Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Debate: Epistemology, God, and Atheism

There's this wonderful debate that's just getting off the ground between Russell Glasser, of The Atheist Experience, and Stephen Feinstein, presuppositionalist Christian apologist.

Feinstein starts, Russell responds, and Feinstein responds again, saying, among many other things, that:
I think by this point I’ve shown you which direction I am going to take this. I am interested to see where you are planning to take it. I think the phase of using feelers is coming to an end.
They've passed the point of pleasantries, are about to start digging in pretty deep, and I absolutely can't wait to see how it turns out. So hurry up, before it starts without you!

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Now, for those of you who are all caught up on the discussion so far, I've thrown in my two cents about epistemology before:
I would say that we believe there is no god, but I do so from an epistemological perspective and not a faith-oriented one.

We cannot truly know anything with certainty. All we can ever hope to do is gather supporting evidence to ensure our "leap of faith," so to speak, from unbelief to belief, is as short as possible for any given claim.

For Atheism, that leap is very small. All the evidence points to the Bible and Christianity, and all the other religions, really, as being nothing more than Bronze Age mythology invented to explain things, perpetuated through guilt and indoctrination, and sustained by the brain's capability to be fooled by emotion and flawed logic. The leap to the "God isn't real" belief is as big as the leap to the "Unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns aren't real" belief.
Personally, while I have high hopes for this debate between Russell and Feinstein, there's a cynic in me who's expecting it to degenerate into "You can know stuff, therefore God" (which has all the same flaws as this little gem of an argument that you may have seen before).