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Old 02-24-2011, 04:33 PM
Deckard
issue 37
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: South Wales
Posts: 1,244
Re: what do y'all think? (the atheism thread)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sean
Where you get off track is in assuming that simply because an adult is aware of the concept of "God", these clear differences no longer apply.
Precisely. Being unfamiliar with the concept of God is only one reason why someone may lack a belief in God, though it's sufficient to debunk the argument that not believing a claim necessitates making an alternate claim.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sean
Using myself as an example, I "do not believe in God". I've simply discarded the concept as statistically unlikely to the point of irrelevance based on the history of human knowledge as I understand it, and a complete lack of anything that could be considered scientific evidence to support it.
Just a small point on this. The reason I don't believe in God is not just because of an absence of scientific evidence, but also (perhaps moreso) the likelihood that scientific evidence for such a Being might be fundamentally impossible. After all, if the commonly held notion of God is correct - that He/it is beyond human comprehension - then we should probably not be too surprised at the lack of scientific evidence available to humans!

Contrast this with, say, astrology. I don't believe in the claims of astrologers, not because there can be no evidence of astrology, but because there is no evidence. Unlike the notion of God, if there is truth to the claims of astrology, we would expect to be able to observe the evidence, to comprehend it, to measure it. The cause and the effect are safely within our observable Universe. With the posited concept of God however, that's not necessarily the case.

This isn't to say I disagree with you in the main point you're making, which is that you can simply "not believe" without necessarily positing anything more. It's just to pre-empt the possible counterargument to your reference to a lack of scientific evidence. When it comes to the concept of God, it's not (just) that there is no evidence, but that there probably can be no evidence (therefore no solid basis for positive belief either way, whether in something's presence or absence).