Absence of belief is itself a belief

Great Debates
41

Again, there is a difference between merely lacking belief and actively DISbelieving.

Is lack of love identical to hatred? I do not love a blade of grass I walked by. I also do not hate it.

42

Cite? Or are you merely indulging in humpty-dumptyism, redefining terms to suit your whims?

Now THAT is a truly stupid practice.

43

Some thoughts:

  1. "Absence of belief is itself a belief "

is not the same as:

  1. “One encounters a given statement. One assesses in one’s mind the statement’s truth or falsity. The conclusion one reaches is one’s belief.”

  2. appears false, as do these:
    Absence of light is light
    Absence of sound is sound
    Absence of x is x

  3. certanly appears true to me
    But I think I know what the OP is getting at so here are some additional thoughts:

  4. I think a complicating factor is that “belief” in this context is a human state of mind. Humans are not consistent/logical etc. If we talk too much about math and logic, we will be working in a different realm than where the problem actually arises.

  5. I don’t think humans have a binary system of “belief”. It’s appears to be similar to neural networks/pattern matching/etc. which results in something far from binary.

  6. If “belief” means having a position (any position including the “I don’t know position”) on something, then the OP is probably right

44

Maybe. It is up to the person: some are happy to believe even though they have no certainty at all. Some demand almost absolute certainty. Maybe it doesn’t involve any consideration of certainty at all. The point is that the binary arises when we look at whether the person is willing to concede the truth of some claim or not. Either they are willing to accept it or they aren’t, no matter what level of certainty they may be at.

No, there is no hard borderline at all. There is only your call on whether you think they are true or not.

45

Let’s try aliens instead of gods.

Some may believe that aliens are out there (we’re not talking UFOs here) and some may believe that aliens do not exist. However it seems most reasonable to withhold belief on the issue until there is evidence one way or another. Lack of belief is a good default position.

This does not mean that the probability of each option is 50% - it means that there is not enough evidence to compute a proper probability. As mentioned above, the error bar is 100%, and the probability of existence and nonexistence overlap exactly, so stating any number as a probability in this case is misleading.

That doesn’t mean you can’t believe or disbelieve special cases. Most of us believe that there are no intelligent ETs on Mars or Venus - this doesn’t say anything about the more general case.

I trust the application of this to gods is clear.

46

Absence of belief a belief?

Impossible. Absence of belief relates to beings who have not even heard of an idea, such that a belief can be formulated.

The topic seems to be addressing this concept with relation to atheism vs. theism.

This is a topic of purpose, meaning and functionality. Is it possible for God to have the stated properties or explicit meanings attributed to God?

Atheists will argue that God cannot be meaningful given the varieties of contradictions. An atheist might speculate that the idea of a God is meaningful with regards to a denial system of some sort or to convince people to give you money to the degree that they don’t even earn a living wage.

The idea is not whether God as a concept or word, does or doesn’t exist. There is zero doubt that these things do exist.
The question is how are these phenomenon interpreted and used. That becomes a question of purpose, functionaltiy.

Absence of belief is precisely what it states. The person in question has NO belief. This person is generally considered to be dead or in a coma, and has never communicated their belief to anyone before these occurred.

When belief is referring to something other than itself (self-referrential), then it is considered that absence of belief is only possible in beings who have no been exposed to any of the multiple layers of experience required in order to even fathom the concept in question.

47

Children this is pointless. Its not a question of belief or whatnot. I happen to know there is no god because I caused him to blink out of existance with the creative use of a tire iron, tinfoil and a hankey.

Do I still believe that there isnt a god or am I the only person in the world who does’nt believe in something?

48

Using the word ‘athiest’ to describe yourself is a bit like saying that you’re ‘not Peruvian’ or whatever…
There should be a word that defines a non-belief in god without reference to the god(s) that you don’t believe in.
This athiest doesn’t know one…

49

That would more properly be termed a non-cognitivist, who may or may not be an atheist.

Actually, the non-cognivist position is that these concepts do not exist- they are words without the claimed type of cognitive content.

No. You don’t have be in a coma or have never heard of something to lack a belief IN it.

