Why aren't you an atheist?

Because i am not a physicalist.

>it requires blind faith to not believe in something

'no'

> meme

You are more like a meme by refuting that atheism isn't a believe system like any religion, baka.

I don't think it is really fair to describe evolution as a random process

Do you mean that if you suddenly became an atheist, you would get a micropenis and autism?

...

I evolved beyond fairness.

Not believing in some random claim that has no evidence supporting it doesn't require faith. This is like saying that you need faith to not believe in the existence of dragons, or unicorns.

Scientific exploration is only a part of our existence.
The way we observe reality and process it is biased as we very well know.
Also, subjective experience is still a complete mystery.

I don't really understand how this is related to describing evolution as a random process

Forget fair. It is just wrong.

The full human experience is not causal. We are not a causal robot we only choose to perceive things in a strictly physicalist causal way because it seems to have been more advantageous and maybe still is. It is however, very possible that soon viewing the world as such will become less advantageous.

Evolution doesn't have anything to do with atheism, though. It just happens that the large majority of atheists believe in it.
Atheism in itself is just 'lack of belief in deities", and you don't need an alternative explanation to something to see that believing in a claim that has nothing backing it up is a bit silly.

You mean that it's not really random since physical interactions tend to follow some tendencies?

Hard atheism requires the belief that there was no "creator," whether that's a divine being or some sort of influential force that played a part in the formation of the universe, and that such a thing will never be proven to exist. This requires faith of some sort. The position you may be thinking of is more like agnosticism, which doesn't require faith one way or the other.

And the unicorn/dragon/sky daddy meme is a poor comparison, because those things are disproven by the fact that we haven't found them on earth, and we've explored pretty much all of it at this point. A "transcendent" god, such as the Judeo-Christian one, would have to exist outside of nature if that God played a part in the big bang, and such a being would not be able to be measured according to our current understanding of science, if ever.

It's fine to then conclude that there's not enough evidence for you to believe, but to be one of those fags that concludes there's enough evidence to disprove God, to the point of becoming a bizarro-evangelist, just means you want to be a zealot and you've thrown your hand in with the hot new religion of the day. And make no mistake, hard atheism is a religion.

>people answering anything other than 'I met god'

> Also, subjective experience is still a complete mystery.

And so are objective ones. Even if science does a worderful work in a pragmatic way, no one can use to define a absolute thruth just because of how subjective is our perceiving facuties.

Astheism as we know is strong materialist and uses it as fundament to define thruth, as the religion uses it's dogma. Both try to define thruth with their subjective believes, be it god or the subjective perceiving of the scientifical methodology.

But the point of the other poster was that atheism requires fate, implying that according to atheism, life just happend "randomly". Which is certanly not true, since evolution is not a random process.

This nigga gets it.

>So insecure about his own beliefs he has to insult others in an attempt to reassure himself

Random mutation is inherent to the process. Selection is dependent on it and can't occur without it.

>people with no arms tend not to be truck drivers therefore everyone who isnt a truck driver has no arms

religious/10 logic

>Hard atheism
That's a VERY small portion of the atheist "community", fundamentally speaking, from the average atheist point of view believing that you can disprove the existence of God or any other magical entity is just as, if not more, absurd than believing in one. I doubt that even 1% of the atheists here are hard atheists.
Thinking that every atheist you see is like this is just ignorance of your part.

>And the unicorn/dragon/sky daddy meme is a poor comparison
Sure, make it a transcendent unicorn/dragon/sky daddy then.
> we haven't found them on earth, and we've explored pretty much all of it at this point.
Oh but they are magic beings, and they are good at hiding.
>A "transcendent" god, such as the Judeo-Christian one, would have to exist outside of nature """""if""""" that God played a part in the big bang
You literally don't have any reason to believe in such a thing, only if you use some appeal to ignorance.
> and such a being would not be able to be measured according to our current understanding of science
It requires evidence regardless, saying that something can't be observed doesn't make it's existence true or even plausible.

yes but harmful mutations die out, while beneficial ones survive, removing the randomess out of the equation

We could try and debate this but neither of us is going to convince the other. There is some interesting evidence that suggests the possibility of a creator, but doesn't prove it, and I'm okay with that and don't expect people to believe based solely off that.

But tbhfam, believing in God makes him/it/whatever real and accomplishes the same thing whether the being actually exists in some form or not.

>There is some interesting evidence that suggests the possibility of a creator
Enlighten me then.

