Terms like “atheist” and “agnostic” have become a similar PITA as words like “theory” have in communicating with the general public.
That is to say, atheist and agnostic have a specific meaning in philosophy, but the popular meaning in everyday conversation has diverged. It’s diverged into: Atheist - believes that there are no gods, Agnostic - thinks there may or may not be a god; shrug emoji
While normally I’d advocate using the everyday meaning in everyday conversations, the problem here is that the everyday meanings suck. They basically exclude a huge chunk of people, because, IME, most atheists are some variety of “weak” atheists – most are open-minded to the possibility of god(s) existing, but are as skeptical about the concept as they are about magic pixies living in their garden.
I get that language evolved, but the atheist and agnostic conflation happened in response specifically to the dynamic of: religious people being dicks, thinking atheists are transgressive for existing, harassing them, atheists inventing “agnostic” as a soft or ambiguous cover for atheism to reduce the perceived transgression of… existing, and not hiding their beliefs.
Same with “strong” and “weak” atheists. When you pin people down to the specifics, they’re almost always weak atheists, it’s just that "we don’t need your God to explain the world, we know that humans create religion in the absence of Gods (the fact that there are many mutually contradictory religions prove this), we understand the psychological and sociological reasons of how religions take hold and spread, there’s no specific evidence for your specific God, and your specific God doesn’t explain anything that other Gods don’t explain. As a result, the null hypothesis is compelling and if your God happened to exist it would be in all sorts of direct contradiction to what we know and would be a wild cosmic coincidence. So there’s no reason to believe that your God exists and it is very unlikely that they do. Sometimes, for the sake of brevity, this gets shortened to “there’s no God” but if you ever actually ask an atheist their full opinion they will probably flesh out that whole position.
That’s weak atheism. It’s a realistic assessment of the situation in a Bayesian analysis. Religious created the “you’re sure God doesn’t exist!” “strong atheist” as a straw man that they have an easier time attacking. Hardly anyone on Earth is a legitimate “hard atheist” and they’re mostly edgy teenagers being provocative.
So, the atheism and agnosticism changes based on colloquial usage were based on bad faith by one side. As such I refuse to honor them.
I think this is putting it too strongly. I mean, I agree with the idea that if these things were to exist, then they’re probably just unknown natural phenomena, based on the fact that so far, everything else has turned out that way. Maybe you mean ‘certainly’ merely in this inductive sense.
But it’s certainly not a given that things need to turn out this way. If telepathy existed, for instance, and something like Cartesian dualism were true, then it might be fostered by a connection entirely in the mental substrate, which a methodologically naturalist science would be unable to account for (because metaphysical naturalism turns out to be false). So in this sense, this would be a ‘supernatural’ phenomenon.
Yes, without a doubt because I see no statistical correlation between them. For example, one can adhere to the ten commandments to a high extent and still be an atheist because one doesn’t need to believe in God in order to believe that not killing, stealing, coveting, etc. are good rules to live by.
Depends on which god you’re talking about. There’s plenty of self-contradictory or mutually exclusive god concepts out there that you can pretty safely say don’t exist because they literally can’t. If you’re in a conversation where this sort of thing comes up, then you should have the opportunity to define your terms, same as if someone brings up the “it’s just a theory” argument against evolution or whatever. The thing about the strong atheist or hard atheist position is that it adopts a burden of proof because it’s making a positive claim. It’s not usually necessary to go there though, because theism needs to make its case first.
As if theists ever concerned themselves with politeness. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with theist dogma, and those have to be challenged. Just because there are some good tenets doesn’t mean the bad ones can just be waived away. Anyone saying they don’t follow the Old Testament or “that’s just a story/metaphor” need their feet held to the fire to explain how they determined what to follow, what not to follow, and how they determined that. They’ll twist themselves into a pretzel to avoid admitting that secular morality fixes most of the problems with so-called religious morals.
Etc. is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Like half of the commandments are about worshiping god and only one god and how to worship him properly. Hard pass. Not killing and stealing are basic tenets of pretty much every religion and secular moral system, Christianity/Judaism have no special claim to them. In a proper moral system they’re situational. Stealing bread to feed your starving family is at least kind of ok. Murder is not, because of how it’s defined, but killing could be merciful, or self defense. Honor your mother/father even if they abuse you, sell you into sexual slavery (which the Bible allows), or kick you out of your home because you come out as gay or an atheist? Yeah no, honor/respect is earned, not given blindly. Coveting is practically a necessity in a capitalistic economy. Keeping up with the Jones’s and all that. The commandments are a joke.
Agree. The commandments, even the secular ones, are a terrible thing for anyone to adopt. Either as a personal policy or as a rhetorical statement.
Because they amount to accepting that the xian bible defines morality.
And that is the entire basis on which theocracies are built. Just say “no” to any idea involving religion. It’s simply an abberent and awful feature of human nature shared by some fraction of the populace.
If we can abjure the will to incest, and the will to kill, as inherent but highly regrettable human drives lacking in any compensating merit, we can equally abjure the will to believe in sky fairies for the very same reasons.
