this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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My problem with atheism (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by platypus_plumba@lemmy.world to c/atheism@lemmy.world
151 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Russell’s Teapot.

[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago

Also, the dragon in my garage.

[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, Schrodinger's was also a logical paradox that contradicted superposition. Too bad reality is more complex than human logic. "well I've never seen a cat being dead and alive at the same time, I guess superposition is just false because there's no evidence".

The fact you're pointing Russell's Teapot shows exactly what I mean with this post. You're using a simple logical thought experiment to derive a most likely conclusion about the nature of the universe, when in reality you have basically null knowledge of what is actually going on with reality. This is exactly my disagreement with atheism.

[–] bane_killgrind 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But reality isn't more complex than human logic... There are solid mathematical proofs that superposition is valid. Superposition is also falsifiable.

[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, we discovered that AFTER the thought experiment. That was possible through knowledge and experimentation. Two things we don't have about the origin of the universe... We have a lot of theories though.

[–] bane_killgrind 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You should know that theories like superposition are articulated after they find math implying the behaviour.

[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

OK, so if maths were so clear about it, why very smart people who think logically didn't think it was the case?

Could it be because maths have said many times in the past "Hey, this could be possible"... Only to find out that, yes, it is possible in maths but not in reality.

https://youtu.be/6akmv1bsz1M?feature=shared

And yeah, we don't have the tools right now to fully unrestand the origin of the universe, so we can't know how to make falsifiable theories around it. For example, Dark Matter is non-falsifiable because we don't have enough knowledge about it.

We observe certain behavior in the universe, we call the cause Dark Matter even if we don't fully understand how to prove or disprove it. We observe the existence of reality and we assume there is a creator even if we don't fully understand how to prove or disprove it. We can observe reality, thus, theorizing about the existence of a creator isn't absurd.

[–] bane_killgrind 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Dark matter is theoretically falsifiable. The god concept is not.

[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If it is falsifiable or not depends on how you define it.

It could be defined in many falsifiable ways, give it a try, pretty sure you can find many.

My point about Dark Matter is that it isn't something we will likely have the means to falsify soon given the nature of the problem. It is also a pretty weak theory that contradicts many of the facts that we already know about the universe. So I could also create a very weak falsifiable argument about the existence of a creator and then call it a day.

"The creator was physically present in the origin of spacetime". In theory, if we could look back in time, we could verify this. There are plenty techniques that allow us to "look" back, we may just need to discover a better one.

"God is physical and exists in the universe"

Making something falsifiable isn't a problem.

You're saying the concept of a god used by traditional religions isn't falsifiable, which is right. But there's no reason to limit the idea of a god to those traditional definitions.

[–] bane_killgrind 1 points 2 months ago

It could be defined in many falsifiable ways, give it a try, pretty sure you can find many.

That's not up to me, that's up to you

An extremely powerful alien or higher dimensional being isn't a god. An entity could be lots of things, but gods are not those things and if people decide to worship higher dimensional beings as gods, that doesn't make the current god concept valid.

If you want to say everything is true if we retcon it, you are being dishonest in addition to willfully ignorant.