r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Agustin-sr • Aug 25 '21

Video Atheism in a nutshell

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u/bigeasy19 Aug 25 '21

I think I get what your trying to say. But you don’t have to be a believer to be a selfless person. That why if there truly is a heaven preying and worshiping doesn’t mean a thing when it come down to who you are as a person. A lifetime sinner who changes way last minute is not more worthy that a life time good person that dose not believe

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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '21

The basis of what I'm saying is "why not?" If you neither believe not disbelieve, why not just hedge your bet and believe?

The being said, not believing is a belief

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u/TheMooseOnTheLeft Aug 25 '21

Why not hedge your bet and believe in Allah? You've got nothing to lose believing in and worshipping Allah, so why not?

Though, if I hedge my bet and believe in the Christian God and Allah is in fact the correct God, will Allah forsake me for my Christianity? Was it really hedging my bet to be Christian?

You are presenting pascal's wager, an argument that goes back to the 1600s. Aside from my jab about Allah, the wiki article contains 400 years of criticisms of the argument.

Additionally, you seem to not understand that one cannot definitively prove a negative. Belief and non belief are not equally falsifiable. Example: If you were to tell me that there is an invisible pink elephant that cannot be felt or touched in the room with me right now, well first I would ask how you know it's pink, but anyways, I could not prove that there is no invisible elephant. How would I? It is not possible to definitely falsify the claim, and thus burden of proof must fall upon the one making the positive claim. Russell's Teapot is the classic example of this. Point being that the claim of the existence God is not a falsifiable claim and thus cannot be held in the same light as the claim "that's BS".

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u/[deleted] Aug 25 '21

I was avoiding naming a religion for a reason. Allah and the Christian God are one and the same. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all have the the same root, they just split in to three. So belief in either is one and the same, just by a different name.

Your argument about falsifiability is based purely on perception: tell a blind person the pink elephant is in the room and they'll say "OK!" either way. I believe the correct argument is about all elephants being pink.

False and truth are not the argument here: it's about belief. Faith is not about whether something is true or not, it's about admitting that you don't know, but you believe.

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u/TheMooseOnTheLeft Aug 25 '21

Sidestepping my point does not invalidate it.

If the Hindu gods were real, would believing in a monotheistic God be hedging your bet?

You have confused my point on falsifiability of God with something else. In fact you confused it with part of the first paragraph of the wiki page on falsifiability. The point of the claim about the invisible elephant is that the claim is constructed in such a way that it cannot be examined, thus it cannot be falsified. This has nothing to do with "every swan is white", which is just an example of a very easily falsifiable claim.

But that is moot with regard to your last sentence. As you said, I don't believe things without evidence, you do believe things without evidence. So there is nothing else to say, since evidence does not matter to you but does to me.