The Folly of Atheism, part 2

There have been as many different perceptions of reality as there have been civilizations. The main factor that determines which perception of reality one subscribes to is the civilization in which a person dwells.

My perception of reality is that I should withhold making a conclusion about what is ultimately the truth of reality because I live in a civilization which allows and even encourages that position. I live in a melting pot of cultural perspectives. I sit in a workplace where my fellow employees are Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Buddhists and a lot of people who don’t know or care much about the true nature of reality. If we all held grudges based on the cultures from which we came the place would be a horrible place to work. As it is we all have a pretty good time.

 

I agree with 90% of this. However, it's easy to poke holes in both of these possibilities:

"The origins of life & the universe were EITHER by:

• Natural processes, with no Intelligent Cause.
• An Intelligent Cause, with their own Creative Processes."

If life and the universe were the product of natural processes, what caused the Big Bang? What caused the early universe to expand at faster than the speed of light, as scientists now believe it must have? What caused the first nonliving thing to begin replicating itself? If life is a "natural process", why has it not happened more than once, i.e., where are the life forms not based on DNA?

If life and the universe were the product of an intelligent cause, where did that being come from? Is s/he the product of natural processes or an intelligent cause? What kind of universe does this being inhabit and where did that universe come from? What caused the intelligent being to become self-aware and creative? Must there not have been something outside of the being to act upon it in order for it to become aware that there was a physical reality outside itself? And if so, where did this external reality come from?

Both options fall victim to the infinite regression problem: Where did it come from? Where did that come from? Where did that come from? Etc., etc.

 

That's not what belief means.

"be·lief
(bĭ-lēf′)
n.
1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another: My belief in you is as strong as ever.
2. Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief.
3. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons."

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/belief

I especially draw your attention to #2, mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth of something. In other words, everything you think is true is a belief, whether you have evidence for it or not.

 

All the example in #2 says is that there is a person who has one "belief" and there is one or more others who have a different conflicting "belief".

#2 seems to be no more than a synonym of "think" as in "I think he fell asleep and drove off the road." And, others see that as not matching other evidence.

It is contrary to the religious use of the word in that it includes the weakest, most doubt filled commitment to an answer. In fact, it really doesn't imply any real commitment to the answer at all. On the contrary, the authors of the Bible did NOT intend this definition when they included, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved."

Perhaps #3 gets closer to the religious definition - a definition that could possible be justification for changing or even sacrificing of one's very life.

 

Exactly. One set of people have a belief that God exists and another set of people have a conflicting belief that God does not exist.

"Think" would be a weaker form of belief, as in, "I'm not sure." Consider, "I believe he went to the store," versus, "I think he went to the store." I'd tend to put more stock in the 1st statement than the 2nd. "He went to the store," is stronger still, but still falls into the definition of a belief, something the speaker holds to be true.

I don't think you should make any distinction between the two uses. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ means accept him as true. You can make a distinction about why you should believe, i.e., you should believe the sun is 93 million miles from earth because scientists have measured the distance with great accuracy, while you should believe in Jesus based on faith alone. But the term belief covers both instances.

I would argue that a set of tenets are a set of beliefs and not just one belief. For example, Baptists don't believe in dancing, but that is a tenet not shared by most other denominations. So it is not part & parcel of being Christian.

 

I think you're just agreeing with me.

There is an incredibly broad range covered by this term, ranging from no more than a nearly random choice (I believe I'll have desert. Oh, nobody else is? In that case let's go.) to describing a life changing religious commitment in recognition that 0% of eternity is spent on earth, and the imminent threat of death is not sufficient to change that.

So, when one hears the term, one has to be careful about guessing what the speaker is intending to convey.

In fact, it seems likely that the word is far more commonly used without intending any religious connotation whatsoever.

 

You were the one who wanted to separate the religious and more general definitions of belief. I merely pointed out that they mean the same. Sure, the intensity of belief varies, but that turns on the individual in question and not on the meaning of the word, which still means "acceptance that something is true". I was initially responding to derideo, who claimed belief meant lack of proof, which it doesn't mean at all.

 

And, I disagree in that the range of intensity in common usage is so broad as to make the word little more than a placeholder in a sentence.

