JonJ I'm suggesting that the sort of cognitive leaps that created all of the great paradigmatic changes in rationalist thought and in scientific endeavour are not explicable by any of the empirically grounded approaches. The leap comes first, then the evidence is gathered. In the case of general relativity, it is still being gathered today, 100 years after the original idea.

I'm afraid that someone thinking in the way that you do could never have come up with the theory of infinitesimals, or relativity, or even evolution, because they would be stuck in the mud of their preconceptions.

Never mind, there are interesting things in mud too.

I, like most realists, understand the need for so many to ‘believe’. This is how religion took root in different societies and has grown in so many forms, often in complete isolation to other inhabitants of the earth in earlier times.

This is of course a human trait, based on fear and the verbal, passed down knowledge of nature’s hostility toward a finite being. As such ‘God’ and any evidence of this entity are but a human construct.

Orison Swett Marden put it down pretty simply when he wrote the ‘Joys of Living’ in 1913, specifically when he stated “Nothing is more foolish, nothing more wicked, than to drag the skeletons of the past, the hideous images, the foolish deeds, the unfortunate experiences of yesterday into today's work to mar and spoil it. There are plenty of people, who have been failures up to the present moment, who could do wonders in the future if they only could forget the past, if they only had the ability to cut it off, to close the door on it forever and start anew.”

He also cleverly surmised “There is a strange propensity in human nature to locate all the good things of life in an existence that is yet to come to us. Man is immortal now; is not to be, but is immortal.”

A simple mantra the ‘religious’ followers of today have completely gotten wrong!

To put it simply there is no God.

Ockham's Razor applies, there's no reason to postulate the existence of a Creator, or the supernatural.

The only real understanding of the Universe will be achieved by scientists, not philosophers and definitely not theologians.

Geoff, you're right! There is no God. And those who claim there is such a thing and promise their followers eternal life are perpetuating a massive fraud that has gone on for thousands of years.

Those who have visited the Pyramids and seen the graphics there know full well how fertile man's imagination is when it comes to denying human mortality.

The fraudsters should be rounded up and jailed. They are con-men pure and simple and they prey upon the gullible and the weak!

Richard Shumack,

My debunking claim may have been an overstatement, but the fact remains that the philosophical arguments for god are seriously flawed. For example...

The Kalam cosmological argument: The premise is special pleading and a bald-faced assertion. Nothing physical has ever been shown to be anything other than a re-arrangement of pre-existing parts. Virtual particles are not relevant to Kalam’s notion of causality. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9DLcTfYBcQ)

The cosmological argument from contingency: Special pleading.

The moral argument: The Euthyphro dilemma. Theist attempts to get around this all fail.

Fine tuning: This argument attempts to conjure up some infinitesimally small probabilities based on the unfounded assumption that the laws of physics are mutable. We only have a sample size of 1; so, as far as we can tell, the probability of our universe existing is precisely 1. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pfwgKrdFaDY&t=3541)

The ontological argument: There are many variations, but basically boils down to, “I can conceive of God, therefore he exists”. Can be used to argue the existence of mythical character.

Has it occurred to you that the fact that some philosophers are wasting their time on these arguments could also be attributed to the fact that some simply cannot let go of an idea - especially when they have an emotional dependence on it? There’s still a lot of debate regarding evolution and creation, but does that mean there’s any credibility to creationism? No. It couldn’t possibly be more debunked.

Much of this continuing debate that you speak of is simply the result of some theist philosophers re-working the old discredited arguments to patch the holes that have been poked in them, with others pointing-out the fact that they still don’t work.

Antiseptic,

But that’s not what theists do, though, is it.

<<The leap comes first, then the evidence is gathered.>>

Theists make the leap, arrive at their conclusion, then fill the gap with anything they can find - no matter how fallacious - while ignoring any evidence to the contrary and happily declaring nothing will ever shake their belief.

AJ Phillips, I think you're generalising from extremes and you're also projecting.

The point about cognitive leaps is that they are rarely evidently true to those who don't experience them. Therefore, demanding a facile answer is simply begging the question.

mac, Ockham's Razor doesn't apply, because the empirical approach doesn't address issues of causality or of perceptual variance.

I have moved recently from a confirmed atheist position to a provisional theist one due to some experiences that I have had. I won't bother going into them, but I can see no reason why anyone would doubt my sincerity or my capacity to judge reality from fantasy. why would I lie and what makes you believe I am prone to hallucination?