If Atheists Had Faith

I posted this as just a link and found to my surprise that it was misunderstood(people have said they thought it was anti-atheism) and downvoted to oblivion.

I’m risking it again, with an explanation this time, though.

https://​​atheistkit.wordpress.com/​​2016/​​11/​​27/​​if-atheists-had-faith/​​

The point is that a theist’s accusation of an atheist’s “faith” is just that, an accusation. They imply that, on some level, they KNOW that faith doesn’t work.

In this dialogue, by going along with it, the atheist gets the theist to lay all the epistemological groundwork for reason, science, no “separate magisteria,”and so on, at which point, the theist’s position is vulnerable to a straightforward analysis of the evidence.

I think this is more realistic than you might think. If you told theists that your atheism was faith-based, they really would start thinking about and presenting reasons why faith shouldn’t overpower reason and evidence, and then you could win based on reason and evidence (hence Dawkins stepping in to do so at the end of the dialogue).