I am tempted to say no, but I suppose I should add something creative to the argument: I hereby propose that your whole argument is based on fallacy. In your OP, you are trying to define the human thought process by something that approaches digital logic. This is fallacy. The human brain does not even operate upon analog logic, it is completely non-linear. Don’t ask for a cite, I doubt that anyone can even stipulate the human brain working on ditigal logic.
Nahtanoj
No. I’m not trying to be cute with you here and I’m not playing the sophistry game. Truly, honestly, I really couldn’t my name to that. I have no “gut feel” about whether or not I’m in a jar, because I lack any kind of context in which I could have such a feel. There is no way for me to get a grip on the question – that, after all, is what makes it such a perennial favorite. At most I can say that the question ultimately does not matter to me (which is, after all, the classic answer).
To be honest, if you’re really giving the answer that you do have a gut feel for such matters, you’re leaving yourself wiiiiide open to the cute first year philosophy, who’ll gleefully pull such a feeling to pieces. And we neither of us want to go down that route 
pan
CarnalK’s Wager:
You must choose whether you are a brain in a jar or a creature in the common reality. If you choose to believe you are in a jar and thus only mental pursuits are “real” then you can still not ignore the illusion of reality. If you do not eat/drink your brain function is affected. Therefore it is wise to act as though you believe in external reality regardless.
(though I’m sure it’s been said before me and enjoys some of the flaws of Pascal’s I’m sticking with it)
And to tie it to the OP: Since I have no way of knowing God’s existence let alone his moral code, and since my interpretation of religion would be based on my internal moral code it is just as well to cut out the middle man and follow my own moral code. Simple. I consider myself an atheist because I devote no energy to believing in God. That doesn’t mean I devote energy to believing in no-God. I would consider both pointless daydreaming (which of course has it’s place 
).
Now there’s a summary I can hang my hat on. Nice one!
I don’t see what is so hard about this jar question either. I don’t believe that I am in the jar. Neither do I believe I am not in the jar. The “default” position is not to grant either claim. I have no context to evaluate these claims, because neither offers any testable implications that have any bearing on anything I can evaluate. All this talk of assigning probabilities to the question seems, in a word, deluded. There is no legitimate way to assign a probability to such an assertion, any more than you can assign a probability to rolling a 3 when you don’t even know what numbers are on the die (could be all 3s, could be no 3s).
The problem for you seems to be that the former is a superset of the latter. There is a group of people who don’t believe in X. Of these, SOME also believe not X (all people who believe not X will also not believe X).
So what the “I don’t believe in homosexuality/evolution/thermodynamics/etc” crowd is saying is perfectly legitimate. They may also believe not X, and indeed maybe most do. But the former claim is enough. We as good scientists should always be prepared to respond to sketpical challenges whether or not they are accompanied with actual critiques of these ideas. That’s what science is all about: constant checking.
kabbes, thanks. It works for me.
I would say that is a bit too specific, but at any rate, I would say “I believe” at a minimum means “I assign a truth value to” (of course there are other things that are revealed, but these needn’t concern us here).
Right… the paradox is that the statement believed is assigned opposite truth values by the statement.
Right, let’s consider that. “I don’t believe” assigns what truth value, and “she may exist” says what about truth values of “Eris exists”?
Well no, it is a hedged bet. “I think so, but maybe I’m wrong.”
But why allow for this in this case so emphatically? There is always the opportunity to be mistaken. This is not only a part of questions of super-beings.
Yes, it is like that. Can we say “There was no verdict reached”? the truth of the statement “OJ is guilty” is known.
Apos
Is there a god(s)? How do you answer this question? Is the answer “I don’t know, but I don’t believe in one”? How, may I ask, did you come to this conclusion, and what does this conclusion say about god(s)?
Kabbes and Apos
Let’s run with your position and flip Moore’s Paradox around; you want me to swallow the following as a possible sentence: “I don’t believe in god but he exists.” Do you see why I have a hard time swallowing this?
Our cases run as follows: either God exists or he doesn’t, and you don’t believe in him. So we have two cases:
“I don’t believe in god, god doesn’t exist” and “I don’t believe in god, god exists.” The union of these is “I don’t believe in god, god may or may not exist”, the latter of which is always true so we may affix that statement to any and not change the sense, so it is no surprise that we can say something like that with impunity; indeed, the opposite (and I don’t mean to use this word loosely) can also be said with impunity: “I believe in god, god may or may not exist.”
The significance, I think, remains with the idea that first person statements of belief assign truth values to what is/is not believed.
Premises. Perfectly valid.
This statement makes the assumption that you have knowledge leading you to believe that the poster is not a man, when you have no knowledge either way. If you do have knowledge either way, it is as of yet unpresented.
