The choise to believe in God, with no science to help.

[Knife]

Basically he was trying to convince me that without the facts, there would be no reason to not believe in God.

Yeah, gosh darn those facts. Facts are Satan's work you know.

Holy fuck, that what this guy is really saying?

Unfortunately for them, it does work both ways though. Without a dedicated dogma and periodic and repititious 'teachings' overly complex stories full of plot holes wouldn't be considered a viable alternative either, no matter what god you put in there.

[wolveraptor]

The bigger misconception from these people is that you go into a debate with a preset opinion, and then draw facts from wherever to support that opinion. To them, facts are used to defend conclusions; they aren't used to draw them.

[Shinova]

Re OP:


I can sort of get what you're saying. We know now what lightning and thunder are, or that the Noah story just wouldn't be possible. A lot of that is common sense, but common sense itself was born through previous experiences, what others have taught us, and so on.

It's very unlikely, but if all those experiences and benefits and tools of intellect were taken away from us, then I think we'd struggle to really understand what this or that phenomena is.

Ancient scientists wanted to understand the why, so they questioned God and strove to understand what really makes the world go around. But they had the benefit of having a well-established belief to work against in the first place, along with the slow accumulation of material knowledge and history built up by their predecessors.

If I were somehow deprived of all that, and all established tools of intellect, and I were thrust into the world without any knowledge almost like a newborn baby, then I wouldn't believe in God, but I'd probably believe that there was something mystical behind everything unusual in the world.

I find it a little bit of a stretch to think that a person would be able to conclude that lightning is a product of nature and physics without any, ANY knowledge of anything.

[Darth Wong]

And yet there were those among the ancient Greeks and Romans who knew that it was a bunch of bullshit meant to quell the masses.

[Shinova]

And yet there were those among the ancient Greeks and Romans who knew that it was a bunch of bullshit meant to quell the masses.

Of course, they had to have had the first-hand or second-hand experience of either their religion's fallability, or an example of its oppression, to develop that sentiment in the first place.

[mr friendly guy]

Except you have to remove logical thinking too.

No reason not to != a reason to.

Good luck convincing him of that.

Welcome to the world of Agnostic morons. What you end up with is a world full of fuckwits with the mentality of four year olds.

I suggest considering Dawkins musings on orbital teapots.

While Dawkins mentioned the orbital teapots, it was Bertrand Russell who first came up with the concept.

Back to the OP, yes I would still be an atheist.

I don't need scientific knowledge to tell me God is very unlikely to be real, logic does that quite well. Even as a teenager it was obvious to me why certain arguments don't make sense, even though at the time I didn't realise they were called "appeal to popularity" or "appeal to authority". Yet I found it puzzling that the adults I lived with couldn't grasp this basic logic.

Thus I conclude that it is highly likely I would develop logical thinking even in an environment which discourages it. With logical thinking I would conclude I shouldn't believe in God simply because their adherents can't provide evidence.

[Keevan_Colton]

I know, but Dawkins has a few particularly good musings on the concept. I'd dig out a link, but the ones I've got are in paper format