OK, it’s time we did this. Taken directly from this postet seq. but related to other discussions I’ve had on these boards, my contention here is that it is fundamentally wrong to think that a lack of belief is ever equivalent to belief.
Belief, by its very definition, is held despite the state of the evidence (present or lacking) relative to its subject: People who believe in young-earth creationism do so despite all the evidence about stellar formation, planetary formation, the fossil record, and the Big Bang; people who believe in intelligent design do so despite all the evidence about biological evolution; people who believe in one or more deities do so despite the total lack of evidence for their existence; and so on. Belief is totally irrational.
This matters to me because thinking a lack of belief in something is simply a belief in that thing’s negation removes the ability to accept that some people live their lives without any belief at all. I am one of those people and it frustrates me to be pigeonholed alongside people I disagree with: I value rationality not due to some unthinking acceptance or disconnect from reality but because I have examined the alternatives and realized that belief of any sort is incompatible with my own intellectual honesty. It is frustrating for people to tell me what I think and twist my own words around to conclude that I have a belief system.
So, no, Larry Borgia, it is not a picayune point. It is the only way you can understand my whole worldview and why I hold to the philosophies I do.
The distinction here that people gloss over is the nature of setting up your lack of belief in opposition to a particular belief. When you start to address the thing you do not believe in then your lack of belief coheres into an ideology whether you like it or not. You cannot continue to say that people like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are promoting a lack of an ideological agenda, no they have an ideological agenda. They are presenting an anti-narrative to the common narrative.
No one lives their life without any belief at all, that’s pretentious nonsense. You might lack a particular belief, but everyone believes in something or another.
The problem also comes when people continually move the goal posts. There are some folks here who, when the topic is something religious, will say without equivocation “God doesn’t exist”, but when the topic is atheism, will say “I don’t have any belief concerning God”.
mswas, I think that’s a fair point to make - everybody has beliefs, of course, and I would agree that someone setting their absence of belief against someone else’s belief is certainly promoting some ideology.
However, Larry Borgia is still wrong: not believing in X is not logically equivalent to believing in not-X. Personally, I would mostly describe myself as an atheist: I do not believe in God. However, that doesn’t mean that I actively believe that God does not exist. There’s no contradiction here: I simply don’t believe in God. In the same sense, if I argue with a theist, I am not necessarily asserting that there is no God. I can set my skepticism against their faith, arguing in favor of secular philosophy or empirical science, all without trying to claim that there is no God.
It may seem like a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one.
I don’t deny that I have an ideology. I deny that I have a belief system. Ideologies can be rational (not that all of them are) but beliefs, as per their nature, cannot be.
This is tangential to the thread. I agree with what you’re saying, but it’s a tangent.
Support this or retract. This is equivalent to saying my whole worldview is a lie.
That can be troublesome and confusing, but it can also be the equivalent of saying “There is no elephant in this room” and clarifying your position by stating “There is no evidence of an elephant in this room right now”.
Worldview is the keyword here. Your worldview is your belief system. You believe you do not have any beliefs for instance. But to put it more simply, you believe for instance that you exist. You believe in rationality and reason. I think you might be using an idiosyncratic definition for the word ‘belief’ where something that can be rationally demonstrated ceases to be a belief. People who support evolution, ‘believe’, in evolution, though because of the evidence they are not taking a leap of faith. I often use words in these debates idiosyncratically, but based on the responses to the thread so far, I believe in this case, that it is you who is using the word idiosyncratically.
Stealth Potato Oh I get the distinction. I’ve never found it a terribly difficult one to grasp. I’m unconvinced, is different from, I am convinced you are wrong.
I’m honestly baffled that this is even remotely controversial and I’m not sure how much time I want to spend on it but if you believe that something does not exist than you have a belief about that thing: that it does not exist.
Let’s take God out of the picture and talk about something less controversial. Unicorns, say. If I asked you “What are your beliefs about Unicorns?” You would say “Unicorns do not exist.” I might say “So you believe there are no such things as Unicorns?” You would say “Yes, I believe there are no real Unicorns in the world.”
Now let’s say I asked you what are your beliefs about [unitelligible gibberish]. You might say “What?” I’d say “Do you believe in [unintelligible]?” You’d say “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t understand what your saying. If you’re talking about cats, then yes, I believe cats exist. If you’re talking about vampires then no, I don’t believe Vampires exist.”
When you model reality there are far more exigent circumstances that you do not comprehend than there are points of clarity. What you don’t know vastly outweighs what you do know. That being said, you move forward with implicit beliefs. For instance, when you cross a one way street you probably make a greater assumption that the car that might hit you will be coming down the street the proper way. You BELIEVE that it will be coming the way the sign says it should. If you do not, then you BELIEVE it is possible that it could be coming the other way. In either case you are acting upon a belief. The belief is informed by your belief in such a thing as a street. A street is just a configuration of rocks and other elements, that it has a form and a purpose beyond that is an abstract concept that is made concrete by the behavior we engage in as a result. You generally believe that people are going to behave in a certain way. Human society depends upon your belief. There is no possible way for you to calculate on the fly every possible complication that could arise when you are hurtling down the highway at 90 mph. Because you share the belief in the rules of the road with the vast majority of other drivers you are statistically safe to believe that you can drive down that road and reasonably know what to expect. If you hit a toll booth, you drive through with your EZ Pass, you believe that the toll will debit your account and that you won’t get in trouble for blowing the toll booth. But who is to say that while the EZ Pass meter might be malfunctioning that day, the traffic camera that photographs your license plate is not? At the same time you believe in the currency that is in your account, you believe that other people will honor that currency and that you can use it for transactions based on commonly understood values. You believe that certain items such as toll roads have a certain agreed upon value that you know before getting on them. You also believe that every bank that mediates the transaction from the Turnpike to your bank account will act honestly and favorably with your money.