The fact that the beneficial mutations survive doesn't change the fact that it's origin has randomness associated with it.

but there is also a process that weeds out randomness, called natural selection
So evolution in itself isnt inheritly random

Correlation ≠ causation

>believing in God makes him/it/whatever real and accomplishes the same thing whether the being actually exists in some form or not.

thats pretty retarded senpai

Like I said, I could bring it up but that would just cause a debate that neither if us is going to concede, and the "evidence" is less that and more hints that allow for the possibility of a creator. It is not objective in any way.

How so?

Most people desire some form of mysticism whether they realize it or not, and it's a deep seated part of the human condition. Whether or not what they believe in exists, it still satisfies this need and provides a purpose, and that's the most important thing a religion does.

Don't call it evidence then, you're giving people false hopes.
And debating is good, you get to exercise your mind and you may even do a favor for someone else.

It's less interesting

>Most people desire some form of mysticism whether they realize it or not, and it's a deep seated part of the human condition.
I bet most people don't even get to choose what they want to begin with. If your parents are religious, you will be raised in a religious background and will be receiving influences as you grow up.
>Whether or not what they believe in exists, it still satisfies this need and provides a purpose, and that's the most important thing a religion does.
You don't need religion to have a purpose in life.

>believing in God makes him/it/whatever real

believing doesnt have any effect on anything and it doesnt make it real

>Most people desire some form of mysticism whether they realize it or not

yeah yeah yeah everyone wants it even if they dont

>it still satisfies this need

you sure it doesnt satisfy the "i wont die even when i die" need?

...

I forgot to put evidence in quotes the first time, since its more subjective "evidence" for my personal belief system.

The problem with using any sort of evidence as the basis for belief is that it becomes a god-of-the-gaps situation, and as soon as that gap is filled by science the belief system becomes questioned and people either give up on it or start damage controlling, as is the case with young earth creationism. What I believe is that there is a compatibility between faith and science when looked at without a bias either way, and certain aspects of the human condition suggest some sort of influence, such as our seemingly unique altruism for an intelligent life form.

Myself and a lot of people I have known have tried to be cold and rational about life with a purely atheistic world-view, but the human desire to find god makes such a lifestyle depressing and unsatisfying. This seems to be a recurring aspect of the human condition across all cultures and civilizations. Therefore, either God exists and wants us to seek him out or our monkey brains evolved this behavior because it had some sort of benefit to us, but that's irrelevant because the results are the same. Could it be that we are smart enough to question existence, even if there is no purpose, and this leads us to be depressed at the realization that there is none? Maybe, but what a sad and unfulfilling life that is to live.

You don't need it, but there's literally no reason not to use it. And what you claim does not explain cases where people raised non- or even anti-religious find religion later in life.

Since 100% of your life is how you interpret your surroundings within your mind, having a belief in something makes it just as real as anything else, to you and only you. It's subjectively real, not objectively.

Also, people seem to latch on to the "heaven/hell" paradigm and the direct influence of God too much when they criticize Christianity. I'm not sure I've ever "talked" to God or if heaven is an actual thing. Perhaps "heaven" is the peace that comes from living a truly good life and it isn't even a place, whether real or metaphysical. But does that really matter? If the effect on the person is the same, isn't that just splitting hairs?

Is being an optimist a bad thing?

>And what you claim does not explain cases where people raised non- or even anti-religious find religion later in life.
And what percentage of religious people do you think they comprise? Also, do you think that these kind of people have thoughtfully thought about the whole existence of gods matter and suddenly just decided to ignore it all or you think they are the type that never cared about these kind of matters from the beginning and started believing in a god due to a harsh emotional period of their lives or some kind of experience they randomly attributed to a god?

Proper evidence wouldn't be considered god-of-the-gaps, I think.
>Could it be that we are smart enough to question existence, even if there is no purpose, and this leads us to be depressed at the realization that there is none? Maybe, but what a sad and unfulfilling life that is to live.
You only think that the lack of an intrinsic purpose is sad and unfulfilling because you believe that we have one to begin with, people can make their own purpose without a problem. There's nothing about life that is unfulfilling in the atheist point of view, quite the contrary. You live because you enjoy living, that's it.

Divine Conservation v. Existential Inertia.

>kind of people
It could realistically be for any of those reasons. One interesting story I read was about a geneticist who was raised agnostic and started believing as his knowledge of the genome and evolution became deeper. But that's just his personal reason. You're right though, it's not a very big percentage of religious people.

