Dear Atheists/Non-Believers

It appears to me that atheists are the ones so determined to prove there is no God.

Hmmmm. That’s a new one to me. I’ve never heard of anyone trying to prove there isn’t a God. I didn’t think such a thing was possible. What type of evidence would one collect to prove there isn’t an undetectable presence?

Wow, I must have missed a lot while on vacation. The existence of God has been proven? That’s fantastic!

How do you know it’s not something like what we call “Devil”? How do you know that this irrefutably proven maker of the Universe is not wholly evil?

Person A: something exists.
Person B: I’m not sure of the evidence for that existing.
Person A: well prove it doesn’t!

I don’t think you’ll find many atheists who fit that bill. I’m sure they are out there somewhere, but most reasonable people understand that you cannot prove the non-existence of God. Can you prove to me that Crom is not presently perched on his mountain, where he laughs at your avatar?

I didn’t think so.

An agnostic is perhaps searching to see if they can somehow prove to themselves that ultimately there is a being such as God, whether by logical or scientific construct. Thus being unable to say with 100% certainty that there is indeed a god.

Atheists (likely a small number) have already made this determination. I presume this by their designation of atheist. They also spend much of their effort at preaching no god, idiocy of the weak minded religionists, and being legal and Constitutional scholars that must separate church and state.

Billions and billions have come to the exact opposite conclusion and believe in some deity.
Moreover, in my faith (Christian), hundreds of millions conclude they have an personal relationship with God, can attest to miracles, and have radically changed their lives by walking away from destructive habits/lifestyles, becoming altruistic, and seeking to live in a more upright moral fashion.

In an unfortunate place, are those that say ‘Even if there turns out to be a God, l don’t want to be subservient to him; l would rather go to hell with the cool kids’, or other such nonsense. An utterly indefensible position. Also the one that Satan has taken and been sentenced to an eternity in a lake of fire.

I personally do not discount these religious testimonies, having a Christian one also, against a philosopher who ponders either the contingency theory nor the scientist that can’t explain thoughts, feelings, or consciousness - yet screams there is no God.

I think that religion gives people a greedy mindset. You have to be a good person in life so that YOU aren’t stuck in Hell forever. Why not be a good person so that you don’t make people live in Hell for their life? Personally, I don’t need some all-knowing, all-powerful man to keep me in check.

Also something based on fear isn’t something I want to believe in. I was driving around town and saw a bumber sticker that said “Eternity in Hell is a long time to be wrong about something”. If being afraid is a way to get people to join, how can religion be good? Sounds like a domestic abuse relationship to me.

Finally, religion is the root source for about 90% of all issues in the world, for all of history (which is another discussion to be had).

These three things make me hope I’m right even more.

I’m a Christian, and agree 100%. No disrespect intended to my fellow-Christians who believe otherwise, but I believe 1) there is no ‘lake of fire’ into which non-believers are cast; and 2) God does not want our obedience out of a sense of fear for our personal safety.

IMO, this is what Christians are called to do.

You don’t have to believe in a higher power to do this. And believing in a higher power doesn’t make you more likely to do it either. If it did it would be hard to explain Ted Haggard or the countless catholic priests who sexually abuse little boys.

I wanted to chime in on this. I believe your actions are all you really own. If you are kind, altruistic, and treat others with respect and dignity, you are walking the right path. If you do so because you believe in a God, and are doing so because you believe he instructs you do to this, well that’s great. If you are doing so because you believe that being selfless and kind is the only way to true happiness, that’s also great.

What religion you identify with (if any) does not define you - your actions do. We will never know if any of the religions are “correct”, or if they are all completely wrong, or if there is some real truth that no one has even thought of. So, in the meantime, all you are is your actions.

Personally, I do accept the explanation of treco because, IMO, doing good should be selfless and the act alone should be enough. I don’t care for the idea of doing good because you are setting yourself up for a payoff down the road from a judgmental God. That just doesn’t seem as pure to me as doing noble acts for the sake of doing these acts, with no expectation of any personal gain.

That’s not what happened. You are misrepresenting facts. He correctly found a hole in an argument I invented, that actually had nothing to do with the existence of God, it was just in a thread with that title. I have since learned not to make my own arguments, but merely defend the ones that exist. Getting a philosophical argument right is extremely difficult. The arguments, are not mine and they stand unrefuted, period.

The arguments do not establish morality, save for the Moral argument which uses morality as a basis for God’s existence. The arguments establish that God exists, the conclusions of which are, Uncaused-cause, Unmoved-mover, Necessary Being. They don’t say anything about what sort of being it is personality-wise, they establish existence.

Since Aristotle.

@anon71262119 I would encourage you to look up the debate between Hitchens and WLC. It’s the fist time in history Hitchens was at a loss for words. He actually gave up his last turn in the debate. It’s on YouTube if you put in WLC vs. Hitchens.

1 Like

Yeah, I hope I’m wrong. Wouldn’t it be good if life really was eternal? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the awe one feels standing in a cathedral genuinely was a tribute to a real, loving god. I don’t think I am though. The sheer size of the universe and the way it is organised, or rather has failed to be organised, leads me to suspect that there is no divine plan and that idea that an intelligence governs the universe is an illusion created by our perception of our own intelligence.

Now that’s bullshit and you know it.

Oh there have been plenty of counter arguments. None have succeeded, but there are plenty of counter arguments. I am not saying you cannot counter argue, I am saying none have ever successfully debunked the arguments. If you look at the arguments in the raw form, it’s pretty easy to see why. No other conclusion can be reached without ending up in circular reasoning. Again, this has been going round and round since Plato and Aristotle, the inventor of the Cosmological Argument.

They are no ‘self evident’ but well reasoned well explained arguments. Technically, ‘self-evident’ is circular. No western philosopher would use the term in an argument. All I am saying is do some research and check it out for yourself, don’t take my word for it. Here is my go to when people have a question about the argument’s history:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/

It’s not pro or anti, it just lays out the facts and condensed as something like this can be.

I don’t want to get into a dead man, name throwing contest. My point is that Hume was perhaps the smartest agnostic in history and he could still not debunk the cosmological arguments. And he tried, not by proving in anyway that the arguments were flawed, but by attacking the main premise ‘causation’. His biggest attempt to throw causation to the wind was to introduce the elusive 3rd element of causation. The process revealed many great insights on causation, but it didn’t refute the argument.

Look at the arguments. Aristotle laid the ground work and philosophers over the millennia have been building on his work.

History says otherwise.

I already have. None of them amount to any more than starting with the assumption that the almighty exists, and working backwards to produce convoluted, and occasionally flippant, proofs. The onotological argument in particular is laughable, a piece of linguistic prestidigation that proves nothing by any objective standard. The cosmological argument is highly subjective. Since the enlightenment, it’s no longer sufficient to have a sound argument that something could exist, it’s now incumbent upon somebody claiming the existence of a supernatural entity to have some actual proof for it too. Don’t bitch at me, I don’t make the rules. Evolution and gravity have to meet the same standards of proof, which they have.