I’m (…) living through that time of the year when many people around me are going to celebrate the birth of the son of a god in whom they “believe”
but this year I don’t want to write to them… I want to direct my attention to the atheists. You know that
observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world
and living after 1931 you still persist in answering “It doesn’t exist” to such a question. Wouldn’t it be more chaste and simple to describe yourself as an Ignosticist?
Let me assign this question to you: it would be a good subject for the next week. :)
nah Im athiest.
sorry to burst your bubble.. but i can only speak for me
Neil: ok, fair enough. You speak for yourself of course but please, don’t touch the bubble. :)
Atheist as well. I used to say Agnostic, which is fine to me as well. To sum it up: non-believer until proven wrong.
Andreas: the core point is when you write “until proven wrong”… IMHO it can’t be proven as right/wrong because, semantically speaking, the proposition “God exists” is meaningless.
To make it simple: the question “Does God exist?” is like “What is the pressure of the yellow color?”. Both are valid questions grammatically but we can’t measure the pressure of a color or declare/negate the existence of God.
Still a question holds: Why?
Thomas: sorry… about what? :)
Carlo: the Ultimate Why, which is completely outside both the reach and the scope of Science.
Thomas: oh, *that* Why. :)
That reminds me of the well known sentence “to boldly go where no man has gone before”. We can’t reach that “Why” (perhaps we don’t even care to reach it) but we ought to try to boldly go there. :)
Thomas, wasn’t the answer to that one “42″? ;-)
I don’t want to become embroiled too deeply in this debate, but as a sailor, I have observed that at sea, as wind speed and wave height increase, the proportion of non-believers diminishes rapidly.
If there is a God (and I would describe myself as a “don’t know”) one has to wonder whether he would behave more like a machine or more like a human being.
The more important question is “Why do people believe?” The answer, I fear, is because they want to or need to.
David: thanks, your sentence about “the proportion of non-believers” gave me the first laugh of the day. :)
I agree with you that they believe because they want to or need to… but, as you know, I’m quite far for the sea right now and that puts me in the position to think more freely on this subject. :)
I disagree. Frankly, I do not think the question “why do people believe” to be relevant at all. And, honestly, I do believe that your argument is pretentious, first of all everybody is different and although you can “cluster” the different reasons still you cannot generalize. You might have seen many people believing because they saw the sea but that is not the only reason why people believe. And secondly, you cannot eve tell if that was the only reason for the people you observed to believe. And last but not least, that might just prove correlation between the two events (being at the sea and believing), but not a causal-effect relationship, which you would like to infer.
It is amazing how Atheists often tend to be more religious than believers in their constant effort to debunk other people’s belief. And sometimes with very very naive approaches such as the one Carlo previously cited.
There is no clash with reason, simply because reason i limited and will never give you an answer to the Ultimate Why question.
That’s the only, plain, simple matter of fact.
Thomas: I suppose that my friend David wasn’t trying to write a scientific discourse… it was just a funny example to say that people need to believe (as they ask themselves the “Ultimate Why” you’ve cited). Of course his example is not an inference… as – after all – the amusing “proofs” collected on “Over Three Hundred Proofs of God’s Existence“.
By the way, one of my favourites is proof #17.:)