What Is The Positive Evidence For Atheism?

How do you have positive evidence for something not existing?The fact that there's zero evidence for the existence of god is all I need to convince me of atheism. If there was even one single piece of evidence that unequivocally pointed to the existence of god, we wouldn't be atheists. All of who? All atheists? That's certainly not true.All of us evolutionists aren't all atheists, either. Who are you talking about, exactly?Yes, atheists tend to be evolutionists, because they tend to be people who are convinced by evidence and not dogma; as a result, because evidence is best supported by all the evidence, that's what we tend to support.

The one doesn't follow from the other. I have no positive evidence, because none can exist; instead, it's the negative evidence that supports atheism. There's nothing faith-based about that. They're not, though. That's a matter of fact. Well, for instance, the people who believe that life on Earth is the product not of evolution, but of intelligent aliens seeding life throughout the universe are atheists, nominally; but are most definitely not evolutionists. Who's "we"? I still don't understand who you're talking about (or to.)

So, how well did filling gaps with God work out, in the past?How well did the presumption that we could eventually answer a question with science work out in those exact same situations?I'm asking you to compare, historically, the accuracy of both of those presumptions - the first that something would never be explained by science, and the second that something eventually would be explained by science.The reason that it's so much more reasonable to fill gaps with the presumption of scientific explanation is because, in the past, that's always turned out to be true. God of the Gaps has never, ever been true.

And cramming those gaps full of God worked out nothing at all.So why rely on it now, when the track record of "God of the gaps" is one of universal failure? Neither does theology. So why insist on using it that way, now? I don't think that it does. People want to know things like "what should I do to make sure my family has enough to eat" and "what happens to us after we die" and "what's going on in the world around us" and "why do people act the way they do", things like that, and all of those are fundamentally scientific questions because they can be answered by observation.Science answers the same questions religion does; it's just much, much better at it. "Non-overlapping magisteria" is a myth; it's simply a way for people to ignore how science disproves their religious views. If the cause cannot be known, then it's not appropriate to simply "come to our own conclusions", because that just means jumping to conclusions that aren't supported.If we lack the knowledge of something, the proper response is to say "we don't know yet" and leave it at that, or try to find some rigorous way to answer the question; if that's not possible, then that doesn't obviate our responsibility not to claim more knowledge than we actually have. The proper response when something is not known is to say "I don't know", not "I know it's God." That just doesn't make any sense.

You're thinking of someone else. Like you, I believe firmly that we can know all kinds of things about god.For instance, I know that god is a myth. If you can't convince anybody else, isn't that reason to re-examine your own belief? When everybody else thinks that you're wrong, isn't that a reason to maybe wonder if you are?

Hardly. Anybody who's ever gone to the store for milk has come to a positive conclusion about a "negate".Concluding from the evidence that things are absent is something all human beings do, all the time. Why is it so unusual, in your view, to apply such common-sense reasoning to gods?

You could certainly gain the knowledge that everybody who believes in God seems to be able to marshal absolutely no good argument for their belief, as I have.When it becomes abundantly obvious that everyone who asserts the existence of God does so on the basis of a bad argument, that's a pretty good indication that there's no reason to believe in God. Further, when it's abundantly obvious that God as described is inconsistent with observation, that's further evidence for disbelief.It's not really about faith. If there was even one bit of good evidence for God, I'd change my mind. That willingness to change the second that there is disconfirming evidence is the exact opposite of faith. When religious people encounter someone who stops believing in their religion at the first indication that it's wrong, they describe that person as "faithless."Well, that's exactly how atheists are about their atheism. The first good bit of evidence will convince us not to be atheists. How can we be accused of having "faith in atheism" if we abandon it at the first indication that its wrong?

And yet, my wife has a sizable collection of fleas - in her entomology library, you wags - so clearly we're able to ascertain the presence or absence of fleas.Similarly, I doubt you're trying to say that God is a flea. We're talking about the putative creator of existence, who nonetheless is supposed to be taking a very personal interest in what we're doing, and intervenes in human affairs according to his plan.So we're not talking about a flea. We're talking about something that makes a pretty big difference. That big difference is how we know the difference between God existing and not existing, and how we can conclude that God does not exist. Oh, you do, do you? I didn't see anywhere where you were "accounting for the nature of the thing" when you made the blanket assertion that you could never have evidence that something didn't exist.

As always, NJ, you're one step away from seeing the reason in atheism, but you just can't be bothered to think it through. If you were a reasonable person, though, you would see that everybody who had color vision identified the exact same objects as green. Indeed you could set up tests where you asked people to pick out the green object, and everyone with genuine color vision would pick out the same object.From that you could conclude that you actually were blind, because the only way so many unconnected people could be picking the exact same object - once purposeful collusion had been excluded - is if they were actually seeing color. In other words, replicability would be your guide to discerning the reality of phenomena you couldn't yourself experience.When we apply the same reasoning to religion, though, we see another pattern. Everybody who claims to "perceive God" sees something different; something that looks a lot like themselves. There are more than 30,000 denominations of Christianity alone. No religion seems to agree with another. Religions stake out all sides of every possible moral dilemma. It's ok to kill. It's not ok. God hates abortion. God leaves it to individual conscience. God hates fags. God loves gays. Our religion is the only true one. All religions are a path to truth.If, at the end of your tests, people had chosen every single object as often as any other when asked to point to "green", you might very well reasonably conclude that color vision was a myth and that the people who claimed to have it were delusional, despite their best intentions not to be. Likewise, since everyone who "sees God" sees something completely different, it's clear that "god-vision" is the delusion. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean you can't test for it. Just because it's beyond your vision doesn't mean it's beyond your reason. And just because you think you're seeing something, doesn't mean you really are. One in 25 Americans have a serious mental illness. You could be one of them. Maybe I am.The scientific method is how we verify our own experiences. Sometimes we have reasons to reject them, because we do see things that just aren't there, sometimes.

But that would be a testable assumption. We could insulate the machine from Subbie's desires by having someone else operate it - perhaps, even have you operate it. We could test it on various objects Subbie had never seen before, so he wouldn't have been able to program the machine with fictitious "green" values, and then ask him to identify the green objects before he's seen the machine's results.There's a lot of ways to verify the output of the machine. Indeed this is a crucial concern of any science that measures things we can't observe with our five senses. Scientists don't simply put blind faith in their instruments; they have to be verified. We have to be sure that they actually detect what they claim to detect, and scientists have a suite of tools and techniques to ensure this is the case.The problem - you've outlined it well, my compliments - isn't nearly as intractable as you suppose. It's simply hard. It's not impossible to see the invisible, scientists do it every day. It's just hard.And the same tools and techniques that verify scientific instrumentation disprove the existence of the divine "instrumentation" you're hypothesizing. Unlike your colorblind example, there really is no such thing as what the theists claim to "see." The same techniques that can verify whether the invisible is being seen can verify that it is not being seen, as well.

It's not the argument from ignorance. The argument from ignorance is when you assert the positive existence of something based on the lack of evidence that it doesn't exist.You know, like the theists do.You need to do a little more homework on your logical fallacies; you keep seeing them where they don't exist. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence; that's how you know when you're out of milk.Are you saying you never know when you're out of milk, Jon?

For one thing, the abuse we suffer at the hands of believers.Why does the existence of atheism illicit such strong feelings of hatred in the believer? Suspicious, no? There's nothing common about God. Every individual believer has their own unique ideas about what we call "God"; hardly anyone agrees on that nomenclature. The irreproducibility of religious experience is a significant indicator of self-delusion.

An adult would have answered the questions posed to them.How do you know when you're out of milk, Jon?

I'm as sure that there's no God in my universe as I am that there's no milk in my fridge.I don't claim total certainty about either. Only enough certainty, respectively, to make a note to go to the store tomorrow and not to live my life by the whims of capricious, asshole deities. In other words I arrive at the practical, tentative, operating conclusion that "God" as described does not exist. People who think that anything short of absolute certainty is agnosticism call me agnostic. I don't think agnosticism actually exists (it's atheism in disguise, imo), so I call myself an atheist, or an "agnostic atheist" when I feel the need to please everybody at once. (I try not to pick fights with agnostics about it, since their hearts are in the right place, so to speak.)On Dawkin's 1-7 scale of belief/disbelief in gods, I'm a 6. (So is Dawkins.) 7 would be the adamant, certain assertion that God definitely does not exist in any form, and I cannot honestly claim that much certainty, and so I don't. I'm not a 7 but a 6.If you wanted to describe me as "faithless", "godless", or "irreligious", I would accept those as synonymous with "atheist" or "agnostic". Additionally, I try to comport myself according to humanism. But that's not strictly related to my atheism; it's more just an expression of who I am.

Gays?