This is equally incorrect because of the previously-mentioned assumptions. Here is, as I see it, the correct way of stating this:
I have a number. It is either 1 or 2. It can only be 1 or 2. I have no knowledge whatsoever either way. So if I am asked if it is 1, my answer is not “No, I don’t think so”, which implies knowledge to the contrary, but something like “I do not know”, which is specifically what I have already stated to be the case: I have no knowledge either way.
If there are two options, and you discount the first (“I don’t think it’s a man”, as opposed to “I have no evidence to suggest either way” or more simply “I don’t know”), that implies knowledge of the second.
I didn’t come a conclusion about anything other than characterizing my own inability to believe in something without a good reason to do so.
Nothing.
I’m not sure I see why this issue has anything to do with anything. Obviously, if one was willing to concede that god existed, they would never say that they don’t believe it. That makes no sense.
Ok. So? I’m missing the problem here.
I didn’t come a conclusion about anything other than characterizing my own inability to believe in something without a good reason to do so.
Nothing.
I’m not sure I see why this issue has anything to do with anything. Obviously, if one was willing to concede that god existed, they would never say that they don’t believe it. That makes no sense.
Ok. So? I’m missing the problem here.
Maybe in some Bizarro world of English.
But the plain meaning is simply that, well, you know the belief that it’s a man? It isn’t had by that person. Peeshka?
If you look up the dictionary definition of BELIEVE you will find something like:
to accept something as true without absolute proof.
I have looked in more than one dictionary. What is the difference between a PROOF and an ABSOLUTE PROOF. The Absolute makes no mathematical sense. I mentioned this in my post.
words and definitions are created by human beings they do not necessarily correspond to reality or logic. see Whorfian Hypothesis.
take the word CONTINENT
North America is connected to South America by the isthmus of Panama.
Africa is connected to Asia by the isthmus of Suez
What is the name of the isthmus that connects Europe to Asia?
Look up the definition of continent. Is it LOGICAL?
There are only SIX continents on this planet. The biggest could be called Eurasia.
Dal Timgar
On a lighter note…
Did anyone else glance at this thread real fast and see “absence of beer is its a belief”? Personally, I believe very strongly in the absence of beer… preferably without consumption by me
rips off his clothes and streaks through the thread
I do not comprehend how it is rationally possible to say that there is no reasonable inference from “I don’t think it’s a man” such that there is plausible cause to say that the speaker of that phrase has evidence to the contrary (i.e. that it’s a woman).
IOW, “I don’t think it’s a man” intimates that there is, or may be, reason to believe it is a man. A statement that has no intimation of that is “I don’t know (if it is a man)”.
Whatever you don’t comprehend, it lies in your own subjective connotations that you attach to things rather than the plain meaning of words and phrases.
Well that certainly helps everyone involved, Apos.
kabbes, of course I realise you are being straight with me. Yet I would find it difficult to…er…believe that you could not bring yourself to say one of these phrases:
“In my estimation Santa Claus does not, actually, exist”
“If I made a guess, it would be that fairies aren’t real”
“Were you to put a gun to my head, I would say that unicorns do not and never did exist.”
Presumably you would not?
The apparently symmetrical “beliefs”:
I believe in Santa Claus
and
I don’t believe in Santa Clause
are in fact of quite a different flavour, the first suggests that evidence has led you to conclude that SC exists, the second is really a statement about the lack of such evidence.
Compare this to belief in God versus Atheism.
I, as an atheist, have seen no evidence that leads me to believe that there is a God, this is not the same as saying I believe in not-God.
Most importantly, it is a falsifiable position (God could pop up and say, “Get over yourself TGU, here I am!”). This falsifiability is what makes atheism the default position – it requires no active “believing” on behalf of the atheist subject. The theistic position is not falsifiable, it is a positive statement that requires some effort. Theism is subtly self-reinforcing – no evidence of not-God could conceivably be found (as the saying goes, you cannot prove a negative).
Atheists are often “accused” of having their own “faith” position, but it is the very falsifiability of the atheist position that separates it from “true” faith positions.
In addition to TGU’s fine post, let me just say that, of course, I do:
B(¬SC)
B(¬F)
B(¬U)
That is because I have been given the explanation as to how each of these things were made up by people and this explanation fits the observed facts to my satisfaction. My “lack of belief in their presence” has strengthened to a “belief in their lack of presence” because I have been pursuaded that they do, in fact, not exist.
You see, once again using an analogy (or, rather, three analogies: SC, F and U) have merely distracted from the issue at hand. God, if He exists, is not Santa Claus, faeries or a unicorn. That is the difference between the topic and the analogy and that is why I can ¬B(G) and yet ¬B(¬G), whilst happily accepting the B(¬SC), B(¬F) and B(¬U) propositions.
pan
And if I say this about the entire history of religion, I can reasonably say B(¬G)?