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

  • @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.