The Nonsense of Atheists

Actually Hahn and Wiker draw from the intelligent design school

etc etc

And far from thinking it stupid to bring the ideas of Dawkins to bear on the junction of science and religion (even if only for the sake of a critique), its all the rage at the moment.

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Nope. I just prefer to believe in things based on evidence, rather than because someone else said so.

If I say there is a blue insect god is that cause for you to believe in it? Can I call you close minded if you don't?

No. Case closed.

 

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your post is nonsense.

those scientists aren't going to be the ones who say god is a fact.

if you had thought about it, you would have realized the difference.

 

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Funny how history repeats itself ....

 

if you base it on presentations of what others accept as evidence, there's really not much difference ...

If I say electrons exist and you don't know which end of the microscope to look through, how do you determine the validity of the claim?
Vox populi?

more like a can of worms

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How true

Scopes Monkey Trials
Galileo

 

Of course not.
They have a different professional interest than theology

Your nonsense aside (namely trying to paint them up as atheists, or potential atheists or something) it still remains that placing science and religion as diametrically opposed is the business of fanatical atheists (and apparently fanatical christians of the 60's too ...) ... all for the pursuit of an obvious political agenda (despite the claims of an earlier post that atheists are as politically neutral as a trappist monk or something)

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or the suppression of (theistic) minorities in soviet Russia
:shrug:

or more precisely

 

it's amazing you still don't get it. i'm not painting them up as atheists. it's that they wouldn't claim that they have proof of god because they are scientists and know the difference.

the rest of your post is meaningless because you don't or won't admit that.

i believe in the paranormal and that there are other universes but that doesn't mean i have proof, assert it's a fact and preach to everyone that it's true as well as go knocking on other's doors on sunday morning to assert my belief as fact. there are as many varied and different speculation and ideas and theism is not the only one. the difference is not everyone has to be assured or lie and state it's a fact in order to entertain the idea and find it interesting or even believe them until such time proves or disproves it. for example, i fancy the idea of time travel, the holodeck, and food replicators but i don't know if it's possible or not. understand the difference? i can hold a thought and acknowledge it's possiblity or even believe it's possible but still be lucid that i have no proof.

there are a lot of things that interest me as well as others or pique my curiosity but i don't have to claim they are a fact to believe in them. if it's proven at a later time to be or not to be, that would be great or perhaps not and if it isn't, then it's an interesting possiblity.

there are a lot of people who have a much more rich life than just a 'god or not' existence. lmao

 

The Soviet Union is not an example of atheists, they oppressed many minorities for various reasons (most of them ideological, having to due with their particular brand of communism), and they also partnered with the Russian Orthodox Church. Meeting privately in general was considered subversive.

 

I agree that atheists are often arrogant and annoying.

But you seem to be trying to play the same attitude game yourself in this thread, aren't you?

Agnosticism, which pretty much amounts to atheism in a weak sense since it implies a lack of religious belief, appears to be the most intellectually justifiable position to hold regarding supposedly transcendental matters and supposedly supernatural revelations.

Well, its true that 'testimonies' and Bible quotations aren't likely to be very persuasive to anyone who doesn't already share the evangelist's beliefs. It's just too circular and somehow, everything always ends up being about the evangelist and his personal 'faith'.

If the evangelist puts aside a revealed theology that's only convincing to those who already believe it, and turn instead to natural theology that purports to spin a personal deity out of the physical universe and from hypothetical abstract philosophical functions like first-cause, then results are going to be weak and notably unpersuasive.

 

What's a "new atheist"? How does a new atheist differ from an old atheist? (I'm not up to speed on Sciforum jargon.) It seems to me that there have been militant atheists for generations, there have been quiet atheists, philosophically astute atheists, ignorant atheists... nothing that I can see has changed very much recently.

As for science being opposed to religion, it depends. Here's my idea of how the history of science and religion went down:

In earlier medieval times Platonism was pretty prevalent. Our physical world was imagined as if it was a shadow, a projection of divine events. So events here on this plane often seemed to possess a symbolic quality, being revelations of higher intentions. That resulted in a traditional world where the miraculous wasn't unusual or unexpected. People's interests weren't in the regularities of nature so much as in the extraordinary and uncanny.

But the 13'th century spread of this-worldly Aristotelianism, the 14'th century Ockhamist revival of nominalism, and crucially, the 16'th century Protestant reformation changed all that. The gap between the creator and his creation received new emphasis. It was unbridgeable, except by Christ's incarnation and (of course) by the Bible. So the Protestants laughed uproariously at all of the Catholic saints, miracles and relics, and sneered at age-old village folk beliefs. The Protestant solution was to teach people to read and get Bibles into their hands.

And the prevailing worldview changed, the physical universe had become 'creation', running like a clockwork on its original impetus, in accordance with laws that God had originally set down at creation. The 17'th century scientific revolution set out to discover those laws of creation and within the space of a single century found themselves successful far beyond their wildest hopes. And so far, science hadn't directly challenged the religious edifice, at least in its new and less-luxuriant renaissance-era form. Some of the early scientists actually felt as if they were reading the mind of God.

