This post asks a lot of questions and invites anyone to participate in a respectful conversation or debate. I don't claim to have all the answers and am open to entertaining any ideas on the matter you may have.
I'm an agnostic atheist. I don't claim to know the answers regarding the origins of existence and I don't believe any of the theistic claims so far made by anyone else due to a lack sufficient evidence supporting the claim. When I speak of know the answers I'm speaking of a practical and useful version of knowledge which I wrote about in my previous post Truth Seeking and The Problem With Trusting Personal Experience. Casting aside solipsism for something useful we must operate under the guide that knowledge is demonstrable.
Quite frankly I can't conceive of how anyone would be able to have the answers to these questions. I have also not come across a single theistic supernatural claim that stands up to scrutiny. They all seem to fall on logical fallacies. Some claims seemingly fail in their definition of a god as being logically inconsistent with itself. We also know that some of these claims have to be false if others are true, meaning someone is wrong for sure. Given some of the religions have to false how do you know your religion isn't the wrong one? There certainly is no proof that any of them are the right one.
When I look at all the theistic supernatural claims of the thousands of religions, many being contradictory and impossible to simultaneously be true I can only think one thing. Isn't this exactly what you would expect to see if none of the claims were true? Isn't existence as we see it today exactly what you would expect from a godless universe? How would things be different from now if there is no god? I can't think of how it would be different from what we have. Conversely I can think of many ways things would be different if there was indeed a god. Answered prayers would be a thing for starters. We would witness this god intervening and bringing inconsistency in physics while doing so.
I know many apologists have ready baked answers for my questions but none of them seem to pass the sniff test.
Why is faith a virtue? When I talk about this with my religious friends it always comes down in the end to that they have no logical reason to believe but they have faith. Why is that a good thing? Why is suspending your critical thinking and allowing cognitive dissonance not shunned?
Is it not selfish to feel entitled to answers? Another thing my religious friends have told me is that it's an answer that makes sense to them without it things don't make sense. Why should the universe have to make sense to us though?
Isn't just admitting you don't actually know the most honest stance to take?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments.