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No, I am assuming that a book written in the iron age was written by people with no knowledge of physics and I am also assuming, like every other iron age religious text, there's no need to accept it as truth.
Your whole "you can't prove it isn't true" argument is not how anything works. The burden of proof is on the claimant. In this case, my claim is I have no reason to believe any of it is true based on modern physics. And telling me I can't assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn't really compel me to think otherwise since I've never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
If your god wants me to believe he exists, he knows what he can do about it. I guess he's fine not providing a shred of evidence he exists outside of an iron age book, which means I'm fine assuming he doesn't exist.
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was written by people with no knowledge of physics
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders? Do you think they did not understand that walking on water, giving life to the death, curing diseases on the spot and other things ascribed to Jesus as wonders were defying the conventional laws of nature?
The burden of proof is on the claimant.
Exactly. You claim to know that Jesus as described in the bible is an impossibility. So you have to proof that. All i want you to acknowledge, is that you are making an assumption, not providing proven knowledge.
And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
Ever heard of modern Physics? Relativity theory? Relativistic effects? All of these are the results of observations in defiance of classical Newtonian physics. There is an ongoing revolution in physics since a hundred years because we keep observing things inconsistent with our prior assumptions about the laws of physics.
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So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders?
The same reason the authors of the Vedas, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and any other religious text you'd like to mention. I assume you don't think Vishnu is a god as well as your god. I look forward to the special pleading of why the "wonders" of the Bible are true and the "wonders" of the Trials of Hercules are not though.
Also, you're "ever heard of" thing doesn't change the fact that there is not a single documented account of the laws of physics not working. You are describing things being more complicated than was thought, not things not working.
But feel free to show me video of a modern-day miracle your god is responsible for. You know as well as I do that there is no such thing, but I'm sure you've got some amusing excuse for why your omnipotent god no longer performs those miracles of his.
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So do you believe the people 2000 years ago knew nothing about the laws of nature or did they? Did they understand that walking on water was something regularly possible or not? Did they understand raising the dead was something not normally possible?
Because that is your claim. And i strongly disagree because we have plenty of evidence that people understood the laws of nature quite well, even if they couldn't verbalize them in math yet. We have many ancient buildings and technologies that only work with a profound understanding of how physical matter behaves under normal circumstances.
EDIT: By the way i do not believe the bible to be an accurate description of Jesus, as there is an accurate description in the Quran. Still i don't claim to have proof that Jews, Christians or Hindus are wrong, because i have different theological believes. I acknowledge that my believes are that. And Atheists should realize that they also have theological believes, which is fundamentally different from knowledge about natural sciences.
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Ah, I see, rather than special pleading as to why the Bible is true and the Vedas are false, you're just going to ignore the whole thing.
I suppose that's a way to maintain that your god is the one true god though, ignore any challenges from other god beliefs as if they don't exist.
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Atheists do not have theological beliefs, atheism is characterized by a lack of religious faith. If one is lacking in faith then they cannot still have faith, that is an incoherent position.
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Yes they do. They believe, without evidence, that no god exists. This is specifically different from agnostics, who say that they do not know. So atheism is a form of faith, because they choose to believe something about the nature of the divine, even if that is the absence of any divine.
Interestingly there is also religious atheism for instance in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.
I always find it silly, when atheists proclaim to "believe in science" violating the very principles of scientific research by proclaiming something as factual and absolute they have no evidence for. If someone is true to scientific principles he'll say he does not know hence he is an agnostic. An Atheist however is always a person of faith, even if many people fight tooth and nail to deny it. Which brings me back to what i wrote here somewhere earlier in the comment chain that my impression is most atheists to be traumatized by bad religious practice or actors abusing the religion to harm them, and not having found a healthier way to address their trauma yet.
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I think you're operating on a different understanding of the words 'faith' and 'belief' here. Do you believe that Tuesday comes after Monday? Do you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, or that puppies are cute? Belief in something does not require faith, faith is a specific kind of belief. This is the kind of belief I have when talking about God.
