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Faith of an Atheist

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[Fair warning: this includes a thought experiment.  Those uncomfortable with the thought of one should probably sit this out.] This subject comes up a lot. If you are an atheist, it resonates irritatingly as I think it takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe in God. I'll leave aside the irony of a believer having less faith in God than atheists having faith in themselves. Okay, after a brief sneering chuckle. But what does it mean? The assertion is predicated on ex nihilo creation of the universe, life, and species. The Big Bang, abiogenesis and evolution are apparently so incredible that they could not possibly have happened by chance accident luck non-supernatural causes. In short, it is a daily double: argument from design and an argument from incredulity . The notion being that because none of us "were there" at inception, we are speculating and taking things on faith. "Were you there?" is a familiar challenge. Well, obviously...
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Thought Experiments and Hypotheticals

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it  ~ Aristotle[1], circa 350 BCE. I like to conduct thought experiments because they are useful to understand how people think. But, almost always, I am disappointed because people get defensive and refuse to engage. Perfectly understandable and often frustrating, but it does not faze me, I'll keep trying. One way to conduct a thought experiment is to use a hypothetical situation. A key requirement for such is that the participant provisionally accepts the premise(s) and then reasons out the rest. Albert Einstein used thought experiments a lot. They were useful to him to explain complex phenomena and to gain insight into them.  His book, Relativity , is filled with such. As an example, they shed light on how the same object falling from a moving train appears to take a different path depending on whether the observer is watching from the stationary platform, or from the t...
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