Throughout history people have attributed many phenomena to God and then shown them to be caused by natural mechanisms. The attribution to God was a move of faith, whereas natural mechanisms stand as discoveries. An inductive argument could be formed from that to show that it is rational to not believe God is responsible for something. This pattern of God-didn’t-do-it has gone on so long and with such reliability that there are next to no phenomena left to hide God in. And even if you could hide your own God hypothesis in some unknown phenomena, your argument would be arguing from ignorance. We don’t know, therefore…
It is true that I have no idea how the universe got here. But science has collected the evidence, made the evidence readily available, analysed said evidence, make their analysis readily available, and from that they’ve written a lot of the story. There are hypotheses around that initial moment (T0) when things appeared, the most persuasive of which is about the instability to “nothing” and the resultant breakdown into polar opposites. It’s surprisingly reminiscent of Dao Buddhism.
All of the hypotheses don’t matter, though. The question is about how I, and other atheists, can make the leap from I don’t know to not God. The answer is that we don’t have to make that leap. If the answer is “I don’t know” then we sit with “I don’t know”. We do not accept any hypothesis regardless of evidence, especially if the only reason for the hypothesis is that it’s protected by antiquity. To engage with discovering truth and rejecting falsehoods you need to bewilling to not know a lot of things; you need to be willing to not have a one-size-fits-all-unknowns answer to all difficult questions.
The idea that God does not exist is not a humble opinion. The Ignostic Atheist is working on a lowest common denominator of God; he wants to know what the least a being could be and, if discovered, be called God. Without a concrete answer to that question the word “God” is a sound with no meaning attached. So, to move this conversation on, go help the Ignostic Atheist. The concept of God, at its most vague and nebulous, is unsupported by evidence. The hypothesis “God did it” has been falsified for event after event. Evidence for God has been demonstrated to be incomplete or mistaken again and again. These are characteristics of any fictional being you care to mention.
As with all science, there is no certainty. Every experiment gives us more confidence in an existing idea, really confuses things or overturns all existing ideas. No idea based on evidence can ever give us 100% certainty. But, without ever being entirely certain, we have built supercomputers, landed on Mars, been to the bottom of the ocean and run the Simpsons for 25 years. There is merit in the method of never quite knowing.
The alternative method is “faith”. And that’s just unreliable
Categories: Atheism
Enquiries on Atheism 
Reblogged this on Allallt in discussion.
I’ve also put it this way: Just because I don’t know for sure what the right answer to a question is doesn’t mean that I can’t recognize when a proposed answer is really wrong. If you ask me how many blades of grass there are on the White House lawn, I can say that there is correct answer to that question, even if I don’t know what it is. But if someone suggests to me that the correct answer is “two” I can easily dismiss that answer as being completely wrong. And even though I don’t know how the universe got here, I can similarly dismiss “It was poofed into being by the tribal war god of a bunch of mideastern bronze-age goatherders” as being completely wrong.
the great part of this analogy is that if used with a theist they would not defer to ‘I have faith that its just two blades’ because they would begin to think about how to count them.. it’s only problems too big for their math skills that cause them to claim god did it. The way to rid society of religion is better math and science education.
mandatory free broadcasting of educational programs across all video carriers is a must. Bill Nye, Mythbusters and so on, there are many more available too. Force education on the public… does anyone remember school house rock?
Oh, great, now I have “Conjunction Junction” stuck in my head!
You’re welcome!
Was the Electric Company part of SHR?
One of these things just doesn’t belong here…
When your get up and go has got up and left and you hanker for a hunk of cheese…
I’d say it was time to flip the channel, start a new page in your journal, and begin wondering how the weatherman is going to mess up tomorrow morning’s broadcast…
I’m sorry, that’s not an argument, that is just a “god of the gaps” argument. We don’t understand everything so God must be responsible for what we don’t understand. Amazing!
Actually, now that you mention it, 25 years of the Simpsons really is impressive.
Further still, we could grant gods existence and the universe could still exist independently of them. It is a leap to say the universe is because of a god.
If you don’t know how the universe was created, How do you know for sure there is a god?
Precisely
Here’s a mental challenge for the theist…
Divide a page into two columns, and label them thus:
Column A – Things once attributed to supernatural causes that now have a natural explanation.
Column B – Things once attributed to natural causes that now have a supernatural explanation.
Which list contains more entries?
Coming up with a god who is philosophically undeniable was a clever idea…but the cleverness ended with the first story of genesis and all the ensuing drama.