How not to understand atheism

[resident_geek]

More On Faith notes from the WaPo: this time, a perspective from the believing side concerning unbelievers, written by Michael Novak. It's an attempt to undermine a prime contention of atheists (i.e., lack of evidence). Unfortunately it is completely off, and instead becomes a game of pointing out fallacies and poor argument construction. Do give

Comments

Burden of proof

[anonymous]

Samuel Skinner
Weak atheists don't bother making a case- they just point out there is no evidence and no reason whatsoever to believe. Strong atheists go further- they point out the entire word is nonsense and impossible.

Needless to say, I'm a strong while most are weak- however, the behavior of strong atheist and weak atheists are effectively identical because people treat a probability of about zero the same as something that is actually zero.

The only differance between behavior is if a God did show up, weak atheists would be shocked and try to figure out what it is (sufficiently advanced alien?) and strong atheists would realize they are in the presence of Cthullu or Choas- seriously, something that ignores logic CANNOT be good.

Re: Burden of proof

[resident_geek]

Greeting, O anonymous interlocuter,

Thanks for the reply. It highlights pretty well the dilemma that we have by living in the phenomenal world--the world exists, but there's no apparent reason for it. We've created various explanations for our existence and that of the rest of the universe throughout our history, and we'll probably keep doing so, refining them as we gather better information about the nature of things. The ultimate problem is finding a process to determine which is the better explanation.

It is a comfortable thing, believing something to be true. When we want to believe one thing or another, despite a lack of actual evidence for such, it takes balls to say, "I don't know yet."

[wordmad]

He claims that God resides in our hearts waiting to be discovered. But I believe that's just another side of the old "There are no atheists in foxholes" argument. What we have in our hearts are certain fears: fear of death, of the future, of dark-skinned foreigners trying to steal 'our' oil rights, etc., etc., and 'God' is what keeps those fears in check, what keeps us from throwing ourselves off the top of a building when it all gets to be too much--an 'evolutionary advantage' surely, but not a proof of existence.