Maybe they also believe in angels?
Neither of those seem to me to require a belief in God. There could be lots of supernatural beings without any of them being a god.
Though I suppose a good deal depends on your definition of “angel”, “demon”, and “god”.
There’s actually a pretty substantial body of research suggesting humans tend to develop “religious-like” thinking even without formal religious upbringing:
teleological thinking in kids (so-called “promiscuous teleology”), spontaneous ritual development in e.g athletes, our hyperactive agent detection systems.
We seem predisposed to it, is what the research mostly points to. Doesn’t mean it’s inevitable that religious thought will spontaneously develop in a blank-slate human, but it’s the way I’d bet.
That article seems biased towards the American religious worldview, which is not shared by many or most people in my country.
I think the article is misleading, and that some here might be talking past each other.
There’s a lot of evidence that humans have a hyperactive “agent detection system”, or to put it another way, that we anthropomorphize a lot. It makes evolutionary sense; beginning with the assumption of a human cause for things, was often a smart approach in a world where we both depend upon other humans, but also where other humans are our biggest threat.
However, there’s a big difference between the belief that this or that phenomenon was caused by something humanlike, and believing in a singular, all-powerful being who wants a personal relationship with us. The latter is a development of society / culture, so it’s playing a bit fast and loose to imply we have an inbuilt yearning for that.
Finally: in terms of the teleology article and paper, they seem to be taking something very obvious to draw a misleading conclusion. Most of our scientific knowledge is counter-intuitive. (e.g. we take atoms for granted now, but it’s far from obvious that a solid block of iron is actually a bunch of tiny separate things that are vibrating and passing smaller bits of stuff between them.)
Of course it’s instinctively easier for us to believe that “cows are still cows” (to take a Hovind line) than that a gradual process over timescales orders of magnitude longer than our lifespans did something that is difficult for us to imagine.
Indeed we could say that the whole scientific method is really an exercise in taking human intuition out of the picture to try to see nature how it really is.
There’s a whole swath of options available to the non-materialist atheist, e.g.:
None of these are materialist positions, but each can be adopted by an atheist without difficulty. Of course, none of these lead (necessarily) to any kind of common woo-beliefs such as ghosts or telekinesis (although some may be more compatible with them than materialism is).
I would say that is agnosticism. I always tell people that I am an agnostic (don’t believe in God). In addition, I am an atheist (I believe that God does not exist).
The popular misconception of agnostic basically evolved in response to not wanting to take shit from religious people. Gnosticism concerns knowing and what can be known and what can’t. Agnostic means, generally, that you can’t know the answer to that question. You can be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist or a gnostic atheist or a gnostic theist, their meanings are somewhat orthogonal. The most reasonable linguistic, philosophical, and logical reading of what atheism is is simply the absence of theism, and everything else is basically a construct of religious people attacking atheists (often with straw men) and people who are atheistic but don’t want to admit it or don’t want to fight about it inventing more socially acceptable frameworks like “agnostic” or “soft atheist”
I realize this is a complicated linguistic issue and I may be missing some nuances, but I think most of the nuances came about because of this dynamic and not because they served important linguistic and classification purposes. It’s mostly about straw men and refuting (or dodging) straw men.
Agree completely.
With the slight addition that one of the challenges is that the “a-” prefix can denote simple absence of or antipathy to. One is an issue of fact, the other an issue of attitude. Which are very different ideas.
Woulda been nice if we’d had separate prefixes for both ideas and used them both in an intellectually honest way when inventing the terms atheist and agnostic.
Since I think “being without a believe in (a) God” is both our natural default state and an important concept not directly covered by any other word (your example of antipathy can be covered by “antitheist”), treating “atheist” as meaning simply “without theism” is the most useful, parsimonious, and honest use case. If anyone want to add any other value to the concept, they should have to specify it, and not just decide what they think the word atheist should mean and bake those judgments in.
I agree with you completely.
But the word should is doing all the work there and the rest of the English speaking world has already decided they don’t agree w you and me.
True, but I try to fight the fight where I can. I hate that the social weight of religion gives them a protected status in this debate which basically allows them to be offended that atheists just… exist… and allows them to decide any moral judgments attached to the word. And with that comes the belief that atheists are somehow transgressive just by… existing, and holding their belief (or non-belief) sincerely. Moralizing and straw manning religious people should be challenged at every opportunity.
It’s slow work but it’s not fruitless. We’re gradually changing the social perception of the word (and concept of) atheist. Through much of human history in many cultures it merited a death sentence. Today, in most places, people are just an asshole to you. But they treat you like you’re rude just for existing. You’re a “militant atheist” if you don’t hide it.
Hard agree.
But I think in the last couple of years the religionists in the USA have undergone their own Iranian revolution and are very happy with the militantly theistic society they think they are creating at high speed. The one that brooks one religion alone and all else is apostacy.
It’ll probably be 75 years before the US returns to the level of religious rejection and acceptance of that rejection that it had in 2010. Yet another way we’ll be a century or more behind the Europeans before this mini Dark Ages of ours is over.
Annnnd … we’ve probably hijacked this GD thread about enough.
Well, I’ll see you in the foxholes. Where we will find religion together.
Edit: wait, that’s actually pretty funny. if they declare war on us, and we dig in, and there are no atheists in foxholes, does that mean they have to just give up mid-battle? they’ve created a conundrum for themselves.
Or you can be a meta-agnostic: someone who’s not sure they’re an agnostic. Unless you’re not sure about that, which would make you a meta-meta-agnostic…
Finally. Someone appears to agree with my thoughts about the “supernatural”. Basically, I just feel it’s a silly word and I’m not sure what it actually defines other than fantasy or magic. There is nothing at all that is supernatural because as Roderick said–if it exists, it is by definition, natural.
I don’t care whether one chooses to believe in angels or ghosts or whatever, as long as they don’t say these things exist yet somehow are not part of the universe. If there are ghosts then they are natural phenomena.
ETA— Have we ever really had that conversation here? Whether the supernatural exists and if it’s even theoretically possible for it to exist.
They certainly are----if they exist. Materialistic and all-natural.
Supernatural being impossible is a sort of logical tautology failure but it’s still a useful metric. The vast majority of human beings have believed in magic that we know did not really exist. They worked themselves into entire belief systems about nothing, convinced it was real. And it’s still true, as true as ever, maybe more. Just because one day we might discover some quantum effects that lead to something that might’ve seemed “supernatural” before we observed it doesn’t mean that we can’t discard a whole massive host of human beliefs that essentially require magical thinking to posit. So, logically, yes, you’re right. But conceptually and philosophically I’m not sure it’s actually useful to point out. Most of the magical beliefs humans have ever held are 99.9%+ likely not to be modelling a real thing.
Saying “if something exists it’s not supernatural anymore” is true, but sort of leans towards credulous interpretation of magical thinking.
And I’d also point out that people many people would describe their own beliefs as supernatural and say that it’s outside the realm of science to measure or analyze. That’s basically bullshit through and through if they’re positing something that actually affects the universe.
OK, but the (almost certainly) do not exist. In any case, there’s no evidence for them. But, loads of people believe in them, and surely many of those are atheists (since they don’t believe in God or gods, really the only qualification you need to join the non-club).
What are you referring to?
There is the option of antitheism
…to me that seems like an extreme position. There are a myriad possibilities concerning theism that are not all inherently evil, so actively opposing theism seems impolite.
You wrote, quoting me:
And I wrote: