re: #11 StephenMeansMe

Only if the atheist wants to sound like an asshat. ^_^ “No deities exist” is a >huge claim, probably unprovable.

Yeah, I probably should’ve been more accurate and said something along the lines of, “Atheism … invariably cites the lack of scientific evidence to support the existence of a deity.”

I stay away from the “atheists can’t prove God doesn’t exist” because it’ll just turn into an argument about burden of proof, Russell’s teapot, Occam’s razor, etc.

I can’t prove the existence of God. I don’t need to—it’s belief. By the same token, atheists cannot prove that the world would be better off without belief in a deity—they can assert it, they can infer it based on deductive reasoning, they can believe it, but AFAIK they cannot provide empirical evidence for it.

This is doubly true if, as someone said up-thread, there is scientific evidence that belief in a deity is a byproduct of the evolutionary process—that would mean we ‘re biologically hard-wired for it, therefore there’s no time in history we can point to and say categorically, “There was no deity belief in society X in the year X, and they were clearly much better off for it.”

So I’m back to where I started: No amount of believing on my part is going to make atheism go away, just as no amount of rational argument on atheists’ part is going to make religious belief go away—at least not in the lifetime of anyone reading this blog right now—so we need to learn to coexist peacefully.