You’re conflating “belief” with “faith”. One is about what you accept as true without evidence, and the other is about what you simply hold to be true.
If someone said “there is no god”, I would take that as a true statement. I believe it to be a true statement because the positive assertion that there is has not met the burden of proof.
The usage of evidence to guide belief is empiricism, and that’s not a theological philosophy, it’s the basis of the scientific method. Empiricism isn’t a prerequisite for atheism because they’re different topics. It’s entirely possible to be an atheist for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of evidence. Asserting that atheism is about not believing things without evidence is fundamentally misrepresenting the broad meaning of the word and substituting your specific philosophy as the main interpretation.
I do not believe in anything
Okay.
There’s either evidence of a thing or there isn’t.
Can you provide me with evidence that that statement is true? Without tying a logical knot?
Empiricism is itself a belief in the sense that you meant it. You cannot have evidence for the validity of evidence without first accepting that evidence lends credence to a notion.
That being said: rewind and reread what I said but take the word belief as “agreeing with the truth of the statement”. The existence of a deity is a binary. Ignoring questions of “why” one accepts a statement, one either accepts a statement, accepts it’s opposite, or rejects the premise entirely. The conventional empirical agnostic atheist stance is to believe there is no deity because the question is not really knowable, and a claim should be disbelieved without proportional evidence. Belief that there is no god is not the blind assertion that there isn’t one. It just means that’s the state of affairs of reality as far as you know.
You’re conflating “belief” with “faith”. One is about what you accept as true without evidence, and the other is about what you simply hold to be true.
If someone said “there is no god”, I would take that as a true statement. I believe it to be a true statement because the positive assertion that there is has not met the burden of proof.
The usage of evidence to guide belief is empiricism, and that’s not a theological philosophy, it’s the basis of the scientific method. Empiricism isn’t a prerequisite for atheism because they’re different topics. It’s entirely possible to be an atheist for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of evidence. Asserting that atheism is about not believing things without evidence is fundamentally misrepresenting the broad meaning of the word and substituting your specific philosophy as the main interpretation.
Okay.
Can you provide me with evidence that that statement is true? Without tying a logical knot?
Empiricism is itself a belief in the sense that you meant it. You cannot have evidence for the validity of evidence without first accepting that evidence lends credence to a notion.
That being said: rewind and reread what I said but take the word belief as “agreeing with the truth of the statement”. The existence of a deity is a binary. Ignoring questions of “why” one accepts a statement, one either accepts a statement, accepts it’s opposite, or rejects the premise entirely. The conventional empirical agnostic atheist stance is to believe there is no deity because the question is not really knowable, and a claim should be disbelieved without proportional evidence. Belief that there is no god is not the blind assertion that there isn’t one. It just means that’s the state of affairs of reality as far as you know.