When I say "I believe I'll have desert" I'm just being polite. And, anyone at the table could change my mind with almost no effort.

When a real Christian or Muslim or Jew says, "I believe God lives", the statement represents a level of certainty that I would have to consider to be unshakeable. And, like I suspect Derideo implied, proof is very obviously totally irrelevant - as we see on this board whenever religion is discussed.

I just want it to be crystal clear that when I say I believe something, it doesn't necessarily imply that I'm having a religious experience or that I'm willing to sacrifice my life over it. And, whey I say "belief" I'm not suggesting that proof (or even evidence) would be considered by me to be irrelevant.

 

I'm not sure this is even worth answering, but let me just point out that in both of your examples, you used the word "believe" rather than the word "belief", which is what derideo was referring to and what I responded to. While both words are based on the same root, to say that "believe" is a placeholder isn't at all a disparagement of the statement that I made earlier that everything you think is true is a belief. I'm not suggesting that anytime someone says they believe or disbelieve something that it has anything to do with religion, I'm saying that all religious beliefs and disbeliefs have the same cognitive functions as beliefs about any other topic, and vice-versa.

 

It does in all instances because we do not know the true nature of reality so, to varying extents, all the guesses that we make about the true nature of reality are not proof

What usually happens is that the theist tries to equate what we can show about the reality that we experience, by making a few basal assumptions, to the narrative that they build around their delusions.

To paraphrase the saying, believing things with justification is the worst form of belief except for all the others.

 

Yes, "believe" is the verb form, a declaration of "belief."

I would add that one can hold a personal understanding of each and every element covered by a religion and yet not have that personal understanding be stronger than one's preference for desert - that is, not being within a country mile of motivating action on issues of any importance.

The point of my objection here is this idea that since I have a personal opinion about the supernatural, I therefore have a religion. And, in this thread the word "belief" has been used to try to finesse the point by switching the meaning of "belief" within the argument.

If someone wants to determine whether I have a religion, they have to go further than ascertaining whether I have a casual opinion about the existence of the supernatural. Religion is not passive.

 

As every single member of every single religion has a different understanding of it....can said religion be given an accurate detailed definition?

Does this not mean there are Billions of Religions and Billions of Gods?

 

Religion is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of faith.

 

Have we established yet that there is some folly in

It rather does compel an atheistic view, as do the failures of theistic proponents to substantiate their claims. Science does not find evidence of gods. Through science, we study the universe and find that natural processes account for what we observe, and we do not see evidence of some kind of force beyond that observable, testable nature that compels one to formulate a theistic hypothesis. All you're really doing is arguing for the God of the Gaps.

 

Well said!

The stark difference is that belief in reality is based upon scientific knowledge whereas belief in a deity is based entirely upon faith alone.

In the former the belief can be substantiated by anyone using the scientific method whereas in the latter the belief cannot be substantiated because there is no evidence for any deity.

 

Bullcrap. Belief in God can be science based but science isn't very qualified to substantially provide evidence.

 

Ironic that you prefaced that inanity with "bullcrap" because that is exactly what followed!

There is ZERO EVIDENCE for the existence of any deities.

WITHOUT evidence there is NOTHING that can be scientifically tested.

ALL beliefs in deities are faith based because there is no evidence.

 

The universe itself is evidence. Prove me wrong, Einstein.

 

Science is not supposed to be able to evidence God. Science is all about phenomena which can repeat. This however has been twisted to sound as if science can do everything. The lack of evidence proves nothing. Your line of reasoning here is a fallacy to sound as if the lack of evidence can be presented as the evidence of absence.

Religion is rather an advocate that life continues beyond our death and an space/time (the spiritual realm) exists outside of our realm. These concepts existed long before the emerging of human science. Science can do nothing about and has nothing to do with these claims as science is experiment based. We cannot go to another realm or go beyond our death to establish experiments to verify the claims, even under the circumstance that they are a truth.

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Science is about the prediction of an end-to-end repetition. Science is accurate because it's always about something which can repeat infinitive number of times for humans to observe and most importantly to predict how it repeats to draw a conclusion. The methodology ToE employed is completely different from any other science. This is so simply because it takes millions of years for an end-to-end evolution to possibly repeat itself. We don't have that time to observe and predict how it repeats to draw any scientific conclusion.

