Interesting points, but two things... To distinguish between an atheist and an agnostic you should compare an apolitical person to any other political person. "But the possibility of God cannot be proven false." The possibility of God cannot be proven - period.
I disagree. If God exists, science would discover him/her/it eventually. My point about independents and liberals was just to say that there is no distinct line. Not to compare either to atheism.
Atheist is simply evidence based thinking, show us god, Christ, holy ghost (whatever the hell that is) leprechauns, angels, aliens, bigfoot, a civilization living in the earths center or Elvis and then we'll talk, OK.
Precisly. That was my point to achilles28. And so as you go around the table of those who subscribe to different religions, every one of those religions will be referred to as occult by others with equal legitimacy. It's all about frame of reference and bias. And the other guy's religion is always the wrong one, the occult. No. The world's greatest scientific thinkers have merely concluded that a god is not required, quite apart from whether there actually is one. And one has yet to present itself to scientific scrutiny. Until then, let us rely on Occam's razor... Any thinking person will consider new evidence if and when presented with it. But until such time, god will take his place among Santa Claus, unicorns and the like. The possibility of a god cannot be proven false? Neither can the possibility of a unicorn. So what is your point? The onus of proof rests on the argument's proponent. Consider's Russell's teapot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russel's_teapot
=========== Excellant points a28. To think they are the same would be confusing a gentle breeze with a killer whirlwind.
Which one? It can't be both But you are right in the latter , if there ever were such a thing as God, only by science could it be discovered as existing. I see. So are you saying essentially, agnostic is atheist. With which I would agree.
It absolutely can be both. Science cannot disprove the possibility of some sort of Creator. Religion will always be able to say that God invented science and utilizes its methods. If there was a Big Bang it was because God used a Big Bang to start the universe. To the contrary, science can support the idea that a certain religious teaching is false. Science can prove that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. But not all religions, or even all christian religions, teach that. So science can prove religious beliefs correct, but cannot prove that some God doesn't exist, only that a particular God doesn't exist. What I am actually saying is that most non-religious people are agnostic. They don't trust that god is provable or knowable. Atheism has become a form of activism against religion, rather than against God. People start out as agnostics and some become atheists. IOW, modern atheism has become anti-theism. They aren't just non-believers, they have become anti-believers.
And what are "the facts" that conclude life arose out of nothing? That "we're here"? That's tautological reasoning, which isn't scientific. Read a biology textbook on simple single-celled organisms. They're light-years more complex than anything man has invented. Read about DNA, enzymes, cleavage, how the cell chemically knows how to replicate which parts of DNA, from where in the sequence, to produce the exact protein needed to fix or replicate another part of the cell, the cell chemically "knows" is damaged or needing replication, to begin with. And then, where to transport and apply that replicated "spare part" to "heal" the damaged site... Buddy, this is incredibly complicated shit man has not even begun to fathom. After you wrap your head around how complex even the simplest single cell is, then consider science says this all sorta happened by accident. According to Darwins nativity story, one day, all the functioning organs, enzymes and plasma needed for a complete and working cell came together perfectly and landed inside a gated, semi-permeable cell wall by a sheer stroke of luck (note, cellular organs have never been witnessed functioning outside a living cell, nor have cellular organs ever been witnessed to spontaneously create themselves outside of a living cell, nor have cellular organs ever been witnessed migrating through a cell wall. Imagine passing your lungs through your colon, in reverse...). But in order to replicate (cause we can't have just one cell with no DNA, or it wouldn't last long enough to replicate and evolve into you and me) the DNA protein code, that *perfectly coded* for all the contents of that particular cell, also happened to come together by random chance, on that exact day, in exactly that locale, and find it's way into THAT EXACT CELL. Mind you, we're talking over a 1 million base pair sequence that just so happened to poof out of nothing and contain the *exact code* for a cell that also appeared out of nothing, and the two got together and made sweet, sweet love. All this despite "science" never having witnessed one instance of a free-floating DNA chain existing outside of a cell in random plasma, outside few base pairs long, that coded for exactly jack squat. Even if 5% of base pairs were random noise, which is a high number by todays understanding, that means 950,000 base pairs were needed in correct sequence to "randomly" code for Darwins "virgin birth". There are 2 options per base pair. Therefore, to calculate the probability of this freak occurrence (to be generous), multiply 2 ^950,000. Do any of you guys know how big a number that is? That's 950,000 doublings of the number 2. For perspective, 2 ^100 is this number here: 157 152 858 401 024 063 281 013 959 519 483 771 508 510 790 313 968 742 344 694 684 829 502 629 887 168 573 442 107 637 760 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. This is called a "googleplex". Now imagine *doubling* that number above, another 9,500 TIMES. Those are your odds. And they're not even really your odds because DNA, other than a few strands long, doesn't exist outside the cell, to begin with. Any of this make any sense yet? You need to do a little bit of research man. Life didn't go from simple to complex. It went from horrendously complex to universes compounded on universes complex.