filtherton

What evidence? Show what evidence there is to discount the existence of a diety. The argument between atheists and spiritualists can really be summed up with a repeated back-and-forth of "you're wrong" and "no, your wrong." The basis of the conflict is a strong sense that the other fella's wrong. There is no "evidence" either way, at least not in the scientific sense.

Just to be clear, i'm pretty much agnostic. I do find instances of faith in others, be it atheist or spiritual, to be interesting, though.


Edit: and as an aside about ockham's razor: I've never understood why it would be advantageous, if one is attempting to figure something out, to always pursue the simplest explanation. I could see it being advantageous to choose the explanation most easily verified, which might sometimes be the simplest. Very often, explanations are complex. I have a feeling that if mr. ockham was alive today he'd be selling diets and herbal supplements on late night television.

It reminds of something i once heard concerning people who lived in the last millenia. I'm not sure which century exactly. The deal is that they thought that rats were borne out of dirty rags, and that maggots spawned directly from rotting meat.

I could see this discovery being predicated on ockham's razor. You have youself a rat problem and you notice that the rats happen to like your cellar, which has a pile of dirty rags in it(it might be the food, too). Now, given the choice between the idea that the rats are the result of complex biological systems working within the framework of the ecology of your neighborhood who mate and produce offspring, and the idea that the rats just spawn out of the rags, which idea would ockham have you choose? Which one is simpler?

Also, though an above example uses ockham's razor to refute theism, it strikes me that the idea of a god as the originator of our universe is actually a whole lot simpler than whatever the scientific soup dujour on the subject.