My problem with atheism
My problem with atheism
First of all, I have more in common with atheists than religious people, so my intention isn't to come here and attack, I just want to hear your opinions. Maybe I'm wrong, I'd like to hear from you if I am. I'm just expressing here my perception of the movement and not actually what I consider to be facts.
My issue with atheism is that I think it establishes the lack of a God or gods as the truth. I do agree that the concept of a God is hard to believe logically, specially with all the incoherent arguments that religions have had in the past. But saying that there's no god with certainty is something I'm just not comfortable with. Science has taught us that being wrong is part of the process of progress. We're constantly learning things we didn't know about, confirming theories that seemed insane in their time. I feel like being open to the possibilities is a healthier mindset, as we barely understand reality.
In general, atheism feels too close minded, too attached to the current facts, which will probably be obsolete in a few centuries. I do agree with logical and rational thinking, but part of that is accepting how little we really know about reality, how what we considered truth in the past was wrong or more complex than we expected
I usually don't believe there is a god when the argument comes from religious people, because they have no evidence, but they could be right by chance.
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My issue with atheism is that I think it establishes the lack of a God or gods as the truth.
Atheism is not about truth, it is about belief. Atheists do not believe there are gods.
If an atheist says that it is an absolute truth that there are no gods, they are an atheist, but also a gnostic. Gnostics claim to know essentially unknowable things as truths.
OK, it still seems like taking sides to me when there's no evidence one way or the other. I'd just say "I don't know" and move on. No need to take sides on something that I'm clueless about, like what's reality or its origins.
A human believing that God's don't exist based on reason is totally irrelevant, considering how limited human knowledge and reason is in these matters.
There is no third position here. You have to know whether or not you believe something. Either you believe it or you don't.
Either you believe unicorns exist or you don't. You can't not know whether or not you believe they exist. You can not know whether or not they exist, but that is a different thing.
You have to know what you believe because it's what you believe.
I think you can't say this is a rule for every scenario. "Believe or not believe" seems to be an opinion of yours that I'm personally not bound to. I'm fine just accepting I don't know something that is clearly outside of the grasp of my rational thought or logic.
I'm not sure why you guys keep comparing the existence of a god with unicorns or leprschauns. But ok, I'll play along. Do I believe there are unicorns in earth? No, we have a pretty good understanding of the land of this planet. If you said "they live in another dimension" I'd just dismiss that because whoever said it has no clue about what "another dimension" is.
Bernard Russell used a teapot in space analogy to show that belief in something that may or may not exist and isn't tangible to living doesn't seem to be worth investing the effort of belief in.
Carl Sagan had a quote, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
Christopher Hitchens had his own: "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
All of these are open-minded observations that can be easily changed with evidence that supports the religious claims. Which are lacking.
I agree with all of them. I feel both sides have the problem of belief. "May or may not exist", as you said.
"Believe or not believe" seems to be an opinion of yours that I'm personally not bound to. I'm fine just accepting I don't know something that is clearly outside of the grasp of my rational thought or logic.
Whether you believe something or not is not outside the grasp of your rational thought. Just... answer the question. That's all it takes to know if you believe something, you take a moment to introspect and you say whether you believe it or not.
There's also a difference between lacking a belief in a proposition and believing in the negation of that proposition. Lacking a belief in something (for example, any particular god) is not the same thing as believing that that god does not exist. Both are atheism, they're just different kinds of atheism. "Strong atheism" and "weak atheism" are the usual terms to distinguish between them.
I'll play along. When I ask myself that question I immediately answer "I don't believe", just because I've conditioned myself to answer that over the years. The same way I answered "I believe" when I was conditioned during my childhood.
My point is that choosing sides is a fallacy, it's something very human though. Over the past years I've realized that I don't need to take sides and that I'm better off accepting when I just don't know something, just avoid having opinions about matters that I can't understand.
But yes, I still answer "I don't believe" internally. Hopefully I'll learn to turn "I don't know" into my instinctual answer.