Quote (El1te @ 25 Sep 2024 14:21)
Great post & welcome back from jail!
Both ^Shadowoffury and ^Modulok2405 make great points and I believe both are correct in their own way, that one side is correct on the definitions of the terms and the other side is correct that you cannot neatly categorize what people believe into these strict definitions. People who would say they're an atheist in their own understanding can range from what was called weak atheism which isn't too distinguishable from agnosticism, and strong atheism which can range to full blown insane Reddit atheists "anti-theists" who are largely unhinged anti-Christian barbarians. Words are used to help communicate our thoughts & beliefs, but they by axiomatic principle can never be 100% accurate though we try our best.
It is also correct that the cosmological/prime mover argument does not belong to Aristotle, while he was the first to enter it into the Western literature & cultural realm, the enlightenment of Greece was preceded by the enlightenment of Persia, from which that knowledge was transferred to the Greeks via Cyrus the Great's patronage to the land. Cyrus & his Zoroastrian Magi well understood the cosmological argument & were well ahead at the time.
Another note on the topic of the prime mover is that it is logically true and cannot be argued. There has never been a single coherent argument to rebut the cosmological argument, because there isn't one. It is simply logically true that there must exist or have existed a Supreme Being who began time so to speak. No one in this thread has formed an argument against it, and no one in human history has either because it can't logically exist. In modern Western scientific thought this has been reduced to the hypothetical singularity, which as someone pointed out would essentially be the effective "God" of a nonbeliever who does believe in the Big Bang theory. It's also important to reiterate that science is not a belief system, it is a method of inquiry based upon the falsification of well defined statements (hypotheses).
Well said! and thanks for the welcome back I escaped Azkaban with minor damages
What I bolded of what you said there is extremely important. When you go to the roots of language itself and even numerology you should see nothing more then the yearning of "mankind" to "declare" an "edict of knowing". This is why science will never find "God" because "God cannot be known" only experienced and the tools we as humans use to analyze reality are by no means ABSOLUTES as they claim to be. The scientist looking into the microscope/telescope will only go further and further into themself(the universe) and nothing they find will be "knew" only knew to their ego in this life. This is one of the first and quintessential questions all beings should ask themselves. What is the ego? Am I merely the name my parents imbued upon me or am I something I can't quite quantify/identify yet. These are all the musings of the mind though. Fanciful questions, answers, and stories going back prior to written language that give us some sense of ease over questions most are scared to confront until "later in life" Just like the Bible is meant to "reveal" something to you not tell you how to live/act so too are the entire embodiment of religion, science, ,mathematics, poetry all attempts to glorify existence itself. There was a time before thinking in the modern human epoch when we as humans were as some say it "one with the gods" "with the divine". This was before we developed language and created separation. Why is it claimed to have been "heaven on earth"?? Because no one thought as the ego back then. There was no "this" and "that" and when you go to the root human language Sanskrit you see the subject/object relationship as well as the use of verbs alone make it so. You don't exist. The ego makes it so. Most people will refuse to "believe" this because it shatters the illusion of your existence forcing you to accept the fallacy in your own beliefs. It forces you to ask self reflective questions like, "Who am I" which go much deeper then some dare to dive. All things written and spoken although backed in the commonality of man actually don't exist in the entirety of the perceivable universe around us. They are illusions created by the mind and nothing more. Agreed upon illusions are exactly that.