The Atheist, the Agnostic, and the *******

[saizai]

http://www.squidi.net/comic/tales/view.php?ep=3&id=1

Note: due to forum censorshipAttempt to bypass the autocensor removed. I was prevented from accurately reporting the title of the comic linked to above.

Do not try to bypass the autocensor.

[Dark Jaguar]

I am sick and tired of this old argument. There IS a dragon in my garage!

Edit: Due to the nature of the internet, I must include a smily :D to indicate this was an attempt at sarcasm.

[Darth Rotor]

http://www.squidi.net/comic/tales/view.php?ep=3&id=1

Note: due to forum censorshipAttempt to bypass the autocensor removed. I was prevented from accurately reporting the title of the comic linked to above.
The Atheist, the Agnostic, and Saizai.

No censorship needed.

DR

[saizai]

Funny, I thought you had earlier apologized for being rude?

[Darth Rotor]

Funny, I thought you had earlier apologized for being rude?
Here is a nickel, buy a clue, or rent a sense of humor.

You are a smart guy. No kidding. You need smilies?

DR

[saizai]

I am aware that you're attempting humor. I don't find your style of humor particularly funny, whether or not it's directed at me; I simply find it crude and rude.

[bignickel]

Which one's the agnostic?

I only ask because while atheism (non-theism) is simply non-belief in supernatural entities, agnosticism is the belief that no evidence or reasoning can prove/disprove the existence of supernatural entities. One can be an agnostic atheist/non-theist with no problem: doesn't believe in god/s, will never believe due to any reasoning or evidence.

[saizai]

The definitions they are using are
atheist = strong atheist
agnostic = weak agnostic
theist = strong theist

[AZAtheist]

just a comment on something I saw on the net while browsing (I'll bet I can't find the site again if I tried)...An individual was calling people idiots because they were using the term atheist as meaning "lack of belief in god". His reasoning is that those "idiots" were trying to redefine the historical meaning of the word atheist...Makes me wonder what he means by "idiot"...was he using the historical definition or...?

[Jimbo07]

Cute.

:)

Just to weigh in...

Isn't God more like the teapot around the sun (i.e. unprovable)? We could do some pretty thorough testing for a chair. That's what the little agnostic dude does, and concludes there's no chair (for his own level of confidence, I suppose).

Apologists have been maneuvered to where they'd have to make some strange claims about God, in order to be consistent with physical observation... the strange claims may amount to philosophical wordplay, but it doesn't make them necessarily unTRUETM.

[saizai]

jimbo - Hard to test an invisible, unfeelable chair.

[Ginarley]

Especially one which has qualities that grow as you do more research... I can't see it so it's invisable; I can't feel it so I suppose it's unfeelable; wonder if smelling works... nope can't smell it so i guess it's odourless; can I hear it... nope guess that means it's silent... etc. The chair of gaps indeed.

[saizai]

Ginarley - Exactly! :)

[hgc]

The joke doesn't make any sense. If the atheist is making a point about how he can just invent an entity at random and claim it exists, without any evidence, then how did the theist, who presumably was not privy to the preceding conversation, know that there was an imaginary chair there to start with? The reality of theistic belief is that knowledge of its deities are conveyed through education about them.

[Jimbo07]

Especially one which has qualities that grow as you do more research... I can't see it so it's invisable; I can't feel it so I suppose it's unfeelable; wonder if smelling works... nope can't smell it so i guess it's odourless; can I hear it... nope guess that means it's silent... etc. The chair of gaps indeed.

Yeah.

I've encountered this problem before, especially in debating with Piggy (where is he now? :( ). I haven't mentally resolved it.

If things like velocity and acceleration and Newton's laws are easy to test, why isn't God? Why is it that every time God is pushed out of the necessity of a gap, apologists get a pass by refining their definitions?

I don't know. It just is (what a terrible answer, but I don't yet have a better one).

There are things we just can't say about the universe. There are things that (even closer to home) for which you and I just do not have physical knowledge. It should not be interpreted that I mean that we should stop searching! I think physics has a lot of hard work ahead of it. The other (top down, if you will) sciences also have much interesting work ahead.

I call it my personal argument from ignorance. I have some (vague and largely uneducated) idea of how the universe has proceeded from the Big Bang. I don't know why there was a Big Bang. I don't even know if 'why' is an appropriate question regarding the Big Bang. I don't know much about the M-theories and string theories, etc. My personal feeling (preferring experiment) is that the theoreticians don't know much about them either. By proposing higher dimensionality for this universe's existence they've only pushed their own physical gap backward.

I'm agnostic exactly because I have the solid belief that humans will never be able to fully answer, "Why something rather than nothing?" or whether that is even a relevant question.

To me, "it's just physical fact," is as bad a cop-out as "goddidit."

:boggled:

caveat: I should note that "it's just physical fact" tends to be more useful, especially in the development of new technologies... :cool: