Ask An Atheist: Are you sure there’s no God?

Ah, those absolutes.

Am I absolutely sure Cleopatra existed?  Am I absolutely sure there is actually an Andromeda galaxy?  Am I absolutely sure atoms exist?  Am I absolutely sure horoscopes don’t work?  Am I absolutely sure there are no leprecauns?  Am I absolutely sure that no one spoke Klingon 1000 years ago?  Am I absolutely sure no Neandethal ever said the Rosary?

Am I absolutely sure that if you pray diligently to your god to miraculously restore a limb lost by some landmine in war or terrorism, that nothing whatsoever will happen to make the limb reappear?  Am I absolutely sure that if an experiment is performed where 100,000 people deliberately and publicly blaspheme against gods currently or previously believed to be real (working methodically through an extensive list, to see varied examples), that nothing will happen to them as a group?  Though there are the remote odds that individuals might accidentally get struck by lightning or have a heart attack, them’s the odds after all.

Yeh to all of those.

That absolute belief is, as always, open to new evidence.  But I’m not holding my breath that such evidence will appear, so my provisional absolute remains such.

And once again, there is that implicit parochial assumption in the question that there is just that one “God” I am to be certain of or not.  If people used a fresh word for the idea, say “spurgle,” asking are you absolutely sure there is no spurgle, people would immediately want to know what you mean by spurgle (and whether it means much of anything without a lot of deck-stacking).

Please, the next time such questions get asked, perhaps an addition of which god I am supposed to be deciding on, and while you’re at it, a brief explanation as to why that god get’s preference in the conversation over all the others that are believed in by all the people who don’t believe in the one you do.  Are you as absolutely certain of the nonexistence of their gods as they are absolutely certain of the nonexistence of your own?  And must I give one of your certainties preference over all the others?

I’m absolutely sure not enough people think enough about that one.