Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
Log in or create an account to join the discussions on the Atheist Republic forums.
Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
FREE E-BOOKS
Get the book "Why There Is No God" and one more book for FREE!
Sign up below for the Atheist Republic Newsletter to get the books.
Record Your Message!
Record your voice here for it to be aired on the Atheist Republic Voicemails Podcast.
Send us your views and opinions, your personal stories, messages of support, comments on recent news, or any comments you would like to share about your part of the world.
Note : By clicking record you are allowing us to broadcast your message on any of our platforms.
Affiliate Disclaimer
Links to atheist related books, shirts and movies and other atheism related products are affiliate links.
All proceeds will go to keeping the Atheist Republic website up and running; providing resources, advocacy, community tools and encouragement to atheists all over the world.
I think either you know nothing about Christianity or you are being dishonest.
Their god is not just omnipotent, they think about there god as the reason they wake up in the morning, they thank him after every delivered meal, they repeat in every mass every 2 hours of every day that god knows everything, CAN DO ANYTHING and is everywhere. BUT most importantly, they truly believe that GOD is LOVE, the perfect example of Love.
Now after me pointing out these beliefs can you honestly dare repeat what you just said?
"God's love works in strange ways."
Yes god love is complete indifference, with him or without him is the same, children will keep drowning, woman will keep being raped and after murdered and the worst of it is that your god has a front row seat watching all this and does nothing.
You do not need to be the perfect example of love to see a child being raped and do something, you just need to be a decent human being.
The christian god is not even that, he is a type of evil character that watches REAL child rape porn everyday and it seems he enjoys this thing because he allows it to continue till its end.
A god that can do anything CAN surly find a better way to give free will and remove most evil of this world because he CAN DO ANYTHING.
He can make you a cat and a human at the same point in time but he cannot even care sufficiently to stop the injustice of this world.
Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1BzP1wr234
I just programmed my computer to draw a small circle. It's one pixel wide and one pixel high and centred in the pixel. hmmm it looks square to me. An independent observer would call it a square, but we know better eh? The program definitely commands that the computer draws a circle.
Now you and I see circles all over the place. They're 2 dimensional right? But what if we were able to look around the side of the circle and see that it's actually a cylinder. Looking at a squat cylinder from side on shows us a ... wait for it... square/rectangle (squares are by definition just rectangles with four equal sides.)
Maybe you're looking at a circle drawn on a piece of paper. That's two dimensional right? But that circle is moving through time. What if an observer could view time perpendicularly as you would the piece of paper? Could your axiomatic round circle exist as a square then? Remember that we see things in only 4 dimensions but super string theory postulates that there are actually 11. We really have no idea how the other 7 work. So a person's observation of a circle is entirely dependent upon their relative position. Your axiomatically impossible square circle might objectively be able to be observed. We can't rule it out.
Ok, so that's a sophistic argument to which the application of Occam's rule of parsimony would tell us that it's unlikely to be true. However, a tiny probability stills negates 100 percent certainty that the axiom "that it is impossible to have a square circle" is true. That tiny little shred of doubt is all that is required to negate your absolutist position.
As far as your claim that concepts of theistic gods are inherently illogical, I'll point out that gods that are personifications of natural phenomena - like the greek pantheon - are not considered to be omnipotent, moral, omniscient or kind. They are not therefore inherently illogical, but are still theistic concepts. Your argument seems to be based on an unspoken syllogism that theistic gods are sufficiently represented by the abrahamic versions of god. There are probably 6000 other kinds of god concepts to consider.
Pragmatically, we're just counting angels on a pin head. It makes no difference whether one considers themselves an agnostic or gnostic atheist. It won't affect our lives. It doesn't negate the theists' burden of proof for their positive claim.
Kiwi Stew - "I just programmed my computer to draw a small circle"
No, you told your computer to approximate a circle. Computers can't draw circles because they operate on a finite lattice.
-------
Kiwi Stew - "it looks square to me"
That is because it is a square.
-------
Kiwi Stew - "The program definitely commands that the computer draws a circle"
There is nothing in the instruction set of a computer to allow it to draw a circle.
-------
Euclidean circles are the set of all points on a plane equal distance from a point. This prevents you from ever having a euclidean "square-circle". That pig don't fly so good.
"I just programmed my computer to draw a small circle. It's one pixel wide and one pixel high and centred in the pixel. hmmm it looks square to me."
