How is atheism a faith?

[antinoos]

When the very nature of the creation implies intelligence and intent

What's intelligent and intentional about my nipples? I'm a guy.

 

[Mytran]

I stated my position.
I defended my position.
My position remains unchanged.
I respect your right to disagree.

What you haven't done though is address any of the refutations raised. You've simply made claims.

I must admit, I was let down after the hype promised an "efficient" proof that atheism is a faith.

Me too. Nothing has been proved beyond a misunderstanding of terminology and the claims for a deity boil down to "I don't know why X, therefore god".
Dissapointing

 

[Oddish]

I wasn't expecting to change your position, I was just hoping for a little more than a few talking points about evolution. Is it part of your stance that if one position is proven to be untrue then another stance on the same subject must automatically be correct?

Depends if they're mutually exclusive, and if additional options exist. Theory A, universe formed at random, is declared untenable by laws of physics and probability. Said laws don't make it impossible, just improbable on a scale that no human mind can imagine. Ergo, Theory B (universe did not form at random) makes the most sense.
Mutually exclusive? Yes.
Third option? No.
The logical position is obvious.

Oddish... Can you give a reason why the Universe could not have just arisen spontaneous without a creator[?] There does not need to be an intelligent force or intent behind the start of the universe, or the way the universe and life developed.

My long post on Page 2 explains one reason why that is not so. I have had many people try to "evangelize" me to the atheist faith over the years. If that is your intent, you're going to have to counter my points, not pretend that I didn't make them.

Corporal captain, I saw your post, but it's late, and I'm tired. I will deal with it later.

 

[Mytran]

Depends if they're mutually exclusive, and if additional options exist. Theory A, universe formed at random, is declared untenable by laws of physics and probability. Said laws don't make it impossible, just improbable on a scale that no human mind can imagine. Ergo, Theory B (universe did not form at random) makes the most sense.
Mutually exclusive? Yes.
Third option? No.
The logical position is obvious.

I wonder what you mean by "random" - are you simply talking about natural processes? Because if so they don't happen at random, they behave in acordance to their nature.

Your implication that the physical laws of the universe needed to be deliberately manipulated in order for them to come out as they are is unfounded, because we simply don't know if the universe could have formed any way other than it did.
Our knowledge stops at the inital moment of expansion.
We have no means to measure how probable such an event is.

 

[at Quark's]

Can someone explain to me what "atheism" actually is supposed to mean in discussions like these, exactly?

If it means a worldview devoid of the idea of there being a(ny) god ('seeing no reason to enter such a hypothesis'), I wouldn't say it is a belief, as, indeed, absence of a belief is not a belief in itself.

If, however, it means a positive affirmation that "(a) god for certain does not exist, neither can he/it/whatever exist", I think that would/could be a belief, since I think it's fundamentally and philosophically impossible to prove the non-existence of something that could/would transcend all our attempts at categorization in the first place.

(Of course these are only the two extreme interpretations I can think of in short order, actual positions may be anywhere in between.)

Put shorter: I think not believing in the existence of a(ny) god is not yet the same as believing in the nonexistence of a god.

 

[NCC-73515]

Can someone explain to me what "atheism" actually is supposed to mean in discussions like these, exactly?

If it means a worldview devoid of the idea of there being a(ny) god ('seeing no reason to enter such a hypothesis'), I wouldn't say it is a belief, as, indeed, absence of a belief is not a belief in itself.

If, however, it means a positive affirmation that "(a) god for certain does not exist, neither can he/it/whatever exist", I think that would/could be a belief, since I think it's fundamentally and philosophically impossible to prove the non-existence of something that could/would transcend all our attempts at categorization in the first place.

(Of course these are only the two extreme interpretations I can think of in short order, actual positions may be anywhere in between.)

Put shorter: I think not believing in the existence of a(ny) god is not yet the same as believing in the nonexistence of a god.

That's the simplified difference between atheism and agnosticism, AFAIK, but people split them into overlapping subgroups here

 

[at Quark's]

^ To me, agnosticism would be the explicit reckoning (and integration) in the worldview that we cannot know this as a core tenet. Atheism 'in the weak sense' as I described it above would in my feeling tend more towards simply ignoring the theoretical possibility of there being a god as irrelevant to the construction of that worldview. But that may be just my personal feeling about the 'dividing line' between those two and I may be mistaken in that.

