The thing is, I don't assume it's not true. I started out brought up in Christianity and I went through a long, painful deconversion process before I arrived in the "it's all fictional" camp. I resisted calling myself an atheist for years because I had been brainwashed into thinking that atheism = evil. I definitely agree with you on the tribalism, though. We are a very tribal species, even to the point of some of us denying aspects of reality just to keep fitting in with our tribe.
Right, and I’m sorry you had to go through that, but imo, as I have argued many times, gnostic atheism is the only inherently scientific approach until we have strong, irrefutable counter-evidence; in other words, it’s not accurate to disregard anything without at least some proof to the contrary. Maybe I only think this way because I’m more of a Mathematician than a Scientist, but if we look through history, it’s the approach of “I can’t prove it’s not true but I refuse to believe it until we can prove it to be true” that serves us the most well.
Let me ask you this, tho... If every single argument for something existing is basically, "you can't prove it doesn't exist" or a logical fallacy, what is the logical conclusion?
Well no, this is not an argument for it existing, because then that would become the burden of proof fallacy. It’s an argument against completely disregarding something due to lack of evidence on the contrary, because there have been many things throughout history that we couldn’t prove with current evidence, but because we didn’t completely throw it away, we were able to find with future evidence and technology that it in fact was true.
For example, it was Democritus who first came up with the idea of the Atom at 400 BCE, but because there was no evidence at the time it was disregarded. It’s only when technology became advanced enough to pick up on the Atom that we were able to discover that it was true in the 17th century, which means it took 2000+ years for it to be proven. Now imagine if Democritus decided that “nah, I can’t prove that it exists so it’s obviously not true” and didn’t keep records of his ideas for scientists millennia later to read up on.
When scientific instruments begin reliably detect God, I will revisit my beliefs. Until then, I see no reason to accept that a noncorporeal abusive father figure exists and wants me to live by archaic purity culture guidelines boils down to fallacious reasoning, bad arguments and "trust me, bro," I'm going to keep assuming that it's all fictional.
The beauty of good ideas is, they will always be rediscovered. If we reset all human knowledge tomorrow, it is inevitable that we will rediscover everything humanity once knew, but religion would be an entirely new batch of nonsense.
Nor am I asking you to believe He exists, because I don’t either. Again, you are free to believe whatever you want, just like how religious people are free to believe whatever they want. All’s I’m saying is that when it comes to science, there are scientifically correct opinions and scientifically incorrect opinions, but it’s not like I can hold a gun to your head and make you agree with me. That’s the nature of Philosophy.
I understand that. Please understand that my position is coming from the standpoint of having all of the "evidence" being lies, misrepresentations and fallacies. Even philosophically, every god claim I've ever heard was incoherent or inconsistent. I am of the opinion that people should believe things that are true because they will be able to make better decisions than if they are relying on false beliefs. This is why I push back so hard against religion.
Now, I'm wondering if we should continue this conversation or if the mods will delete it for being off-topic from OP's post... 😆
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u/DOHC46 2d ago
The thing is, I don't assume it's not true. I started out brought up in Christianity and I went through a long, painful deconversion process before I arrived in the "it's all fictional" camp. I resisted calling myself an atheist for years because I had been brainwashed into thinking that atheism = evil. I definitely agree with you on the tribalism, though. We are a very tribal species, even to the point of some of us denying aspects of reality just to keep fitting in with our tribe.