devilnis wrote:
|> There's no more proof of God's nonexistance than there is of his existance, so any claim to "know" one way or the other is voodoo...

[Russell's teapot](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot)

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dunga wrote:
|> EVERYSINGLEPERSONINTHISFUCKINGWORLD believe to be inside a group that have all the answers

I disagree; I for one have no illusion of having all the answers.

|> How can I communicate the information that i am not trying to prove myself right or either that yourself is wrong?

Please keep in mind Internet forums may not be the most appropriate place for having delicate discussions:

- There are many people here who's native language is something other than English; having a discussion, especially one with subtle points, is very demanding on your command of the language in which you do so.
- We're writing plain text; the absence of intonation, facial expression while saying something and body language makes it incredibly easy to misunderstand one another.
- Anyone can participate in the discussion, from an extremely over-confident 16 year old know-it-all to a professor of theology who's spent his entire life studying exactly this question. While it should be easy enough to tell those extremes apart, it can be rather difficult to gauge just how much credibility any given person deserves. (For some reason it seems to be "not done" to ask people their "credentials". Maybe because you're essentially asking "why should I believe a single word you're saying", or maybe because it's far to easy to lie about it...?)

|> Can we stop thousands of years of acting the same way, declaring that being opposed to ones thoughts is cause for hostility?

Given how we're nowhere close to achieving world peace, I'm afraid it would be unlikely we can stop discussions from deteriorating into shouting-matches...

|> Can we take each others will of being right out of the equation?

This seems to be difficult even for scientists; even when a given theory has been proven wrong some of its proponents may still feel the need to tweak and fix it, just so they can show (the people backing) the other theory was actually wrong as well... This may just be an innate property many, many people have (to different extents of course).

Perrin3088 wrote:
|> atheist makes more sense then theism purely because the fact that it is impossible to prove anything does not exist, but it is simple to prove something does exist..

That reasoning implicitly assumes God wants to actively proof his/her/its existence. What if God had a reason to specifically *not* want to show him/her/itself (or, at least, not any more)...? In that case your argument completely falls apart.

My claim is inarguable - I don't know much of the vast assortment of things there are to know, and when others say that they know the answers to the eternal questions of life (Why are we here? Is there a God? Is there a purpose?) yet all they can point to as evidence is some musty tome written thousands of years ago by multiple authors in multiple languages that have since been translated and retranslated hundreds of times (for example,) I say that they are overstepping the bounds of their true knowledge and allowing the twin forces of habit and desire to taint the clarity of their perceptions. Is that demeaning? The answer lies in the eye of the beholder. If you can't deal with the fact that I believe your claims are wildly improbable, then yes to you it's demeaning, but there it is. I didn't truly dismiss them out of hand though, I just asked where the evidence is, since you claimed that you had seen some :) Ball's in your court, my man!

I'm a Christian I'll say... but religious posts on the war light forum blow up... I hate it when this happens, the internet isnt the exact place to switch someone to your point of view....

|>|>Can we take each others will of being right out of the equation?

|>This seems to be difficult even for scientists; even when a given theory has been proven wrong some of its proponents may still feel the need to tweak and fix it, just so they can show (the people backing) the other theory was actually wrong as well... This may just be an innate property many, many people have (to different extents of course).


people tend to believe theories are facts long before they are facts... but it is also important for the proponents to keep tweaking for the case in which perhaps the old theory was in fact correct, but just slightly wrong and perhaps the new theory could in fact be more wrong then a modified old theory is...

RvW, it is irrelevant on if the thing wants to be proven or not.. the pure fact of the matter is, is that next to nothing can be proven not to be, while things can be proven to be... in order to prove john doe is not on a moving train you must simultaneously view every portion of said train at the same time to prove john does lack of existance on said train, but to prove john doe is on said train, all you have to do is find him.

Yes, Exactly RvW - Russel's teapot indeed. Like him, I approach atheism since I believe the existance of God in any way I've ever heard it described to be an EXTREMELY low probability. But the possibility of God exists, and picking apart the bible (for instance) by disputing small factual points within it (where's the dinosaurs?) is a fool's game since if you take as an assumption the presence of an omnipotent deity, everything else becomes quite possible, aka the system is "internally consistent".

I'm not going to believe bigfoot exists purely because bigfoot does not want to be found... I am going to believe bigfoot exists when he is found, or conclusive evidance is provided to prove he does exist.

"RvW, it is irrelevant on if the thing wants to be proven or not.. the pure fact of the matter is, is that next to nothing can be proven not to be, while things can be proven to be... in order to prove john doe is not on a moving train you must simultaneously view every portion of said train at the same time to prove john does lack of existance on said train, but to prove john doe is on said train, all you have to do is find him."

