/atheism/ - Atheism

>Kant

> Real truth is unknowable because to know it a person would have to relate to reality directly without depending upon his conceptual mechanism.

There's always a certain margin of error when discussing the real world. Even within science there's always the chance that something is incorrect.

However because some claims about the universe are able to demonstrated and even applied to things such as gravity, medicine, etc, it is for the sake of simplicity safe to assume those things are true.

>If reality is ultimately unknowable than the proposition that God exists is just as valid as the proposition that God does not exist because both are propositions about the nature of reality beyond our sense impressions

Whether or not a position is valid or not based on that criteria doesn't lend any actual credence to its existence. If God is unable to be proven by scientific means, (something that has time and time again 'proven' things and even the existence of things it would be impossible for humans to know about using our senses alone), then there's no good reason to believe that one exists at all.

Not believing the positive claim that there is a God is what most atheists fall under, not necessarily saying that for a fact there is no God.

In short, Kant's argument does nothing against most atheist's positions and after all is said and done, theists are left with the same problems they started with before.

Once again it seems it has to be said. There's a God? Prove it.

>>10151

This. There is no god, do what thou wilt.

Philosophy 101:

You can't know shit. That's my made up bullshit is legit as any scientific findings.

>>10166

This. Only pseudointellectuals use this line of thinking.

>>10148

>Real truth is unknowable because to know it a person would have to relate to reality directly without depending upon his conceptual mechanism.

This here is where the argument falls apart, it assumes the conceptual mechanism cannot produce an explanation that coincides very well with reality.

>>10166

Socrates really was a tit sometimes.

>>10176

Christians love the Socrates defense. "How can you be sure evolution is true, or my savior didn't do all the miracles the childrens' bible stories book said he did? As long as there's a slight possibility, there's room for all kinds of miracles!"

>>10185

You can always make the "we could live in some kind of matrix" argument. The real

world could have different rules. I think it doesn't make much sense to talk about unprovable things.

>>10188

Socrates was obsessed with questioning because he thought (correctly) that people of his time were operating on assumptions. If you were to tell Socrates that we can't know anything therefore every statement can be correct he would not be very impressed.

>>10148

Congradulations, OP. You've officially discovered what most of /atheism/ has known about since childhood. Most of us have long since pondered these "problems" and come to our own conclusions.

>>10148

When ever Christian say something along the lines of God is a scientific/empirical question there pretty much saying God will never manifest in any way that is detectable to our senses, so basically non existent. Well except after our deaths of course.

>If reality is ultimately unknowable than the proposition that God exists is just as valid as the proposition that God does not exist because both are propositions about the nature of reality beyond our sense impressions

>we don't know X

>which means that the veracity of X is equal to its falsity

>which means that X is 100% true

Nothing about this makes any sense whatsoever

> Reality is ultimately unknowable

Fuck off. I'm a human being, sat at a computer, reading the bullshit you have to say. That I can say with absolute certainty. I live in the real world, I see real things, I know real things, and I have no patience for idiots who want to suggest they live in a world of pure imagination.

> You can't prove got is real, you can't prove god isn't real

Okay, so let's just drop the subject entirely. There's no point in talking to someone who refuses evidence right from the outset.

> reality is ultimately unknowable.

I should have stopped reading right there.

Basically this faggot's argument boils down to, "You can't know what's real, so god is real!"

>>10148

>1. reality is ultimately unknowable…

yeah, yeah. Strictly speaking there's no such thing as absolute truth, AFAIK. This is the fundamental question of epistemology.

> If reality is ultimately unknowable than the proposition that God exists is just as valid as the proposition that God does not exist

Not exactly. I see 2 big problems with your reasoning:

Number one is that even though we don't know about absolute truths, we actually have very good chances of approaching reality objectively, with science and formal logic. We know that some claims are much more easier to disprove and out of touch with reality that others. Technically we can't be certain that science and math are ultimately true, but they do fucking make wonders and are clearly way, way beyond any other kind of claims, including religious ones.

The other problem deals with the slippery slope about agnosticism and atheism. Atheism is NOT defined as the proposition that gods don't exist (did you notice that your OP automatically assumed one god?). The only characteristic that all atheists share is their LACK or REJECTION of belief in the existence of gods, which doesn't imply that they claim that the existence of gods is false, only that there are no valid justifications to believe that it is true.

>Claims about the existence of God are different from scientific claims

I have to disagree. God is an ill-defined concept, and this ambiguity is on of the reasons that makes it popular. Different people, even from the same religion, make it fit to their definitions.

A non-deist god, which is a god that interacts with our reality is on principle subject to science. This is the kind of deity that most people believe in.

Things about a deist god which doesn't interact with us in any way could still be inferred from the alleged creation of the universe.

If you want to go full dishonest with unfounded assertions and try to protect your god idea with the claim that it is not subject to the way nature works and lies outside space and time, whatever that means, then to my intellectual pleasure you are proposing a self-defeating claim for which I have even more reasons to disbelieve. If dualism or any other non-monism is the correct metaphysical view, then by definition that means that our reality and the others are totally disconnected. What happens in some other reality is completely irrelevant to us. there might be a horrible war going on in another inaccessible universe, or god might be watching divine porn somewhere else; yet these events would be completely indistinguishable from imaginations to us.

And even though I would expect a justification for the existence of some kind of god to consist of empirical evidence, logic alone suffices to rule out nonsensical formulations of religions and gods, a priori, just as mathematical consistence is required before a new scientific hypothesis is proposed for empirical testing.

One question for you OP. If kantian non-cognitivism is so appealing as an argument to you, why did you smell like a christian judging from your picture. the christian religions claim a bunch of nonsense to be ultimately true and fundamental to life, and they don't even have the support of science. if that's the case, why would you come to our board to try to argue against atheism using an argument that not even you buy into? I apologise in advance if I am mislabeling you