50

When last this topic came up, I was at odds with myself on where I stood. I think I have resolved it to my own satisfaction, but I would be interested in comments. (Gee, ya think? Is that why people post to message boards? :p)

So we could say, “I don’t believe that X”. Another person could say, “I believe that not-X.” The question the OP presents us with is that the “not” operator with respect to the (shall we say) operation of belief is commutative. That is, given

B(X) and a negation symbol !,

!B(X) == B(!X)

Some motivation for this idea might come from Moore’s Paradox, something that is best illustrated by the sentence, “I believe X but it isn’t so.” It is supposedly paradoxical because the very notion of expressed belief is that the speaker assigns a positive truth-value to the statement. Which is to say, if I say “I believe Eris exists”, I would say that the statement “Eris exists” is true. Thus, to say otherwise (“I believe Eris exists but she doesn’t”) is to speak nonsense.

A resolution of this “paradox” can take the form of understanding the difference between the third person and first person use of the verb “to believe”. In the first person, the verb “to believe” asserts what is believed as true; in the third person, the verb does no such thing (“kabbes thinks Eris exists but she doesn’t” is a perfectly understandable sentence).

Given this, it would seem that to profess any belief is to assert what one believes, even though the sense of “I believe X” is generally different from “I know X” (knowing usually indicates that a method of demonstration is available, for example, while belief expresses no such thing). We might also note that the truth of propositions any person “knows” expressed in the first person does not change when we shift “know” to “believe”. Belief, it seems, is a kind of knowledge. I don’t find that notion particularly off, do you?

Now we raise our question. “I don’t believe in X” versus “I believe in !X”: how does this play out? In any first person account, I think I have motivated the idea that they cannot be deconstructed appropriately without allowing for the sentence “I believe X but it isn’t so” to be constructed. That is to say, first-person use of “to believe” in any sense is a declaration of the truth of a proposition, and no realignment of the sentence will escape that analysis.

This all depends, however, on the idea that belief is a boolean construct, that is, that one is either in a “state” (so to speak) of belief or a state of disbelief. If we allow for the state of “no belief”, read as “absence of” (much like an “open circuit”/“high impedance”/“Z” in electronics) then we must rethink the analysis.

kabbes et al, want us to consider the sentence “I have no belief regarding X” (however it should commonly be constructed). The more I think about it, the more I find this usage to be twisted, an escape from the possible paradox of having an opposite but equivalently unsupportable belief in the face of an unsupportable belief to counter that belief. In the third person, “kabbes doesn’t believe anything with respect to Discordianism” would indicate, likely, that he just doesn’t consider the topic at all, or perhaps has never heard of it. In the first person, however, I find the statement suspect. It would require the following: to say “I have no belief regarding X” would mean: there is no truth value assigned to the proposition X. To have assigned a truth-value to the sentence indicates knowledge or belief. I would suppose that agnostics could claim they had no belief, but even that seems suspect.

I think it is significant to reflect on the difference in use of “know” versus “believe” and note that in the case of “know” we often can expect supporting evidence or arguments to state the claim which should resolve themselves should the listener hold him or herself to the same standard of proof as the speaker (sorry, all you realists, I’m a relativist in just about every way possible). “Believe”, however, has no such use; we seem to often use the word belief to indicate (in the first person) propositions which are “true” but for which there is no body of evidence (at least not of the kind that we would use for “know”, though there may be a motivated discussion behind it, of course).

Hopefully that was clear. By way of a summary, I would say that there is no significant difference in the first person mode of speech to indicate a lack of belief other than to say “I’ve never really thought about it.” If you have thought about it, then it seems you came to some conclusion in order to assign a truth-value to some statement. Whether you choose to say you “know !X” or “believe !X” or “disbelieve X” seems irrelevant to the question of “do I have a belief regarding X?” If you’ve assigned a truth-value to X the answer must be ‘yes’.

To say otherwise is to say that a person can assign truth-values to propositions without belief or knowledge. That’s pretty interesting.

What say ye?

51

Of course, significant is the first person present tense of “believe”, and not insignificantly that would go for “know” as well (“I knew it but it wasn’t so” is perfectly sensible).

52

Some people are trying to get the word bright accepted to refer to people who do not believe in the supernatural. It is not supposed to be used as an adjective.

I’m not sure myself about how good a term this is, but check out the website if the brights.

53

How do people here feel about this differentiation:

Rather than saying “I do not believe in God”, which implicitly involves the existence of God to me in some way;

“I believe that God does not exist”, which does not validate any claim that God does exist except to say that insofar as someone else places truth in it, you do not. For you, then, it is not a matter of not believing but in the belief that the thing does not exist.

Thoughts?