I've also met people who introduced additional terms such as non-theism to try to clear up some of the confusion.

 

[Tosk]

Theism is the belief of a god or gods.
Atheism is a lack of belief in a god or gods.

Theory A universe formed at random
Theory B universe did not form at random
Mutually exclusive? Yes.
Third option? No.

"Not random" is not the same as "created by a deity".

Doesn't matter anyway, the point is that atheism is not a faith. And even if it was, it wouldn't change anything. Some people would continue to believe in god/s, and some would continue to not believe in god/s.

 

[Miss Chicken]

Depends if they're mutually exclusive, and if additional options exist. Theory A, universe formed at random, is declared untenable by laws of physics and probability. Said laws don't make it impossible, just improbable on a scale that no human mind can imagine. Ergo, Theory B (universe did not form at random) makes the most sense.
Mutually exclusive? Yes.
Third option? No.
The logical position is obvious.



My long post on Page 2 explains one reason why that is not so. I have had many people try to "evangelize" me to the atheist faith over the years. If that is your intent, you're going to have to counter my points, not pretend that I didn't make them.

Corporal captain, I saw your post, but it's late, and I'm tired. I will deal with it later.

I do not need to counter your points because it is quite alright for an atheist to declare ‘we do not know’. Just because we are not certain about how the universe or life started it does not mean we have to jump to ‘a god created it‘. Just because we don’t understand something does not mean that we should decide on a supernatural explanation.

We do not need a god to be the answer for anything especially as I cannot see how any god could be the beginning.

 

[rhubarbodendron]

Third option? No.

I beg to differ. The third option is that the universe has formed according to the laws of physics. No creation involved.
And the laws of physics depend on natural factors. A gram was not created to be a gram, it is simply the weight of a certain amount of matter. Blue was not created to be blue, it only happens to be light of a certain wavelength (which btw most insects are unable to see. But they can see UV and infrared which we can't).

 

[Miss Chicken]

Can someone explain to me what "atheism" actually is supposed to mean in discussions like these, exactly?

If it means a worldview devoid of the idea of there being a(ny) god ('seeing no reason to enter such a hypothesis'), I wouldn't say it is a belief, as, indeed, absence of a belief is not a belief in itself.

If, however, it means a positive affirmation that "(a) god for certain does not exist, neither can he/it/whatever exist", I think that would/could be a belief, since I think it's fundamentally and philosophically impossible to prove the non-existence of something that could/would transcend all our attempts at categorization in the first place.

(Of course these are only the two extreme interpretations I can think of in short order, actual positions may be anywhere in between.)

Put shorter: I think not believing in the existence of a(ny) god is not yet the same as believing in the nonexistence of a god.

I pointed out earlier that before I could properly argue about for or against a God’s existence I need ‘god’ properly defined. As ‘god’ is such a ridiculously broad term what are we really discussing? All I can say is that I have never seen the slightest evidence for a god (by any definition of the word) so I see no reason why I should believe in one.

 

[at Quark's]

I pointed out earlier that before I could properly argue about for or against a God’s existence I need ‘god’ properly defined. As ‘god’ is such a ridiculously broad term what are we really discussing? All I can say is that I have never seen the slightest evidence for a god (by any definition of the word) so I see no reason why I should believe in one.

You are right in that. As a concept it would be too broad to talk about, even not taking into account the possibility I raised before, that 'god' could theoretically defy any attempt at definition other than not-this, not-that.

However, specifying what this 'god' is supposed to be would be the task of the believer, the one professing such a belief.

 

[Miss Chicken]

^^^ yes, which is why the first thing I asked Mormons or JWs when they knock on my door is to define the god they are talking about.

The last time The JWs came they went on about how fine tuned the Earth was for the life that was on it and that that proved God. I suggested that they read ‘Imagined Life’ by James Trefil and Michael Summers which looks at how life might evolve on exoplanets that were significantly different from Earth.

https://www.amazon.com/Imagined-Life-Speculative-Intelligent-Supergravity/dp/168457577X

 

[rhubarbodendron]

However, specifying what this 'god' is supposed to be would be the task of the believer, the one professing such a belief.

But wouldn't that be analogue to a self-fulfilling prophecy?