... And then subsequently prove that what appears to be John Doe actually is the John Doe you were speaking of and that the train was indeed moving at the time that you conjectured John Doe was on it (not at the time that you found him.) And then, to a true scientist, what you call proof would be merely a high probability. There are no proofs in the real world, only in abstracted systems such as mathematics or logic. We are forever limited by the weakness of our powers of comprehension and observation.

[all you need to know about atheism](http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/)

NOT ANOTHER RELIGION TREAD!

Religion threads are awesome! Noone ever gets convinced of anything they didn't already believe, it's just for entertainments :)

devilnis, your differences with RvW seem to be mostly semantic, at least to me.
You both seem to agree that the probability of God existing is extremely low, while being impossible to completely rule it out.
You call that agnosticism, due to the fact that you can't in fact fully rule it out.
Some people (which seem to me to include RvW) call that atheism.
I don't think it really matters.

The reason it seems of little significance that you can't rule it out (to me) is that the same is true of any claim whatsoever.
You can't that ANYTHING doesn't exists: unicorns, dragons, the FSM... maybe you want to say that the appropriate response is to be agnostic about the existence of all those things, in which case I think our disagreement is merely semantic. Otherwise, what's the difference?

In other words, if your point is merely epistemological (i.e.: we can't know ANYTHING with absolute certainty) then I don't think most atheists would disagree with the underlying point; they just choose to call the position of being as certain of the nonexistence of God as they are of the nonexistence of unicorns atheism.

one thing i hate about religion threads are people make long post so can someone plesase recap what has been said so far.

Well, on what do you predicate the certainty of your belief that unicorns don't exist? Because they just might. Actually, I find the existance of a horse-like mammal with a single spiralling horn sprouting from its forehead to be quite a bit more probable than the existance of the Abrahamic God.

And yes, the argument is of semantics - If you grant that there is at least a slight chance that God exists, and yet call yourself an atheist, you are semantically incorrect. It's like calling a man a woman or a dog a cat. Close, but no cigar :)

Semantically incorrect?
What are you basing that on?
On my experience, most atheist stuff I read (including, say, Dawking, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion, "Dawkins does not claim to disprove God with absolute certainty. Instead, he suggests as a general principle that simpler explanations are preferable(...)") would agree with my characterization of atheism.

And as far as I'm concerned, words, particularly labels people use to name the philosophical views they adhere too, mean what the people espousing those ideas claim them to mean.

Do you have any grounds for claiming your definition of atheist is correct, and the one used by most people calling themselves atheists isn't?

If you agree with most of the position and choose to call yourself agnostic, fine... But I don't see how you can say atheists are wrong because you think the beliefs you would like people calling themselves atheists to adhere to are wrong (as opposed to the beliefs people actually mean to endorse when they call themselves atheists).

Perhaps this helps: http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/09/25/8419/
I think most atheist's would identify themselves as what that article terms agnostics atheists, not as the gnostic atheists you seem to belief atheism ALWAYS means.
Does clarifying terminology removes our disagreement?

agnostics are like hipster atheist. dawkins is too mainstream.

"as long as you accept a few completely, utterly impossible and self-contradictory statements, which do not coincide with the empirical facts we have discerned about the universe, it kind of makes sense."

of course you cant defnitely say he doesnt exist, but you cant definitely say anything. scientific laws can always be disproved by new evidence. but the likelihood of god turning out to have existed is so minute, its misleading to call yourself agnostic.

taking the middle ground isnt always the best option. in this case, there are clear logical flaws to the middle ground.

devilnis, if you are 99.99999999999999999999999999999% on the atheist-theist spectrum, you should just round yourself up to atheist. would you call yourself bisexual, because you might be attracted to one of the 3.5bn people of your gender? if i asked you the time, would you say: "its 5:23.352358032527234059345346034276234870634763487560827346580764087654783264756384764874549875932847594879574897294875"? i think youd say its 20 past 5. dont be such a pedantic troll, otherwise we cant have an entertaining religion thread like you said.

Well, language does morph over time. Look at the roots though:

A (without) + Theist (God (anglicized))

Without God.

A (without) + Gnostic (Knowledge (anglicized))

Without Knowledge. Gnosis evolved from its original simple meaning of Knowledge to one laden with connotations of spiritual knowledge, so it's more accurately:

Without Spiritual Knowledge.

That slight distinction is actually quite useful in describing someone's mindset. But you're right. The two terms are conflating themselves more and more as time goes on and eventually they will be one and the same in the mind of the general public.

As to "clear logical flaws in the middle ground".. That's utter BS. There's no logical flaw in recognizing that every probability has a corresponding improbability that is yet still quite possible. And yet there's Dawkins describing them as "utterly impossible" in one breath even as he accedes to their possibility in the next. The man is a class A douchebag, and not a good standard bearer for the banner of rational thought. It's his ilk (and the tireless efforts of organizations like the Inquisition) that have made Atheism a term so freighted with misconceptions by the general public that it's nigh useless. Like "Socialism".

- An Empiric Agnostic.