What do you think Atheist means?

If you are confused this might help http://www.rationalresponders.com/am_i_agnostic_or_atheist

What evidence do you have to support a belief in a deity?

If you have a belief in a god, you're theist.  Are you currently in what you would've called a gray area without a solid belief in a god?  If so, than you are without a positive belief in a god, and are an atheist.  If non-believer sounds better to you because of the stigma you associate with the word atheist, go ahead non-believer.

If you were to believe in a god what god to you most closely lean towards belief in? 

There are literally an infinite number of 'possibilities' once you allow for things that don't have to fit in with the fundamentals of what we currently know about the Universe. There is literally no way to know which, if any of such purely speculative entities does exist, and what their attributes of motives might be.

So all you are saying is you/we don't know everything about reality. D'uh!

Belief in any specific such entity could NOT possibly be based on logic - logic can only tell you what conclusions are or are not consistent with some proposition. Since we have by definition no knowledge of what such a being can or cannot do, we can logically make no conclusion one way or another about it. The only proviso is that possible beings could not have mutually contradictory attributes. 'Infinite' attributes would already stretch the possibilities to breaking point.

Logically, a creator-of-everything is highly problematic if it is anything more than some minimum-energy quantum twitch because you have then to explain the origin/cause of the 'creator'. The only origin scenarios which are coherent involve small 'causes' leading to bigger 'effects', otherwise we have an monstrous endless infinite-regress problem. The infinite sequence of lesser causes leading to greater events allow the whole sequence to be finite in space and time.

Any rationally-based belief would have to be based on evidence of some kind, which could only be interpreted based on currently established 'laws' of science.

The only logical stance is "We don't know" the ultimate origin of the Universe. 'God-creators' raise more questions than they answer, so are fundamentally illogical in the absence of very specific positive evidence.

Actually it is not quite that simple - the totality of matter+energy in a closed system cannot change. Gravitational potential energy is effectively negative, decreasing in magnitude as mutually attracting objects are pulled apart, toward a value of zero at arbitrarlily large distances. Which would be infinity in a flat space-time, large but finite in a positively curved space-time, which is what we seem to inhabit.

This allows the possibility that the notional Big-Bang singularity had zero net mass-energy, but split into a large positive mass+(non-gravitational)energy plus a matching negative value of gravitational energy.

Of course this says nothing about the background from which the BB spawned, and there is much speculation about that...

Nihilism is default. Past that requires positive evidence. Burden of proof is on the claimant.

Are you a nihilist? If not, why?

it seems to me that you believed before , but your curious about what atheist have to offer, or have you been unsure about several areas in chrisitanity and are currently looking for what is the truth ? i am a christian , i believe in jesus christ and i search for ways to prove he is real. so others may be able to look for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

 It seems to me that you are making two fundamental errors in critical thinking, which is roughly described as consistent use of valid logic applied to consistent, reliable evidence.

First, you are turning the Burden of Proof on its head.  When we propose that a thing exists, we do so for only a couple of reasons:

1. There is a phenomenon which we have quantified (or at least identified as genuine) for which there is no causal explanation.

2. There is a prediction which follows from previously established evidence suggesting the existence of a thing.

For the God hypothesis, there's a real problem -- it doesn't match either of these criteria.  The universe does not imply an intelligent creator, so that's out.  There are no phenomena I'm aware of that give validity to the claim that things exist which do not follow the laws of nature.  (How could there be?)  There is no evidence that believers in one deity have quantifiably different experiences than believers in any other deity, or for that matter, non-believers, suggesting that there is no evidence of a god's interaction with the universe in tangible ways regarding humans.  Etc, etc, etc.  I could go on, but everything for which God is suggested as a possible solution, there is not really a problem to be solved.  God literally doesn't fit anywhere in a legitimate scientific hypothesis.