 

[Mytran]

But wouldn't that be analogue to a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I'm not sure how - it would just be akin to asking the claimant to explain what they believe in and why.

 

[J.T.B.]

The problem with Pasteur's work is that it throws a giant monkey wrench into the gears of atheism, which postulates that everything on earth (indeed, in the universe) formed randomly, with no outside help whatsoever. And the problem is that the very sciences that atheists rely upon refute that belief. The laws of physics tell us what happens in an energized system, such as a planet in a stable orbit around a star: the transfer of energy causes changes in the system on a molecular level. The laws of probability tell us the nature of these changes: order can occasionally emerge from chaos, but it is much more typical that order decays into chaos. Ergo, nothing as sophisticated as a bacterium (the simplest self-sustaining form of life) can just "happen".

That is a mis-application of the science in question, as @CorporalCaptain has already ably addressed.. The thermodynamic argument is that entropy will increase in a closed system. But science has explained and modeled how natural processes can decrease entropy within systems which have an external energy source. Nothing about life evolving as increasingly complex and ordered systems is inconsistent with the second law of thermodynamics; as long as they return more energy into their environment (heat, movement, reproduction, decomposition) there is no net decrease of entropy.

What is harder to explain are the actual origins of life. There are competing theories, but, in relevance for this discussion, none are inconsistent with the second law of thermodynamics. A couple of samples:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45859788_Thermodynamic_Origin_of_Life
https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/

Small and humble as it might be, said bacterium is a conglomeration of around ten billion precisely placed atoms. A jigsaw puzzle of such size and complexity cannot possibly assemble itself.

This is an interesting proposition from someone whose position, I take it, is that there is an entity(?) in the universe so complex that it "designed" all life on earth. How was that entity assembled?

Proponents of atheism call this the Watchmaker argument, and they bluster that it has been repeatedly debunked, but they cannot tell us how or why, aside from a few minor things, like amino acid creation. It really reminds me of someone kicking a few loose bricks out of the Great Wall of China, and declaring that the entire 1500-mile long structure has been reduced to rubble.

Once you have amino acid formation, you can have protein. You can have nucleotide formation. You can have systems assembling in progressively more ordered forms over millions of years. Nothing about the evolution of life is refuted here.

In short, properly examined atheism requires a person to believe in the existence of an undiscovered and unverified scientific principle that runs 180 degrees against current ones, something that makes the impossible possible (not unlike God, when you think about it). Therefore, whatever you might think, it is a faith.

Eh, no. There are a lot of people in the United States right now that believe that highly-placed Democrats and celebrities are involved in running a criminal pedophilia and cannibalism organization. I have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true. At what point does my disbelief in this theory become a "faith"?

When the very nature of the creation implies intelligence and intent, is it logical to declare that there was no Creator because you never met Him? That's a little like saying that because you never encountered William Shakespeare, "Hamlet" must have written itself.

What a terrible analogy. There is abundant evidence that humans are capable of constructing written language at that level of complexity.

I must admit, I was let down after the hype promised an "efficient" proof that atheism is a faith.

Yeah. Also unfortunate was the personalizing: The other side is ferocious, loud, blustering. No need to characterize, just lay out the argument.

 

[Oddish]

Hold it. You don't get to be the gatekeeper of terminology, especially given the errors you make later in the same post. These posts do better:





Moving on:

What you've posted here, @Oddish, is, in essence, a gish gallop [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop]:

During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4] In practice, each point raised by the "Gish galloper" takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.​

Accordingly, I'll post specifically only these refutations:

1. It is not a scientific postulate that a bacterium spontaneously assembled out of non-living matter. Arguing against the spontaneous formation of a bacterium is a straw man argument.

2. The second law of thermodynamics applies to an isolated system. The Earth is not a thermodynamically isolated system, and neither is the Solar System (as one example, extrasolar influences are relevant to the orbits of objects in the Oort cloud, which in turn are relevant to terrestrial biological evolution). Vaguely arguing that the level of chaos in a system increases over time overlooks these facts as given here in #2, and it overlooks the points in #3 regarding additional internal sources of energy in the Earth and the length of the time scales involved.