But something else was happening in the 17'th century. Religious free-thinkers were appearing who asked the inevitable question -- if everyone is supposed to dismiss the 'as above, so below' symbolism and all of the ever-present miracles of medieval Catholicism as ignorant, credulous and false, then why in the world should the Protestants' own beloved Bible be treated any differently?

So not only did we see the beginnings of the higher-critical study of the Bible, we also saw a new skepticism about all revealed religion spreading out among the European intellectual classes, a tendency that came to be called 'deism'. In 1648 Europe was exhaused and filled with revulsion at the religious enthusiasms that had fueled the wars of religion. The upshot was that all purported divine revelations were increasingly treated with skepticism. The idea started to take hold that nobody really had the definitive answers and that religious adherence should be a matter of personal conscience, not state compulsion. We see these ideas being expressed by some of the American founders.

But the deists weren't atheists exactly. While they were skeptical about revealed theology, they still accepted natural theology. They were especially impressed by the design argument. They just didn't see any natural way that biological organisms could have become so well adapted to their particular environments without a creative hand that had originally designed them that way. So we have the popular picture of the deist deus abscoditus, the supernatural being who had originally created everything and then took off for regions unknown, with no continuing role in his mechanical clock-work creation.

A century later and we are in the 19'th century with Darwin, Wallace, T.H. Huxley and natural selection. Science suddenly produced a persuasive and broadly convincing explanation for the mystery that had always been natural theology's strongest argument. In so doing science came into direct collision with what many people believed was the rock solid heart of religious belief, the total obviousness of God's creation and man's place in it. Even the skeptical deists hadn't touched that.

That's where contemporary atheism was born out of deism and where the contemporary science-religion death-struggle really got its start. It's why today's fundamentalists spit out the name 'Darwin' with even more vehemence than 'Satan'.

It's generated all kinds of reactions, not only a revival of traditional Christian fundamentalist/Biblicist religiosity with its monkey-trials, but also from more romantic philosophical corners whose 19'th century theories of absolute idealism were intended to put science back into its proper place, subordinate to spirit. Today, the philosophy of mind has perhaps become supernaturalism's last respectable intellectual redoubt, with qualia theories and such things hoping to demonstrate that human subjectivity is fundamentally inexplicable from the point of view of physicalistic science.

 

The New Atheists write mainly from a scientific perspective. Unlike previous writers, many of whom thought that science was indifferent, agnostic or even incapable of dealing with the "God" concept, Dawkins, in his book argues to the contrary that the "God Hypothesis" is a valid scientific hypothesis,[11] having effects in the physical universe, and like any other hypothesis can be tested and falsified. Other prominent New Atheists such as Victor Stenger also propose that the personal Abrahamic God is a scientific hypothesis that can be tested by standard methods of science. They conclude that the hypothesis fails any such tests.[12] They also argue that naturalism is sufficient to explain everything we observe in the universe, from the most distant galaxies to the origin of life and species and even the inner workings of the brain that result in the phenomenon of mind. Nowhere, they argue, is it necessary to introduce God or the supernatural to understand reality. Many of the New Atheists dispute the claim that science has nothing to say about God, and argue that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" when evidence should be there and is not (see Argument from divine hiddenness). They conclude rather that the universe and life do not look at all designed (by either God or by any supernatural being), but look just as they would be expected to look if they were not designed at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_atheism

 

then you are considered grossly misinformed by contemporary academic standards (which is arguably another nonsense of atheism)

needless to say, the list goes on to show that religion in the USSR did have a dominant atheist ideology, which included the (brutual) persecution of theism (including the russian orthodox church, although they were admitted a brief sort of reprieve around the WW2 era) for the sake of fulfilling the criteria of marxist ideals (which were thought of bettering the national interests)


But all that aside, my precise point was that Dawkins et al shares the atheistic idealism with Baron d'Holbach (an idealism that was diffused in the academic community due to the antics of the soviets)

 

Then its not clear why you unpacked the claim "maintain their theistic world view" as contradicting the requirement to establish god as a fact using naturalistic methodologies (which, as it happens, is the standard claim of the new atheists)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_atheism

 

Atheism says nothing about persecuting those of religion. It's a simple disbelief in God, which doesn't cause persecution of anyone.

 

Then by your definition, new atheism stands outside the norm of the term
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Root_of_All_Evil?
:shrug:

 

Don't dream it

Your response to the issue you propose is to cite belief under duress?

True. And tragic. Then again, it will take a couple of generations for the atheistic movement to find its own voice and stop imitating its theistic progenitors.

"Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths." (Denis Diderot)​

 

Nope. No persecution there. The world might also be better off with only one million people, but that doesn't mean it's ethical to kill people to get to that point.

 

If you think persecution only occurs at the point of murder, then you have also neutered about 90% of the impetus for the new atheists, who call for change due to persecution by a dominant theistic class

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