It is just the worn out old straw man, that all atheism is "hard atheism", which it is not. Hard atheists who are willing to declare their certainty that there is no god and no supernatural or undiscovered natural realms beyond the known, are rare among atheists. Most atheists are soft atheists, who simply declare that they have found no convincing evidence for god, and prefer not to believe without that, or agnostic atheists who do not think it likely that anyone has found such evidence, and think it a waste of effort even to pursue it.

This article is fairly typical of the poor shabby values applied to thinking, which often occurs in those who have come under the thrall of religion, with its destructive effects on the best qualities of the human personality, especially honesty and values. Sadly sometimes found even among scientists. Though of course it is quite possible that the writer is just ignorant of atheism and does not understand it, which is excusable even if not good.

The argument is one which I have heard hundreds of times from apologists, who love it, and is typical of the straw man fallacy. Of defining a thing into existence, in such a way that it is perfectly suited to your counter argument, even though that may not reflect reality.

Atheism is not inconsistent with science because atheism is not a belief system, atheism is the absence of belief/faith.

"If I declare that my god is real and that it's scriptures are infallible."

Atheists do not make the assertion that a god does not exist because then they would have to prove that assertion. An atheist does not care about unsubstantiated beliefs. Believers try to project that everyone is concerned or obsessed with their gods.

Everyone is agnostic, including theists. They, like everyone else, DO NOT KNOW definitively if a god exists, that is why agnosticism is irrelevant.

In order to know, you must have knowledge, in order to have knowledge, you must have evidence. Believers simply believe without evidence producing knowledge. An atheist accepts knowledge that evidence produces. Theists have NOT produced any evidence for gods.

This is why atheists demand proof in order to obtain knowledge and theists demand belief in order to sustain their faith.

A god is not defined by reality or existence, believers make the assertion that it is, the god makes no assertion whether it exists or not, it is therefore the believer who must then prove the assertions they make.

Religion says believe it.
Science says prove it.

He's an agnostic.

He says you cannot prove the non existence of god. Fair enough. However lack of negative proof does not equate to positive evidence - or by that argument there is suddenly positive evidence of everything that has not been proved false. Rabbits performing Italian grand opera, anyone? No-one has actively disproved the idea.

Yet to say you admit that operatic rabbits cannot be disproved (they might be SOMEWHERE) doesn't mean you actually give the idea any serious credit. You can still not believe in operatic rabbits, even while acknowledging that they cannot be disproved.

No, it isnt.

I could explain to you why, but my hand puppets are in storage.

It does not matter whether a scientist speaks Chinese, Japanese, English or any other language because science is based upon a universal yardstick.

There are no parameters/experiments/apparatus to prove the existence or non existence of any god(s) because such notions do not admit of scientific testing. The Higgs Boson theory was postulated within the existing framework of physics/mathematics, no such framework exists for the notion of god(s).

It seems to me that god(s) and science belong in two distinct categories.

If anyone makes a claim that particular theory is based in science then the onus is on them to produce evidence that such is the case. Ever since the birth of modern science there has been a trend to seek scientific endorsement for a theory and no shortage of people who claim that the work of such and such persons is based in science.

To disprove the existence of God, you'd have to be all-knowing - in other words, God.

Marcelo's "argument" is profoundly nonsensical.

Present credible and verifiable evidence for the existence of any god, and I'll reconsider my stance.
Until then, it is perfectly reasonable for me to deny the existence of that which has no proof of its existence.

What a dumb thing for any scientist to say.

Seeing as how he won the so called Templeton award which is given for "affirming life's spiritual dimension," I'm not surprised by what he is trying to say.

Go about your business.

There's nothing to see here.

He is merely contending that you can't prove there are no gods.

Faith is the problem, faith that your god is real, faith there cannot be deities.
For myself, I see no evidence that there are what are known as gods by western definition. Thus, I am an atheist. Should evidence arise to counter my belief, then being a scientist change my mind.
In the hardest sense, Marcelo Gleiser is correct that atheism is inconsistent with science, but this is the same for faith in any of the pretend sky faeries humans have invented to explain the world.

excerpting: " I don’t believe.’ Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, ‘Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.’ "

Gleiser is contriving a distinction where there is none (except for the hard or strong atheists). That's because Gleiser doesn't see religion as a bad alternative to science. He gives religion a pass as so many people do in order to preserve their social standing.

Actually, Gleiser is projecting, and has it upside down and backwards. It is religionists who espouse beliefs that are disproved by science, as we know only too well. Religionists can only be scientists if they completely wall off and segregate their beliefs from their science. How can one search for answers when all the answers you'll ever need are in this or that holy book?

Show me a competent scientist who combines their idiotic superstitions with their research.

