How is atheism possible?

Question

I can understand an agnostic's view that we can never be certain whether or not God exists. But isn't an atheist, asserting conclusively that there is no God, like a person born blind who claims there's no such thing as light? If atheists depend on reason, could someone please explain how a person can start from, "I've never witnessed it," and reach the conclusion, "It doesn't exist"?

P.S. Please don't bother asking how Christianity is possible. Christians claim faith; atheists claim reason. I'm just trying to understand how reason allows atheists to claim--as FACT--what reason alone, it seems to me, can neither prove nor disprove.

Thank you.

You guys are great; thanks for all the thoughtful replies. Very enlightening!

Answer 1

Not all atheists make that assertion.

Agnosticism is a position on what can be known. It holds that the existence of god is not something that can be proven or disproven. Belief is something entirely different. If you don't believe, you are an atheist.

Only strong atheists take the position that there is definitely no god. Weak atheists do not believe without evidence, or just lack belief (like babies, for instance).

I *am* agnostic - an agnostic atheist. I say there's no way of knowing, but I have no evidence, so I don't believe. You'll find that most atheists are weak atheists (same thing as "soft" or "agnostic" atheists) for the very reason you mentioned - reason itself.

PS... I didn't feel the snarkiness in your tone like I feel most of the time when I see a q like this... so thank YOU :)

Answer 2

Well I can expain how a person can start from nothing, you just have to ask your parents about his.

The thing is the univerise is too big and we are just a very very very small part of it. To some of us it scares the pants off us, to even think that we simply came from nothing is too big a a thing for them to deal with.

But to be honest I have never seen a bear sh*t in the woods but it does not mean it did not happen. The same can be said for the big bang, if there was any pre big-bang univerise it would had been destroyied in the big time. Maybe the univerise has always been here going through cycles of big bangs with each new big bang destroying the old one. Maybe this time around the physics and the chemistry of the univerise were right enough to form life on planet earth.

At the end of the day its all down to faith, christians have blind faith, athesists have faith in logical and scientific reasoning. At the moment religion has been around for 1000's of years and has a long long time to come up with philioscial answer to questions, modern science has only been around for 30-40 years and is still growing. If science knew all the answer to the univerise there would not be a need for research, religion on the other hand has not advance much in the last 40 years as compaired to science.

Answer 3

If you raise a child in a secular environment, shielding him from faith, that child will not spontaneously have a knowledge or belief in god. Faith is something that is taught (some would say ingrained), into humans, in many cases while the mind is still very open to suggestion (meaning during its early developmental period).

The reason that I use this example, is that its a very basic version of my upbringing. As a young child, I was encouraged to question everything, and not take it at face value. I was then exposed to christian indoctrination thru school (I was sent to a parochial school because, religion classes notwithstanding, the actual education...math, science, english, history...were of a higher quality than the local public schools). I questioned every single aspect of the religion, as well as many others, and frankly, when compared to science (which the school was required to teach by law, and made known that they disagreed with the state's curriculum), the answers in favor of a god came up lacking.

It's funny that you use the phrase ' "I've never witnessed it," and reach the conclusion, "It doesn't exist"?' to make an argument against atheism. The very same things are used by Creationists everyday, in order to disprove evolution.

Answer 4

Logical almost dictates that things are false unless they're proven true. Like for Aliens. There are no aliens, but there is no way that you can search 100% of the universe because its infinite. But the statement there are aliens can be proven true by finding one alien. Like in the example of light and the blind guy. IF the blind guy need how to operate certain devices he would be proven wrong because the device would detect the visible spectrum of electromagneticism i.e. light and notify the user. Now apply this to god. How do you prove god's existence?
1. The Bible and other holy books. Right? Wrong, works written by men hundreds of years after the alleged events then censored by emperors and kings repeatedly.
2. "Miracles" - Just because our knowledge of science can't understand it yet doesn't mean god did it.
3. "The Beauty of the Natural World" - I can't understand their reasoning, things happen by chance and we're lucky.
4. "Well if the x was a little bit stronger or ... humans wouldn't exist so god must of set those ideal situations." - But, if its random and whatever force was changed we wouldn't even have the debate.

Can't think of anything more at the moment.

Answer 5

A person does not beleive in God is like a person that is impaired?

Overall a poor suggestive simile. A blind person is "handicapped" in the one sense you are suggestiong, seeing a light. This is of course in comparison to people that can see, being able to see a light.

An athiest is not handicapped, has the same 5 senses as most religious people

Do Ghosts exist? a religous person might say yes or might say no, an athiest would say, until it is proven, it does not exist in my line of thinking.

Imagine that we have a conversation one day and I say to you, "I believe in the gerflagenflopple. You cannot prove that the gerflagenflopple does not exist, therefore it exists." You can see that this is ridiculous. Just because I have invented something out of thin air does not mean that its non-existence is suddenly unprovable. There has to be some evidence that the gerflagenflopple exists in order to assert its existence. Since there is not, it is quite easy to say that the gerflagenflopple is imaginary.

Now let's imagine that we have a conversation one day and I say to you, "I believe in Leprechauns. You cannot prove that Leprechauns do not exist, therefore they exist." You actually have heard of Leprechauns. There are lots of books, movies and fairy tales dealing with Leprechauns. People talk about Leprechauns all the time. Leprechauns even have a popular brand of breakfast cereal. But that does not mean that Leprechauns exist. There is no physical evidence for the existence of Leprechauns. Not a single bit. Therefore, it is obvious to any normal person that Leprechauns are imaginary.

The classic religious response is, "God must remain hidden. If he proved his existence, that would take away faith." This is clever -- here we have an object named God that proves its existence by completely hiding its existence. Of course, in the real world, any object that provides no evidence for its existence is classified as imaginary.

Even more interesting, this object called God, which is supposedly hiding its existence completely, is in the meantime supposedly writing books, answering prayers and incarnating itself. How can that be? This obvious contradiction shows how imaginary God is. When we look at prayer scientifically, we find that "answered prayers" are actually nothing but coincidences. When we look at the Bible scientifically, ethically or rationally, we find that the Bible is wrong. When we look at all of Jesus' miracles scientifically, we find that none of them left behind any scientific or historical evidence. Nor, for that matter, did Jesus, nor did Jesus' resurrection. Strangely, not a single historical source independent of the Bible ever mentions the resurrection.

The reason why we can find no empirical evidence for God's existence is not because "God is a magical being completely able to hide from us." It is because God is imaginary.

"The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual - the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of "God-eating" - were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions."

"Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian God Mithras - called the Son of God and the Light of the World - was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.

By the way, December 25 is also the birthday or Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus.

The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity's weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans."


Notice what happens when anyone is "miraculously cured". A person is sick, the person prays (or a prayer circle prays for the person) and the person is cured. A religious person looks at it and says, "God performed a miracle because of prayer!" That is the end of it.

A scientist looks at it in a very different way. A scientist looks at it and says, "Prayer had nothing to do with it - there is a natural cause for what we see here. If we understand the natural cause, then we can heal many more people suffering from the same condition."

In other words, it is only by assuming that God is imaginary that science can proceed.

Answer 6

Very thoughtfull indeed. It seems that youa re finally asking the right question. Others have answered your question with some of their own. Faries, for example. They don't rule out their existance because they cannot prove Faries don't exist. So why are they so ready to prove God does not exist? Can they disprove his existence? Doubting is okay, believing or laying your life on a theory of your own, is not.

Yes you are right in your definitions of athiesm and agnosticsm. As defined by the dictionary. If anyone is about to argue, they should first research the words they think they understand.

You are also right in asking if athiesm is possible. No, it is not possible. It takes a leap of faith and a lot of ignoring logic and fact to be an athiest.

Don't read this wrong, if you are athiest, I would love to kindly and peacefully debate with you on such topics, please do not take offence at my logic. Contact me if you wish.

Answer 7

Atheism simply means "without God," i.e., without a belief in a God. Agnosticism refers to "without knowledge," i.e., declaring no knowledge (or evidence) of a God's existence. Therefore, all atheists are also agnostic, whereas all agnostics are not necessarily atheistic.

There are several different forms of atheism. Broadly put, there is soft atheism, which basically says I don't see any evidence that God exists, but no one will ever really know. Hard (or positive) atheism, on the other hand, states that the evidence against the existence of God is so complelling that it is entirely rational to state positively that no God exists.

Your analogy of blind persons does not apply here because it is assumed that we all have the exact same capacity to perceive deity or not. If you believe otherwise, then I'm not certain which faith tradition you follow.

Both forms of atheism stem from use of logic and from reviews of evidence, not just, "I ain't never seen God, so I guess there ain't one." I don't think you intended to belittle anyone, but suggesting that atheists are being unreasonable. Atheists are, by and large, among the most reasoned thinkers. It is possible to reach different conclusions, but to declare atheism as senseless is to deride the use of logic at all to reach conclusions.

I have thought through the reasons why I don't believe in God (a moderately soft atheism) and put them on my blog, if you care to read them at the link below:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-t0BORtswfacdeOuprS2h8mE-?cq=1&p=36

Answer 8

I have more understanding of Agnosticism than I do of Atheism as well. But I also have more understanding of Agnosticism that I do of any one who believes they KNOW God exists too. And I'm not agnostic so go figure? It would be a very hard task to prove to those of us who have experienced God, that He doesn't exist, and it would be hard to prove to those who haven't experienced God that He does... but one very logical point I think is missed by the majority of Atheists/Agnostics as that something is more likely to exist if someone else experiences it, than if someone doesn't. eg. Do headaches exist? Not everyone has had one, they are not visible nor measurable so how can we be sure they exist? Because millions of people have experienced them.

So though many Atheists/Agnostics claim they corner the market on logic and reason, it doesn't seem like they use it much in reference to God.

Answer 9

I'll answer this question by reminding you of the infinite number of things that you undoubtedly reject right now. Think about all the things that you don't believe in: Fairies, giants, unicorns, leprechauns, all sorts of things. How can you be completely, 100% sure that those things don't exist? You can't. They have the POTENTIAL to exist, and one could argue that just because you haven't seen one, it doesn't mean there aren't any. But do you leave the door open for the potential existence of those creatures? Chances are you don't. You can never definitively say that anything doesn't exist, but that isn't proof that it does, and it certainly doesn't mean that you should consider the possibility that it does.

Answer 10

Well, I'm a "weak" or agnostic atheist. There is no evidence that a god exists, so I don't believe one exists.

Strong atheists seem to me to be operating as much on faith as any theist, although it is faith from a different side of the issue.