Is atheism a legitimate intellectual position?

Question

After seeing all the criticism of believers of all kinds of this site, I am wondering if atheism is just as intellectually bankrupt a position as they claim belief in God is. How can anyone say that there is no possibility that God does not exist? Now I can understand agnostics, who just aren't sure one way or the other. I think that is an intellectually sound position. But to say God's existence is impossible is just as "illogical" as my belief that God does exist. What do you think?

Answer 1

Agnosticism is compatible with atheism, just as it's compatible with belief.

Answer 2

Atheism is a lack of belief in any gods. Since no gods have come forward and performed any testable, repeatable and observable miracles for us, it's is reasonable and intelligent to assume that no gods exist.

Answer 3

No, it is a logical position.  I indeed believe that it is a rational and compelling position given the empirical data.  In statistics there are two ways to approach them, either through frequentist statistics or through Bayesian statistics.  Bayesian statistics provides a solution here.  In Bayesian statistics you take a pre-existing belief and structure it as a probability distribution.  In the case of something like a chemical experiment you can use past actual data to form your prior belief so there is little to no subjectivity in it, but you can also form a purely subjective prior belief.

The nice part about Bayesian statistics is that data trumps beliefs in almost all cases.  There is a special case where there is a "degenerate" prior belief.  An example of this is where the prior belief is 100% certainty of anything.  Any trivial amount of subsequent evidence will support that belief because the contrary position has the data multiplied by 0%, so no weight at all is counted toward contrary data and only good data gets counted in.  Any evidence would then count as 100% proof.

What you can do is operationalize each belief separately and ask what the real world implications would be.  For example, for a god to alter anything would require the presence of mass/energy to cause the change.  The conservation laws make it clear that if a god exists outside the universe, that god cannot get in and add energy or matter to make the event occur.  If that happened even one time, it would be loud in the data.  Religions claim it happens all the time.  Consider prayer.  For prayer to work, especially silent prayer, the god has to constantly monitor your brain activity.  Presuming as the grand designer the god could figure out the activity, the activity at the particle level would be disturbed by this.  In other words, the very act of looking will change the particle structure of the brain.

This would create a funny effect when you had a PET scan.  The presence of prayer would disrupt the anti-matter flow from the body that is was injected.  Technicians would have to tell people not to pray during the scan or it would mess up the results, since God would be scanning at the same time.

As each piece of physical evidence comes in, you update your beliefs.  Although the God belief could never reach zero, asymptotically it could at the limit, using limit theory from calculus.  Yes it is rational.

Answer 4

Atheism is the only legitimate intellectual position. Atheism does not involve denying the existence of a god, although some atheists do that. Atheists just ignore all claims of all-powerful non-existent fairies.

Answer 5

Sure there's a possibilty that there's a God.

There's the same possibility that a gang of invisible ninja penguins might break into my home while I'm asleep and steal my kidneys to sell on the black market.

The point is, does a remote possibility that they might exist obligate me to arrange my entire life around that possibility? I don't think so.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go check the penguin traps before I go to bed....

Answer 6

There is absolutely no logical theory in there being a God. Faith is the shield used in most cases, but there are so many logical, scientific ways to disprove any supernatural nonsense. Science over faith any day.

Answer 7

You have obviously been indoctrinated into religion at an early age, Therefore the mental control affliction you have is probably too far gone, because the religious virus attacks one's common sense.

Answer 8

Kinda agree with you but I don't think it's about being logical. A position on Religion or a prejudice against religion or the idea of God often has deeper roots than a logical, rational point of view towrds this issue. By the way, agnostics are not those who "just aren't sure one way or the other", but those who would really like to believe that there is a actually a God out there, but, just can't truly believe. This is a more logical, rational attitude in my view, since it's based on reflexing on the improbability/impossibility of the concept of God.

Answer 9

For some it is, and that's okay.

I can't say one way or the other.

I pretty much think the God thing is a delusion, at least a personal God.

This is my concept of God...

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive...

Why would any of this ever have existed at all?

Ya got me... I don't have a clue.

Answer 10

I'm an atheist and I do not say there is no possiblity.  I am open to anything.  But if you are going to make extraordinary claims, I will require evidence.  So far, there is none.  No proof for ANY deities.  That is fact.  Give me ANY kind of proof.  I won't deny facts if you can give some.

