I agree with RAZD, if there's no evidence, we should be agnostic since we can't know. I think we can also, rationally, be atheistic, meaning, despite recognizing we can't absolutely know whether a god/s exist or not, we also don't believe they exist.
It's more than that. Basic consistency requires us to admit that "We don't know" concerning the existence of
all unevidenced entities.
I consider myself an atheist because I am forced to consider the existence of god(s) as exactly as likely as the existence of an invisible dragon, ectoplasmic ghosts, an immaterial unicorn, an intangible troll, a hidden goblin, an elusive fairy, a secret ninja turnip, and every other unfalsifiable, unevidenced proposition.
The pure "I don't know" agnostic must continually acknowledge the possibility of these and an infinite number of other conceivable entities...an infinite number of which are also mutually exclusive.
Thus means that, given the evidence at hand, at best we can say that god(s) are one possibility among an infinite number of mutually exclusive possibilities. Quite literally, that means that the probability of god(s) existing given no evidence at all is 1:infinity.
That's a pretty low probability, though it's still a possibility.
The rational response is that we
don't know, we
can't. It is also rational to
not include such asserted entities into one's worldview, while it is
irrational to do so.
Atheism is simply the rational realization that god(s) must be placed in the same category as Santa Claus, ghosts, an flying spaghetti monsters. We may not know or have any way of ever knowing whether any of them exist or not, but there's absolutely no reason to think that they do, and the proposition doesn't seem very likely at all.
This is all assuming an absolute evidential vacuum.
But as we've demonstrated before (whether RAZD acknowledges it or not), we don't live in a vacuum of evidence. We know from past experience that people do tend to manufacture god concepts to fill in gaps in knowledge, to obtain community influence and power, or simply out of self delusion. And while RAZD is correct to point out that "some is not all," his supporters (I'm looking at you, CS) routinely claim that the near-universality of belief in the supernatural (even if the specific concepts themselves bear absolutely no relation to each other and are frequently mutually exclusive) is evidence that the supernatural actually exists despite a lack of anything objective (a blatant appeal to popularity and tradition
And as Onifre has pointed out, when dealing with an entity whose properties include "unknowable," a contradiction is inherent in claiming to "know" that such an entity exists. If something is unknowable, what could you possibly know that would cause you to believe it exists? Logical consistency requires that any such concept must come from one's own mind - in other words, it's completely made up.
We've gone over the reasons that people believe in things without evidence in other threads. Our brains are not rational tools left to themselves. There's a reason not just anyone can be a scientist, and why scientists must force themselves to rigorously follow the standards of the scientific method in order to ensure accurate results. We consider things that impact us emotionally (things we want badly, things that terrify us, things that cause us to feel empathy, etc) to be far more likely than a rational examination of facts justifies. Quite literally, we subconsciously "feel" that winning the lottery is more likely than it really is, simply because we;d really like to win the lottery. We're absolutely terrified of terrorism while we barely consider driving on the freeway, even though you're orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack.
Quite simply, god concepts are not rational in any way, shape, or form - and neither is any other belief concerning objective reality that is not based on repeatable, independently verifiable, falsifiable objective evidence.
In an absence of evidence, the null hypothesis is maintained.
Occam's Razor requires that we prefer mundane explanations over those that introduce an extraneous entity - meaning before we say "maybe" (and long, long before we say "I think so") we should see if there is a better, naturalistic explanation.
RAZD's "skepticism" isn't skepticism at all - which is exactly what should be expected from someone who maintains confidence that there exists something that by his own definition he cannot know about, and does not (and cannot) have any evidence to support.
When someone asks you, "do you believe in invisible toilet trolls," what is the rational response? Yes? No? I don't know?
How about the Immaterial Pink Unicorn?
What about garden fairies?
The Force?
Quetzalcoatl?
Thor?
Yahweh?
The rational answer, of course, is "no." This is not a claim that all of these things do not exist. It's a simple statement that the positive belief that tehy
do exist is not held.
And what about the "unknowable, indescribable something?"
If
you don't know what it is, then I certainly don't know what you're talking about, and so I cannot believe in the existence of something I cannot even describe in discrete terms. You may as well ask whether I believe in Granflom, without defining what Granflom is.
This thread was never about "pseudoskepticism." It was about RAZD trying to turn the argument around, using a strawman of atheism (since no actual negative hypothesis is implied except with a "7" on the Dawkins scale, absolute certainty, which even Dawkins does not count himself as), and a shift in teh burden of proof to construct a massive tu quoque argument.
RAZD is using the same, tired old Creationist nonsense approach that, since we cannot show that god(s) do
not exist, we're being irrational, too.
But that's not what we're saying.
We're saying that naturalistic explanations that do not assert an extraneous, unevidenced entity must be preferred over bare speculation.
We're saying that the null hypothesis is maintained because there is no evidence suggesting god(s) exist.
We're saying that we consider god(s) to be no more or less likely to exist than any of the other infinitely conceivable entities, an infinite number of which are mutually exclusive.
We're
skeptical. And this thread makes me question whether RAZD even understands what that word means.
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