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My problem with atheism (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by platypus_plumba@lemmy.world to c/atheism@lemmy.world
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First of all, I have more in common with atheists than religious people, so my intention isn't to come here and attack, I just want to hear your opinions. Maybe I'm wrong, I'd like to hear from you if I am. I'm just expressing here my perception of the movement and not actually what I consider to be facts.

My issue with atheism is that I think it establishes the lack of a God or gods as the truth. I do agree that the concept of a God is hard to believe logically, specially with all the incoherent arguments that religions have had in the past. But saying that there's no god with certainty is something I'm just not comfortable with. Science has taught us that being wrong is part of the process of progress. We're constantly learning things we didn't know about, confirming theories that seemed insane in their time. I feel like being open to the possibilities is a healthier mindset, as we barely understand reality.

In general, atheism feels too close minded, too attached to the current facts, which will probably be obsolete in a few centuries. I do agree with logical and rational thinking, but part of that is accepting how little we really know about reality, how what we considered truth in the past was wrong or more complex than we expected

I usually don't believe there is a god when the argument comes from religious people, because they have no evidence, but they could be right by chance.

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[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 7 points 3 months ago

"Believe or not believe" seems to be an opinion of yours that I'm personally not bound to. I'm fine just accepting I don't know something that is clearly outside of the grasp of my rational thought or logic.

Whether you believe something or not is not outside the grasp of your rational thought. Just... answer the question. That's all it takes to know if you believe something, you take a moment to introspect and you say whether you believe it or not.

There's also a difference between lacking a belief in a proposition and believing in the negation of that proposition. Lacking a belief in something (for example, any particular god) is not the same thing as believing that that god does not exist. Both are atheism, they're just different kinds of atheism. "Strong atheism" and "weak atheism" are the usual terms to distinguish between them.

[-] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world -4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'll play along. When I ask myself that question I immediately answer "I don't believe", just because I've conditioned myself to answer that over the years. The same way I answered "I believe" when I was conditioned during my childhood.

My point is that choosing sides is a fallacy, it's something very human though. Over the past years I've realized that I don't need to take sides and that I'm better off accepting when I just don't know something, just avoid having opinions about matters that I can't understand.

But yes, I still answer "I don't believe" internally. Hopefully I'll learn to turn "I don't know" into my instinctual answer.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago

You seem to think if you believe something, you have to hold that belief for a length of time before it becomes a belief. That's not how believing things work.

If you don't believe that there is a god for 10 seconds and then start believing again, you are an atheist for 10 seconds.

[-] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I honestly didn't understand what you said there. I don't believe a person needs to hold a belief for some time for it to be valid. Not sure how you arrived to that conclusion.

I just said that my instinctual answer isn't one that matches my worldview clearly. When I say "I don't believe" I actually mean "I have no belief/I don't know". I just need to train myself to say "I have no belief" which represents what I feel much better and with less ambiguity.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

What you don't "understand," despite multiple people telling you multiple times, is that belief isn't knowledge.

Maybe the text wasn't large enough for you.

BELIEF ISN'T KNOWLEDGE.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 8 points 3 months ago

"Knowing" and "believing" are two separate things. There are plenty of theists who would say "I don't know that god exists but I believe that it does."

[-] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yeah, in this case believing anything is worthless because we don't understand the origin of reality. That's my point. It's fine to believe something when enough evidence has shown it is likely the case. It is not fine to believe something is true without evidence, or false because of lack of evidence. Specially when gathering evidence about it is nearly impossible with our current understanding.

Maybe the humble thing to do is to wait until we gather more evidence that supports or rejects these ideas.

this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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