Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
@27
We did all of that in 5 years, though. Less time than it takes a human child to learn to talk.
I was trying to avoid the argument because it feels very off topic, but the thing about "does the soul exist?" arguments is that every time someone puts evidence on the "no it doesn't side", the "yes it does" side raises the bar. 20-30 years ago it was psychiatrists are crackpots and we can never understand how to treat mental illness. 10-15 years ago it was this AI thing is bullshit because humans are special. Now, it's "well AI isn't that great and can become racist". What will it be tomorrow? You tell me.
I consider any argument where one side of the argument continues providing evidence and the other side of the argument continues moving the goalpost and even going so far as to say of course we can't provide evidence because it's faith to be a pretty clear-cut argument. There will always be room for a soul, but only if people keep changing the definition of a soul so that it fits in the hole that's left for it.
@28
I'm not saying that good and bad don't exist. You believe in ethics because god, which isn't an argument for ethics as such, just "I believe in a thing called god, there's no real evidence, but I believe". I believe in ethics because I have ethics because I believe in ethics because... which is a tautology, and also no real argument for ethics. People just have it, same way we have 2 legs. Is it a good thing? yes. Why is it a good thing? because. You can't really get deeper at it than that. You can try, but trying requires saying that there's no particular truth, or believing in a god, and if you use believing in a god then which god? Sure, you can construct big towers of philosophy and freak out about it and watch as everyone constructs incompatible towers of philosophy that end at the same place, and maybe say "well there must be a deeper truth". Or you can just accept that it's a thing that happens, same way as the sun coming up.
One of the reasons I no longer bother trying to get people to be atheists is that one of the key inherent capacities of atheism is the ability to be fine with questions that end in tautologies or big question marks. As with everything else atheism-related, there's no particular value judgement on it though: as far as I can tell it's either a thing you're born with or you aren't. It doesn't make you a better person, just one who is more able to value truth as an end in itself. And I'm pretty sure it can't be learned. There's very little research and such on these topics, probably a lot because atheism is actually quite rare and admitting to it is still somewhat taboo. I don't believe in a higher power because I don't need one: I can be fully comfortable with the universe existing just because it exists, or people doing things we can't explain because we just don't know yet, and so on. When I think about those ideas and stuff like it I don't feel the slightest bit of discomfort not knowing.
It would be nice to know, but what I care about is truth, not having a reason. Saying "but god" is a reason, but one to which there's no truth. Saying "because god" has no predictive power, and just makes the universe more complicated without actually explaining anything at all.
But mostly, I'm an atheist because (like with the soul) we keep having to change the definitions of what god does because science and other evidence-based things keep intruding. There'll always be room for a creator and higher power too, but if you keep having to change the shape of the hole that it fits in, then it's a bad argument, nothing more. if someone had said 2000 years ago "here is exactly what god does, you can go talk to him, and these things reliably happen", sure. But instead it starts with finding reasons that god "withdrew" or whatever and just keeps going and going and going, taking capacities away but still saying "there's a god". If it were anything else at all and people treated it like they do arguments about god, we'd laugh them out of the room--but god/higher powers get a pass, you're allowed to pull out every tool in the arguing in bad faith toolbox, every cognitive bias in the cognitive bias toolbox, and we praise it and call it wisdom.
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