h_k_s wrote: ↑September 29th, 2019, 2:44 pm
GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 28th, 2019, 9:56 pm
I think many atheists believe that a theist is merely someone who has failed to think through matters of existence. Perhaps a theist is mentally ill or mentally inadequate for thought. Or he is afraid and worried about what his acquaintances will think. Or perhaps he is just mentally lazy. What about evidence? Why can't a theist see the lack of evidence for a God? Surely, he muses, if the theist truly looked at the lack of evidence, he would, if honest, change his mind? He will never understand atheism.
Theists base their theology on faith, which is belief in the absence of proof.
Atheists base their anti-theology on the fallacy of argument from ignorance, which means having neither proof nor absence of proof you/they ass-u-me one or the other. Either way these assumptions are a fallacy to logic and rationalism.
Don't forget about the other two categories of thinking on this topic of God -- namely (3) deism and (4) agnosticism.
A deist and the theist are not the same thing. You may want to google these and read the wiki's on them to find out.
Just as an agnostic and an atheist are not the same thing either.
So your word for the day is Deist.
Good Morning _S, I am well acquainted with deism vs. theism. I am a theist, not a deist. As I understand the difference, a theist such as I - I'm not going to speak for all theists nor am I going to play dictionary - believes in God and the gods because of something directly experienced, while a deist merely infers that there is a God because of certain other experiences he has. Direct experience vs. inference. The question of whether or not one, i.e. a human being, can directly experience God or a god is an age-old question. In Protestantism, it was the Charismatics, such as Wesley, who said Yes, vs. the Calvinists, who said No. I say Yes. Once I was in Istanbul, watching some Whirling Dirvishes. Later, in a tourist gathering with the Imam, I asked if the Dirvishes saw God in their ecstasy or just an image of God. The Imam, very forcefully, insisted that they saw God directly, not an image.