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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I’m kind of an agnostic, so naturally my point of view is: it’s hard if not impossible to tell.
I don’t really believe in a soul but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was such a thing. Maybe we’re all going back home after we die, maybe we just stop existing. Maybe it’s both. It’s hard to tell.
Is it, though? Nothing in physics supports the existence of, or even the need for, a soul.
That is the view of the atheist faith (that all that is currently known by science is enough to know), but the replier is agnostic, in which we don’t know what we don’t know.
Atheist faith doesn't exist, atheism is absence of faith. Atheists are more into facts and less into belief. If you have to believe in something for it to become true, it's nonsense.
I know that it’s a common belief in atheists that it’s not a faith. But if you take a step back, it’s hard to deny that there is some belief in the sentence: “if science has neither evidence of something nor of its absence, it doesn’t exist”.
The opposite of that is: “if science has neither evidence of something not of its absence, then science doesn’t know yet, and until then, neither can we”.
It’s fine to believe in things. I’d say it’s not great though, to think so highly of one’s own belief that one wouldn’t want to call if a belief.
And it's common belief of theists that everyone has to believe in something. I don't believe in anything. I believe people, like the scientists that discover stuff, but that's believing someone, not in something. Pretending it's the same is ridiculous.
I don’t know if that’s what you were implying, but I’m not at all a theist. And as a scientist, I can remind you that the scientific method is to keep researching topics that are inconclusive. To conclude something as non-existent because the research is inconclusive is not the scientific method.
What you are doing is listening to the science indeed, and drawing faith-based conclusions that something doesn’t exist because it wasn’t proven to exist. Which is fine, a lot of people do that to base all kinds of faiths, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that you’re not.
It's not inconclusive, it's improvable which basically means "why even bother?"
I don’t disagree with “why even bother”. But again following the scientific method, it wasn’t proven to be improvable. Scientifically speaking, we just don’t know.
I realize it’s not a very comforting thought, though. And I don’t mind people who believe otherwise.
If it's something invisible with no physical manifestation (as the soul is thought to be by the believers), it's quite literally improvable.
atheist faith describes people who BELIEVE that god does not exist
besides the fact that I do exist...
if there is no evidence that god doesn't exist, or that god does exist, then yes, there is no reason to believe god exists, but apart from the absurd and extremely vast absence of evidence that would point towards proving even the slimmest of traces of existence, that is also an epistemological challenge in that our perception is extremely limited and we don't know, as ritswd said, what we don't know.
so we have a lot of evidence, but there exists an extremely small and remote possibility that our theories are wrong, just because we're dumbfucks with very smol brains & tiny eyes that can only see 3 dimensions
so saying with 100% certainty that god does not exist is a dogmatic belief in our conclusions.
To be clear, it's highly likely that what we consider to be a "god" or a "satan" (as well as physical places we cannot see/reach where these two reside) isn't real, based on evidence that we've come upon today scientifically, but that also doesn't mean there isn't some form of a higher being that we are unable to recognize as such because of our limited abilities that you've explained above.
No, it's a logical conclusion. God isn't needed for the existence of the universe and thus doesn't exist. Sure, there's minuscule chance that's wrong and if it ever happens I'll be among the first who'll say I was wrong. Until then, science says God doesn't exist.
You're right. Just a note
This is the scientific perspective. All signs point to no. But as always, we might have missed something. I think this is the agnostic perspective, even the "agnostic atheist" perspective. I think, and I might be wrong, that the pure "atheist" perspective is that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no God.
But if there's a tiny retarded chance that for some reason there is something as absurd as a god... lol.
...then that'd be me of course
Atheism doesn't mean belief in nothing. It means a lack of belief. They don't have "faith in science". They simply have no need for faith. And they certainly don't believe that everything that is currently known is all we will ever know, only that there's no point in basing your life on things you can't know.
Agnostics are willing to speculate or hedge their bets, whereas atheists prefer to assume the obvious: that there probably is nothing higher guiding our lives, we're on our own and should not deceive ourselves otherwise.
It’s a common misconception, but agnosticism is the one that is the lack of belief, and applying the scientific method to one’s belief system. It’s the “we don’t know what we don’t know” approach, which defines the scientific method.
I certainly don’t disagree.
Sure. Given that the realm of souls claims to be outside of physics, this isn't surprising. Now whether that all makes sense or not, I do not know. As I said, I don't believe in it but I accept the possibility 🤷♂️
Well, quite literally everything is physics, so if a soul exists, it has to be supported by physics.
True, but physics does not explain everything yet. Ask an astrophysicist, and neurophysicist, or a quantum physicist, and they'll probably have a long laundry list of things we don't understand yet.
And so, accepting the possibility does not mean rejecting physics. It only means we haven't gotten there yet, and maybe there are things about the human experience that physics hasn't yet even begun to grapple with.
The soul lives in the gaps in our knowledge. It is an artifact of the conscious mind, the part of us that allows us to reconcile the unknown and unknowable with the everyday experiences of our senses.
It is immortal in the sense that nothing is ever truly gone, both because echoes of it ripple outward across time and space, but also because the experience of time itself is inextricably bound with consciousness.