You've alluded to this by saying that God cannot be proven or disproven by science, but you're saying that as if it gives some validity to the claim.  In fact, it makes the claim completely nonsensical.  It is the same as saying science can neither prove nor disprove glarbofarks.  Of course science can't prove or disprove them, since it has absolutely nothing to start proving or disproving!

Please read this article to understand how you're misplacing the burden of proof:

http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/science-vs-religion/

Your second mistake is that you are apparently succumbing to the appeal to popularity.  I know you probably don't think you are, but this is a very subtle machination.  Here's how it works.  Humans are instinctively predisposed to believe repetition.  This is not a hunch -- it's very solid, quantifiable, repeatable science.  The more times you tell a person something, the more likely they are to believe it.  The more people tell a person something repeatedly, the more likely they are to believe it.   The claim itself doesn't even have to be particularly believable.

How this applies to the god hypothesis is simple:  Lots and lots and lots of people believe in God, and more importantly, they believe the god hypothesis addresses a real question.

As I've tried to show you, the God hypothesis doesn't actually address a real question.  God is not a solution to any legitimate problem faced by science, nor is it a solution to any problem faced by man, such as moral ambiguity, meaning and purpose in life, or anything else commonly claimed as being solved by God.

It has not always been so, of course.  Before the discovery of the scientific method and the philosophy of science, God was on relatively equal footing with many other hypotheses because it failed the falsifiability test just as abysmally as every other proposed solution.   Man didn't have the language or understanding to render God as a useless and meaningless concept until very recently in our history.

"God" is really a very clever way of saying "I don't know."  If you take any question whatsoever in which God is supposed to be a reasonable answer, you can substitute the words "I don't know" and it works just fine.  In fact, it works a hell of a lot better, because it illustrates that all this mumbo-jumbo about supernatural, outside the laws of nature, beyond our reality, etc, etc, is just a way of putting fancy language onto a slate completely devoid of actual content.

Yet... you, and many other people, think that the God hypothesis is more plausible than it actually is, or more precisely, that it is different in kind from saying that magic pixie dust fairies secretly rig every lottery in the world so that only trailer trash rednecks win.

The only reasonable explanation I can find is that it's such a popular theory that it gains credibility.  It's been repeated so many times, you want to believe it much more than you want to believe in the celestial teapot, unicorns, or the healing power of colloidal silver.  It's human nature predisposing you favorably towards a hypothesis that is (on paper) as devoid of merit as any other non-scientific one that you reject out of hand.  Yet, it's been asserted as true so often... there has to be something to it... right?

I don't know of any human that has ever murdered, stolen or raped without purpose. Illogical and asinine purposes perhaps, but I'm pretty sure they all had a purpose.

Obviously, it's not the only reason. And, obviously, it's not everybody nor does it necessarily include the people you mentioned. But, it is a significant reason for many people. Time and time again, history and statistics has shown us that people tend to pick up the beliefs of their parents and community. It's easy to make an impression on children, and people follow trends, even unconsciously.

That's a whopper of a misunderstanding.

Hamby's statement was laying out one of the sufficient criteria for claiming an entity's existence. God does not meet this criteria.

And, "for which there is no causal explanation" just means that we don't currently have a causal explanation. Of course, the entity would need some causal explanation. We just wouldn't know what the cause is yet.

Can you name one who committed his crimes solely in the name of atheism? Or under its banner to cloak other reasons?

 Ah sorry, I really didn't mean it as an argument.  It was offered as humorous irony. 

  ( ps, many lines of inquiry in this forum are unfortunately quite repetitive and I get bored easily....pardon the interruption. )

Exactly - that is why making the claim of "atheists have their criminals also" makes no sense when you compare it against the Christians, Muslims, Jews, et al. that commit atrocities in the name of their gods.

The ones that get pulled out (Stalin, Pol Pot) were atheists but atheism was not the sole motivator behind their crimes. It was not even a shield for them.

I don't think there was ever a question as to "Did Mao's lack of a belief in a god propel him to massacre hundreds of thousands?" A lack of a force can never propel an object.