OK, well, apparently crystal powers are a widespread belief in China, as are other various forms of woo. Since 60-90% of China is apparently atheist, there are undoubtedly many millions of Chinese atheists who also believe in various woo stuff.
This is, of course, off-topic and I apologize to the OP. The question is, can you be an atheist and not be a materialist, and of course you can. Just like collecting Starbucks coffee mugs doesn’t make you a stamp collector, not being a stamp collector just means you don’t collect stamps, and not being a theist means you don’t have a belief in God or gods.
And there’s the problem of pseudoscience. A lot of the “woo-adjacent” stuff tries to masquerade as science, which muddies the water. How many times have we seen people touting crap studies that “prove” that something like homeopathy works? You could be an atheist who also has a weak grasp on how actual science works, and therefore fall for some woo belief that spins a convincing tale about how “It’s really Science!” Those people would think they were atheists who believe in materialism, even when they don’t.
I would think a big chunk of the 20-30% of the EU that seems to be atheist/“agnostic” probably doesn’t think about all these philosophical issues at all. They’re atheist because they were brought up without any religion and that’s as far as they’ve thought about it.
Whether they go off into other woo directions is basically unrelated to their lack of belief in any God or gods.
I don’t know if I’ve got any interesting speculations to offer, here. I think dualism suffers from unsolved problems, most notably the question of how the two substances are supposed to interact, but just because I can’t think of any solution doesn’t mean there isn’t any. Having said that, if there is a mental substrate, maybe there isn’t any need for information to travel—there might be no applicable notion of distance (indeed, Descartes considered the notion of extendedness the characteristic feature of the material, hence calling it ‘res extensa’ or extended thing). So what seems like communication across a distance from the point of view of the material may just be shared access to the same information in the mental realm. But again, I don’t think there’s an empirical basis for such a phenomenon, nor do I put great stock in the notion of dualism in the first place.
As far as the argument that “everything that is real is by definition material and natural” goes, there’s a lot of people who believe in things that aren’t “material” or “natural” (to the universe); even those who think physical reality is an illusion and that there isn’t anything “material” in the first place. Not my position, but they exist.
Also the great majority of the time when somebody is pushing “generic theism” in an argument, they are being disingenuous and are arguing for the existence of their god; and that’s the actual claim the atheist is opposing. So the atheist ends up using all sorts of arguments that only apply to a tiny subset of gods, but it gets treated as an assertion of pure atheism anyway because both sides know that it’s really only an argument over that specific god even if they don’t admit it out loud. From the viewpoint of the believer there’s no practical difference between “this specific god doesn’t exist” and “gods are impossible”, because that’s the only god they care about.
Very few people who believe in some vague undefined “god” care enough about it to pick fights with other people over it in the first place. And most atheists won’t speak up until somebody provokes that fight. So while such arguments may nominally be over “is there a god”, but in practice are almost always “my specific God is real, and no other position is acceptable”.
Just note how that very phrase “is there a God” assumes monotheism, and almost certainly Christianity (thus the capitalized “G” God" with no name). When was the last time you saw somebody arguing over whether or not Zeus or Shiva exists?
“Can you admit that the universe exists, and must have a cause, and therefore something, whatever you want to call it, was that cause?”
“Well… maybe.”
“Ok! Well then God exists! And this was his prophet! And this is holy book! and these are what foods you can eat on what days and a list of people you’re supposed to hate!”
One of the great all time stretches in argumentation that rarely gets called out for what it is. Because every culture has so deeply internalized what God is (the US will almost always consider the Christian God the real God, people in India probably have a very different idea) that if you can just get someone to accept “God” in any form then they can implicitly accept a whole bunch of cultural assumptions and values about what describes that God.
One of the most obnoxious things about Christians is that they seem to think they have invented the concept of rules against murder, theft, etc. as though these weren’t fundamental parts of the social contract in the most basic human societies going back since humans became humans. Because someone wrote down those rules at some point, apparently they’re owned by Christians.
So all the in the 10 commands is either: obvious and practiced by practically all societies, or some arbitrary religious bullshit. The only one that might be genuine non-obvious philosophical advice is not coveting. The idea that the 10 commandments are laudable, generally applicable to everyone, a great personal philosophy, etc. is pretty silly.
Yes, I agree, but I have to say that I neither stated or even implied that in my post. I just brought up an example of something that is normally associated with theists but is often agreed with by many atheists. To say someone can’t be an atheist simply because of that is, in my opinion, incorrect.
I’ll point out that what had started as a discussion about materialism, atheism, and the seeming inconsistency of atheist belief in the supernatural has, once again, become a generalized rant about religion and especially its dominant place in US culture.
I’m certainly a major part of this digression. But maybe it’s time to return to the official topic or spawn a new thread to contain the offshoot?
You’re right. I wasn’t really objecting anything you said I was just kind of on a rant against theists. Sorry. My previous posts about the semantics of the word atheist and how bad faith actions on the part of theists created the language shift got me in the mood to fight some theists.