On Sun, 21 Jul 2002, Dan Minette wrote: > In other words, if you pressupose naturalism; then you can prove beyond a > reasonable doubt that religion is wrong, right? I cut the rest of your > arguement, because it appears to presuppose the conclusion. The real > question is whether you can presuppose that naturalism is the only vaid > understanding of reality.
More to the point: You have to decide what "reason" is before an argument about reasonable doubt can have any meaning. As far as I know, all arguments for or against religion and or God (in the classical western sense, at least) assume a framework of reason in which the answer is presupposed in some way. The question is, which framework is better at explaining the world in general? It seems to me that an atheist can choose a framework that explains what and why religion is without contradicting the rules used to explain how a TV works or who was at fault in a traffic accident. The religious apologist, however, is obliged to make assumptions of a kind that one is not allowed to make when explaining other kinds of phenomena. In order to sustain these assumptions, one must rely on faith as I define it: a recurring and ongoing willingness to invest belief in that which seems impossible or unprovable by the standards by which we understand everything that is *not* religious. So I need to ask you a question. If atheism represents a kind of faith, then what is faith? Before we argue more we should come to terms. What is faith? What is reason, if believing in God is rational? I need definitions if I'm to understand what you say. What is religion? Religions aren't a homogenous bunch, after all, and we cannot assume that people living in different belief systems are going to experience faith in the same way. What kind of faith does atheism represent? > Let me ask you one more question. Are you ready to discard everything else > that can be argued against in this manner? The list is a lot longer than > naturalists are willing to face. I find it very ironic that they run from > the logical conclusion of their arguement. Please list them for me so that I can understand where you're coming from. I'm not so much interested in proving naturalism (which was never my intent, and which seems to me to be unnecessary for atheism) as in showing that calling atheism a form of faith is playing fast and loose with language. It distorts the definition of reason and it distorts the definition of faith, at least as I (halfway, I'm happy to admit) understand them. Marvin Long Austin, Texas There ain't no Devil; there's just God when he's drunk. -- Tom Waits
