Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
There also hasn’t been any proof that supernatural phenomena doesn’t exist. It’s why I choose to keep an open mind about it. It’s a subject that suffers a lot of stigma in the science-centric world we live in, and thus few people talk about it.
It rightly suffers stigma because it does not follow the scientific method, but claims to have scientific merit.
Supernatural phenomena does not claim to have scientific merit. You are also assuming that science will eventually explain everything about everything. That it is the only existing truth. This is called scientism, and it oversteps science’s proper boundaries.
Um… no? Not what I said and not what I believe.
To quote professor Farnsworth: “The pursuit of knowledge is hopeless and eternal. HOORAY!”
We’re always going to have things we don’t know. The point is to build on the knowledge we do have and to slowly get better. What the belief in the supernatural does is actually the shortcut to “being able to explain everything about everything”, because you’re presupposing the answer without any proof or testing done. Sure, those things might be possible, but so might be waking up in the Pokemon universe tomorrow.
Until there’s proof, I have no reason to act like there is. It’s a fun game to think about, but it shouldn’t hold any weight in how you see the universe we actually live in.
Also, the natural universe is weird enough already. Have you heard of the fine structure constant? Basically, we found this one constant number within all of these different fundamental formulas for how the universe behaves, but it doesn’t have a unit associated. So, we know that it exists and can calculate it, but no one knows WHY it exists. We think it’s a constant, but it might have changed over time, so we’re trying to find ways to test that. We might never know, but those questions are far more interesting to me than “maybe aliens”.
Yes, there’s going to be stuff we don’t know about. That’s why I’m advocating for open-mindedness to supernatural phenomena. That’s my goal.
You can play that game all day with anything. It’s not a valid argument.
Exactly. There’s no definitive proof that winged monkeys won’t fly out of my asshole five minutes from now, but I’m not making plans that assume they will.
Well, you sold me. I definitely believe in your five minute asshole monkeys!
I don’t.
But I want to.
Why is it not a valid argument?
That’s already been explained to you by others here.
I want to hear your opinion. That’s the point of this post. It’s how we have healthy debates.
I’ve already started my opinion.
All you’re doing is telling people no. That’s not a debate.
You haven’t really said anything. You just said that my argument isn’t valid, refused to elaborate why, and when asked to do so, you said that others have told me why, when I’m getting completely different opinions from multiple people. Also, disagreeing with people is literally what makes a debate a debate. What do you want me to do? Agree with everyone even if I don’t? That’s not how a genuine conversation works.
You can’t prove a negative. Which is why in the scientific method, the onus is on the person making the claim to provide the proof, not the other way around. That’s why we rarely engage in debates with people who don’t grasp that concept, because for the most part they’re argument comes down to “You can’t prove it doesn’t exist, so therefore I’m right.”