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Originally Posted by tooblue
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Originally Posted by non sequitur
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Originally Posted by tooblue
Your very answer is demonstrative of the kind of faith required ... how do you know you are inteligent enough to discern that a giant blue squirrel on Neptune did not create this world?
That's placing a lot of faith in your own cognative abilities, therefore cannot it not be argued that your cognative abilities are in fact your God? In turn we could then label your faith the religion of nonsequiturism.
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I think most atheists/agnostics are not arrogant enough to deny that anything is possible: maybe there is a God and maybe a giant blue squirrel inhabits Neptune. The atheist/agnostic simply chooses not to expend effort considering possibilities which do not seem plausible. By the same token, it might be possible that I could eventually hook up with Angelina Jolie, but I'm not going to spend a lot of my free time picking out china patterns. |
To me the choice not to expend effort considering possibilites is an act of faith ... in fact I can think of few better definitions. |
I think non-sequitor is right here, but let me try to re-state what he is saying. Comparing an atheist point of view to religious faith is highly misleading, for much the same reason as comparing science to religion (which some religious folks such as my friend Waters are wont to do) is highly misleading.
So here's my restatement of what atheism means. Atheism is a discplined, deliberate refusal to believe anything that is not verified through the scientific method as true. If you can't demonstrate it through experimentation, through reason applied to sensory experience, it isn't there. But that is not to say an atheist rejects the possibility of there being some truth out there of which he is not aware. On the contrary. An atheist, at least a thinking atheist, is ever alert to to the possibility of newly discovered truth. But he refuses to speculate about it, refuses to have faith in it, until he sees it, smells it, touches it. So atheism is really the converse of faith. It is most emphatically not an act of faith.
The atheists' Bible ought to be the epic poem "The Way Things Are" by Lucretius, a Roman philospher who lived during Augustus' time. There the atheist's perspective is described much more eloquently and clearly than I ever could do. (A snippet from the poem is my signature on CB, partly as a tease.) As Harold Bloom attests, this often ignored work is in the pantheon with the best parts of the Bible, Shakespeare's King Lear, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and the Illiad, as the greatest works of Western Civilization. It is an easy and delightful, even liberating, read.
Aetheism (as I understand it) used to be known as "materialism," and the perspective was refined by Epicurus and some of his forebears whose writings are essentially lost.
By the way, I don't regard myself an atheist. But I do appreciate the perspective and how it has been constantly misrepresented by religious folks.