Answer 11

Believing in any god is illogical. Just something to comfort weak human beings. Man created gods. So your saying your logical enough to believe in any god ? That's illogical to me.

Answer 12

Well Christianity is just as illogical then because you are criticizing us right now.

Answer 13

Is it possible there are undiscovered micro-organisms on my keyboard?  Of course.

Is it possible there's an elephant in this room?  Only if there's a tiny, invisible elephant that doesn't do anything.

Any god that might exist must do so little as not to deserve the name.

Answer 14

Sure, it can be.  Any position can be, I guess. Personally though, I don't think blind faith is safe. It's lead to so much trouble throughout history. But a lack of empirical evidence isn't sufficient grounds for rejecting the possibility of a God. Agnosticism is more honest.

Answer 15

Materialism, atheism, is the maximation of ugliness, the climax of the finite antithesis of the beautiful. Highest beauty consists in the panorama of the unification of the variations which have been born of pre-existent harmonious reality.

Modern secularism has been fostered by two world-wide influences. The father of secularism was the narrow-minded and godless attitude of nineteenth- and twentieth-century so-called science--atheistic science. The mother of modern secularism was the totalitarian medieval Christian church. Secularism had its inception as a rising protest against the almost complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church.

Answer 16

hmm, using logical and reasoning to deduct that the idea of god is inconsistant with the rules of nature and even the rules that they use to define god

blindly believing

I'd have to go with the first one

Answer 17

Is not believing in the toothfairy a legitimate intellectual position?  Essentially, my question and yours are the same.  I'll leave you to answer it yourself.

Answer 18

Well see, we use Occam's Razor and Russell's Teapot to assert that the existence of a God or gods is extremely unlikely. While you can't disprove that God is there, purely naturalistic explanations are much more simple and likely than what religion has thus far offered.

Answer 19

When christians cannot fact the music of modern reason they want everyone to cater to religion.  

Answer 20

Most of us don't say God doesn't exist. We just say it's impossible that the common religious perception of "God" exists, due to far too many contradictions and lack of any evidence.

You Christian types just have to get your head around the concept that yoour "God", this anthropomorphic personification of the guiding forces within our universe, is just something that was concocted to make reality simpler for people of a more simpler, less intellectual time.

Generally, atheists prefer to expand our minds and learn more about what's really going on in our physical world and beyond.

Answer 21

First, it is true that atheism is based on a set of unconfirmed philosophical assumptions just like religion (logical positivism, materialism). And it is true that many in the new atheist camp are intellectually bankrupt. The God Delusion, for example, was openly ridiculed by both theist and atheist philosophers across the western hemisphere, but here we have a troops of little sheep following as if it were gospel without feeling the slightest need to check the facts for themselves.

It is telling that the author of the most powerful book refuting the existence of God, the founder of the New Atheism, has since embraced theism and admitted the logical absurdity of his former position. It is also telling that the majority of philosophy professors are now theist, and even the atheist philosophers are willing to take theistic arguments seriously.

Answer 22

In that case, you'd have to believe that anyone who claims to know that any supernatural being doesn't exist is being illogical.

So, if you claim that leprechauns don't exist, but can't prove it, is that irrational?  If you claim that invisible monsters don't exist, but can't prove it, is that irrational?  If you claim that Greek gods don't exist, but can't prove it, is that irrational?

The funny thing is, non-existent things cannot leave evidence that they never existed.  However, I'm sure you've dismissed plenty of supernatural beings as nonexistent, even though you couldn't prove that they don't exist, on the grounds that the very idea of some supernatural beings is just plain illogical.  That's the position that atheists take on God.

Answer 23

I think you are mistaken in your assumption of what atheism is all about.  Atheism is not claiming that god does not exist.  It is a statement of non-belief.  Atheism is claiming that there is no reason to believe in any god.

The possibility of any god's existence is there.  The probability is very low, given the total lack of objective evidence to date to support such existence.  

Similarly, the possibility of the existence of the invisible pink unicorn is always there.  However, the probability is also very low.

This is a very logical position, and perfectly defendable.