I can see this clarification going nowhere fast.
So I'll reply despite it.
The theory of evolution makes atheism more of a viable position than it was previously.
If every phenomenon in existence is explained naturally then the only room left for God would be the margin of error in the mass of evidence supporting those explanations. Currently, God has a lot more room than this but clearly every naturalistic discovery makes this room smaller. Naturalism can never disprove God for sure. It can only continue to make atheism appear more likely than theism.
If and when a non-naturalistic phenomenon is discovered, this trend will be completely reversed and atheism will be shown false.
*natural in this post means non-divine.
I disagree for a couple of reasons. One, the idea that "God" is an explanation (for natural phenomena) in no way hinders or is compromised by a natural explanation provided "God" is a
supernatural aspect of that very same nature (as is held by some) for example, the idea that God "lives" or "resides", metaphorically speaking, in every event, every thing. And second, as I understand it
naturalism ignores the
supernatural aspect; it does nothing to disprove or even disuade it. It doesn't even attempt to do that, as it's happily discounting it.
A non-naturalistic phenomena should properly never be discovered, since if it was it would nave
no nature by which to know it.
I disagree for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think that "determined to be true" is too vague. When is something determined to be true? It can't be when you have accepted its truth because then "We believe in things because they are determined true" is the same as saying "We believe in things when we accept their truth" which is trivial.
Is that true, what you said? Is it true that you think "determined to be true" is too vague? Is it trivial? The point at which we determine a thing to be
true is the point at which it is "true to us", and since we're the ones doing the believing, that's the significant point.
On the other hand, it can't be when a belief is measured against a standard apart from yourself because then there is no guarantee that the standard is actually measuring truth. For example, plenty of people will say that one way of determining something to be true is if it can be found in scripture. Other people say that its whatever the pixie on their shoulder tells them. More still will tell you that science or reason has the answers. And whilst all these situations are very different, what they all have in common is a claim of a mechanism of truth without a clear explanation of how that mechanism works. So "We believe in things because they are determined true" would mean "We believe in things because we believe them to be true" which, again, is trivial.
Somehow, I suspect that whatever "standard" apart from oneself that one uses to judge what is
true is their standard because it's true to the individual who uses it.
Again with the belief in the trivial.
Secondly, once we accept that beliefs are as much of an agent as we are (memetics), it becomes apparent that there is only one attribute that matters, survivability, and that only the humans and the beliefs that have that trait are the ones who will dominate. Is truth the same as survivability? No because there are thousands of religions most of which are mutually exclusive (and so clearly can't all be true) and therefore are very survivable without being true. It is not just religion either. Look back to when everyone knew that Newton was right. Look back to the 60s when everyone assumed that no other object than the sun could possibly emit radio waves that would reach the earth.
Newton was not wrong --his models still work and are still in use. Motion is still being measured relative to the rate of change in position of a body at a particular speed. It doesn't become untrue just because we have more accurate ways of measuring or more information available by which to formulate new equations. The truth of Newton's laws remains truth
in its context.
I won't comment on the truth of religions, though --that depends on what a person is holding about the religion to be true.