If you implicitly claim that a human can be evolved from in the end a single cell organism, then you have to make the single-cell to human process repeats itself infinitive number of times for humans to do enough observations, and most importantly predictions on how this repeats in order to draw a scientific conclusion. That's how each and every single science works.

This is so because humans are creatures of the present. We don't have the capability to reach the past, and we don't have the capability to reach the future. It is because we have no capability to reach the future that if we can correctly and repeatedly predict how a phenomenon repeats itself into the future, we know that we hit a truth in terms of how we make use of a "theory" to predict the repetition. This is the nature of science and why it is accurate. In a nutshell, science is the making use of predictions repeatedly to identify a truth (which can repeat). ToE is a valid hypothesis in suggesting that evolution (from single cell to fully grown) can be a repeating process (of natural selection). However it's not up to the scientific accuracy as long as you can't make it repeat itself (to the extent of infinitive number of times) for the prediction of its repetition to be made correctly and repeatedly.

That said, to me the theory of common ancestry is a joke in concluding that everyone has an invisible common ancestor without knowing who it is. In terms of how things work, the genes are so if you would like that animal to have its appearance and behavior. If you want a chimp to have its current appearance and behavior, you need the genes to be so disregarding whether the genes share anything in common with that of humans. Everything else can be anything, not necessarily be a result of evolution. It can be a result of interbreeding or a mixture of interbreeding and adaptation. The difference between adaption and evolution is that species can be selected by the nature, however this may not be the way how they are brought to their current state from a single cell.

An analogy is that whenever you see someone in uniform sitting in the cockpit of a plane, you draw the conclusion that he's a pilot. This can be true however it's a pure speculation. He's a pilot when he launches and lands a plane from one airport to another repeatedly as we predict. Then he's a pilot. This what science is and how it makes a difference from the pure speculation. Similarly, when you see how nature changes a species to draw the conclusion that nature can drive a single cell to that species, it's a pure speculation. If you can predict repeatedly how a single cell turns into that species without error, only then you have a science!

 

Perception of the reality is based on how you can frame the reality correctly to establish your perception. Atheism is based on a delusion established through the long years of secular education ever since childhood. The delusion basically has the following 2 fundamental elements acting as the framework of atheism,

1) everything can be evidenced
2) you should refuse to believe before evidence is presented to you

The reality however is working in the opposite way. Not everything can be evidenced, especially the past which can hardly be evidenced. That's why you can never present the evidence of what you yourself just did (as recent as) yesterday.

Humans seldom rely on evidence to approach a truth, instead we rely more often (than you can realize) on faith to reach a truth. That's why you don't need evidence to be presented before you "know" for a fact that black holes exist. We can (possibly can only) reach what you did yesterday if an eyewitness wrote about it for us to believe with faith.

That's how this reality works, in the opposite way of the atheistic delusion.

Personally, I speculate that the Bible has already mentioned/prophesied such a delusion. Humans adapted a twisted concept of what science is in order to accommodate an incompatible "evolution". This twisted concept however is made used as a satanic deception. This deception works complementary with the delusion to have an in-depth influence in this world.

 

The only thing the universe proves is there is a universe, we have no idea if there are more, how it started or even many discoveries yet to be made about it we have yet to use our reason and science to do so but since there are no deities presenting themselves to us a claim "a deity or deities did it" isn't demonstrated at all.

 

Since when is any deity required to present itself?

When you see a computer do you assume it appeared by the magic of putting itself together?

 

That is not what was said, you made a straw man that was probably even less defensible than what was actually said. What was said is that no deities have presented themselves so a claim regarding their existence and being is not justified. If you can't show it, you don't know it.

I also know that people design and make things like computers, produce your designer. If you can't show it, you don't know it.

 

Ironic since you just proved yourself wrong!

The existence of the universe is only evidence for the existence of the universe, nothing else!

Onus in entirely on YOU to prove that (a) your imaginary "creator" exists and (b) that your imaginary "creator" had anything to do with the existence of the universe.

There is ZERO EVIDENCE for either (a) or (b) above and you cannot produce any evidence.

 

Well, how do you know if any computer was designed and built unless you see it with your own eyes?