We all get together on the sabbath to plot how to convert you personally, Oddish, into the atheist fold so that we can get those mad final boss debate skillz of yours on our side and win the war for control of Earth.
How is atheism a faith?
- Thread starter drew
- Start date
Theism = A belief in a deity or deities.
A-theism (not Athe-ism; the 'a' prefix negates the word it precedes, as in "asexual") = an absence of theism.
It is no more a faith than baldness is a hairstyle or nudity is an outfit. It's a positive term applied to a negative state of being, like "naked", "dead" or "extinct"; this is why, grammatically, you "go extinct" rather than "become extinct".
The world is not divided into Believers and Atheists; it is divided into people who disbelieve in approximately 4,200 religions and people who disbelieve in 4,199.
A-theism (not Athe-ism; the 'a' prefix negates the word it precedes, as in "asexual") = an absence of theism.
It is no more a faith than baldness is a hairstyle or nudity is an outfit. It's a positive term applied to a negative state of being, like "naked", "dead" or "extinct"; this is why, grammatically, you "go extinct" rather than "become extinct".
The world is not divided into Believers and Atheists; it is divided into people who disbelieve in approximately 4,200 religions and people who disbelieve in 4,199.
Yes, but you promised "efficient proof". Still waiting.
Anyone can make a declaration, that's the easy part.
Oh, no, he called us evangelical. How can we ever come back from that?
The Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago. The earliest indirect signs of life on Earth are from 3.85 billion years ago, and those are not clear (they could be sedimentary rock, which would indicate life, they could be volcanic rock, in which case they would not indicate life). It took at least 700 million years for life to exist on Earth. And, again, those signs of life are not undisputed. The earliest direct signs of life we have, though even those have been contested, are from 3.5 billion years ago. That would mean more than a billion years of Earth without life. The oldest certain proof of life is from 1.9 billion years ago. So, it is quite possible, maybe even likely, that Earth existed for several billion years before life started.
Do you understand just how much time that is? None of us hear is older than a couple of decades, and it took at least 700 million years, that's 70 million decades, for life to appear on Earth. And Earth is just one planet capable of sustaining life as we know it, we know of a couple for certain, we can assume there are a lot more that we have not discovered yet, of which quite a few might very well be older (and in cosmic sense that means millions or billions of years) than the Earth, in our galaxy alone, not even to speak of all those other galaxies like Andromeda or the Magellanic Clouds, Sculptor, Cartwheel, and that's just a couple of those we have a name for.
So how exactly is "formed naturally" violating the laws of probability?
Do you even understand what science is? No, we don't take science on faith, because science isn't supposed to be taken on faith. Science is verifiable, you don't need faith in it, you can research it yourself, that's the whole point of it. We also know that there is a lot that science has not found an answer for yet, but through science, we learn more each and every second.
And if you still don't understand the difference between faith and confidence, then I'm guessing you don't want to understand it.
What you demand is that we proof a negative. Well, guess what, that's just about impossible. It is your claim, that (a) god exists, which is a positive, and should therefore be easier to proof. The burden of proof is therefore on the side of the positive claim, not the negative one.
You can't (or at least I can't) research everything or even a sliver of everything. So we have faith or confidence that others aren't leading us astray.
Faith and confidence really aren't all that far apart in the definition department from what I've seen. They both require us to have trust in something beyond our control.
I have faith the Dolphins will win this weekend.
I have confidence the Dolphins will win this weekend.
They are both the same basic sentence, one could have religious overtones associated, but not necessarily.
LOCUTUS: I thought atheists didn't believe in the sabbath. 
IAMNOTSPOCK: It is no more a RELIGION than baldness is a hairstyle. But it is a FAITH like a shaved head is a fashion statement (just like a mullet, a crew cut, or a mohawk).
KAI: It took 2.5 billion years for prokaryotes to evolve into eukaryotes, which is a much smaller step in complexity, and allows the driving force of evolution. And the odds against life forming at random are so astronomical, even if you factor in the number of atoms in Earth's oceans and the number of years the planet had existed, it doesn't change anything, any more than one drop of ink dropped in the Pacific Ocean would cause it to change color. A trillion might seem like a huge amount, but divide it by a googol and you're still effectively left with zero.
IAMNOTSPOCK: It is no more a RELIGION than baldness is a hairstyle. But it is a FAITH like a shaved head is a fashion statement (just like a mullet, a crew cut, or a mohawk).
KAI: It took 2.5 billion years for prokaryotes to evolve into eukaryotes, which is a much smaller step in complexity, and allows the driving force of evolution. And the odds against life forming at random are so astronomical, even if you factor in the number of atoms in Earth's oceans and the number of years the planet had existed, it doesn't change anything, any more than one drop of ink dropped in the Pacific Ocean would cause it to change color. A trillion might seem like a huge amount, but divide it by a googol and you're still effectively left with zero.
In a word; nope.
I don't choose to reject your religion or any other as some kind of statement of rebellion, the way I can choose a hairstyle, because belief is not a choice. This is one of the reasons Pascal's Wager is such nonsense; one cannot choose to believe in something they don't find compelling simply to err on the side of caution (and certainly not to the point of fooling a deity!), any more than one can choose not to believe in something. We simply don't.
Naturally, a religious person is going to consider [the particular] faith [they happen to believe in] to be the logical default position and any deviation from it to be an illogical rejection, but this is not the case. My lack of belief in your god is equivalent to your (I assume) lack of belief in Santa Claus.
