Documentary Research

Finally started my documentary research due to THE FEAR!!!

 

So as always we start with notes from Wikipedia…

Atheism Research

Wiki

• Atheism is the disbelief of the existence of God or God’s.
• Atheism – from the greek atheos meaning ‘without God(s).

Rational for disbelief:

1. Lack of empirical evidence
2. The destiny of the unevangelized, by which persons who have never even heard of a particular revelation might be harshly punished for not following its dictates.
3. The argument from non belief contests the existence of an omnipotent God who wants humans to elieve in him by arguing that such a god would do a better job of gathering believers.
4. Using Occam’s razor (among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected) it can be contended the development of religion and the belief in dieties can be explained by natural theories and evidence and that the supernatural may be dismissed until proven true.
5. Russell’s teapot (cosmic teapot, celestial teapot) coined by philosopher Bertrand Russell to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others.
6. If God made us, who made God? A God that is responsible for the creation of a universe would be at least as complicated as the the universe it creates. Therefore God must have also been designed by a designer who had been designed by a designer etc.
7. The omnipotence paradox – If an omnipotent being is able to perform any action, then it should be able to create a task that it is unable to perform. Hence, this being cannot perform all actions.
8. The omniscience paradox – If God is omnipotent, then he should be able to change the future to an ‘alternate future’ that is unknown to him, conflicting with his omniscience.
9. The problem of hell – an ethical problem in religion in which the existence of Hell is regarded as inconsistent with the notion of a just, moral and omnibenevolent God.

Issues include whether the existence of hell is compatible with justice, whether it is compatible with God’s mercy, whether Hell is populated with the damned, and if hell ceases to exist once the wicked are destroyed. In some aspects, the problem of hell is similiar to the problem of evil; assuming the suffering is something that God can prevent.

• The argument of free will – “Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest ‘He knows’, then it necessarily follows that man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God’s knowledge would be imperfect…” The arguement of free will contests the existence of an omniscient god who has free will – or has allotted the same freedom to his creations – by arguing that the two properties are contradictory. If God already knows the future, then humanity is destined to corroborate with his knowledge of the future and not have true free will to deviate from it. Another argument attacks the existence of an omniscient god who has free will directly in arguing that the will of God himself would be bound to follow whatever God foreknows himself doing throughout eternity. An ustated assumption here is that God is contained within the dimension of time, and since this is directly contradictory to the stated nature of God as given by believers, forms a straw man fallacy.
• The anthropic arguement states that if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect, he would have created other morally perfect beings instead of imperfect humans.
• The ‘no reason’ argument tries to show that an omnipotent and omniscient being would not have any reason to act in any way, specifically by creating the universe, because it would have no needs, wants or desires since these very concepts are subjectively human. Since the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an omnipotent god cannot exist.
• The “historical induction” argues that sine most theistic religions throughout history and their gods ultimately come to be regarded as untrue or incorrect.
• The disappointment arguement claims that if, when asked for, there is no visible help from God, there ois no reason to believe that there is a God.

The figures for a 2010 Eurobarometer survey in the EU reported that 20% of the EU population claimed to not believe in “any sort of spirit, God or life force.”

The ancient Romans accused Christians of being atheists for not worshipping the pagan deities.

Barron d’Holbach said that “All children are born Atheists, they have no idea of God.”

Implicit Atheism – the absence of belief without a conscious rejection of it.

Explicit Atheism – the absence of belief with a conscious rejection of it.

Positive Atheism – the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist.

Negative Atheism – All other forms of non-theism.

Some atheists have doubted the very need for the term “atheism”. In his book Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris wrote:

In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist“. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.[