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Comment by gobrewers14 | Hacker News Reader

> "that you take your atheism on faith, too." This is a nonsensical statement. Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods. It requires no faith.

> "Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre ... should be super easy to refute, right?"

You're shifting the burden of proof; there is nothing to refute. It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions. Regardless of a persons' intelligence, they cannot argue their deity into existence. It either exists or it doesn't. None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.

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>Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods.

You're bemoaning a lack of empirical evidence when the problem is actually a philosophical one.

>there is nothing to refute

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like your stance is that God doesn't exist because God doesn't exist? Circular argument much? Atheism is a positive statement, too.

>It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions.

Of course it's not your "job". But I'd rather talk to someone who can actually explain why they think what they think.

> It either exists or it doesn't.

We are not omnipotent beings. We must strive to gain knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in. How do you know whether or not it exists?

>None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.

Disagree completely, they all presented interesting arguments.

> the problem is actually a philosophical one.

This is what I would say too if I had no evidence for the things I was claiming exist.

> your stance is that God doesn't exist because God doesn't exist?

You said Kierkegaard et al's arguments should be easy to refute. If I come up with a clever argument for the existence of leprechauns, and no one can refute my amazing logic, do leprechauns all of a sudden magically exist? Again, there is nothing to refute. You can come up with the most magnificent argument you like for a god, but that god either exists or does not, independent of that argument, and my inability to refute any claims you've made is not evidence your god exists.

>How do you know whether or not it exists?

Is there a hidden third option I'm missing?

> Disagree completely, they all presented interesting arguments.

Replace in any of those arguments the word "unicorn" instead of "god" and they are as equally meaningful.

You don't believe that we can access meaningful knowledge about the world through logic? If not, then what the heck are you doing on a forum about computers?

I think the issue is that we can't access meaningful knowledge about the existence of a God that interacts meaningfully with the world through logic alone. Why do you think the Bible is inspired/manipulated/written by God more than other books?

Well it depends on the nature of God's interaction, doesn't it? There are no big hands coming out of the sky and moving things around, I'll give you that. The theologist Paul Tillich argued that God is not a being-in-the-world, but exists outside of time and space. Given that, atheist expectations of an empirical proof of God tend to miss the mark.

On the contrary, I think that tons of other things were inspired by God. As Walt Whitman wrote, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars". A healthy dose of relativism is not incompatible with religious belief - see the Trappist monk Thomas Merton who famously took a pretty serious spiritual interest in both Zen Buddhism and Islam.

> You don't believe that we can access meaningful knowledge about the world through logic?

And there it is, the pathetic strawman. The last refuge of a person with nothing intelligent to say; the death knell of every argument.

Computer logic is falsifiable. Asserting deities exist is not.

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