Positions

[Humble Bee]

Hello,

I'm an agnostic right now but would like nice strong arguments for either side. The atheist position seems a little more likely to provide these.

[Plu]

There are no arguments for atheism, only arguments against theism. The only thing you have to do to be an atheist is not believe in things that have no evidence for them. It's ridiculous that you even have to say it, but that's how normal religion has become; that nobody ever has to mention that they don't believe in dragons, but that people ask for evidence to prove that there is no god, even though it's more reasonable to believe dragons exist than gods, because at least they make sense.

Ah well.

Welcome to the forums :)

[Humble Bee]

Science is great. But can it be used to argue the atheist position?

Theists just say religion and science answers different questions. That there is no contradiction.

[Humble Bee]

Welcome to the forums :)

Thanks!

[Humble Bee]

There are no arguments for atheism, only arguments against theism. The only thing you have to do to be an atheist is not believe in things that have no evidence for them. It's ridiculous that you even have to say it, but that's how normal religion has become; that nobody ever has to mention that they don't believe in dragons, but that people ask for evidence to prove that there is no god, even though it's more reasonable to believe dragons exist than gods, because at least they make sense.

Ah. Is that the weak athesist position? You should not have to provide evidence.

But a strong position should produce evidence, right?

[Plu]

Logic can be used to argue against the theist position. All gods are either logically inconsistent, or irrelevant and powerless. You cannot "argue for atheism". That doesn't even make any sense. You can only show that gods and religions makes no sense, and then all you can do is fall back into the atheist position. All atheism means is "I don't believe gods are real".
Atheism isn't really an end-point either. If anyone ever shows conclusive evidence that some gods exist, atheists will immediately start believing in those gods. (And we'll stop calling them gods pretty quickly and come up with a new term, because we're now talking about something that's real and has properties, and the word "god" is too vague and meaningless to describe something that exists.)

As for answering different questions; two points:

A) Religion tries to answer questions. They intentionally don't pick questions that can have a definitive answer, so they can't be proven wrong. (In the past they did, and everytime they did, they were proven wrong. Most religious characters have stopped trying.)
B) In all situations where religion and science both say something on the same topic, trust science, because it's verifiable and religion is not. Something that you can try for yourself always beats something you have to take on faith.

--

Can I ask you, what does the word "god" mean to you, anyway? There's more meanings to the word than there are people, and they all mean something completely different.

[Humble Bee]

The only thing you have to do to be an atheist is not believe in things that have no evidence for them.

What about things that are hard to explain? Like consciousness. Science does not fully understand it. Religions say they do. No position can provide the type of evidence that the scientific model requires.

[Plu]

But a strong position should produce evidence, right?

Yes, if you say "I know that god does not exist" you need to produce evidence. But before you even do that, you need to pick a definition for "god" that you're going to disprove. There's so many definitions, that it's really pointless. Not a lot of people are strong atheists, and those that are generally are about as irrational as knowing theists.

There have been thousands of gods throughout out human history with extremely wide variance in traits and personality. None of them make sense, many can be proven not to exist, but there's a number that's specifically defined to be unprovable anyway, so why bother? Something that cannot be proven to exist or not exist, by definition, can not have an impact on the real world.

[Plu]

The only thing you have to do to be an atheist is not believe in things that have no evidence for them.

What about things that are hard to explain? Like consciousness. Science does not fully understand it. Religions say they do. No position can provide the type of evidence that the scientific model requires.

Simple. You say "I don't know, but lets find out." And then you do research, and you learn more and more.

If you take the religious path and say "god did it and that's final", you'll never figure out the real answer. And the real answer has never in the history of the world been "god did it", and has always provided new insights that made life more interesting. So there's no real reason to skip on looking for the answers.

Religious folks will try to say that not knowing something is a horror and that science doesn't have all the answers and they do. The problem is that a wrong answer, or a vague answer, is a lot worse than no answer at all. It's better to approach these situations where our knowledge is lacking with curiosity to find the correct answer than it is to just make shit up and pretend that you know, and never study the topic again.

[Humble Bee]

Nice answer!

Can I ask you, what does the word "god" mean to you, anyway? There's more meanings to the word than there are people, and they all mean something completely different.

As agnostic the term may mean anything that is plausible. Hard to rule out something that can't be proven wrong.

E.g. what is the "Life Force"? The force that seems to drive conscious beings. What happens to it at death? One second the body was alive, the next dead. What is the physical difference? This "life force" could be god. Not saying or proving, but it's a theory.

[Plu]

I'll throw in an example building on the subject of consciousness.

Science, in the past few decades of research, has shown us that thoughts arise from electric currents in the brain, that hormone levels influence our actions, how the electric signal travels through the body to the muscle, how we store information, which parts of the brain are responsible for which parts of our consciousness, and lots more.

In doing so, they figured out how to detect and fix various personality disorders, set the first steps into reading someone's mind, and steps towards building more powerful computation machines using the biological model, as well as countless other things that I don't even know came from this kind of research.

Religion, in the past few thousand years of its existance, has claimed that consciousness is from god. Nothing has happened since.

It's really not hard to see why one approach to reality is superior to the other.

[Humble Bee]

You are well versed!

Can you help me point out the error in this "proof" which bothers me. Get's me stuck.

1. If humans have free will, it's origin is either physical or non-physical.

2. All humans experience the freedom of choice and that they can think freely. Nothing suggests that their will should not be free. One who contradicts this, having the will not being free, must provide evidence for it and also solve the problem of what happens with ethics and moral in society if nobody did anything out of free will.

3. A will with physical origin (e.g. brain chemistry) can not be free because a strict physical explanation requires determinism, which means that the wills of humans are just a consequence of physical processes. (Randomness is not the same as choice.)

4. Since free will cannot have physical origin and the fact that it exists makes us conclude that the origin of free will is non-physical.

[Jason78]

What about things that are hard to explain? Like consciousness. Science does not fully understand it. Religions say they do.

Religions say a lot of things.  But when it comes to actually finding stuff out about the world, it's science we turn to every time.  

Science is wrong some of the time.
Religion is wrong all of the time.

[Humble Bee]

Religion is wrong all of the time.

Problem is we can't know that right? Religions say consciousness comes from a spirit soul. You say this is wrong. Must you not have evidence for saying that?

[Plu]

Well, the basic failure is lack of a really strong definition of "free will" and what that means. There is no real conscensus on what free will is.

The real problem with the proof as given is in point 2).

There is no way to distuinguish between a person who says he experiences free will but does not have it, and a person who says he experiences free will and does have it. Both would act exactly the same. Just because people think they have free will doesn't automatically mean they have it.