But, like I said, let's focus on the Judeo-Christian god. I'm well aware that the Bible even enumerates on the slaughter of Sodom and Gomorrah, on Jericho, and on many kingdoms where the god-supported kingdom destroyed the un-god-supporting kingdom. But by answering the way you did, you're suggesting that theistic doctrines are the reason behind Christianity's sore spots. I think those classify more as under the category of "veiled under a banner for something else." Yes, the Crusades were a "Holy" war but it's no secret that the popes of that time were corrupt even by humanistic standards, but by saying god wants them to, they could rally support for anything. But that's not god, in actuality, did want them to, rather it's a malevolent human using the veil of god to support a war.

Same as the Inquisition. Yes, the Church at the time was both staunch and fundamentalist, but the Inquisition was just as much about the church's consolidation of power as it was about stamping out heresy. One could argue in either case that the Bible did not support either the Inquisition or the Crusades, in fact it's a very easy argument to make. It's a common tactic I've seen. You point to the past of an organization when the organization went wayward of the very values it preaches. But the blame can't be shifted to the values, but rather to those in control of the organizations.

The origin of the universe? Well, I don't what the process is, but I assume that the universe has an origin.

The universe is here, so that's proof that the universe is here.

Not yet anyways....I think.

I can see that life exists. Therefore, life exists. Carbon 14 decays into nitrogen 14 because we can observe it happening. Therefore, it happens.

I don't know any good arguments for the existence of God.

I know life exists because I can look in the mirror. How do they know "God" exists? 

Well, yeah. I'm pretty sure that the universe exists and life exists and radioactive isotopes decay. Do you doubt those things?

Edit: I'm not saying I can't be wrong. I can be wrong about anything and everything. We could all be in living the Matrix or whatever. But, these things are simply what we have observed and deduced to be true. When's the last time you observed God?  

The difference would be that I know the universe and life exists because the evidence is overwhelming. For God, not so overwhelming i.e. there's pretty much zero evidence. I don't think the term has even been coherently defined yet.

A fact is a fact is a fact.

If P and Q contradict, then it follows that P and Q cannot both be correct. 

When they say their belief in God is subjective, all that means is that they don't have any objective evidence. It's ludicrous how people argue that everyone's beliefs are equally valid; therefore, just live and let live. Belief in a God is not just an aesthetic choice; it's not like deciding on a favorite movie or food. It is not merely a matter of personal taste. It's not like "believing in love" (whatever the heck that means) or "believing in change" (whatever the heck that means). When you say you believe in God, you are, first and foremost, taking the position that this God exists. This is a positive claim that is subject to philosophical debate and scientific scrutiny. 

I'm looking for a rational/logical reason as to why an invisible pink monkey doesn't exist.

Again, you can't prove a negative. You can say anything exists, but the burden of proof is on the person making the claim every time.

Saying otherwise is like saying "You can't DISPROVE that an invisible pink monkey doesn't exist!" somehow assuming that in any way makes it real.

Basically, why are you under the notion that anyone has any obligion to disprove whatever idea of a god you may or may not have, or any other imaginary beings for that matter?

You can claim you believe in anything you want. It doesn't make it true, and if you say no one else can look and everyone just has to trust you...sorry that isn't going to cut it. 

Unless you are starting a religion. But that is just capitalizing on other people's emotions and fears, usually fear of death.

Part of this came into play when I watched that Brian Sapient debate against Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. Kelly said near the end something to the effect of "You accuse us of needing faith to believe our side, but then you use faith also." That's the point though. As far as I can tell from what you've told me, both theism and atheism have to accept there are things they just don't know. Atheists assume the universe and life both have beginnings because they can tangibly interact with both. Yet at the same time they say matter doesn't have a beginning or an end. We can prove matter is there, but the third law of thermodynamics says it has no beginning nor end, it just always exists. Also, isn't it dangerous to assume the origin of the universe or the origin of life are scientific? If you don't know how the processes happened, how can you militantly argue against any of the proposed hypotheses? At this point, the god hypothesis has just as much possibility as a scientific one because it hasn't been proven otherwise.