I am sure it does, considering that you have asked it to draw a circle in a grid, precisely one space wide. It would be impossible for anyone/anything to do so, and seeing how you have asked it for the impossible, should we really be impressed that the output wasn't actually a circle? I have just programmed it to do the same thing, only for a triangle, and it popped out a square again, does that mean that triangles are really squares too? If you do not see the problem with this line of reasoning, I'm afraid I just can't help you...
"Now you and I see circles all over the place. They're 2 dimensional right?"
Yes, indeed, we were discussing a two dimensional object.
"But what if we were able to look around the side of the circle and see that it's actually a cylinder."
I think you missed the two dimensional part... If you look at the side of a truly two dimensional object, you wouldn't see anything at all.
Circles are only axiomatically 2 dimensional. They're still moving through time, so in objective reality they are at least 3 dimensional and looking at it perpendicularly in respect to the time axis, that circle might actually appear square. My argument stands.
"Circles are only axiomatically 2 dimensional"
Right they are 2d by definition, so any object you say is not 2d CANNOT be a circle. This is the whole point: you will never be able to demonstrate a Euclidean square circle without violating the definition of a circle (or a square, or both).
There's a big difference between an axiom and something that you expect to observe in reality. Axioms are only valid as a mutually agreed hypothetic scenario for the sake of argument. A Euclidean circle cannot exist in nature as it has no depth yet we observe things that approximate circles in nature all the time and we call them... circles from our point of observation.
You seem to keep missing the point that your square circle analogy fails because the euclidean circle as you happen to define it cannot exist, let alone a square one, therefore you're using the idea of a square circle axiomatically. Gods are not generally presented as being axioms but as inferable agents in nature.
We have to approach question of whether a god or gods exist by hypothesis testing, just as we would for any other hypothesis. To otherwise is akin to special pleading. Since we cannot test every conceivable hypothesis for the existence of a god, then we cannot say with 100% certainty that the null hypothesis is true. Granted we've covered all the most likely ones, so the confidence level is high that the null hypothesis is true, but it still is not 1. Therefore, "gnostic" atheism is the height of arrogance even though pragmatically it works as a worldview.
" approximate circles in nature all the time and we call them... circles from our point of observation."
this just in, approximate circles, are not circles.
"Circles are only axiomatically 2 dimensional."
That's right, axiomatically 2 dimensional, as in, taken solely as two dimensional. Geometric circles do not exist in more than two dimensions, we might call something 3d a circle(like a ball, or a coin), but they are not actually circles(a sphere and a cylinder). This means that the argument you are attempting to use, extrapolates exclusively 2 dimensional object into 3 dimensional space, meaning anything you say is null from the outset. You are quite literally taking a simplified 2 dimensional shape used to teach children geometry, attempting to make it 3 dimensional(which even a High School geometry student would avoid), and then feigning awestruck because it does not translate properly into 3 dimensional space. Well, duh, one would have to be a fool to think it would.
"They're still moving through time, so in objective reality they are at least 3 dimensional and looking at it perpendicularly in respect to the time axis, that circle might actually appear square."
If it were moving through time on a 2 dimensional plane, and occupying the same space, it would still be a circle. Your argument assumes that not only time is moving, but the circle is as well, which is odd considering no one has ever attempted to argue movement in 2 dimensional space; ever.
"My argument stands."
Perhaps upon your own desire, but not on any logic or mathematics, of that you should rest assured.
There are more than one god that people believe in. When I say I am an agnostic atheist, I don't mean that I am agnostic about the Biblical God. I can confidently say that that God is not real. But there are plenty of other god ideas that don't fit the same description. Each one that I am presented with and questioned about the existence of, I can either determine that it is false, or it remains indeterminate. Specifically, the idea of a deistic, un-ivnvoled higher power who kickstarted existence, I remain agnostic about, just in the sense that I haven't searched every corner of the universe/multiverse, and determined that there are no gods.
I happen to think anyone who claims to be a gnostic atheist is just as erroneous as a gnostic theist, and base their assumption on a lack of evidence. I think holding the positive positions that there are definitely no gods is just as unreasonable as claiming that there definitely is one.
totally agree,
I would also add that a Gnostic Atheist is even worse then a Gnostic theist since the claim of the Gnostic theist is centered on 1 particular god while the Gnostic Atheist is making a bigger claim on all possible Theistic gods.
I was an agnostic and I totally understand their confusion. They are playing between 2 major beliefs and that they are really confuse. Agnosticism is the main road to atheism.
I agree that, as others have noted, agnosticism is a legitimate opinion in and of itself. I don't consider myself an agnostic, but it's a defensible philosophical position. To admit one's ignorance on anything is the opposite of cowardly.
Pages