Last edited:
If I may borrow from my Nuclear Platypus brethren, I believe that God and the universe itself is a 24 dimensional biscuit with a mild speech impediment (since rectified).
I have to wonder what you mean by "random" since as far as I can tell, most other posters are referring to natural process (such as chemical reactions) simply doing their thing. The earliest, simplest lifeforms didn't just spring together one day out of a group of random atoms - they were the result of a long series of natural chemical reactions each building on what came before.
Statistically that 1.0 difference is pretty small. Disbelief takes it.
Absolutely true. I had a girlfriend who was religious. I was kind of jealous of the comfort and reassurance it gave her and actually tried to see things her way. Accept God if you will.
Nope, didn't take.
Atheism is to Faith as Sobriety is to Intoxication.
Atheism is the absence of faith.
I cannot see how anyone could interpret this any differently, save for a desperate attempt to establish some false equivalency in order to claim "everyone has some kind of faith."
Atheism is the absence of faith.
I cannot see how anyone could interpret this any differently, save for a desperate attempt to establish some false equivalency in order to claim "everyone has some kind of faith."
"Faith" used conversationally, sure. What is being debated here, though, is faith in something with no empirical evidence of existence. If the person in the example said "I have faith that invisible angels will guide the ball so the Dolphins win on Sunday," that would be a very different conversation. Expressing disbelief in these angels would not, to most reasonable people, be considered an expression of "faith."
You're not providing anything of statistical rigor in support, just saying essentially "these big numbers don't sound very likely to me, so they must not support the premise." As @Mytran said, the process is a build-up of small chemical interactions over vast stretches of time. A proper analysis would be the probabilities of each step of the process. Which, since chemicals can only interact in a limited number of ways, may not be so astronomical after all.
Fair enough but that's a long way from "proving," in an "exceedingly efficient" manner, that atheism is a faith as you've defined it.
That's all it is, an old tactic to get a tu quoque argument: "You're saying I believe in something that's not provable but you do the exact same thing." They've gotten a lot of mileage out of it, though.
I'm an atheist and I've also argued that, at least gnostic atheism, requires a leap of faith as much as gnostic theism.
I have some rebuttals to the 'The odds of life forming at random...' line of thought.
Yeah, the odds of life forming at random on a planet are pretty low, as far as we know. The thing is, there are a fucking huge number of planets for it to happen on. If the odds of it happening are one in a trillion, and there are a trillion planets, one of them is very likely to have life. Just like the guy who wins the lottery can say "Wow, it must have been fate", but no, you're the guy who lucked out.
Furthermore, they did some experiments where they recreated the chemical conditions of primordial earth in a laboratory, and very quickly elementary amino acids and phospholipids formed. The building blocks of life.
I have some rebuttals to the 'The odds of life forming at random...' line of thought.
Yeah, the odds of life forming at random on a planet are pretty low, as far as we know. The thing is, there are a fucking huge number of planets for it to happen on. If the odds of it happening are one in a trillion, and there are a trillion planets, one of them is very likely to have life. Just like the guy who wins the lottery can say "Wow, it must have been fate", but no, you're the guy who lucked out.
Furthermore, they did some experiments where they recreated the chemical conditions of primordial earth in a laboratory, and very quickly elementary amino acids and phospholipids formed. The building blocks of life.
Last edited:
No, we're not debating subjective opinion here. I'm afraid you don't get to be objectively wrong about a dictionary definition and say, "Oh well, let's agree to disagree". If there's any debate to be had, it's about the nature of faith vs empiricism and the reliability of faith as a pathway to objective truth, but first you have to be intellectually honest about exactly what faith is. We can't even begin to engage in any kind of meaningful discourse until you gain a clear idea of what an opposing position actually holds. Falsely equating atheism with faith is projection and a shifting of the burden of proof.
Walks into thread...backs slowly out and closes the door...and then locks it - and then hammers some boards across the door etc...
This one (oh, how often does this pop up?) has gone off the rails and into the furrowed fields beyond...
This one (oh, how often does this pop up?) has gone off the rails and into the furrowed fields beyond...
I'd argue that faith, trust & confidence are not the same. That's why we have those different words. Colloquially, we can use them similarly, sure, but they possess different intent. Faith is complete & total internal conviction. Trust is agreed upon or fortified assurances, & confidence is merely expectation of assuredness. They are only synonymous in that they support the same concept... in degrees, similarly to how smart, wise, & genius, are all basically describing degrees of intelligence.
A person has confidence they'll get to work tomorrow. They have trust they'll be compensated for doing the work, but they have faith that the universe is a better place for their work.
Personally, I have no basis for banking on that last one. So I don't. Same goes for the almighty.
i would imagine that only a small percentage of atheists are gnostic atheists.
Usually fueled by animosity for religion. I usually see them as people who that because of their perceived wrongness of religiosity, view the opposite position as having to be true. Basically, because someone thinks believing in God is wrong, believing there isn't one must be right.
That shit's mighty rare in my experience too. Most of us just don't want none of your God malarkey. We have no place in our mind for any believing to do with supernatural beings whatsoever
Wait up there, Starcruiser. I'm going with you. This debate has been relatively friendly. I'm walking away before it turns into a verbal knife fight.
I believe in the existence of a Creator, and His relevance.
I still see atheism as a faith.
I think my presentation was quite efficient.
I respect, and indeed would give up my life defending, your right to disagree with me.
I reiterate... let us agree to disagree.
The last word is yours. I will not return to this topic.
Last edited by a moderator:
Similar threads
