If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?

  • @ritswd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That is the view of the atheist faith (that all that is currently known by science is enough to know), but the replier is agnostic, in which we don’t know what we don’t know.

    • Rikudou_Sage
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      41 year ago

      Atheist faith doesn’t exist, atheism is absence of faith. Atheists are more into facts and less into belief. If you have to believe in something for it to become true, it’s nonsense.

      • @ritswd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I know that it’s a common belief in atheists that it’s not a faith. But if you take a step back, it’s hard to deny that there is some belief in the sentence: “if science has neither evidence of something nor of its absence, it doesn’t exist”.

        The opposite of that is: “if science has neither evidence of something not of its absence, then science doesn’t know yet, and until then, neither can we”.

        It’s fine to believe in things. I’d say it’s not great though, to think so highly of one’s own belief that one wouldn’t want to call if a belief.

        • Rikudou_Sage
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          11 year ago

          And it’s common belief of theists that everyone has to believe in something. I don’t believe in anything. I believe people, like the scientists that discover stuff, but that’s believing someone, not in something. Pretending it’s the same is ridiculous.

          • @ritswd@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I don’t know if that’s what you were implying, but I’m not at all a theist. And as a scientist, I can remind you that the scientific method is to keep researching topics that are inconclusive. To conclude something as non-existent because the research is inconclusive is not the scientific method.

            What you are doing is listening to the science indeed, and drawing faith-based conclusions that something doesn’t exist because it wasn’t proven to exist. Which is fine, a lot of people do that to base all kinds of faiths, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that you’re not.

            • Rikudou_Sage
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              11 year ago

              It’s not inconclusive, it’s improvable which basically means “why even bother?”

              • @ritswd@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I don’t disagree with “why even bother”. But again following the scientific method, it wasn’t proven to be improvable. Scientifically speaking, we just don’t know.

                I realize it’s not a very comforting thought, though. And I don’t mind people who believe otherwise.

                • Rikudou_Sage
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                  11 year ago

                  it wasn’t proven to be improvable

                  If it’s something invisible with no physical manifestation (as the soul is thought to be by the believers), it’s quite literally improvable.

      • God
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        1 year ago

        atheist faith describes people who BELIEVE that god does not exist

        besides the fact that I do exist…

        if there is no evidence that god doesn’t exist, or that god does exist, then yes, there is no reason to believe god exists, but apart from the absurd and extremely vast absence of evidence that would point towards proving even the slimmest of traces of existence, that is also an epistemological challenge in that our perception is extremely limited and we don’t know, as ritswd said, what we don’t know.

        so we have a lot of evidence, but there exists an extremely small and remote possibility that our theories are wrong, just because we’re dumbfucks with very smol brains & tiny eyes that can only see 3 dimensions

        so saying with 100% certainty that god does not exist is a dogmatic belief in our conclusions.

        • Rikudou_Sage
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          1 year ago

          No, it’s a logical conclusion. God isn’t needed for the existence of the universe and thus doesn’t exist. Sure, there’s minuscule chance that’s wrong and if it ever happens I’ll be among the first who’ll say I was wrong. Until then, science says God doesn’t exist.

          • God
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            1 year ago

            You’re right. Just a note

            there’s minuscule chance that’s wrong

            This is the scientific perspective. All signs point to no. But as always, we might have missed something. I think this is the agnostic perspective, even the “agnostic atheist” perspective. I think, and I might be wrong, that the pure “atheist” perspective is that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no God.

            But if there’s a tiny retarded chance that for some reason there is something as absurd as a god… lol.

            …then that’d be me of course

        • @OceanSoap@lemmy.ml
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          21 year ago

          To be clear, it’s highly likely that what we consider to be a “god” or a “satan” (as well as physical places we cannot see/reach where these two reside) isn’t real, based on evidence that we’ve come upon today scientifically, but that also doesn’t mean there isn’t some form of a higher being that we are unable to recognize as such because of our limited abilities that you’ve explained above.

    • @CeruleanRuin
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      1 year ago

      Atheism doesn’t mean belief in nothing. It means a lack of belief. They don’t have “faith in science”. They simply have no need for faith. And they certainly don’t believe that everything that is currently known is all we will ever know, only that there’s no point in basing your life on things you can’t know.

      Agnostics are willing to speculate or hedge their bets, whereas atheists prefer to assume the obvious: that there probably is nothing higher guiding our lives, we’re on our own and should not deceive ourselves otherwise.

      • @ritswd@lemmy.world
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        41 year ago

        It’s a common misconception, but agnosticism is the one that is the lack of belief, and applying the scientific method to one’s belief system. It’s the “we don’t know what we don’t know” approach, which defines the scientific method.

        there’s no point in basing your life on things you can’t know

        I certainly don’t disagree.