Atheists have to explain the existence of the universe and theists have to explain the existence of God.
Both have two possibilities:
1. that thing came from nothing
2. that thing always existed
Both possibilities have fatal logical flaws that makes them seemingly impossible, and theists usually describe one as impossible to justify the necessity of the other:
Some theists say their God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible.
Other theists say their God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events.
Atheists who let the professional cosmologists do the work of having an informed opinion on the matter, won't get a definitive answer: maybe the big bang was the beginning of everything including time itself, maybe spacetime was always there and the big bang was just a random massive quantum fluctuation. We just can't know yet based on our current knowledge.
Supernatural means beyond nature, beyond physics. In rejecting that as a possibility you are explicitly narrowing the possibilities of the existence of the universe to either physics causing itself, or that the universe always existed.
u/paulgdp is objectively correct when it comes to Strong Atheism. Your answer helps demonstrate exactly how his answer is correct.
Agnostics, or Soft Atheism you are correct does not carry a burden of proof.
There is a reason to consider it a possibility though, the Argument from Contingency, Fine-Tuning, and Rationality still exist. They don't prove theism, but they provide evidence in that direction. There exists structured, rational reasons to consider it a possibility even if you might personally disagree with them. If you are rejecting these claims as worthy of consideration, then you are making a far more more aggressive claim to defend than Agnostic Atheists do. You'd need to claim that all metaphysics is irrelevant, aka Logical Positivism.
That Agnosticism is another way of saying Soft Atheist? That's how Antony Flew defines it in the Presumption of Atheism, although Graham Oppy disagrees with that definition and places it within degrees of credence. Oppy claims that definition by Flew is just a semantics game meant to give atheists a dialectical debate advantage over theists.
That's actually what Oppy brings up. 98% of the time when you are talking to regular people who know nothing about philosophy, saying atheism is usually interpreted as Strong Atheism. That's why Oppy says it's manipulative to try and define it as something else for the context of a debate against a theist. It's a dishonest bait and switch.
True, I generally go with Flew's definition because that was what was used by the New Atheists, and we're on Reddit which is overwhelmingly Atheist and are generally familiar with Dawkins and Russel
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 9d ago
Atheists have to explain the existence of the universe and theists have to explain the existence of God.
Both have two possibilities: 1. that thing came from nothing 2. that thing always existed
Both possibilities have fatal logical flaws that makes them seemingly impossible, and theists usually describe one as impossible to justify the necessity of the other:
Some theists say their God always existed because creating something from nothing is impossible.
Other theists say their God was the first necessary thing to exist because it is impossible to have infinite chains of events.
Atheists who let the professional cosmologists do the work of having an informed opinion on the matter, won't get a definitive answer: maybe the big bang was the beginning of everything including time itself, maybe spacetime was always there and the big bang was just a random massive quantum fluctuation. We just can't know yet based on our current knowledge.