Well certainly one can construct an ad hoc belief system that carves out a special niche for God. But one could do the same thing for any hypothetical entity. One could just as easily construct an ad hoc belief system that makes a special exception for invisible unicorns. All you’ve done is pushed the problem up a level. Instead of needing to justify your belief in God, now you need to justify your adoption of a belief system that makes special allowances for God. I fail to see the advantage of such a strategy.
I don’t understand what you are saying here.
What I am saying is that it does not make sense to apply a binary belief system to god, or to anything except pure logic.
With that established, “lack of belief” now makes sense, but is less inclusive. If you go up even a tiny step on whatever the scale of belief is, you no longer qualify as an atheist.
You can’t have it both ways. You can either have a senseless binary system in which everyone is trivially an atheist, or you can have a more subtle belief system in which “lack of belief” does make sense, but is far less inclusive.
Maybe what you are missing is that to many, many people the god hypothesis is fundamentally different, and they do feel that they have experienced phenomenon supporting it, while still being far from certain.
Well people who believe, believe. The question is what is special about the God hypothesis such that people who do not believe, think they have to carve out some nebulous middle ground between thinking that God exists and thinking that there is no evidence God exists. They don’t do it for other hypothesis, why God?
Belief is binary. Certainty is on a continuum.
I find it useful to think of it as a number line from 100 to -100. If you are at 100, you are perfectly certain it’s true. If you are at -100, you are perfectly certain it’s false. If you are at 0, you have no opinion whatsoever.
So, by this model, 100-1 are theists, 0 to -100 are atheists, and 99 to -99 are agnostics.
Of course, this breaks down some when you realize that people are often perfectly certain of something while simultaneously being willing to accept they might be wrong. For example, the earth might suddenly stop rotating in two minutes, flinging everything to the left at a few thousand miles an hour and killing us all. Do I think it’ll happen? No. Do I entertain any doubt on the subject? No. But could I be wrong? Yes - though I won’t even entertain the possibility until I see some remarkable evidence for it.
Contradiction? It looks like one, but it happens to be the way I think, so perhaps my model has a problem. Maybe there are three factors: a binary belief, a continuum of certainty, and a binary willingness or not to entertain the possiblity you’re wrong, which I will call blindness. If there is a possibility that your certainty is unfounded, you are blind if you do not admit that fact.
In that case, then agnostic becomes hard to define - is it “people from 99 to -99”, or “everyone who’s not blind”? 'Cause relatively few atheists are blind - while some gods are disprovable, some irrevelent ones that nobody worships aren’t, and most atheists will admit this. (In my experience most theists are blind.)
Blindness is much easier to assess than certainty - 99% certainty feels much the same as 100% certainty, presuming that you’re not blind about it. This being the case I intuitively use blindness as the divider between agnostics and, er, gnostics(?). So, most-if-not-all atheists are agnostics.
Easy - because they are not completely without belief. They may be mostly without belief, but not quite.
Perhaps they were once in a dangerous situation, prayed to God for help, and got out of it in a seemingly unlikely way.
Perhaps they once prayed for help in finding a lost item, and then found it in a seemingly unlikely way.
Perhaps they were distraught, prayed to God to calm them, and it worked.
There are any number of possible reasons, but at some point they experienced something that made the god hypothesis fundamentally different to them.
I’m not saying they are certain God exists. They may not even give him 50% odds. They do not “believe” in a binary sense. But in a non-binary system, they are not completely without belief.
Right, but most of what we deal with on a day-to-day basis is not “pure logic”. I’m reasonably certain my car is parked in the parking garage next to this building, even though there’s a tiny chance it was stolen in the three hours since I got back from lunch. I’m also reasonably certain that God is fictional. In fact, I’m MORE certain that God is fiction than I am that my car is still parked where I left it. There’s plenty of empirical evidence that cars are sometimes stolen, but none at all for the existence of God.
Why should beliefs about God be accorded different status than other beliefs about the nature of reality?
Using that standard of proof, no one can make ANY factual statements about ANYTHING. I can’t be ABSOLUTELY certain that I’m not in the middle of an elaborate hallucination right now, although I strongly believe that I’m not.