I do not need evidence to disprove the existence of God, much the same way that I do not need the same for Dragons, or Magic, or the Flat Earth. I am not claiming these things do not exist, I am simply not going to believe they do until there is some evidence of their existence. I would suspect you do not think that I am religious in my lack of belief in dragons.
I also do not "believe" in science. That is a misunderstanding of science, which is simply a methodology. One cannot believe in it any more than they can math. It just is.
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Tuesday coming after Monday is an arbitrary convention. In the same way that for natural numbers in the decimal system we called the number after one two and the one after that three. But we could have also called them three, two, one, four...
And yes i claim that believing there to be no god is a form of faith.
Think about it this way: God promises the believers who do good and ask forgiveness for their sins paradise and threatens the disbelievers with eternal hellfire. This is reiterated throughout history multiple times by prominent figures and the believe in god is the standard around the world. So from a rational risk minimizing point of view believing in God is the safer thing to do. Especially with how little religious practice Christianity requires compared to Judaism or Islam.
But to get to your core argument: Flying Squid claimed Jesus like in the bible did not exist because it is impossible for him to have existed in this way.
That is like saying you know for a fact Dragons never existed because there is no Dragons today. Now replace Dragon with Dinosaur and you see why this line of argumentation is problematic from a scientific methodological point of view.
So i think we agree that what is consistent with scientific methodology and what are matters of believes need to be separated in argumentation.
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The Tuesday/Monday example being arbitrary is my point, glad you pointed that out. This is the casual way that I "have faith" that there is no God. In my eyes your choice of deity to worship is just as arbitrary, there are thousands of religions. The fact that some of them promise "hell" to "sinners" is not a reason for me to operate as though these things are true. There are just as many if not more spiritual practices that have nothing to do with eternal damnation, why would I operate as if any of these are the reality when they're all claiming to be The One Truth? I'm expected to pick yours just because you said so? That seems silly, and it's also silly to call this thought process "faith" I think.
Regarding the dinosaurs, we have fossil records, and that's a bit different than "God is gonna getcha, better be a good boy, believe me bro," but I do in fact believe that Jesus existed, because we have extensive historical context and documents talking about him. As stated elsewhere this is sufficient to generally consider a person to have existed. Most historians also claim as much, and I'm not a historian so I will defer to the experts. Whether or not he is the Messiah though, and has magic powers as stated in the bible, is a much more ridiculous claim. When you tell me a reality-bending zombie that is his own father exists, the burden of proof for that claim is much higher than "Did this person exist historically?" This is the point that FlyingSquid is making, which I agree with.
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Fact: when science holds an incorrect idea, based on observable evidence - the idea changes to match reality. If there were observable evidence of your imaginary sky guy, scientists would update their idea or theory to match the observable evidence.
Saying that there might be elephants living on top of clouds doesn't make it true. Entertaining the idea without proof is not science or even theory.
Even with perfect faith, elephants still live on terra firma.
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Which is why is said scientific arguments need to be separated from theological arguments.
Saying you believe there is no god is a theological argument based on a believe. It is not scientific.
Saying there is not observable physical proof or disproof of a divine power, which is agnostic, is in compliance with science.
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what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence
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Science is about testable repeatable actions and concepts. Science describes what can be observed.
What can be observed and tested in your claims?
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Where did i say that it should be scientifically proven? I merely reject the idea that it is scientifically disproven or to claim that what has no scientific proof does not exist. This kind of thinking has rejected microorganisms, atoms, gravity and many other nowadays established things. Heck people acknowledge it to be perfectly reasonable to theorize about the existence of dark matter that is unobservable to us and holding the universe together.
It is simply unscientifc to claim to have "facts" against what is written in the scriptures as they describe events from 1400 to 5000 years ago. Not believing in them is perfectly valid, but it needs to be acknowledged as a matter of believe, a matter of faith and is in such in no way more valid than the believe that a scripture is true.
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Things that exist, can be scientifically proven. We have evidence for the presence of dark matter. This is a placeholder for something we don't know what it is yet.
We don't have evidence of gods in any way that can be tested.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" - hitchens razor
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