Whatever, its still a sizeable amount.
No... It's not... It's something like 4-5% in Australia.
Going by Pascal's wager its the other way around actually.
Who said anything about that junk logic?
Santa has never been professed as a diety. I think your biggest problem is that you're applying a percentage scale to something that is has an infinite probability. What if the creator was neither god nor non-god, how can you even begin to profess and declare something that is so completely out of the range of the human mind?
A SUPERNATURAL Santa is also completely out of the range of the human mind, it does not matter that no one professes santa as a diety. Seriously what you have to understand about the analogy between X supernatural entity and Y supernatural entity, is that the ONLY thing that needs to be true for both is that they're not falsifiable.
You CANNOT disprove the existance of a magical santa claus, or a magic cow floating around mars, or that our existance is all a dream ANYMORE than you can that God exists - yet almost everyone will not claim agnosticism about such things. In situations where you have no concievable way of proving something either way, the posibility of it being true bursts open all currently known logic/knowledge and requires many more wild assumption(s)... then it is fairly safe to say 'it is not true'.
So yea... Being an agnostic is always going to be the more easily justifiable position. I can admit that I don't have all knowledge, so if you want to be really technical I'm an agnostic. The only way I could not would be if I knew something for certain... which really, I don't. Whenever human beings make a claim about something existing, it is generally accepted that evidence of its existance will be needed, or it's fair enough to say it doesn't exist.
Cannot be verified by the methods you consider to be acceptable you mean
Well yes. I would argue that it cannot be verified via scientific method at all, but hey maybe it can and I'm just very silly.
no offence but science has lost so many subfields and has been rewritten so many times one could hardly rely on it with any genuine belief in eternal correctness.
I don't believe in its 'eternal correctness'... that doesn't even matter to me. What matters to me is that science represents the best knowledge we have, at the time.
I'm only towing my line, and notice that both christians and atheists become hostile to those who do not share their view - to me it will always seems as .. same bullsh*t, different assholes
I'm 'hostile' to you because you're;
a) a hostile person yourself,
b) hold views that I really don't like.
I'm telling you that I am not arrogant enough to publically spout my beliefs without proof, be they one way or the other.
And I'm telling you that you ALREADY do spout beliefs that cannot be proven 100%, especially if we're willing to throw supernatural explanations into the equation. You say you're male? I say you're just a program in a computer made to think you're male - or a fairy has magically fooled you into thinking so. Surely you're not agnostic about that, you just reject it.
Again thats something which can be verified, not saying that it will, but it can - what I'm arguing is that the atheist argument itself CAN'T be verified.
No, it can't be verified. You cannot verify against ANY supernatural claims.
You cannot apply logic where no conclusive evidence or result exists
No conclusive evidence exists for anything once we start allowing supernatural claims into the equation.
