Some atheists nomatter what will not believe a God exist.
Most atheists decide what is true about the world by applying reason to evidence. We are mostly rational skeptics, meaning that we believe that nothing should be accepted as true without sufficient support to justify belief. We also believe that such evidence hasn't been found or provided, therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in gods.
Most of us are willing to believe whatever evidence suggests, including in the existence of gods.
What you are describing - belief or unbelief refractory to contradictory evidence - is what is called closed-mindedness, or the unwillingness to consider evidence impartially and to be convinced by what a consensus of qualified critical thinkers considers a compelling argument. It's characteristic of faith-based thought. I can show you a few examples:
The moderator in the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on whether creationism is a viable scientific field of study asked, "
What would change your minds?" Scientist Bill Nye answered, "
Evidence." Young Earth Creationist Ken Ham answered, "
Nothing. I'm a Christian." Elsewhere, Ham stated, “
By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record."
What's Ham telling us there? He's telling us that nothing can change his mind, no matter what, because he has resolved to disbelieve even true things if they contradict his faith. His mind is closed to contradictory evidence, hence the term closed-minded.
Here's another prominent theologian saying the same thing in puffier language:
"
The way in which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart. And this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence. And therefore, even if in some historically contingent circumstances the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I do not think that this controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation, I should regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I'm in, and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would discover that the evidence, if in fact I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me. So I think that's very important to get the relationship between faith and reason right..." - William Lane Craig
Did you follow that? He's telling us that his present beliefs cannot be modified by any evidence presented to him, even incorrect beliefs. He would simply decide that the evidence doesn't mean what it appears to mean, and go on believing as before.
We can call that phenomenon faith-based confirmation bias. One more:
“
If somewhere in the Bible I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn't question what I am reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and do my best to work it out and understand it."- Pastor Peter laRuffa
Is that how you see an atheist like me, for example? Do you think that if compelling evidence for a god came along, that I would hunker down like the three closed minds just quoted, and refuse to accept its implications? Most of us are not like that. Bill Maher said it well on his show Real Time speaking to this difference:
"We're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens ... I'm open to anything for which there's evidence. Show me a god, and I will believe in him. If Jesus Christ comes down from the sky during the halftime show of this Sunday's Super Bowl and turns all the nachos into loaves and fishes, well, I'll think ... "Oh, look at that. I was wrong. There he is. My bad. Praise the Lord." - Bill Maher
Its within our experiences that codes and information only come from intelligence
The kinds of codes that we are aware come from intelligence are literal codes as your provided definition describes: "
a system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols substituted for other words, letters, etc., especially for the purposes of secrecy." DNA is not that, which describes a system of arbitrary symbols assigned meaning by convention and agreement.
The false equivalence others have been writing about to you is to consider the cellular machinery that transcribes sequences of nucleotide bases in the cell's nucleus, which are then transported to the ribosomes outside of the nucleus and translated into proteins.
The differences between these two is too significant to think that what is true about the man-made code must be true about the other simply by virtue of calling them both codes. One difference is that intelligence is not only needed to create a literal code, but also to use it. If all intelligence ceased, the human code would no longer accomplish anything, and it never did without a conscious intelligence to encode and decode linguistic messages.
The cellular phenomenon that you claim needed an intelligence to create needs no intelligence to do its thing. If all intelligence left the universe, but unconscious unicellular life persisted, what you are calling a code would continue doing what it does.
We can substitute every element of a man-made code and it can still function the same. Consider cursive writing and printing. They look pretty different, but can function alike. Or, I can write "two" or "2," and by convention, they will have the same meaning to you.
Not so with chemistry. Why? It's not a code. Matter is passively responding to force. There is no code, just the laws of physics and chemistry. No intelligence is known to be needed for chemical transformations such as the unraveling of a double helix to occur.
The four bases in DNA cannot be substituted without changing their "meaning" to the cell because they are not there by agreement or convention, and nobody need agree what they mean. Change them, and we can expect the cell to die.
Not so with the symbols that represent them, A, T, G, and C. They can be changed with no loss of meaning if we agree that a, t, g and c will have the same meaning as their capital counterparts. Or, we could have called what we call adenine by another name beginning with another letter and have that symbol stand for the same molecule.
Anyway, I just finished writing a post on another thread explaining why it's futile to try to make a reasoned, evidenced argument to a person whose beliefs were arrived at by faith, a contention supported by the quotations above, so I don't expect you to change your position. I presume that you agree with those three men that there is nothing that can be said or shown to you to change your belief that living cells are intelligently designed.
So why do I write it? For the practice converting my thoughts into code - for the practice of writing better arguments, and couching them in language more effectively. It's fun and stimulationg
Also, you are not the only reader. If you were, this post would look very different.
Let me tell you why im not gonna give you evidence we wer not created last thursday: First because you nor i even believe we wer created last thursday
How is that relevant? Perhaps you are both incorrect.
It's a great exercise from the topic of limits of knowledge, which goes back to Descartes at least, when he recognized that he had no way to rule out the idea that all of experience was a clever deception arranged by a demon, since he could not escape the theater of his own conscious experience to confirm that what lay beyond it is what his intuition strongly suggested was out there. Modern variations include brain-in-a-vat, holographic simulation, and Matrix scenarios.
It's interesting to realize that the limits of knowledge are so narrow. Better to speak to experience than what lies beyond it and serves as its source. Hence, "I think, therefore I am" is the first and last incontrovertably true idea we will ever hold in the sense that it cannot be a deception or misinterpretation, although perhapssome Buddhists would disagree and include self-awareness and individual existence as illusory..
i dont need to give evidence because you have it from your memories from last thursday and before.
You might benefit from reading about this idea called last Thursdayism. It suggests the notion that your memories were created last Thursday along with everything else, memories of thing before last Thursday which never actually occurred.
