What’s the point of all this? Clearly, with blind faith one can believe everything and its opposite, we don’t need any proof: we already have countless religions for that. I think that many atheist are so not because they are blindly faithful in atheism, but because they arrived at atheism through considering rationally the world around us, and this they deem superior to uncritically accepting the supernatural cultural norm of the society they were born into.
Yes, I’ve discovered the need to make more explicit the purpose. I was surprised it was not more intuitive.
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.
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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).
What’s the point of all this?
Clearly, with blind faith one can believe everything and its opposite, we don’t need any proof: we already have countless religions for that.
I think that many atheist are so not because they are blindly faithful in atheism, but because they arrived at atheism through considering rationally the world around us, and this they deem superior to uncritically accepting the supernatural cultural norm of the society they were born into.
Yes, I’ve discovered the need to make more explicit the purpose. I was surprised it was not more intuitive.
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).