The Unreasonableness of Atheism

[_EAllusion]

Voltaire was a deist.

[Guest]

Atheists are heavily disproportionately represented among professional philosophers. Atheist positions on various philosophical attempts at theistic justification are dominant in their relevant fields. Even most theist philosophers of ethics do not put much stock in moral arguments for God's existence, for instance.

Talk of philosophy seems to be a major interest of atheists whenever they collectively gather. Check out iidb to see an example of this. I'd be shocked if was the case that atheists on the whole were less interested in philosophy than theists unless someone did something funny like define standard religious discourse as philosophy. Kevin is pulling that statement out of nowhere.

[_EAllusion]

Right, and I agree.

But would this still be true even in the outlandish example of unicode characters found in 'junk' DNA I mentioned earlier...?
Or in other words - assuming the possibility of a God that created the universe is even on the table, what 'state' would that universe have to be in to convince you it was the case? Or would 'secondary' evidence not be good enough - would God literally have to show him / her / itself to settle it? Would 'that' even settle it?

I posted the Sober essay to clarify my position on this, since it is a relatively long answer. I don't think one can be justified in thinking that an omnipotent, omniscient, etc. being exists. I think one can be confident that a really powerful, really knowledgeable etc. that created X exists under certain circumstances. God "showing himself" could pull off the latter.

[_ajax18]

rather than attempting to impose a "higher law" which supposedly solves complex human social dynamics. I don't have the desire to get into endless asides, you either agree or you don't.

I'm deist, but if I concluded that the higher law was something invented by man and was being imposed on me for the benefit of others at my expense, I'm not sure I'd be to happy about it. Faith is a belief that fairness exists and that justice will be served, not a means of training people to get a desired earthly societal result. When religion sinks to an attitude of, "All that matters is whether or not we can get people to do the right thing, not whether things will ultimately be fair or not," is when it weakens the force of its initial premise. The earthly result should in fact be of no concern to religion, and when religious groups sink to this in an effort to attract people to a religious way of life, they once again detract from the founding principle that of Christianity, that Christ's kingdom was not of this world, but the next.

It is important to seek justice in this life and try to improve the human predicament. True Christianity recognizes that our best efforts at justice will fall short. Nor can we ever achieve happiness all the time. This is why religion will continue to interest people.

[_ajax18]

This "boring atheist" is a concoction of Dart's imagination and based on his preconceptions.

I haven't met many atheist tackling existential questions either. For the most part all I see them do is tear down those who do.

[_Tarski]

This "boring atheist" is a concoction of Dart's imagination and based on his preconceptions.

I haven't met many atheist tackling existential questions either.

Oh come on. Just because they have philosophical objections to the way religionists approach these existential questions, does not mean that they don't have their own ideas. Indeed, what is usually called existentialism is largely an atheistic movement.
Perhaps religionists never get to the point of hearing the atheist on his own terms since they are always trying to push the God idea as the answer to everything and have never listened.

I'd venture to say that a typical atheist has at one time grappled with every existential question that any other thinking feeling person has grappled with.

[_beastie]

I don't believe it's a straw man. In my experience, it is a quite common perspective of some theists. The fact that you don't believe it doesn't disprove my point, as I acknowledged up-front that this is not universally true. As for the evidence for God you claim to find, it's not evidence (I imagine) that I find persuasive.

Interesting that in one breath you say that I am posited a straw man, then in the next breath you state that my observation is significant in that die hard atheists reject it, implying, therefore, that theists accept it. If is was such a irrelevant straw man as you claim, then I struggle to figure out why it is at the same time significant.

I don't argue that all theists have a need to believe. I said as much in my post; I think this is true of a non-trivial number of believers but certainly not all nor even a majority. So your "give me a break" dismissal is inappropriately applied.

All that needs to be said here is…. There are no atheists in foxholes.

[Tator]

Stop embarrassing yourself beastie. That phrase "I don't think I am a pantheist" hardly changes the argument and does nothing to further your crazy agenda in proving Einstein wasn't really a theist. Einstein was speaking as someone who didn't understand what pantheism entailed: cautiously. My source didn't "deliberately" leave it out, in fact I think I did. I wasn't planning to cite the entire paragraph so I decided to leave out irrelevant portions. But after he started talking about the giant library it seemed like every other word pertained to the point. The comment on pantheism doesn't change anything. He said point blank, he doesn't think he can be called a pantheist. At the very least it shows he is leaning against it, which still flies in the face of Dawkins and others who said he was an atheist. And even if he did think he was a pantheist, how would that even begin to help your case? Pantheism is just another variety of theism!
You have no case to be made. You're quibbling on irrelevant tid bits because your case is pretty much a lost cause. You kept going round and round over territory that has already been addressed and I got tired of repeating myself. Essentially what you have to do is ignore a dozen unambiguous citations while reading something you like into ambiguous ones. That is what your case boils down to.

I would say that the individual who edited out the question Einstein had been asked (do you believe in Spinoza’s God) and edited out his first sentence (I can’t answer with a simple yes or no), believing it had no relevance in a conversation about what Einstein meant by “god” is the one who is an embarrassment.

Now, if I wrote the following, would I be "baiting" believers?

These questions naturally gnaw at the consciences of most humans, but from my experience theists aren't interested in them because they go beyond what religion can answer. They're afraid that going beyond religion might lead to some kind of doubt, and they have built up defense mechanisms against this. So the result is a boring, uninteresting, and sometimes an anti-social being who is more interested in attacking atheists than anything else.

Of course it's possible my intent would not be to bait, and I could just be stating what I truly believed to be facts - that theists are boring, uninteresting, and anti-social beings. If you combined that with previous statements that, for whatever reason, I believed that theists were less morally developed, then you might be able to build a case for bigotry.

(ps, "whatever reason" might be something along the lines that theists lack a prequisite inhibitor which would otherwise disincline them to engage in immoral acts:
http://www.mormondiscussions.com/discus ... c&start=42

[_antishock8]

This "boring atheist" is a concoction of Dart's imagination and based on his preconceptions.

I haven't met many atheist tackling existential questions either. For the most part all I see them do is tear down those who do.

Wow. Sartre might have been amused to hear that. I would suggest that Atheists or Agnostics that have tackled existentialism far beyond what most Religionists have ever attempted to do.

[_Tarski]

dup