And again, that’s not a standard of proof anybody applies to any other aspect of day-to-day life other than God.
Sure, many people feel that way. But how to they JUSTIFY it?
“I believe that unicorns are real!”
“Interesting. Do you have any evidence that unicorns are real?”
“I don’t need evidence. In my belief system unicorns can exist without there being any evidence of them.”
“Um … why do you carve out a special exception for unicorns in your belief system?”
“… .”
That all makes sense. But there appears to be people who haven’t witnessed the sorts of things you mention and yet still label themselves as agnostics.
But this is true of ALL factual statements, not just statements about God.
For example, I strongly believe that George Washington was the first President of the United States. However, given enough evidence to the contrary I could be convinced that my belief was mistaken and that everything I’d been taught in school and learned from history books is a lie. I believe that the statement “George Washington was the first President of the United States” is true, even while keeping in mind the tiny possibility that I might be wrong.
Does this make me an “agnostic” about George Washington? Not at all. I feel confident in going about my day-to-day business secure that my historical knowledge is correct. If my daughter asks for help on her homework I’ll tell her who the first President was without adding any weaselly qualifiers. I’m as certain of that fact about Washington as I am about anything.
The same is true of God. I believe there is no God, even while acknowledging that with sufficient evidence I could be convinced otherwise. That doesn’t make me agnostic.
Not so. It makes sense to say that you lack a belief even if you acknowledge that with sufficient evidence you could be convinced otherwise. This is where all the standard unicorn examples come in.
The difference with God is that a great many people do not completely lack belief. The God hypothesis is different to them than the unicorn or George Washington hypotheses because they have experienced something that seemed to support it. Maybe they even temporarily felt certain. There does seem to be a genuine difference there.
"Why should beliefs about God be accorded different status than other beliefs about the nature of reality?’
Because they’re attempts to explain aspects of reality that cant really be answered entirely by empirical testing. The same doesnt really hold true for pink bunnies or the like, which are simply imaginary constructs rather than attempts to answer ‘great questions’.
Ie what happen when we die, how did the universe ‘begin’, what the heck is consciousness really etc etc. We can say whenever we see someone else die they just seem to die, but that doesnt answer what consciousness means for us personally as individuals. It seems likely we just ‘stop’ but we arent going to really ‘know’ for sure that till we die ourselves, testing wise.
To me that kid of thing is more about what an agnostic position is about, and to some extent intersects with solipsism and the like.
Otara
No it was not…as you just showed.
It means without gods…not without a *belief *in gods…which is what you originally asserted.
You ought really to read your citations before posting them and pretending they back up your incorrect statements.
Marley
I wrote, ““Atheistic” didn’t come about by adding “a” to "theistic.””
FinnAgain responded: “That’s exactly where it came from, following long-established rules of English grammar.”
But it didn’t.
The word “theist” actually came into the English language AFTER atheist…if anything, theist was derived from atheist, not the other way around.
The citation from Wiki tells it rather clearly. Atheism - Wikipedia
Is it just the graphic nature of this comment that was a problem? Because Frank did say in another thread that he posts because it gives him pleasure to make atheists squirm.
:smack:
Wrong, it’s not hard to understand if you stop being so reflexively argumentative in the service of proving how open minded you are. The grammatical process in the Greek is exactly the same as English. “a” + “theos”. * I just showed that. * The construction of a- + theos is exactly it meant "godless’ or “to deny the Gods” and exactly describes soft and hard atheism. The word’s construction was lifted, pretty much intact, directly into French and we took it, pretty much intact, directly into English. A-theism, without god or gods, denying god or gods, godless.
It’s the same word and it’s been intact for about a millenium before Beowulf was a twinkling in a bard’s eye.
That’s why it was so easily adoptable into English from French. It follows the same grammatical rules and didn’t have its meaning altered one jot. A + theo = godless which is a synonym for a-theism. Why are you having trouble understanding this?
I’ve seen some people pretzel themselves to avoid just saying "yeah, I was wrong’, but your denial is turning into some sort of n-dimensional figure on this one.