In terms of what we know of the universe, both theists and atheists, creationists and evolutions, everyone is pretty much on the same page. We know the universe exists because we can see the universe. We know life exists because we can see life. The differences come from what humans don't know. Theists have an answer, as unscientific as it might be. But there's no science on the atheistic side of it either.

The issue you take is term faith, where many atheists believe there is no god, it doesn't require faith, even if we cannot prove how the universe started, it does mean that we have faith in atheism or in science. Not in the same technical sense that theists have faith in their god, which is basically believing in something without any evidence whatsoever. As much as there is a god hypothesis....and I use this in the looses of terms, there is nothing really to prove it, and there is nothing to back up the so call hypothesis, which is why the god hypothesis is not and cannot be used to prove how the world began.

More so what god are you referring to? If it is the christian god, then once we show that some claim of this god is false, the hypothesis goes out the door. The whole adam and eve part, the creation of the universe as per genesis, all that part has been shown false, and therefore that hypothesis is not out. Is there another definition of god you would like to use, a more coherent one?

Creationist, don't have much to stand on because they cannot produce the evidence to back it up. The most honest answer is I don't know, not god did it. As well evolution doesn't say anything on how the universe came to be at all. Evolution however does have a lot of evidence on how humans evolved, which is far more than what creationists have, which is basically god did it....and they have no evidence to back it up.

Ah, the "few bad apples" argument that Rumsfeld used to cover his and his bosses' failures at Abu Ghraib.

If you've read the bible and your posts indicate you have, then you should be seeing the problems with your idea. Sodom and Gomorrah and the flood (if you believe the stories) were not just a few bad people doing things. It was Yahweh himself committing those atrocities. Then, after he gives commands to his worshipers to not do the things he does so well, he continues and commands them to commit his crimes also.

It is appropriate that one of the Christian symbols is a fish because it stinks from the head down.

Not at all.  I hope you don't take this personally, because I mean it to be helpful, but I think a couple of basic classes or books on critical thinking and/or reading comprehension would be a good idea for you.  I suspect that part of your problem understanding things right now comes from you hearing or reading something quite different from what the writer or speaker said.

Go back and re-read what I wrote, please.  I said that throughout history, people didn't have the philosophical or scientific means to render the god hypothesis useless.  I said that NOW, you and a lot of other people give it more credence than you ought, and that I suspect it's because of the popularity and historical significance of the idea, not because of any inherent merit contained in the hypothesis.

A common error in critical thinking is called "All or Nothing Thinking."  It can work in a few ways.  The way you're employing it now is in assuming (for no apparent reason) that by pointing out one reason to believe in god, or want to believe in god, I am demanding that all belief in god rests solely on that foundation.  That's absurd.

I would suggest that a more probable explanation is that many very intelligent people succumb to god belief for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the popular appeal and historical ubiquity of the idea.

Wow, dude.  You're going off the deep end with pretty much everything I've said.  I'm guessing you didn't read that article I linked.  Please read it. 

I'm afraid that if you think science is restricted to a laboratory, you're sadly and grossly misinformed about the nature of science -- which is one way I know you haven't read (or comprehended) my article on science.  Determination is a description of a set of emotions.  Emotions are descriptions of psychological states.  Psychological states are descriptions of neurological states.  Neurological states are descriptions of electrochemical states.  Etc, etc.  If you're not in the field of "brain science," I'm afraid you're probably not well versed in the methods for quantifying and describing things like emotions and behaviors, but such methods do exist, and they're consistent with the scientific method.

Not at all.  I have no difficulty demonstrating the existence of determination.  This post ought to be proof enough.

Well, there's where you're just dead wrong.  Sorry.  First, you need to get off the "atheist" kick.  I, and many (most?) other science-minded atheists are naturalists first, and the atheism is something of a side-effect, not a foundation.

Second, naturalists most certainly do NOT accept that certain things exist without causal explanations.  (Please don't invoke QM here.)  I really don't know how else to explain this.  You seem to believe you're onto something here, and I suppose you're not going to take my word that you're wrong, but you're wrong.  I really wish you'd read that article on science.

Modern physics says the universe can come about ex nihilo (out of nothing). We know from quantum mechanics particles pop in and out of existence out of nothing. They borrow energy from the void of space and then give it back when the particle annihilates with its anti-particle. Each particle is associated with some sort of field (photon with electromagnetic, etc.)

Inflation theory holds that a quantum fluctuation of the Inflaton and Higgs field(s), which created our universe. This fluctuation caused a rapid expansion of the universe. The excess energy from both fields led to the particles we see today (via e=mc^2)

The Cyclic Model of the universe holds that we live on a 3-dimensional brane in a higher, five-dimensional universe (4-spatial plus 1-time). Our brane is in an infinite series of 'bangs' and 'crunches' with another brane that happens every trillion years or so.

A singularity is where our physics breaks down and our equations spit out infinities. Singularities are a consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity. To understand these more thoroughly, we need a theory of quantum gravity, due to the fact that the densities are high, and the size is small.

Source(s):
"The Inflationary Universe" by Alan Guth
"Endless Universe" by Paul Steinhardt & Neil Turok

I don't know about you, but I don't "militantly argue against any of the proposed hypotheses". I LIKE it when new hypotheses are proposed. It helps us better understand the world when breakthroughs are discovered.

However, if people are just making things up with no evidence, then it isn't really beneficial to anyone now is it? If someone said "Here is tangible evidence this is how our universe was created" I would look at the evidence, and if it was compelling I would nod and think, "Great! One step closer to understanding how things work." while other people studying this look over it and agree, then it becomes a new basis for scientific studies allowing deeper understanding of our surroundings.

Basically, science looks to understand the world around us through discovery. Religion looks to make excuses and explanations, without discovery.

If you want to provide an alternative theory, feel free. But keep in mind there needs to be support for that theory in the first place. Not "someone told me so."

Time after time through history things given credit to a god or spirits have been proven natural by science. The supernatural world continues to shrink the more we understand.

The burden of proof is not on us atheists to disprove god's existence; it is on those who believe he DOES exist. Atheism is a lack of belief in a god. It CAN mean denial of a god, but not necessarily. Either you believe or you don't. Period. It's that simple. If you don't believe there is a god, then you are an atheist already. And to me, it seems you don't.

I've been absent from the forums for a long time, and now probably isn't the time to jump back in. I have too much on my plate already. But, what the heck? You only live once, right?

What strikes me about this forum topic is that the OP asks for a logical reason to believe in atheism. 46 posts later, no one has offered one. Is that because there is no logical reason to believe in atheism? Is that because atheism is an emotional response disguised as an intellectual one?

Because 'believe in Atheism' doesn't make sense.

'Prove there is no God' would be a better way to phrase the sort of demand which is meant.

But that is not a valid request, even without using the 'burden of proof' argument, because the concept of God typically includes supposed attributes which would allow the Theist to argue away any supposed anomaly we might point out as 'proof' of the non-existence of God.

The proposition that God exists also has things in common with the 'cosmic teapot' described by Bertrand Russell - it is proposing the existence of something currently beyond our power to disprove. 

There are literally an infinite number of entities one might imagine that could similarly be beyond our ability to empirically 'disprove' - it would be utterly absurd to insist that we must assume that everything that we cannot prove does not exist, may actually exist.

So until someone can produce some very strong evidence for the existence of such an entity with something close to the attributes that the various faiths assume it possesses, the only logically coherent position is to assume it probably does not exist.

The emotional belief is Theism - it has no really rational or logical justification. If such a being actually existed there is no way one could know anything with certainty about its nature or motives, so even if a God being exists, there would still be no way to justify any specific religious doctrine.