this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
41 points (95.6% liked)

Asklemmy

43970 readers
761 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Atheist faith doesn't exist, atheism is absence of faith. Atheists are more into facts and less into belief. If you have to believe in something for it to become true, it's nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I know that it’s a common belief in atheists that it’s not a faith. But if you take a step back, it’s hard to deny that there is some belief in the sentence: “if science has neither evidence of something nor of its absence, it doesn’t exist”.

The opposite of that is: “if science has neither evidence of something not of its absence, then science doesn’t know yet, and until then, neither can we”.

It’s fine to believe in things. I’d say it’s not great though, to think so highly of one’s own belief that one wouldn’t want to call if a belief.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And it's common belief of theists that everyone has to believe in something. I don't believe in anything. I believe people, like the scientists that discover stuff, but that's believing someone, not in something. Pretending it's the same is ridiculous.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don’t know if that’s what you were implying, but I’m not at all a theist. And as a scientist, I can remind you that the scientific method is to keep researching topics that are inconclusive. To conclude something as non-existent because the research is inconclusive is not the scientific method.

What you are doing is listening to the science indeed, and drawing faith-based conclusions that something doesn’t exist because it wasn’t proven to exist. Which is fine, a lot of people do that to base all kinds of faiths, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that you’re not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not inconclusive, it's improvable which basically means "why even bother?"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don’t disagree with “why even bother”. But again following the scientific method, it wasn’t proven to be improvable. Scientifically speaking, we just don’t know.

I realize it’s not a very comforting thought, though. And I don’t mind people who believe otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

it wasn’t proven to be improvable

If it's something invisible with no physical manifestation (as the soul is thought to be by the believers), it's quite literally improvable.

[–] god 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

atheist faith describes people who BELIEVE that god does not exist

besides the fact that I do exist...

if there is no evidence that god doesn't exist, or that god does exist, then yes, there is no reason to believe god exists, but apart from the absurd and extremely vast absence of evidence that would point towards proving even the slimmest of traces of existence, that is also an epistemological challenge in that our perception is extremely limited and we don't know, as ritswd said, what we don't know.

so we have a lot of evidence, but there exists an extremely small and remote possibility that our theories are wrong, just because we're dumbfucks with very smol brains & tiny eyes that can only see 3 dimensions

so saying with 100% certainty that god does not exist is a dogmatic belief in our conclusions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No, it's a logical conclusion. God isn't needed for the existence of the universe and thus doesn't exist. Sure, there's minuscule chance that's wrong and if it ever happens I'll be among the first who'll say I was wrong. Until then, science says God doesn't exist.

[–] god 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You're right. Just a note

there’s minuscule chance that’s wrong

This is the scientific perspective. All signs point to no. But as always, we might have missed something. I think this is the agnostic perspective, even the "agnostic atheist" perspective. I think, and I might be wrong, that the pure "atheist" perspective is that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no God.

But if there's a tiny retarded chance that for some reason there is something as absurd as a god... lol.

...then that'd be me of course

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

To be clear, it's highly likely that what we consider to be a "god" or a "satan" (as well as physical places we cannot see/reach where these two reside) isn't real, based on evidence that we've come upon today scientifically, but that also doesn't mean there isn't some form of a higher being that we are unable to recognize as such because of our limited abilities that you've explained above.