>intrinsic purpose
Perhaps, but why has that been such a consistent part of human mythos for all of our history until very recently? And why do we all of a sudden think we no longer need an intrinsic purpose as a society, whether that's just a delusion or not?

>people can make their own purpose without a problem.

Do go into this more.
How do you know this to be the case that people don't seek generally the same thing ultimately? How do you parse it from difference expressions that are caused confused understandings of reality or cultural expression?

I have to head to work but do tell.

As someone who attended an evolutionary biology lecture a few hours ago I can safely tell you that you're wrong.

Natural selection only removes randomness from the equation if the only part of evolution that is valid is Darwin's theory and that mutations happen.

Gene drift for instance is an integral part of evolution and is pretty much just entirely random distribution of allels in the population since the population is finite in size.

You're making wrong assumptions, intrinsic purpose to life isn't something shared by all societies or religions, much like the idea of a divine personal god.
Humans naturally want to know/understand things, and come with all sorts of explanations to them, gods are one of them.
Science can give us some of these answers, but science as we know it's a very recent thing, and the capacity to share information easily is even more recent.

I mainly argue that science can only explain the natural, and certain aspects of the human condition cannot really be explained by science, which is the domain of religion and spirituality.

Can I choose to sit the arguement out?
As others have noted, it's just as ludicrous to assume that the universe suddenly expanded with great energy from a single point over 13 billion years ago as believing that a benevolent being created everything like magic because he said so

Both require faith in something intangible and I am not ready to concede that. I will settle for doing right by people and trying to leave something good in the world.

Meant to reply to

atheism is the ultimate blue pill

I'm not even saying that some sort of purpose is needed, my point is that if you need such a thing to live go and make one instead of binding yourself to some fixed random purpose that may very well have been invented by some random person. The life is yours, you should live it as you want.

>How do you know this to be the case that people don't seek generally the same thing ultimately?
Why would I even consider such a thing to begin with? Even if you wanted to group every human being on earth together and affirm that they share the same ultimate goal in life, why attribute it to a god instead of to the common ancestry and genetic traits we all share? You can attribute it to anything you want I guess, but can you prove it?

I'm not saying you can't make your own meaning, but what's wrong with using a blueprint that's already out there. How much trial and error did each ancient religion go through to get where it is today? All the theological development and cultural significance of any given religion gives it a lot of appeal. Not that doing shrooms and worshipping a rock doesn't have some appeal, but religions that already have preloaded storylines are pretty appealing tbqh.

>It's subjectively real,

nd how is that different from not real?

>well perhaps my own specific interpretation is true

i guess theres no point in asking for any evidence because literally everything you believe is real to you

> isn't that just splitting hairs?

it stops being harmles when you start manipulating other people with it

Because if you decide to pick some random blueprint you will need to follow everything that's in there, regardless of what's in there, even if you dislike it.
>How much trial and error did each ancient religion go through to get where it is today?
"They all got it wrong but at least today we are right", is that what you are trying to say?
You talk as if you didn't care if your religion is true or not. Are you really going to heaven this way?

I am. Now fuck off.

Because of the law of causality. No matter how we look at it our universe was created by a process that goes against our laws of physics. Something was there before anything, something that did not come into being as a direct result of something.

If that something is a someone, I do not believe it has any contact or knowledge of us but technically it is a god-like being.

Therefore I do not discount the idea of a being that created the universe (by creating the previous events that led to our universe) but I do not practice any religion since if such a being exists our religions are very disconnected from it.

We humans need to accept the fact that we know very little.

Claiming that you know that a God exists is an extraordinarily arrogant claim it isn't being humble and accepting the fact we know very little at all.

But I don't claim I know god exists.

>No matter how we look at it our universe was created by a process that goes against our laws of physics.

What is your physics background?

ITT

I've read literature on physics, though don't have a degree on it. Did 10 courses on it back in school, but it didn't go beyond earth.

Welcome to atheism.

You seen to be struggling with what "faith" means.

I have no wishes of burning in hell with the likes of Steve Jobs and Joseph Stalin

Atheists have always changed their definition of the word to make it more and more public friendly.

First it was the denial of any deity, now it is the absence of belief. My point doesn't fit either of those and I don't attach myself to dictionary definitions.

