As for your second point, only because it is convenient to has a special term for lack of belief in any god. If we want to talk about a-supernaturalists, all a-supernaturalists would be atheists but not vice versa.
As for your first point, I think that this was what I was getting at. People in the West know enough about the Father of Christ so that it would be hard to find anyone with a simple lack of belief about him (it?) But clearly identification of someone as not believing in the Father of Christ is not sufficient to determine atheism.
The point I was really trying to make was to examine lack of belief in the context of a god we know nothing about. That is a bit simpler, not having the baggage of preconceptions.
The important test of a hypothesis is not the evidence already existing for or against it, but its predictive power. You can plot an infinite number of curves that include two points - the test is which also include a third. Evolution and geology have excellent predictive powers, creationism not so much.
True, but also not having the force of a known god. I mean, I myself am an atheist if we are to mean that I don’t believe in Thualchtomec, the god of celery. So again, I think the question should be as broad for the believing side as it is for the disbelieving side (or as narrow, either way just so they’re the same). Framing the question in terms of whether someone believes in the Christian God versus the celery god really isn’t helpful. The commonality, I think, in every case is deity. So, it seems more meaningful to discuss simply belief in a deity or lack of belief in a deity period, without regard to who or what the deity in question is.
Maybe the problem is the “but” in my post, which was not meant to imply any versus. An atheist lacks belief in all gods, so you disbelieving in the celery god does not make you an atheist.
We all lack belief in gods we’ve never heard of. One hopes that if someone mentions a new god to you, you’d also lack belief in this new god. Once you find out more, you can believe it exists or believe it doesn’t exist, but that is a more advanced level of belief than the initial one.
Right, and we can test those by their predictive power also. If you are in the desert and see water, if you hypothesize it is a lake, you are making a prediction which will soon be confirmed or falsified.
This is, yes, what I think. I think it’s self-evident, but I think I see two objections to it, only one of which I anticipated:
The people who believe everyone is irrational. This is the one I anticipated: I know from prior experience that there are people who take as a matter of faith that everyone and everything operates on the same blind faith they hold in Jesus (or whatever their object of faith is). My whole point in all this is to demonstrate that at least some people take a rational view of life without any use for faith, using evidence and reasonable assumptions*. That is the essence of my philosophy.
*(Making assumptions does not automatically make an ass out of you, me, or anyone. Making unreasonable assumptions does. Everyone has to make assumptions because nobody has perfect information.)
The people who constantly shift between two different meanings of ‘belief’. I didn’t anticipate this one. I’ve said that multiple times already, but it bears repeating: I didn’t anticipate there would be any dispute over the meaning of the word ‘belief’. I am using the word ‘belief’ as a synonym for ‘faith’, meaning “a position held despite available evidence.” It most assuredly does not mean ‘opinion’ or anything similarly watered-down. Since it is impossible to have a debate, or even a discussion, if you cannot agree on the meanings of words, I really have nothing to say to the people who refuse to stick to one definition.
Use of a term in some technical way divorced from its usual usage, when there is a perfectly good alternative term, is a bad way to proceed in conversations like this. That’s why I would insist on recasting the debate in terms of “faith” instead of “belief.”
Replacing “belief” with “faith” and “believe” with “have faith in” in your OP makes it much easier for most English speakers to understand what you meant. In my own case, it certainly transforms it from borderline nonsense into an utterly sensible and unobjectionable post.
