws and evolution. To believe otherwise amounts to an argument from incredulity and a hubris mix of anthropocentrism and god of the gaps thinking.

The conditions that we observe, namely, those around our Sun and on Earth, simply seem fine-tuned to us because we evolved to suit them. We cannot prove that all other possible forms of life would be infeasible with a different set of conditions or constants because the only universe that we can observe is the one we occupy. Indeed, modelling [2] suggests star formation (a necessary precursor to our form of biology) may be viable under a number of different universal conditions.

Without actual proof of creation, naturalistic explanations [2] for the properties of this universe cannot be wholly ruled out. It is possible an infinity of universes [2] exist, all with different conditions and forms of life. The fact that our particular universe has the physical constants we observe may be no more to the point than the fact a hand of cards, dealt from a shuffled deck, is the one a hypothetical player holds. Though the chances of any one universe being hospitable to life might be low, the conditional probability of a form of life observing a set of constants suitable to it is exactly unity. That is to say, every possible universe would ‘appear’ fine-tuned to the form of life it harbours, while all those inhospitable universes would never be observed by life at all.
 

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