3. Despite the fact that most of the energy being continuously added to the Earth comes from the Sun, this energy isn't believed to drive geological processes, because not very much of it penetrates that deeply. A major source of energy for geological processes comes from the radioactive decay of isotopes left over from when the Earth was formed. The predominant isotopes whose decay produces this heat have half-lives measured in billions of years, so it will take many eons yet for this source of heat to be exhausted. Also, the formation of the Earth itself generated a tremendous amount of heat (when gravitational potential energy was converted into e.g. kinetic and electromagnetic potential energy), and evidently there has still not been time for all of it to radiate back out into space. These sources of energy that are introduced into the biosphere from inside the Earth itself are important to the evolution of life on Earth, and perhaps even the creation of life itself; it's worth noting that the creation of life (assuming terrestrial life was in fact created on the Earth itself) must have occurred when both of these sources of internal energy were far more abundant.​

These points alone negate pretty much your entire argument, such as it is. For the rest of it, @Kai "the spy" and @Mytran both spoke eloquently on the subject of what it means not to know how life was created in the context of scientific understanding.


But the nature of creation does not imply the existence of a creating intelligence, whether it is one having any intent or not, so the rest of this post is irrelevant.

I must admit, I was let down after the hype promised an "efficient" proof that atheism is a faith. Pretty much every refutation to that that there is, including those offered so far in this thread to what you've said, involves the idea that, in a scientific theory, every aspect of it is subject to questioning, examination, and testing. There isn't any part of a scientific theory that gets a free pass to be accepted on faith alone. Even mathematical axioms and postulates get tested every time any experiment is performed. For example, if at any point a selection of integers is made for which the commutative law fails (or for which any other axiom of number theory fails), this could be observed and detected; to date, this has never happened.

In closing, note that an unnecessary assumption that could be neither tested nor questioned would constitute glorified ignorance. Assuming the existence of a Creator with both unknown and unknowable properties is an assumption that is both unnecessary and untestable, and by claiming its necessity you are asking us not to question it. What you're essentially saying is: science doesn't presently have all the answers, therefore let us amend the set of scientific postulates to incorporate ignorance as a perpetually ingrained component of it. That itself is, to put it succinctly, simply ignorant.

It seems that your evangelical colleagues are attacking in force, determined to either convert me or shout me down. So I will have to keep my rebuttal brief.

* The OP demanded that I defend my position. I defended it. If that's a Gish gallop, so be it. I think of it as an opening broadside.
* (1) Life exists. When the Earth formed, it did not. Ergo, it (a) formed naturally, (b) was formed by an intelligence, or (c) was deposited from outside (meteor strike). Since "formed naturally" violates the laws of probability and (c) doesn't address the basic issue, (b) becomes the most sensible theory.
* (2) and (3) are salient, but irrelevant. I mentioned an energized system. Nothing I said required that the energization be solar. I have been involved in debates like this for decades, and I know a distraction when I see it.
* I'm not sure I get your next... you claim that you don't take science on faith. And yet, you presumably claim absolute conviction that it explains everything, with no room or need for the supernatural. Were that not the case, you would be an agnostic, not an atheist. Did you get confused by your own smoke and mirrors?
* I declared that atheism is a faith, and I hold to that. I never said that my personal beliefs were not. Belief in a Creator might be grounded in science, history, anecdote, personal experience, or a combination of the above... but it is still fundamentally, faith in the Unseen.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

evangelical colleagues

No. I think we're done, here. Well, I am at least.

 

[J.T.B.]

It seems that your evangelical colleagues are attacking in force, determined to either convert me or shout me down.

Again with the personal characterizations. No, your arguments have simply been addressed.

Since "formed naturally" violates the laws of probability and (c) doesn't address the basic issue, (b) becomes the most sensible theory.

That is a fallacy, an argument from incredulity. You have also not demonstrated that life originating and evolving on Earth violates the laws of probability.

I'm not sure I get your next... you claim that you don't take science on faith. And yet, you presumably claim absolute conviction that it explains everything, with no room or need for the supernatural. Were that not the case, you would be an agnostic, not an atheist. Did you get confused by your own smoke and mirrors?

That is a mis-representation and a false dichotomy. There was no claim of absolute conviction, only that science is and has been providing better explanations of the evidence than any alternative. Not supported is the implication that if the scientific process has not explained everything about the natural world, the explanation must therefore be design or instigation by a supernatural force.

 

[BillJ]

All I know, is that I pledge allegiance to the Space Koala. Long may it reign!