To put it simply, your entire life is governed by belief. There are many things that you believe to be true implicitly that you take for granted. If you did not believe in anything you would be paralyzed, incapable of acting because you would have no rational expectation that cause and effect would work out the way you expect it to. I’m not even talking about such ideas as empirical facts like one atom colliding with another. I am talking about how you interact with the data that informs how you orient yourself in space, in relation to the Earth, it’s terrain and to the people around you. How you react to metaphysical objects like works, and symbols.
You believe that you are actually speaking to another person right now, and that we can mutually comprehend each other based upon the arrangements of lines that form the characters in our sentences.
You are quite clear. You simply are also quite clearly wrong.
I have no beliefs at all concerning unicorns or vampires. I do not specifically believe in them, but I also accept that this does not mean they do not exist. They may exist and I am unaware of them, or I might be insane and unable to accept their existence, or they may exist elsewhere. I am agnostic concerning uncorns and vampires. If I say, however, that no uncorns or vampires exist or ever existed, I am making a positive statement about the universe, and one which cannot be proven or disproven. I would, in fact, be stating my belief about the universe, which may or may not be true, and which I could not actually prove.
Seriously? You really think there might be Unicorns or Vampires roaming about? I don’t think you do.
Look, I know it’s logically impossible to disprove an empirical propostition, but come on. There are some things which are so absurd and have so little backing that we can safely say they don’t exist. There are no such things as unicorns or vampires. Trust me on this.
Not believing in god is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
The fact that this even needs to be talked about is messed up. An atheist does not believe in ‘god’. An atheist does not believe ‘there is no god’. These are two separate statements that mean different things. I’ve had such a hard time explaining this to people. And always religious people. They always seem to want to frame everything with belief.
Again, I’m lost here. What is your belief on the exisitence of Vampires? Is it a) vampires do exist or b) vampires do not exist. I’m betting it’s b. Unless you really would say “Well, I don’t know. Maybe Vampires do exist. Maybe they don’t. Who am I to say?” But I’m pretty sure you’d pick b.
No. My worldview is to accept the available evidence and use my best efforts to put it together into coherent philosophies.
Support this or retract.
No, I know that I exist. I know this because I observe reality and reality reacts to my presence.
No, I do not. I use them because they work, at least according to the best evidence I have.
This is the definition of belief I’ve heard from every religious person I’ve ever heard expounding on the philosophy of belief. In short, they believe because it is absurd.
Belief is a jump into the darkness, I think the quote runs.
I disagree. I’ll dig up cites later.
You are factually incorrect here. I would say “There is no evidence supporting the existence of real unicorns.” Belief has nothing to do with it.
I think the evidence is against it, but if the evidence came in to the positive I wouldn’t reject it. That is the essence of rationality: Accepting all the evidence, with the caveat that it’s possible to manipulate or misinterpret evidence, or to simply be lied to. We rule out the later aberrations with independent corroboration and, if possible, double-blind testing.
This is a pragmatic statement but statements like these can’t be allowed to blind us to new evidence. It was once pragmatically true that heavier-than-air flying machines were not possible.
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? A) Yes. B) No. (This question is ill-formed as posed because the two possible responses don’t include the best answer, which is “All available evidence indicates that vampires are a biological impossibility.”)
True, which is why we have rational assumptions, which can be changed by new evidence in precisely the way beliefs cannot be.
No, the assumption is based upon my prior experience with one-way streets and how American drivers tend to view our laws. If I were raised in Paris, for example, I’d have a much more cautious view of the matter. (Nothing wrong with Paris. I just got the one clinically insane cabby in the whole city, I’m sure.)
I’m acting upon assumptions based on prior experience. If I were acting upon belief, I wouldn’t be willing to avoid a collision when someone was doing something “impossible” in my lane.
Who indeed? My prior experience tells me that such malfunctions are rare. I’m willing to accept they might happen to me, because I don’t believe they’re impossible.
I think I’ve demonstrated to the contrary by now.
This is a strawman argument. It’s deliberately conflating irrational beliefs with rational assumptions, ignoring the fact assumptions can be changed by new evidence whereas beliefs are set in stone.
There was a very good argument I heard in opposition to this: if God came down right now and turned water into funk, theists would still (obviously) believe and atheists would still not believe. Well, the atheists would believe that the being that appeared had existed and had the powers it did, but there would still be no way to prove it was an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving being responsible for managing the afterlife. So while the lack of belief may not be semantically equal to belief, it may very well be psychologically equal as an integral part of that person’s worldview.
Derleth, how can I argue with someone who fervently disclaims any belief? No matter what belief I suggest, it would be easy for you to deny holding it.
Perhaps we’re simply using the word “belief” in different senses; but since I can’t get inside your head, I must simply choose what to believe about your worldview based on my assessment of your external behavior. I will venture to suggest, then, given your conduct in this debate, that you believe that you are a man without beliefs. Is that fair?
(Nothing wrong with Paris. I just got the one clinically insane cabby in the whole city, I’m sure.)