Well, he can still believe, and not claim to know it exists, making him an agnostic theist.

oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/faith

>Atheists have always changed their definition of the word to make it more and more public friendly.

Sure words do change their meaning over time.

Sinister used to mean left handed.

During the early years of Christianity Christians were often described as atheists by the Romans.

Bullshit, atheism is the absence of belief in the existence of deities and has always been so. Being agnostic or gnostic in relation to this position is just other thing to consider.

You're retarded.

No, you.

Because the Catholics did a bang up job with their apologetics in the middle ages thanks to guys like Aquinas and Scotus being top tier philosophers, and save a few minor holes that need to be filled, which is the case for every theory and belief system, their work mostly holds to this day. I don;t have 100% certain belief in a theistic God, but to me it is very clearly better than the physicalist/naturalistic alternative in terms of explanatory power.

This guy gets it.

>I don;t have 100% certain belief in a theistic God, but to me it is very clearly better than the physicalist/naturalistic alternative in terms of explanatory power.

God has quite literally no explanatory power. It's also not a falsifiable concept

>implying correlation = causation

I know, right? Goddidit is such a marvelous tool with unlimited explanatory power!

I am one, The more I learned about anthropology the more obvious it became that religions are self-serving spontaneous fantasies. Also they insist on impossible premises and seem to attract superstitious people so just that aspect alone makes them unattractive to me.

But I understand the social and ritualistic angle so I get why people practice religions. I only object when they advocate for physical and psychological harm against people.

I care too much about the knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world to reject it for a post modern reductionist ideology.

Anthropology doesn't glean as much insight into the nature of the human consciousness as you think it does user.

Why belittle the opposition as an argument?

to not believe is a belief, god can't be proven or disproven, atheism is a faith

teapot

Well I studied many other fields as well.
It's just that anthropology in particular gives the constant pattern of humans grappling with observable concepts and extrapolating them onto the unseen world. It's why we personify inanimate objects, apply human emotions and relationships onto god, later you see fields such as alchemy and numerology trying to use chemical process or logic to invent spiritual principles.

Belittle? I'm pointing the fact that goddidit has no explanatory power, if anything it stops people from trying to figure stuff out. Why would someone search for an answer for something if they are told that the '''"explanation"'''' is God did it and that's that.

Not owning a vase is owning a vase.

This is how stupid you sound.

to not believe is a belief, Zupsuldenblergh the magical washing machine god that created the universe and that hides your socks when you aren't looking at them can't be proven or disproven, atheism is a faith

to not believe is an active decision you fucking idiot, just the same as a refusal to act is an act of itself, which is why people which witnessed a crime and had the time to act, but didn't, is then part of the criminal act and will recieve a punishment

>Blaming the listener when they aren't convinced by your speech
>literally equating people who disagree with you with "criminals"

Why are christians such sociopaths?

haha xd upboated

>comparing disagreeing with your ideas to a crime

Literally SJW tier

Falsifiability does'nt matter save in certain very specific fields of inquiry. It is a nice tool for creating applicable quantitative abstractions in experimental science, it isn't particularity useful in ontology or metaphysics. Treating it as something absolute that all knowledge claims require will ultimately be question begging since there is no way to falsify the claim that all knowledge claims must be falsifiable. Hence we cannot have knowledge that such a principle must hold in our general epistemology.

And it is not as if their ontological commitments can be reduced to "God did it", the properties of God and how these work with the natural order have many features to it that is specific to that form of philosophy/theology that you won't find in something like modern Evangelical apologetics. It is true that God is the first principle, but save something like Ghazali's occasionalism, which is extremely austere in comparison to regular scholasticism, the total explanation is allot richer and has more features to it than you are giving the discipline for.

>Why would someone search for an answer for something if they are told that the '''"explanation"'''' is God did it and that's that.

You would be better off studying something before you comment on it.

You're fundamentally misunderstanding certain religions, namely Christianity. Many sects have a belief that God created the universe with concrete natural laws, and by studying these laws we get closer to what the creator did it all for. It's really just the ass-backwards protestant meme sects that Bible-bash and treat it like a scientific text.

>Falsifiability does'nt matter save in certain very specific fields of inquiry.

It kind of does. It means that you admit that you could be wrong about what you propose, which is quite literally the first requirement for critical inquiry

Ontology and metaphysics aren't particularly useful in providing verifiable information about the world around us, aside from actually producing the scientific community.

Flat earthers could use the same logic and have it be relevant to their """"metaphysics""""