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Originally Posted by filtherton
I don't know that atheism needs to have anything to do with a commitment to logic. I've spoken with quite a few atheists who didn't really seem like they were all that concerned with framing their atheism in a logically rigorous way. On the other side, there are plenty of logical reasons to believe in a god. I don't think logic is necessarily relevant in any kind of general way. Certainly you might be an atheist (I'm not sure if you are) out of a commitment to logic, but then one might wonder how such a commitment to logic can be reconciled with the fact that it is very difficult to make a sound logical argument that the universe behaves absolutely logically. At some point in any organized system of ideas, usually near the base, logical arguments evaporate and all we are left with are assumptions. Logic says nothing about the verifiability of these assumptions, just what they must mean if they are true.
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There's anecdotal ignorance on both sides of the fence. Those anecdotes do not address the underlying reasoning. While some people are secular because they follow a certain logical rigor, others simply reject God because they are bitter or angst-ridden. So? Does the presence of the latter group mean that atheism is a weak position? No. No more than the ridiculous claims of fundamentalist Christianity define theism. They merely occupy stations in a spectrum.
As for your claim that a person can't say that the Universe behaves logically -- of course it does! People can tend towards the irrational, but the laws of physics are pretty well defined. When we get down to the subatomic level, we get paradoxes like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. But does that mean or even suggest that God or something mystical hides within this gap of understanding? That depends: How rational are you?
At the edge of understanding, there are always assumptions. In science, this is called a hypothesis. Sir Isaac Newton had a hypothesis about how and why the Moon orbited around the Earth, and how planets revolved around the Sun. The Wright Brothers had a hypothesis about what it would take to keep an aeroplane in the air. We know how these systems work now. At the time, they seemed as cryptic and bizarre as Heisenberg's discovery. But no one would claim that God was moving planets or airplanes around. It was just a matter of testing assumptions until you found the right one.
But when no testable data ever represents itself, over the course of thousands of years, you have to eventually move on to something that is in some way tangible.
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There is evidence. The fact that it doesn't pass a scientific litmus test only invalidates it from a scientific perspective, not a logical perspective. Logic and science are two different things.
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I'm usually a diplomatic guy in these discussions, but... I just got through saying how it's a leap of faith. You're going much further than most religious folk, who acknowledge and accept and are sometimes even proud of the fact that their decision is not based on logic.
Second, separating logic and science this way is, frankly, ridiculous. Logic is used by science all the time. Math
is logic, only defined with numbers instead of words. Science is observation, with logic (often math) used to determine what the observed phenomenon is.