re americans and evolution in article ba c ac i dbstu rz tu bs de i dbstu rz tu bs de benedikt rosenau writes in article pq tinn lp senator bedfellow mit edu bobs thnext mit edu robert singleton writes deletion i will argue that your latter statement i believe that no gods exist does rest upon faith that is if you are making a positive statement that no gods exist strong atheism rather than merely saying i don t know and therefore don t believe in them and don t not believe in then weak atheism once again to not believe in god is different than saying i believe that god does not exist i still maintain the position even after reading the faqs that strong atheism requires faith no it in the way it is usually used in my view you are saying here that driving a car requires faith that the car drives i m not saying this at all it requires no faith on my part to say the car drives because i ve seen it drive i ve done more than at in fact i ve actually driven it now what does require some faith is the belief that my senses give an accurate representation of what s out there but there is no evidence pro or con for the existence or non existence of god see what i have to say below on this for me it is a conclusion and i have no more faith in it than i have in the premises and the argument used sorry if i remain skeptical i don t believe it s entirely a conclusion that you have seen no evidence that there is a god is correct neither have i but lack of evidence for the existence of something is in no way evidence for the non existence of something the creationist have a similar mode of argumentation in which if they disprove evolution the establish creation you personally have never seen a neutrino before but they exist the pink unicorn analogy breaks down and is rather naive i have a scientific theory that explains the appearance of animal life evolution when i draw the conclusion that pink unicorns don t exist because i haven t seen them this conclusion has it s foundation in observation and theory a pink unicorn if it did exist would be qualitatively similar to other known entities that is to say since there is good evidence that all life on earth has evolved from more primitive ancestors these pink unicorns would share a common anscestory with horses and zebras and such god however has no such correspondence with anything imo there is no physical frame work of observation to draw any conclusions from but first let me say the following we might have a language problem here in regards to faith and existence i as a christian maintain that god does not exist to exist means to have being in space and time god does not have being god is being kierkegaard once said that god does not exist he is eternal with this said i feel it s rather pointless to debate the so called existence of god and that is not what i m doing here i believe that god is the source and ground of being when you say that god does not exist i also accept this statement but we obviously mean two different things by it however in what follows i will use the phrase the existence of god in it s usual sense and this is the sense that i think you are using it i would like a clarification upon what you mean by the existence of god no that s a word game i disagree with you profoundly on this i haven t defined god as existence in fact i haven t defined god but this might be getting off the subject although if you think it s relevant we can come back to it further saying god is existence is either a waste of time existence is already used and there is no need to replace it by god or you are implying more with it in which case your definition and your argument so far are incomplete making it a fallacy you are using wrong categories here or perhaps you misunderstand what i m saying i m making no argument what so ever and offering no definition so there is no fallacy i m not trying to convince you of anything i believe and that rests upon faith and it is inappropriate to apply the category of logic in this realm unless someone tells you that they can logically prove god or that they have evidence or then the use of logic to disprove their claims if fine and necessary btw an incomplete argument is not a fallacy some things are not even wrong deletion one can never prove that god does or does not exist when you say that you believe god does not exist and that this is an opinion based upon observation i will have to ask what observtions are you refering to there are no observations pro or con that are valid here in establishing a positive belief deletion where does that follow aren t observations based on the assumption that something exists i don t follow you here certainly one can make observations of things that they didn t know existed i still maintain that one cannot use observation to infer that god does not exist such a positive assertion requires a leap and wouldn t you say there is a level of definition that the assumption god is is meaningful if not i would reject that concept anyway so where is your evidence for that god is is meaningful at some level once again you seem to completely misunderstand me i have no evidence that god is is meaningful at any level maybe such a response as you gave just comes naturally to you because so many people try to run their own private conception of god down your throat i however am not doing this i am arguing one and only one thing that to make a positive assertion about something for which there can in principle be no evidence for or against requires a leap it requires faith i am as you would say a theist however there is a form of atheism that i can respect but it must be founded upon honesty benedikt bob singleton bobs thnext mit edu
