@ answered at top :)

Copy and pasted here:

@Fish&Chips

...” does that mean you are open to the possibility that there is?”

I’m open at about a .01% for maybe something unexplainable that might be reckon’d a god - don’t really know though because nothing like that has been evidenced in this universe. I’m at a 0% for any god described by man.

...eg of universe forming “ This, paired with all the other odd-defying supposed coincidences ...”

It is mind blowing. Here’s putting it in perspective- you can think of all the sperm ejaculated and a woman’s monthly cycle. Now it’s only that “one sperm and egg” that made “you” (otherwise someone else would be here). If your dad had (excuse the crudeness) jacked off early morning “you’d be nonexistent”. Follow this back to grandparents, etc... fuck, you shouldn’t be here. Do you know what the odds are for your very existence by a natural sex act?!?! It’s crazy. Yet you are here. So is the universe.

... “If you look out on any building, how do you know there was a builder?”

Read of course the whole paragraph ;)
But, from what I understand, I could look at the building and say “Hey, this is proof that there is a greater invisible building making buildings in its image...”

I don’t get much into labels. “Agnostic” maayyybbbeee with the whole I don’t know (.01% something) ... atheist fully when it comes to man’s idea of god or “knowing” this “something”.

@ FishNChips007

"So, building is to builder as painting is to painter, as creation is to: ?"

Not at all. We know from past experiences, including even watching buildings under construction, the origin of such constructs. But we do not have any emerging universes to compare against, so to assume it was created is just that, an unevidenced assumption.

Oh look who's returned. And with so many canards ripe for the unleashing of the discoursive ordnance. This should keep me entertained for an hour or so ...

Is Merriam-Webster's dictionary correct in defining "atheism," as: " a: a lack of belief or a strong disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods. b: a philosophical or religious position characterized by disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods."

Oh look, it's that favourite piece of mythology fanboy duplicity known as argumentum ad lexicographio. Which fails for the following reason.

General purpose dictionaries are aimed at providing information on everyday and colloquial usage of words, and have a habit of devoting little or no space to the rigorous use of those words within relevant disciplines. An apposite example of this is provided by Merriam-Webster's entry for tensorDefinition of tensor

1: a muscle that stretches a part
2: a generalized vector with more than three components each of which is a function of the coordinates of an arbitrary point in space of an appropriate number of dimensions

From the standpoint of mathematicians, that second definition is woefully inadequate, because it makes no mention whatsoever of the essential features that differentiate a genuine tensor from another object merely resembling a tensor in the world of mathematics. Namely, that [1] a tensor obeys a well-defined set of coordinate transformation laws, and as a corollary thereof, is independent of the coordinate system within which it currently resides , and [2] the number of components thereof is R^N, where R is the total rank of the tensor, and N is the number of dimensions of the space within which it is embedded.

As a corollary, no mathematician would rely upon the woefully weak account of the nature of a tensor in the Merriam-Webster definition.

Likewise, those of us who paid attention in class, and exerted intellectual effort learning about the requisite concepts, regard attempts to strawman atheism via specious recourse to non-technical dictionaries with well-deserved scorn and derision. From a rigorous standpoint, atheism is nothing more than suspicion of unsupported supernaturalist assertions. That is IT. in short, if consists of "YOU assert that your magic man exists, YOU support your assertion". The inference being of course, that in the absence of proper test or evidential support of said assertion, no one is required to do other than discard said assertion, in accordance with the rules of proper discourse, rules which I and others here frequently see being flagrantly violated by mythology fanboys during the peddling of their apologetic fabrications.

In short, we discard mythology fanboy assertions about the existence of their various cartoon magic men, because none of those assertions have ever been accompanied by genuine evidential support, and as a corollary, all of those assertions are discardable in accordance with the rules of proper discourse.

This does not, of course, mean summary dismissal of the idea that a god type entity of some sort might exist, but until actual evidence for such an entity arrives, we may safely operate as though such an entity does not exist. We may treat the requisite assertion as discardable, until we have data informing us otherwise.

Now, let's see what other canards await, shall we?

If "atheism" is correctly defined here, does that not mean that atheists believe that there is no God?

reject belief itself as purportedely constituting a source of "knowledge". Quite simply it doesn't, because belief, certainly as practiced by mythology fanboys, consists of nothing more than uncritical acceptance of unsupported assertions. NOT treating sunsupported assertions in this manner is, by definition, the antithesis of "belief".

Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines, "agnostic," as follows: "1: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (such as God) in unknown and probably unknowable. broadly: one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god. 2: a person who is unwilling to commit to an opinion about something."

And again, your tiresome resort to a non-technical source omits several important applicable nuances. Foremost among these being that it is possible to be agnostic about god type entities in their most general form, but to consider specific asserted candidates for the role to be null and void for cogent reasons. Cogent reasons such as the fact that those specific candidates are asserted to possess logically contradictory attributes, or are asserted by accident or design within the requisite mythologies to be purportedly untestable. Of course, those of us who paid attention in class are already aware of the patterns being established here, with respect to [1] the manner in which those mythologies upon which doctrines are built, have a tendency to be little more than laundry lists of unsupported (and in some cases untestable) assertions, and [2] the manner in which mythology fanboys routinely resort to egregious violations of the proper rules of discourse, in order to peddle their vacuous ex recto apologetics.

Indeed, if you had bothered to conduct even the most elementary of checks before posting your ardent nonsense, you would have discovered that I am on public record here and elsewhere, as welcoming the appearance of evidence for the existence of a god type entity, on the grounds that said evidence will almost surely falsify all of the risible pre-scientific mythologies that various fanboys masturbate over. Again, I have become depressingly familiar with the intellectual indolence of mythology fanboys, both with respect to prior research and exploration of the requisite ideas, and your posts here are woefully true to form.

