There are some (usually unacknowledged) semantic disconnects (“failures to communicate [1]“) whenever theists and Atheists argue. Neither side responds as though they were aware of the unstated fundamental assumptions of the other side. Here are some of these for your consideration.
For Atheist and Ignostic [2] consideration: Theist’s perceptions of atheism (as far as I’ve been able to discern)
- Atheists say “There Is No God” as a matter of faith. They claim to know this as a fact, but one cannot scientifically absolutely disprove anything. Therefore they are wrong. Therefore God exists.
- God, his acts and his will are terms we use to cover anything that we don’t understand. Atheists therefore are claiming that they know abso-(gerund)-lutely everything. They are therefore wrong.
- God is omnipotent, so he can waive (violate) your man-made “Laws of Nature” any time it suits him. This is not a violation of causality, because causality itself is just a human invention. All ideas not found in {holy book title here} are merely human inventions (as opposed to the divine truths of that particular text).
For the theists, some common faiths among Atheists:
- God is unnecessary. If God exists, who made him? If he/she/it/they have always existed, why not just assume that the physical universe has always existed? Why would either need a creator?
- The universe is consistent and mathematically describable in its entirety. It may change over time, but only in a systematic and describable manner. We don’t yet have the full description, but the bounds of what we know are far beyond human scale, in all directions. We will never have answers to all possible questions, just to all reasonable ones.
- Science, Technology and Math have directly explored many more dimensions, degrees, and scales of magnitude of every subject than were ever even alluded to in any holy book. Static holy books and the wisdom therein are therefore inferior to the living, dynamic, testable world of scientific exploration. When they don’t agree, bet on science.
Evolution (you knew this was coming) neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. It is a fact (repeated, consistent observation) that everything evolves, is evolving, has evolved. The “Theory of Evolution” is an attempt to explain the observation of evolution. If you must have a deity, it is simple enough to consider evolution as a divine progressive act of creation, too complex to try to explain to literate desert nomads three (or more) millenia ago.
Science is a process, not just a list of facts. As more and more minute details of the general theory of evolution are worked out, with the ever growing pile of evidence to study, there is a growing list of failed evolutionary theory details littering the history of the theory. These discarded, discredited, disproved sub-theories don’t prove that the main theory is wrong, just that the particular detail had since been corrected.
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