You just went on to quote the Wiki link (which was already given to you to clear up your mistake and which you’re now re-citing in an ignorant misuse…) which shows that the use was exactly consistent from the Greek to the present, with a meaning that started by meaning “godless”. Do you really need a dictionary now as well as an etymological dictionary? And it points out that by the fifth century BCE, it meant an active type of godlessness, that is an active denial when before it ‘simply’ meant “godless”. You’ve just had hard and soft atheism described for you, from the ancient Greek via grammatical processes that were intact in the Greek, and come to us in English through the French, and which did not change. A-theos, a-theism, same root, same grammar, same semantic content. Over a span of more than 2,500 years.
They mean, and meant “without theism, without-a god, without-gods, without-goddism, without-insert-your-dodge-here-Frank”. Being godless does not mean that your buddy god went down to the sodey pop store for a pack of smokes and just never came back, (good lord I really do have to clear up your ignorance on basic vocab as well as basic etymology), it means [
](Godlessness Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster)
That’s the very definition of a-theism, which you’ve been railing against in some sort of quixotic attempt to prove that you aint what you am and we’re not as cool as you because you can deny the plain-as-day fact that you’re an atheist whose arguments are as strident, inflexible, rationalized and frustrating (how many posts have you made on this topic in the last, say, 72 hours?) as any theist or hard atheist.
You really ought to understand wtf you’re talking about before you make such embarrassing statements.
How about if I say that Pink Bunnies created the universe? I know that sounds silly to you, but it is exactly the same as saying that some sort of God did it.
I don’t have any problem with your model without the “blindness factor” and I still think it is fully consistent. I would just suggest that if you even use the phrase “yes it could happen”, you are not actually at +/- 100. Of course that means that no statement about reality could reach either extreme for moderately intelligent people, but that’s rather uninteresting. The real issue, as was brought up with the George Washington example, is whether you are certain enough to simply say “X is true” instead of “I see absolutely no alternative to X and it would rock my world view if X were false but just maybe X is not true.” The only reason this is controversial for X = “God does not exist” is because the large majority of people believe that predicate is incorrect and get upset that someone might exist who is so sure they are wrong. And surprisingly enough (or not) we tend to consider other people’s reactions to our actions and statements.
So only on this issue do you get a large group of people who try to claim the high ground by displaying their “open-mindedness” and unwillingness to stake out a position on the spectrum of belief. What they don’t realize is the aforementioned “plain as day” fact that by not acknowledging a positive belief in God, they automatically are placed on the opposite side of the spectrum. So maybe the only true agnostic position is at zero when you both believe and not-believe with equal complete uncertainty?
So if I am without a belief that you are wearing white socks right now I believe you are not wearing white socks right now?
Apparently you are still having trouble with the English language, Finn.
Sorry about that.
In response to my comment: “Atheistic" didn’t come about by adding “a” to "theistic.””…
…you wrote: “That’s exactly where it came from, following long-established rules of English grammar.”
It simply did not. There is no disputing that.
And you are talking about “English grammar” in that quote…in fact, “long-established rules of English grammar.”
Now you are talking about Greek going into French and then into English…in an attempt to make me wrong in what I said.
You were the one who was wrong…and you are the one who seems unable to simply say, “I was wrong.”
So let me raise you one: :smack::smack:
You’re narrowly correct that it didn’t come about by adding “a” to “theistic,” it came about by adding “a” to “theos.” Of course, FinnAgain already said that and cited it. On the bigger count, which is the inference you are attempting to draw from this, you’re wrong and your contention is silly. The current use of atheism is about three hundred years old, as the Wikipedia citation shows. The word is defined by its usage, which has been consistent for a long time, not by a literal translation of the word from its roots in Greek.
Yes, it’s because it’s graphic and drags the conversation downward. I did offer Frank apisa a mod note about the comment you mentioned but I don’t think he was saying anything sexual.
From Wiki:
Maybe his point is that, in English, the term “atheist” was not originally “a+theist.” Based upon Wiki, it appears “atheist” appeared in English in 1571, while “theist” appeared in 1662. Thus “atheist” in English predates “theist” and was not originally “a+theist.”