Why Atheists don't believe

In this particular case my lack of belief has an evidentiary basis. Not that I have evidence that the divine doesn't exist. In the first place, I'm not sure you can "prove" a negative. In the second, I'm not the one making the positive claim: "God/gods" exist. I am not the one required to produce evidence in support (or refutation, for that matter) of the claim. My position is, "Where's the beef?"Since we started drawing on cave walls, literally millions if not billions of human beings have proclaimed the existence of some kind of unreferenced divine. Not one, ever, to my knowledge has ever provided any kind of unambiguous evidence in support. So, if people have been trying to find evidence (presumably) for 40,000 years or so, and haven't been able to produce any, I see no reason to take their claims seriously.A second aspect to this is the fact that there is literally a bewildering array of mutually contradictory claims and relgions and conceptions of the divine. While I concede the possibility that one of them is correct, which one would that be? This is related back to the lack of evidence in favor of one or the other - or any, for that matter. Unfortunately, there is simply insufficient time to evaluate every claim that comes along. I'm sure I have a fair collection of (irrational) beliefs, urban legends accepted as fact, reliance on authority, and every other kind of fallacy. If the claim doesn't contradict something I have already investigated, or doesn't impact my life in any way, then I generally "go with the flow". On the other hand, whenever someone piques my curiosity, or makes a claim that contradicts something else I've looked at, I dig deeper - into both. Then I think I can make the claim that I go with the evidence.Two simple examples spring to mind:1. For a very long time I completely bought into the claim that massive doses of Vitamin C could prevent colds. I don't remember what prompted me to look at the issue in more (scientific) depth, but I blame it on one of those long, beer-soaked bull sessions I used to have with some of my colleagues. Once I got interested in the issue to dig into the scientific literature on the subject and found that it was bogus, I dropped the idea.2. When I was a kid, I remember reading and becoming fascinated by Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods. Since I was an avid scifi buff at the time, I remember buying it whole cloth. Unfortunately for Von Daniken, even a cursory investigation (which I undertook because I was curious to know more - i.e., looking for support for the idea, not a refutation), showed that the entire edifice was utter boloney. Ahh, loss of innocence...I'm not sure my current crop of irrationalities really constitutes "belief". I like to think of it more as "provisional acceptance". Since I've seen myself drop ideas when they were falsified, I'm not sure that this constitutes belief per se.Hope that answers your questions from the point of view of this atheist.Edited to add: Rat, you need to fix the spelling on the title and in your posts. Atheist (as in non theist) is how it's spelled. Athiest sounds like it belongs in a sentence like, "I'm waaay athier than you are. I'm the athiest." Sorry, just a pet peeve.This message has been edited by Quetzal, 05-11-2006 11:22 AM

