say what? (The atheist delusion)

by dhw, Saturday, January 28, 2012, 20:00 (4684 days ago) @ scoobypoo

SCOOBYPOO: The author's supposed smackdown of Dawkin's work is shoddy and ridiculous. I think you're a christian pretending to be an agnostic.
The simple premise is that there is no logical reason to believe in a supreme being. And there isn't. Dawkin's doesn't need to "prove" anything, that's the burden of the theist and no one has done so. Nobody proves a negative, as otherwise I will claim my pink unicorn created the universe and you can't prove that is false.
I was excited when I first found this site, but now know it to be a sham.
Too bad.-You appear to be unaware that agnostics, as David Turell has pointed out, are neither theist nor atheist. Nowhere in any of my writing will you find me requiring proof that a supreme being does not exist. I neither believe nor disbelieve in a supreme being. You clearly understand why I do not believe, but are apparently unable or unwilling to consider the many good reasons for not disbelieving, which by some extraordinary act of intellectual contortion you seem to equate with Christianity! Here are three good reasons for not disbelieving: the astonishingly complex mechanisms of life and evolution, the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of certain experiences such as NDEs in which information, corroborated by third parties, is obtained by no explicable means. Dawkins hopes that science will one day explain all of these: "If there is something that appears to be beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural" (p. 14 of The God Delusion). The absolute rejection of one possible explanation in the hope that the other will prove correct is an act of faith in which I do not feel able to indulge. This applies as much to chance as to design. If you share Dawkins' faith, that is entirely up to you, but don't kid yourself that atheists have any more reason for belief in chance than theists have for belief in a designer.
 
If you yourself are indeed an atheist, perhaps you would provide us with whatever evidence convinces you that materialism holds all the answers to the above problems. l would also welcome an example of what you consider to be "shoddy" and "ridiculous" in my rejection of Dawkins' arguments, but only if you are prepared to dispute my words and not your own made-up version.