While atheism, requires a decision to disbelieve

BBBBBZZZZZZZZTTTTTTT!!!!! WRONG!!!!

You have it backwards, as is usual for mythology fanboys. There is no "decision to disbelieve", it's the default option according to the proper rules of discourse, to discard unsupported assertions.

The genuine "decision" being made here, is the decision by mythology fanboys like you, to treat unsupported assertions from mythologies uncritically as purportedly constituting fact. A decision taken again in violation of the proper rules of discourse.

and committing to an opinion for sure

Except that once again, you have it backwards. Because those of us who paid attention in class, are perfectly prepared to modify our views the moment we have data informing us that this is required. Whereas, all too frequently, mythology fanboys have been vocal with respect to admitting that no amount of data refuting their most cherished assertions would cause them to change their minds. Several famous (or, in some cases, notorious) figures from the world of mythology fanboyism have delivered public declarations to this effect.

defining one's mind-set around disbelief in any god

Except that here we have an instance of that well-known mythology fanboy abuse of discourse known as quantifier abuse. Do learn the elementary concept that "some" does not equal "all". Just because those of us who paid attention in class, consider the cartoon magic men of mythology to be fatuous, does not means summary rejection of other candidates yet devised. I'm perfectly prepared to accept an entity that provides some observational data for its existence, and in doing so, either demonstrates consonance with known physics, or the existence of consistent extensions to known physics. What I'm not prepared to do, is treat uncritically as fact, assertions in a mythology written by people who were incapable of counting correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses.

agnosticism holds more of an unwillingness to commit to any particular view-point focusing more on the admission of not knowing.

Except that as I've already expounded above, it's perfectly possible not to know in the general case, but at the same time to be certain of the truth or falsity of specific instances.

These two world-views are opposed to each other, since one denies the existence of any gods and the other is simply set on not knowing and unwillingness to commit either way.

And with my above exposition, I've just tossed your simplistic, naive and binary view into the bin.

So, which of the two world-views do you subscribe to?

Since your two options are simplistic caricatures of the reality in question, your question is null and void in the light of my exposing your options as being thus.

Okay, another question: do you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything?

Oh dear, you just HAD to erect THIS canard, didn't you?

Time to break out the serious ordnance ...

Let's deal with the "atheists believe something out of nothing" canard once and for all, shall we?

Item one. Atheists dispense with belief altogether. Instead, if they're contemplating a postulate properly,/em>, they ask "what evidence exists in support of this postulate?", and look to whichever discipline is supplying the evidence.

Item two. The people who REALLY think the universe came from "nothing", are those supernaturalists who think their imaginary magic man from their favourite mythology, waved his magic todger and poofed the universe into existence from nothing. So even before I move on to the next items, this alone stuffs the "atheists think the universe came from nothing" excrement down the toilet and pulls the flush hard.

Item three. The question of the origin of the universe has nothing to do with atheism. This question is the remit of cosmological physics. And, once again, those of us who paid attention in class, turn to that discipline, and ask what postulates arise therefrom, and what evidence is supplied in support thereof.

Item four. No cosmological physicist presents the fatuous notion that the universe "came from nothing". Instead, cosmological physicists postulate that testable natural processes, involving well-defined interactions acting upon well-defined entities, were responsible for the origin of the observable universe in its current form.

Item five. The question of the origin of the universe is an active research topic, and as a corollary, a number of hypotheses are extant in the field, with respect to the origin of the observable universe. Indeed, it's a measure of how far cosmological physics has progressed, that researchers in the field are able to postulate a number of pre-Big-Bang cosmologies, and then work out how to test those cosmologies and the hypotheses underpinning them. See my above brief exposition on the work of Steinhardt & Turok for an example.

Item six. As an example of the ideas extant in the literature, I'm aware of two papers by Steinhardt & Turok, in which they propose a pre-Big-Bang cosmology centred upon braneworld collisions, and which possesses three elegant features. Namely:

[1] It provides a mechanism for the donation of energy to the newly instantiated universe, facilitating subsequent matter synthesis;

[2] It eliminates the singularity problem from standard Big Bang cosmology;

[3] It provides a testable prediction, namely that the power spectrum of primordial gravitational waves will take a specific form, with the graph skewed towards short wavelengths.

Indeed, [3] above is one of the reasons scientists have been labouring diligently, to produce operational gravitational wave detectors, precisely so that they can test this prediction, once they've learned how to distinguish between primordial gravitational waves and gravitational waves of more recent origin. The moment they learn to do this, the requisite tests will be conducted. Furthermore, if those tests reveal a power spectrum that matches the Steinhardt-Turok prediction, then Steinhardt & Turok walk away with the Nobel Prize for Physics. Anyone exercising reasonable diligence here, will know that I've covered Steinhardt & Turok's work in some detail already on these forums, and the relevant exposition can be found in this post.

Word of warning for you, boy ... do NOT venture into this level of duplicity again.

If the universe began to exist, it therefore must have had a cause. Do you believe the universe began to exist?

And once again, we see the duplicity inherent in treating science as a branch of apologetics. It isn't. Learn this lesson quickly, boy.

To deal with this, see Item Four above in my demolition of your tiresome regurgitation of the "atheists believe the universe came from nothing" bullshit.

One more question: and you do not have to answer of course, as it is a personal question. When did you begin to have faith in atheism?

You're acquiring quite a reputation for duplicity at this point, and it's not going to be good for you.

What part of "NOT treating unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as fact, is the very antithesis of 'faith' " do you not understand?