Well, if you want to call horrible evidence “evidence,” then I guess you’re right. But the “evidence” that Christians bring would be comparable to me saying, “I chew Juicy Fruit gum. Therefore, Pitt will win the NCAA tournament.”

You can call anything you want “evidence.”

I’ve come to this conclusion as well. It’s a clever method that reveals the true desires and heart of each person – much like a Rorschach ink blot test.

I wasn’t giving my opinion what what atheist is, just trying to keep everyone talking on the same page.

Merriam-Webster defines atheist as:

one who believes that there is no deity.

and an agnostic as:

a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable

BTW, I do agree with your point – when faced with a question without a clear proof, one’s bias certainly drives the outcome.

Rather clever of God, eh? Now that’s what you call true free will – the ability to deny the existence of your own creator…

I wouldn’t say it this way, but I would say atheism is a product of looking at evidence/reality through a particular filter, or worldview. This is also true for theism by the way. Some atheists reject the evidence for God because the evidence gets filtered out resulting in no evidence.

I suspect this is why Professor Chaos can say, with confidence, that there is no evidence for God and an afterlife. He looks at the pile of evidence that Christian’s bring to him and he says “What evidence?”.

Actually, I think the lack of belief is agnosticism.

Atheism is not the lack of belief, but an active belief: one that there is no God.

Also, religion may or may not have anything to do with it. For example, Einstein and TJ were not “religious” but still believed in God. One doesn’t have to be a bible-thumper or subscribe to a doctrine to believe in the Divine. All those “spiritual” folk out there will start to take offense at us if we don’t be careful!

If I follow this logic here, you mean:

1) “I want to believe in something I cannot prove experimentally and cannot prove logically (God/afterlife)” so therefore
2) “I choose to believe God exists against the evidence”.

I think this reasoning is flawed – it leads to things such as:

1) I want to believe in love
2) So, therefore love exists

or

1) I want to believe in objective reality
2) So, therefore reality exists

You can see the problem with this analysis. Just like the vast majority of us believe in love, the world is not a dream, etc. without evidence or proof, the VAST majority also believe in a divinity without proof.

So what? It doesn’t mean it’s “just because we want to”. I want to believe in love, but still think it objectively exists not because I want to but because I just think it does. I want to believe I’m filthy rich, but I still don’t. So the logic doesn’t take us home here. The vast majority of human life cannot be “proven” – but most of us wouldn’t give it up or think it’s not real.

Also, if one didn’t believe that the soul was eternal, what meaning would any virtue have? Or vice? Nothing would have any meaning at all. We are just a lump of carbon and water. In a sense, the life of an athiest, lived out truly, would be that of an insane man by the rest of humanity.

My mind rebels against the idea of that final non-discovery. Perhaps especially in that my mind rebels against the idea of not being a mind at all, but rather a deterministric process of chemical reactions.

In the end, free will is the great selling point of religion from an intellectual point of view, or at least from mine.

So perhaps it’s not so much the lack of afterlife but the lack of soul and lack of purpose in the world (indeed the lack of a mind in a meaningful sense) that I find so thoroughly uncongenial about atheism.

Whew! Professor C, you’re more stoic than I! The thing that always got me is that whenever I got happy or excited about anything at all, it felt like it mattered (e.g. the purchase of a cool condo, landing a hot job, falling in love, etc.)…then I’d remember that it only mattered in my own mind, which wasn’t all that “real” anyway since I was a soon-to-be-gone set of chemical reactions. And especially that all of humanity was going to be dust shortly anyway, I saw no point in really feeling excited about anything, despite what my gut was telling me. It was really hard to deal with.

As I said, the evidence points the other way for me. I’d be lying to myself to pretend otherwise. Take the afterlife out of Christianity and replace it with nothingness and I would still believe in God – because of the evidence.

BTW, Lurker is dead. Long live SteveK !!