54

IMHO, trying to use mathematics, language and religion in the same formula is silly. Of the three, you have a slight chance of people agreeing on the mathematics, and no chance whatsoever of them agreeing on either the language or the religion.
I see it more as a series of steps someone wants me to take without any evidence whatsoever:

  1. You have an invisible friend
  2. Your invisible friend knows everything
  3. Your all-knowing invisible friend can do anything
  4. Your all-powerful, all-knowing invisible friend is immortal
  5. Your immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing invisible friend created the universe

Notice how much I have to believe without evidence, and I haven’t even gotten to the Flood, Jesus Christ or Heaven yet?
Honestly try to imagine how many steps it would take to get to the belief system some of you currently follow. These are not beliefs I follow-these are beliefs I reject, and the rejection of a belief do not mean that I have added a new belief to my worldview-it means that my worldview is the same as before you tried to introduce this belief(or as I have already pointed out, a pyramiding series of beliefs) to my worldview.

55

I don’t just get what’s so hard about it.

I don’t believe in X.

I = me

don’t believe = do not grant the truth of

in = the positive assertion of

X = whatever.

What might trip people up is that this statement is perfectly consistent with BOTH “I don’t believe in not X” AND “I believe not X” even though they are not consistent with each other.

56

A: I believe Eris exists, but she doesn’t.

B: Hot dog buns!

57

By which I am stating that mebbe Eris isn’t the best choice for the argument, as it is perfectly possible to make that statement about her and still have it make reasonably logical sense.

58

Gets much better than that. I think you missed steps 6 through 15,649,132 (as of last memo. I still get them, though why I have NFC. I asked to be taken off the mailing list years ago). In summary:

  1. Your IAPAK friend can do anything He wants to
  2. But only if He wants to
  3. And nobody but the REALLY special people can even get that to happen with any regularity (i.e. more than once)
  4. Some of them, though dead, are able to still do it
  5. But the living people, despite the fact that their brains still function and you’d think that would make the more able to call upon Him, can’t unless The Friend feels like showing Himself
  6. He usually doesn’t do it in front of many people
  7. You don’t see the inherent oddity in Him not displaying it Once and For All so All Question is Removed About His Existence
  8. I reject “Well, He said He created the universe because He was here first and made it” because “He said so” doesn’t convince me any more than “Yes I did” “No I didn’t” “DID TOO!” is a convincing argument for either side
  9. Somehow I’m the daft one there
  10. He couldn’t find a better way to allow for the forgiveness of sins (like, say, POOF sins can be forgiven. Difficult, I know, but still plenty loving) than to have his own son executed. This one I’ve never gotten, not even when I was Catholic.

And so on. By about number 32 it gets pretty complex, and past 4,591 they’re all written in furiously-scribbled Latin (the emails are pictures and it’s utterly impossible to tell what’s written) and so impossible to decipher.

Apos, the reason I find fault with “I don’t believe in X” in favor of “I believe X to be false/invalid/whatever” is that people say, for example, “I don’t believe in homosexuality/evolution/thermodynamics/etc”. They exist, the people just don’t believe in them. Maybe it’s bias from that which causes me to get all icked up, so to speak, when someone who believes God does not exist says “I don’t believe God exists”.

59

Eris, I like your arguments but I disagree I’m afraid. As usual, I think the reason lies in the woollyness of the English language rather than the logic.

To me, “I believe” means “I am convinced that…”. “I don’t believe” means “I am not convinced that…”

Therefore, “I believe in Eris but she doesn’t exist” is indeed paradoxical – you can’t be convinced and simultaneously know that she doesn’t exist.

But I don’t think that sentence is the one under consideration. Instead, consider, “I don’t believe in Eris but she may exist”. This sentence isn’t paradoxical at all. I am not convinced that Eris exists (i.e. the arguments for existence don’t convince me) but allow for the possibility that there is further evidence or, more directly, that I may simply have drawn the wrong conclusion.

Again – the whole argument is similar to the difference between assuming innocence and seeking to prove guilt and assuming guilt and seeking to prove innocence. OJ was not guilty, not because his innocence was proved but because his guilt was not.

pan

60

Plenty of good points since last I posted. (Incidentally, I’m merely putting my head above the parapet for anyone to have a shy at here: What I seek is a cast-iron chapter in a well respected publication which simply rips me a new one, intellectually speaking.)

I must niggle at kabbes for a while longer.

Given that the jar and the external reality are mutually exclusive propositions, I will ask: Do you believe in an external reality, given that neither can justifiably monopolise the “default” position?