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Do you know? Aren't you afraid to say before God that you know what he is? And if you don't know, how can you claim that it exists?
This is actually such a demagogic trick – ” do you know?”. In any normal conversation, the parties first agree on definitions. I am an easy-going person in this sense, tell me what we will mean by “God”, I will agree.
But in fact, the question “is there a God” is completely superfluous. The correct question is “is it necessary to have one”. If it is necessary, then we must believe that it is there. And if we go around, don't. And the concepts I know that require him to exist are either no more convincing than mine, in which he is better off if he is not, or they are immoral to the point of indecency and therefore completely unconvincing – if God, as these concepts describe him, existed, it would be the greatest meanness to worship him. There are also concepts that simply double down on concepts – they take something that exists (the universe, the laws of physics, ethics) and call it “god”, but this is just a scam or advanced idolatry – an advance in the fact that the idol has ceased to be material.
Counter-question to the author: “Which god do you mean?” Yahweh? Allah? The Buddha? (Although he is not supposed to be a god, but a spiritual teacher). Perhaps one of the gods of various pagan pantheons?
Please don't take my question as an insult. After all, there are many religions, representatives of each of them (often) they consider their picture of the world to be the only correct one. So to answer the question of whether I believe in God and why, I need to know which one.
I'm sorry, I'm “not a real atheist”, but if you can, I'll still answer.
There is such a thing as a scientific approach to research. To talk about the existence of something, its properties, etc., it is necessary to meet a number of simple and understandable requirements related to the possibility of repeating the result, checking them for falsifiability, etc.
Atheists didn't invent God. This was done by believers. So it is logical that they should provide evidence of his existence, or at least establish descriptive criteria for what God is. And then these criteria can be checked, analyzed and said that God exists or does not exist, that God has such properties, but we either cannot check such properties, or we have checked them and it has not been confirmed.
What do we have in practice? There were times when priests tried to describe God (not the fact that they did it correctly, but still). But the old stories about the firmament, a white-bearded, handsome man sitting on a cloud, and the creation of the world seven and a half thousand years ago were safely refuted. Now the “line of defense” is built with reinforced concrete: the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, the Lord is unknowable, and in general, if you believe, then you will understand for yourself. In other words, everything is done so that it is not possible to know God, and the opponents themselves must present evidence of his non-existence.
The logic is great: we won't tell you what God is, so you don't know what God is, and so you can't say that he doesn't exist. It's time to think about Russell's Teapot, the Flying Macaroni Monster, and the Invisible Pink Unicorn, which fully match the same description, but I won't.
Therefore, I would formulate the following position not of atheists, but of agnostics, to which I have reason to consider myself: in the studied part of the universe, no signs of the existence of any super-being have yet been found, the known laws of nature fully explain everything without introducing additional entities, and believers are not in a hurry to present a list of criteria by which it would be possible to check whether there is a God or not, and that it is their God who exists, and not the conventional Odin, Buddha, or Zeus. Therefore, it is pointless to spend time and effort on checks. There will be criteria – come, we will discuss verification methods, etc., but there is no answer and there is no court.
Again, I will have to answer for the atheists, because nothing intelligible will come from them.
That's what atheism is all about-ignorance. I deny what I don't know. This reminds me of Chichikov's dialogue with Korobochka. Do you remember? Chichikov asks Korobochka if she knows such a landowner Manilov. And Korobochka answered him: “I don't know any Manilov, and there is no such landowner at all.” If I don't know, then I don't know at all. It is the same for atheists. The Bible and the Gospel were not read, the holy Fathers were not read, but they immediately rejected everything. I am, of course, a sinful person, and I will stand next to atheists at the Last Judgment, but my only joy, before being thrown into hell, will be to see the faces of atheists. By the way, not “what is God”, but “Who is God?”.
Just as there is a presumption of innocence, so there is a presumption of atheism. The human mind does not have to prove the unprovable, i.e., the existence of a god who always has an alibi.
The best way to answer this question is in the words of Socrates. “I know I don't know anything.” No one knows anything about it. Including priests. Hypotheses are not the truth. Faith is a personal matter. Because-someone is Orthodox, someone is a Muslim, someone is a Catholic, etc. And someone is an atheist. And no one needs to impose or prove anything. And it's even worse to hate each other on religious grounds.
And who can know exactly what it is if there is no proof of its existence? Everyone is free to come up with their own version or not at all.