Originally posted by traditionaldrummer
Originally posted by ::.mika.::
Originally posted by traditionaldrummer
Perhaps I can help clear up any misunderstandings or incorrect assumptions you may have about people without beliefs.
but but... this is a belief in itself man
No it most certainly isn't.
Okay, this is maybe my logical myopithy, or maybe semantics, but I'm not sure that I follow you here.
If you make a statement like "I know that there is no God, because there is no proof of his existence," you're using the lack of evidence to prove
a negative, which doesn't really mean anything, as you yourself would admit that we don't know everything.
And you preface an absolute with a non-absolute, ala "I know that we don't understand everything, but I know that there is no God", which also is a
logical fallacy. Fixing the non-abolute with another absolute works ("When we know everything, we will know that there is no God") but then it
assumes that you already know the result of the first absolute, in order to figure the second.
The best I can come up with is something like "In the face of the evidence, I see no proof for the existence of God", which is a long way from "I
know there is no God" and a fair bit closer to "I believe that there is no God," because it's merely you interpreting an observation. Looking at
the same evidence, I see lots of proof, meaning that my interpretation is different, and neither of them is particularly factual in the provable
sense.
To the fellow who compared this to the existence of fairies and unicorns (or whatever,) the same rules apply... you can't use the lack of evidence in
a non-absolute existence to make the case for the non-existence of something. There may be unicorns on another planet somewhere. There may have been
unicorns on Earth 20,000 years ago and we just haven't found any fossil remains. You can prove that unicorns exist, but until you know and
understand everything, you can't categorically prove that they don't.
It seems to me that anything which can't be proven is a subjective thing, and thus a belief, regardless of how rigidly held it might be. If you were
to say "I have no opinion about God, don't know if he exists or not, don't really care either", that's a much different thing, moves you closer
to "people without beliefs", but makes you agnostic, not atheistic, in my view.
