Rvkevin you're just playing words.
Athiesm is also the belief that theism is wrong. Whether you/we release it or not, any belief requires a combination of both faith and reason. yes, even scientific claims require a degree of faith.
Nonetheless, I think the issue with your proposition is that, once we give credence to the possible idea of a deity existing, there is still the issue of determining exactly what is the nature of it, how it interacts with the universe at large, and a host of other attributes to which, I would hope, have to be defined in order to really be passed as a specific entity rather than some nebulous, unprovable idea. It's when we start trying to do that, that we still fall into the issue that no one really has any coherent idea of what a deity exactly is.
People know what constitutes being a deity, or the diety. A diety is a concept formulated to fill the role of the original cause. Therefore, a diety is considered something that is self-necessary, eternal (required for self-necessity) infinite in potential, and possesses an intellect. You only need to show that a natural entity cannot possess these traits to logically assert that a God must exist. What then becomes more tricky is whether this God cares for us, what his motives are etc.
Sure, we cannot say with any confidence what happened before the big bang, or what caused it (if such ideas of "happening before" and "causation" could even be applied to it). But neither can the religious. I am simply against having people affect others with beliefs that don't even have a shred of evidence of whether it is true or not.
If corroborated evidence ever does arise, I would immediately recognize it for its implications (at least, I hope I would), but, at the moment, how certain policies, beliefs, and events happen based on an idea that has not even started to step into the realm of being proven disturbs me.
But by that same logic, it is no more logical to assume there is no God.
The thing here is that you have a narrow definition of what constitues 'well-founded' belief. You're pretty much saying if it's not scientifically proven it's not worthy of belief, but there are plenty of things which are fact which aren't scientific. The belief that scientific methodology could accurately deduce truth origniated from philosophical logic. Yes we can't always claim our beleifs are irrefutable fact, but logic can point you towards cetrain beliefs, and it's not as if there's no logic/evidence for theism or deism.
However, a bit more interestingly, there are some lines of thought and theories that could give us some insight into the nature of the universe in such a way that it could give us some idea of how it came to be. In this specific case, the model of loop quantum gravity can give some notion as to what was before the big bang (though, in this model, it posits that universe simple has been cycling between big crunches and subsequent big bangs).
There is the issue of whether the idea of loop quantum cosmology being an accurate depiction of how universe really is or not, but it does seem possible to infer or create models for how possibly the universe did get started, and not just forever in the realm of the completely unknowable.
It depends what you mean when you say loop quantum theory. If that's the theory where the unvierse is in an infinite cycle, continually looping, then I'm sorry but that's rubbish. That was proven to be proven to be logically impossible years ago. The infinite regress of time is logically impossible, that's virtually a logical fact. If you're talking about things such as time having a 'curvature', such as what Steven Hawkins said, then that becomes more plausible.
I think you also give little credit to religion. The Catholic Chruch for example, has hundreds of mriacles correlating to it, as well as historical facts, as well as alot of theological prophecies that have been successfully fulfilled which are hard to explain. If you look into the alleged evidence of the Church, you may not believe it, but you'll notice it has a very strong argument.
The thing is, the reason why I say the burden of proof is on atheists is because their belief contradicts natural theology. Essentially, atheists argue that a purely naturlistic, non-intellectual entity was the original cause. However, to be the original cause, an entity has to be self-necessary, eternal (required for self-necessity), infinite in potential, and have an intellect (this is more debatable though). The thing is, even if you remove intellect as a necessity, in all of the world, no natural entity fits these traits.
No (or at least no known) natural entity is self-necessary, eternal, or infinite in potential. Now I'm not saying atheism is stupid or wrong, but because atheism contradicts inductive logic, the atheist cannot sit on his backside and assume his belief is the well-founded alternative because the deist cannot prove God's existence.
In other words, I believe that until someone has a philosophically sound argument for atheism, they're not well-founded for their belief in it, the same as a theist's belief is not well-founded if he believes merely because of his upbringing and fails to investigate it philosophically.
Thanks for your answers.
