Why I'm not an athiest

[Bioture]

can I pledge you xog?

you know what i'm talkin about.

I'm not talking about frats.

[Jason]

i don't like big groups of people because you inevitably end up touching someone sweaty and then you feel diseased for hours and hours after the encounter

at least that always happens at festivals

and i fucking HATE it

[Xog]

but, festivals are where the love's at, man

[Kontrolz]

To be an atheist is to have a belief that god doesn't exist. To believe in god is to have the belief that god does exist.

I don't begin to assume that I am anywhere near knowledgeable enough to formulate an educated opinion either way. God (if it does exist) must encompass EVERYTHING. Who am I to say I can know, or would ever be able to understand an idea that encompasses everything?

God cannot be known by our feeble understanding of everything. If God cannot be known then how can you know God exists or doesn't exist?

Agnosticism.

[Bioture]

To be an atheist is to have a belief that god doesn't exist. To believe in god is to have the belief that god does exist.

I don't begin to assume that I am anywhere near knowledgeable enough to formulate an educated opinion either way. God (if it does exist) must encompass EVERYTHING. Who am I to say I can know, or would ever be able to understand an idea that encompasses everything?

God cannot be known by our feeble understanding of everything. If God cannot be known then how can you know God exists or doesn't exist?

Agnosticism.

This is pretty much the correct view philosophically. The general TW public should know by now that I'm an apologist, but beforehand I was a pretty staunch athiest.

However addressing this issue with just intellectualism and philosophy would be almost impossible, since Kontrolz is right - we have an imperfect understanding of the universe. There are a few things that I absolutely can't stand about threads like this. The first being that it is extremely divisive and puts everyone into a "us vs. them" mentality that never ends well. Secondly, protestant Christians nowadays are pushing foward with philosophy and theology, but does a TERRIBLE job of living a Christian life. Of loving your neighbor, and of making peace. What does this thread accomplish in terms of setting an example of living a Christian life? Absolutely nothing. Which makes this thread and the other 1000 religious threads on this forum (I've made a few myself) complete bullshit. I mean I understand what some young thundercat Christians are trying to do, but man go give a dollar to the poor or plant a tree or play a game of checkers with the elderly - any of those things mean infinitely more than discussing Christianity on a spaceship forum.

Ravi is an incredibly intelligent and witty apologist and theologian, but he often sacrifices the incredible mysticism found in the Christian faith in favor of philosophy. You can do this to an extent and have most Christians on board, but it won't make sense in a strictly philosophical sense for people who do not believe.

[L.C.]

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate your replies! My curiosity was and is to see what kind of replies I would get, and then also to see what people think and get different points of view (not that I necessarily agree with all of them, but this is naturally a part of critical thinking).

[Tigron-X]

No, philosophically, agnosticism is not the correct view.


First off, it's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of acknowledgement. An atheist acknowledges that a theist believes in a concept labeled 'God', but also acknowledges that it is not a part of the real world. It's an idea, and one that is not supported by empirical evidence.

What so annoying about agnosticism is they claim, "I can't define *it*, but I'm going to call *it* 'God.'"

And, those two statements are logically contradictory.

It's like saying, "I don't know anything about 'X', but it's slimy, furry, green, and smells like a wet dog."

You just can't make that statement. If 'God' is an unknown unknowable, then you can't use the term 'God' because the term has specific characteristics.

I'm going to use the term 'unicorn' for example.

If 'unicorn' was defined as a horse with a horn on its head, then no rational person is going to say, "There is no way that a horse with a horn on its head could not exist," because on some other planet in the universe that could be possible.

But, if you say 'unicorn' is a horse with a horn on its head and can live on the surface of the sun, travel through time, bursts into flames but is also made of ice and has a square-cirlcle as a house, then at some point you've defined it out of existence.

Some of the characteristics commonly associated with 'God' are: consciousness without material form; omnipotence; omnipresence.

All of which are contradictory. Consciousness can't exist without matter; it is an effect of the brain just as gravity is an effect of mass.

If agnostics want to say, "I can't know that God exists," a statement that makes no sense philosophically, then you can't call something 'God'.

People always want to put 'God' outside the reach of human knowledge:

"Oh, God is in the thunder."
"Oh, he's in the eclipse. He's darking out the Sun because we didn't kill enough virgins."

Now, people want to say that God is in quantum physics. Or, God is in the tenth dimension. He's always in the next house just right over the horizon of human knowledge.

It's like chasing a mirage. You've checked the 10 thousand houses prior, why would he be in ten thousand one? He is not in the next house. There is no God.

By definition, supernatural cannot exist! If something is measurable/ detectable, objectively, then it is not supernatural. And, if it cannot be measured or cannot be detectable, then that is synonymous with nonexistence.

[Jerome Scuggs]

i bet god would be laughing at your logic right now, cuz he invented it!

[gran guerrero]

so an apologist is someone who was an atheist but now found God and is apologizing???

[Summa]

/thread

[Jerome Scuggs]

no for real though, tigron-x:

how do you account for human 'irrationality', and other human behavior which defies logic? or can it all be logically explained?

[the_paul]

/thread

There is so much wrong with that that I'm not even going to start. I'll leave it for bioture or someone else to handle if anyone feels charitable enough to address that.

Summa do you and Tigron get along well? I feel like you would.

Jk summa ily even though we disagree here. :wub:

[Kontrolz]

Tigron, the problem with that logic is that it's... logic.

Logic is a cause/effect structure. If "God" exists, it is infinite or an infinite series of "God"s. At some point either something came from nothing which cannot be understood using logic. Or, what exists is infinite which cannot be understood using logic because it means it never began and will never end.

You can always ask, "what came before that?" or "what's that made up of?". Logic is great at finding those answers but it can never resolve the paradox of existence. There will always be room for "God".

That being said, God can't actually "exist", at least not in any way we could ever know. God would have to be outside of cause and effect and so he would be outside of science.

So you can play the language game anyway you want, you can say that since god can't "exist" at least in any way that we can know then god doesn't exist. Or you can say maybe there is some other type of existence outside of what we can comprehend (btw obviously the word exist is wrong here but we don't have a word/idea for what god would "be").

You can't know either way. If you can't know then you're an agnostic. Your generalization that agnostics call the unknown god is just flat out wrong. I call the unknown... the unknown. I don't assume it is or is not anything.

There is a tea cup orbiting Saturn. Odds are it would be impossible for a tea cup to be up there and so the gut reaction is to say that's wrong. But... you can't KNOW until you've examined every area of space that's within Saturn's gravitational field.

The unknown could be anything, hence "unknown". It's a great misstep to say that the unknown could be anything EXCEPT FOR THIS.

[Squeezer]

A Priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar.
After sitting down, ordering, and chitchat the Priest says "Have you noticed there are no women in this bar?"
He then realizes the truth "I think we`re in a gay bar."
A man approaches and is trying to flirt with the priest.
The priest is dumbfounded, and doesn`t know what to do.
The Rabbi leans over and whispers something in the mans ear.
The man walks off.
The Priest says "Thanks, but what did you tell him."
The Rabbi replies "I just told him we`re on our honeymoon."

WHY DO THEy CALL THE KMOON A HONEY WHEN THE MOON IS OBVIOSLY MADE OF CHEESE? because god

[Kontrolz]

I should probably specify also that the "unknown" I'm talking about is what cannot be known. What is outside of cause/effect. What is infinite.