Quote:
Originally Posted by uBeR
Atheism is the absence of theism, that is, a belief in God or gods. How many things do you not believe in? Do you believe there's a magical flying teapot orbiting Neptune? Do you believe there's a talking unicorn in your room? Do you believe you're some magical cat who has the ability to appear and act like a human? Does not believing these things make you faithful? Does not believing these things make you "ignorant and unquestioning"?
Certainly these things are logically possible. You cannot deny with 100% certainty that anything logically possible is false, just as the epistemic skeptic tell us. But there's no good reason to believe in anything, merely because it's logically possible. If you don't have any evidence for the above things I listed, then you are perfectly rational to withhold belief, and I'm sure most skeptics would say so too. In fact, if you have evidence against them, e.g. you don't see or hear a unicorn in your room, then your absence of belief is even more reasonable. According to the skeptic, there is absolutely nothing you can be 100% certain of in the empirical world. You can't be certain you're sitting in front of a computer monitor reading this forum. Does the fact that you believe you are making you "ignorant and unquestioning"? That's a pretty big leap.
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Obviously your examples are outlandish, whereas with a God/creator, we truly can't know because what if he did create everything, how would we disprove that? You could say the Grand Canyon was clearly made from erosion, but then you could counter and say that that was God's intent. The only thing we can really counter religion/god/creationism with is deductive reasoning and our own intuition, but even science says that's not enough to form a solid conclusion. We have the hypothesis, but we don't have a workable and reworkable method to prove it.