The existence of God/gods is not the difficult or important question. As “ignosticism” claims, you must first agree upon a definition of the word, “god”, before the question of god’s existence is even relevant or meaningful.

And in the absence of such agreement the question then defaults to “Does a god of ANY description exist?”

And the answer to that is easy. Of course, god as a figure of speech (metaphor) symbolizing nature, reality, truth, love, highest values, etc. self-evidently does exist.

The only issue left to argue about is God’s nature. And different folks will always have different ideas about that. But the question of God’s existence is not difficult to settle. Gods of certain descriptions are observable.

If your response is “But THAT’s not what people mean when they use the word, “God”, then you’re back to arguing about God’s nature.

Clearly not ALL people, or even all religious people envision God as a literal person.

Most arguments that people think are about the “existence of God” are really only about the existence of a particular god - a literal, personal god.

And not only is there no evidence for that god’s existence, there are mountains of evidence for why humans are evolutionarily predisposed to believing in them.

So, in my view, there are insufficient rational grounds for agnosticism about either Russell’s teapot, on the one hand, or the existence of metaphorical gods, on the other.

As someone who prefers to be referred to as agnostic, I find much more in common with atheists than theists including an overlap of how many atheists define their lack of belief in any diety. I realize that my lack of any belief in any particular diety also fits under the the definition of atheism, even though I don't choose to use that term for myself.

While I would tend to believe that the concept of diety as a whole has not and perhaps cannot be disproved - very many concepts of diety exist - I do believe certain specific definitions of diety have been discredited sufficiently as to have been disproved. Amoung these, imo, would be the conception of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God.

In terms of science, the utter lack of any proof of any Gods make attempts to disprove God generally an utter waste of time. The disproving of particular claims concerning the existence of Gods may be worthy of addressing as has been the case with claims coming out of the Discovery Institute in past decades. The goal of the Discovery Institute was deceptive from the beginning claiming to want to advance science when its true aim was to promote one particular religion - Christianity - by appearing to discredit science using essentially pseudoscientific conclusions pretending to disprove long standing scientific theories.

Marcelo Gleiser is as brain damaged as Francis S. Collins.

To answer your question, he is not thinking at all.

So is religion, what is your point?

For future reference, this is from Wikipedia:

"Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities.Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist.In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities."

I have to agree with the basic premise that pure, unadulterated atheism is unscientific. That is, if atheism is defined as belief that God does not exist, which is not the same as lack of belief in God's existence. If it is the former, then to claim that the lack of evidence of God proves his non-existence would be going too far. Absence of evidence of God is not proof that He does not exist. HOWEVER, a scientist could reasonably talk in terms of probabilities, and say that, considering the dearth of evidence of God's existence, the many inconsistencies in His personality (e.g. His supposed benevolence contrasted with his obvious indifference to the suffering of innocents), and the human propensities for invention and for lying, the PROBABILITY of there actually being a God is vanishingly small. It would be perfectly acceptable for a scientist to self-identify as an atheist-leaning agnostic, or an agnostic who estimates the probability of God's existence at 0.01%, or says (s)he is 99.99% certain that He does not exist. That would be quite alright. But I doubt that most scientists spend a whole lot of time on this issue. There are many more pressing matters at hand.

Being an atheist has nothing to do with science. Atheism is a lack of belief in a god. Science doesn't try to prove there is a god.

From my knowledge science doesn't try to prove God or God's exist or not. Scientists simply do test's, have theories that happen to question the word of the religious beliefs. Many scientists believe in some sort of powering force of nature they regularly don't believe in the text in religious scripture. There is a BIG difference in believing in deities something supernatural and believing in religious script. Of course this is just my opinion which don't count for much. I just might be full of crap though. At the end of the day all this is everyone personal opinions since there is NO way to prove or disprove one or many "gods" exist or not. I personally do not believe in any kind of deity or anything supernatural but I absolutely despise organized religion period.

Just goes to show that a person of letters with the prefix, Dr., in front of their name doesn't mean they're above saying something ignorant.

And what does "affirming life's spiritual dimension" mean? Does it mean spiritual in the sense that something is deep and meaningful to you like a love of nature, or is it an affirmation of spirits, ghosts and that sort of thing, or is an affirmation that a spirit dimension of souls and the afterlife are affirmed? What does this award recognize?

There's no proof either way. So?

This is the kind of sloppy thinking that tends to get the Templeton Prize. As opposed to real scientific inquiry, they start with a desired conclusion and backfill the arguments (note I didn’t write “evidence&rdquo. Atheism is totally consistent with science as the proposition that gods exist has no evidentiary support. Therefore there is no reason to consider it.