Absolutely. Unless for some reason the person testifying to something like this is a pathological liar (which you have given no reason to "believe" is the case with you personally), no one should doubt that you experienced something. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don't think this type of experience is "delusional", etc. I have heard enough testimonies to fully understand that the experience is "real" from the standpoint of the person experiencing it. However, and here's the rub, it is invariably an entirely subjective, internal event. An event, moreover, that is interpreted through your particular cultural idiom. A third person observing this moment (or moments) would not have witnessed anything at all. In other words, the conversion event had no extrinsic, external reality for anyone other than you. Doesn't imply it didn't occur - for you - only that such an experience can't be used for evidence of an external reality. One thing that I feel bolsters this argument is the fact that, whereas most testimonies I've heard/read have similarities, no two testimonies are identical in the details. Moreover, the similarities appear to be traceable to cultural context. Moslems don't appear to have the same conversion experiences as Christians (from my admitted very limited sampling).To bring this back to the topic of the OP, I think in many ways it comes down to how we individually evaluate truth claims. At least as it relates to the supernatural/divine, as is apparent from the responses you've received on this thread (again, assuming everyone is being reasonably honest). Atheists appear to have a higher standard of required evidence on this particular topic. In my opinion, this standard derives from where we set the bar. As an example, I would argue that there are two basic types of claim: big "C" and little "c". The evidence for the former must needs be more compelling than evidence for the latter. Permit me to give an example to illustrate my point:Suppose I were to say to you, "Hi. My name's Quetzal. I live at the equator. Today the temperature is hot, but we're experiencing torrential rain." Most of us would prbably take this at face value (unless there was some reason to doubt Q's veracity). We would likely accept the claim, in spite of the fact that there are actually three truth claims in the statement: name, location, current weather. Obviously, if we desired, we could test all or some of them (check the IP for location, or global weather charts for that aspect, etc). Most of us wouldn't bother. We're willing to take the claim "on faith". It is a small "c" claim, and the standard of evidence required to accept it is low (all other things being equal).On the other hand, suppose I said, "Hi. My name's Quetzal. Last night an alien spacecraft landed in my back yard. The aliens kidnapped me, took me in the blink of an eye to Phobos, performed bizarre medical experiments on me which I don't really remember very well, and then returned me to my bed where I woke up. Oh, and they spray-painted my dog purple." I think most of us from either side of the EvC fence would take an a priori skeptical view of this account. We would be quite justified in asking for additional corroborative evidence to support the claim before we accepted it. This is a big "C" claim: something so totally beyond our own experience, or for that matter beyond what has been empirically verified in other cases (or has even been disconfirmed), that we can reasonably conclude (in the absence of the supporting evidence), that the claim is questionable. Not, I hasten to add, that it is necessarily either false, or that the individual didn't experience something. However, most of us would evaluate the claim as being unlikely in the absence of confirming evidence. And I think the evidence presented would need to be pretty damn compelling.Let me bring out another aspect of this evaluation process, which all of us use more or less rigorously on a daily basis. Suppose I add to the end of the first (little "c") claim the following: "I hate rain. It makes me sad and miserable." How do we empirically evaluate this statement? The three critical elements of the statement - "hate", "sad", "miserable" - are utterly subjective, ambiguous, and internal to the individual. How can a third party possibly know exactly what the person means by "sad", for instance? We can (and do) make a generalization from what we mean by the term, but that doesn't necessarily correlate to what the person speaking means by it. We simply cannot objectively evaluate the internal emotional claim made. It's not possible. Therefore, claims about internal, subjective experience are neither big "C" nor little "c" claims. They are, by definition, invulnerable.Bringing this back around to the question which you asked: Yes, I completely believe you experienced what you testified to. I have no reason to doubt you. In any case, it is an invulnerable claim that would be impossible to evaluate one way or the other. On the other hand, I feel I am justified in questioning the conclusion you reached based on that experience. You are, in fact, making a big "C" claim when you attribute the experience to a deity - the claim being related to the existence of such an entity. If there is any commonality among atheists, it probably boils down to that one claim. A claim we evaluate as being highly unlikely in the absence of any confirmatory evidence.

Once again we're looking at subjective experience. Each of the people are experiencing something, clearly. However, there are other explanations for the phenomena that don't require a Big "C" claim. There's a fair amount of literature on the subject of contagion, for instance. You might find the article Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness interesting in this context. It discusses the historical record of this type of phenomenon in a large-scale sociological context. Crowd psychology effects, especially in the charismatic and Pentacostalist churches, is also well documented as part of the religious experience that you describe.However, my point is that there is no way to objectively evaluate the experiences the individuals you mention. The conclusion that the Spirit filled them is based on a Big "C" claim that is simply not evidenced. That they had an experience is beyond doubt. What that experience actually derived from is problematic. I think this is a very cogent point. Individual subjective experience IS going to be different because each individual perceives the experience differently (THAT was awkward). It lends credence to my argument that people are not experiencing an extrinsic phenomenon, although there are other possible explanations. Indeed. I can quite believe that your conversion experience made a profound change in your life. That is often the case - in both directions. However, that doesn't substantiate the claim that there was an extrinsic reason for the experience, now does it? I guess I come down on the side of "never". On the other hand, given a large enough sample, we can come up with a statistics that would allow us to predict a distribution of responses around a mean. In other words, we can develop a model that allows us to state in general terms what a particular "feeling" might mean. However, it can never be more than a generalization - not objective reality. I think you're conflating objective with subjective. What you've described, your understanding of "love", for instance, will never be more than subjective. You said it yourself: "I know what I feel". I would argue that no one else can know it, however, except in their own subjective understanding of what it feels to them. Well, as a friend once told me: 2+2 can equal 5, for sufficiently large values of 2. In other words, the concepts of "2", "4", and "5", are conventions. They represent identities which we all agree on. They are not "Truth", as you and I usually use the term, and as you use it here. They don't depend on feelings at all. We would find it weird if someone insisted that 2+2=5, because they only way that would be "true" is if we redefined 2, as my friend did. Redefining your terms to make a statement true when in reality it is false is rather poor approach.As to the rest of your post, I want to thank you for sharing your experience with me. And the beer was pretty good, too.

Thank you.