Re: Atheists are not the freethinkers they claim to be

Response to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU1SoobAn1g

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[BespokeGroupUK]

Free Thinking doesn't mean science, reason and logic. Free Thinking shouldn't be anything ese appart from thinking freely, so you can't put any bounderies on it.

[SentientRaven]

@BespokeGroupUK: Okay, with all due respect I'm killing the semantic bickering right away. Glenn provided a definition of free thought according to Wikipedia and that's what I'm going to in the interest of speaking the same language. As a result, that's what I mean, if you mean something else, fine, but we have a very clear and agreed upon definition here that is useless to debate any further.

I say this with all due respect, I just hate ending up in semantic bickering.

[BusinessIDBAI]

@SonistheFatherofMan

Provide evidence for a supernatural explanation and we'll consider it. You can't just assert something and act like it can stand on its own.

It is unscientific to assert without evidence, when you get that correct, we can talk about how atheists are unscientific or have limits on their thinking. Theists tend to reject natural explanations, no matter how much evidence is presented, that is limited thinking, not vice versa.

[0019josh7100]

That was wonderfully done. . Free thinkers will one day inherit the earth. . .

[Acrimonator]

Wating for the answer, in form of "atheism is a religion to"... :D

[pandorachild]

Subbed. I like your manner and logic.

[Gnomefro]

@hatredapathy52 The only way you could get it to work somewhat is if you backtracked into Deism and said that the designer designed the laws of the universe, and not life itself directly. However, now you have a host of other problems, such as unfalsifiability, inability to distinguish between "god" and "nature", no justification for why the material phenomenon we call intelligence can exist outside the universe and somehow not need an explanation despite being the most complex thing we know of.

[Gnomefro]

@hatredapathy52 The effect of having such an explanation is that when we look for a parsimonious explanation we must chop off the unneeded designer according to Occam's razor. The reason for this is that there is always an infinity of possible unneeded things we could add to a hypothesis that is not supported by evidence. Not excluding superfluous entities simply make our explanations worse. This is why the concept of theistic evolution quite simply is braindead.

[Gnomefro]

@hatredapathy52 "A scientific argument for evolution is not the same as an argument against a designer."

It is when the entire reason to introduce a designer to begin with was because people thought it was impossible to explain life without introducing a designer. There's another aspect to it as well. Evolution is a "design" algorithm. It will achieve results without a designer or a mind behind it. That's the entire point, and why it is a scientific theory.

[hatredapathy52]

@lilmarome That's not the point. In fact, I am running on the assumption that the parent is "brainwashed."

[lilmarome]

@hatredapathy52 But the cosmological argument fails on every point. It's only convincing if you've already been brainwashed to believe in invisible gods.

[hatredapathy52]

@lilmarome (cont'd) But suppose the parent did do the research. The cosmological and teleological arguments are much more convincing than most people give them credit for. They don't establish beyond doubt that there is a God. But they convince the believer that believing in God is not unreasonable.

[hatredapathy52]

@lilmarome If a parent believes in a religion, then this will shape his or her entire worldview. If this religion entails belief in something like hell, then the parent will want to convince the child that the religion is true to keep the child away from hell.

Religious experience is a much more powerful motivator than argumentation. Whether or not the experience is genuine is another question. But ultimately, the parent is only looking out for what is best for the child.