Atheism

4026 readers

8 users here now

Community Guide

Archive Today will help you look at paywalled content the way search engines see it.

Statement of Purpose

This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
Superstition hucksters have no reason to subscribe or post here at all.
If you are looking to debate or proselytize, options will be linked lower in the sidebar.

Acceptable

Honest questions or conversations.
Discussions on parenting or advice.
Struggles, frustrations, coming out.
Atheist memes. We can have fun!
News headlines relevant to atheism.

Unacceptable

Depending on severity, you might be warned before adverse action is taken.

Anything against site rules.
Illegal and/or NSFW material.
Troll posts and comments. There will be no attempt to explain what that means.
Leading questions, agenda pushing, or disingenuous attempts to bait members.
Personal attacks or flaming.

Inadvisable

Self promotion or upvote farming.
Excessive shitposting or off-topic discussion.

Application of warnings or bans will be subject to moderator discretion. Feel free to appeal. If changes to the guidelines are necessary, they will be adjusted.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a group that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of any other group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you you will be banned on sight.

Provable means able to provide proof to the moderation, and, if necessary, to the community.

 ~ /c/nostupidquestions

If you want your space listed in this sidebar and it is especially relevant to the atheist or skeptic communities, PM DancingPickle and we'll have a look!

Connect with Atheists

Matrix: #atheism:envs.net

Help and Support Links

Streaming Media

This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.

Orgs, Blogs, Zines

Mainstream

Bibliography

Start here...

...proceed here.

Proselytize Religion

Convince an Atheist

From Reddit

As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Looking for a counterexample to an argument for God (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

At some point, I ran across an argument along the lines of: "We hunger, and food exists. We thirst, and water exists. We feel horny, and sex is real. We yearn for God, and so I conclude that God exists."

Now, I can easily pick this apart a bunch of different ways, the easiest one being that just because you want some to exist doesn't mean that it really exists. But what I'm really hoping for is a couple of counterexamples: something like "Yes, well, we all want a unicorn, too, but unicorns don't exist."

This particular one doesn't work because wanting a unicorn isn't a universal desire the way food or sex are (even counting asexual people, we can still say that the vast majority of people want sex). But maybe some of you can think of something.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Wow. This is a uniquely horrible argument with very little thought put into it.

We hunger, and food exists. We thirst, and water exists.

Tell that to anyone dying of thirst or hunger.

We feel horny, and sex is real.

Ok, so who is responsible for the guinea worm? Who willed that into existence?

This isn't a logical argument as much as it's a vapid bit of poetry, akin to "look at the trees." Thus it's not easy to debunk it with a logical argument, because any rational plea you could make can be hand-waived away with as little thought as went into the initial statement. Everyone is providing absurd counterexamples, which I think is a good way of showing how absurd the original statement is, but I think you'd do better if you pushed the speaker to form their argument into something more structured, to move away from wishy-washy nonsense and towards something that can be broken down and discussed. Otherwise your conversation will forever be stuck in the realm of "it just feels that way."