Originally posted by: magreen
You cannot find that there is no god because of evidence. You're confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence. One cannot prove that there is no God, one can only say there is insufficient evidence that there is God. Just like you cannot prove that there are not invisible leprechauns who are impossible to see or detect by any known instrument. To be 100% sure that there is no God is in fact a statement of faith.
Okay. These are good points; I agree with them.
Originally posted by: magreen
Rather, one can say, "I will conduct myself as an atheist in the absence of evidence to the contrary," which is not a statement of faith, and would probably be called agnostic, not atheistic.
I agree; that statement is not a statement of faith. However, I would say that such a statement is definitely a statement of atheism, not agnosticism.
Perhaps it's just a terminology distinction, but if we assume that the existence of evidence is what is at the core of the argument---that an assertion must produce evidence to either support it or refute it---then the "argument" (I don't know what other plain but politically correct word there is) for God is unfalsifiable. It cannot be proven, and it cannot be disproven.
Anything that happens can be attributed to God. Anything. It is not possible to produce evidence that God absolutely doesn't exist.
To ask for evidence to allow for use of the term "atheist" seems cowardly to me---"No no, it's not enough that all evidence points to the extremely unlikely existence of god. We must wait until the final piece of evidence is produced, the final piece that actively disproves the existence of god, before we can use the word 'atheist' with certainty." Such evidence can never be produced, so the word can never be used. But I find the use of the word worth defending; to others, like I said, it's probably just a linguistic distinction.
Mayhap I'm just touchy about certain words.
Originally posted by: magreen
And there certainly were branches of faith that proclaimed their faith in there being no God. Soviet Communism, for one, went around systematically destroying and uprooting any and all forms of traditional religious belief to prosecute its secular faith. Nazism for another. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Communist China has been similar.
I don't feel that I know enough about soviet communism, Nazism, or the philosophy of communist China to discuss them. I feel like I want to make a distinction between religious ideologies and ideologies of state, but I don't know if that's a valid point to make. Certainly the two blend at times....
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