I meant ANY god/s.
I said “if this is indeed your point…”. If it is not, then what I said does not apply to you.
Well then I am back to having no idea what your point is. Could you maybe help us out with that?
When did I say that? It’s nice to see that you are getting what you wanted out of my post, even if it wasn’t there.
Nope - I gave a definition already - read the post. I would change one thing, since it seems to have created confusion, although for the life of me I don’t see why; an atheist is one who does not believe in ANY god/s. Some of you seemed to be confused that I said God, so I’m changing it to ANY god/s.
Huh? The evidence is either convincing, or it’s not. To clarify, I didn’t say “partially lacking and partially convincing”, which seems to be how you read it. “More evidence” does not necessarily equal “more likely”. One has to consider whether the evidence is valid. That doesn’t mean one is ignoring it, it means one is evaluating it. There is quite a bit of evidence for Santa Claus - e.g., pictures, testimony of children, presents given by him. Does this increase the probabilty that Santa Claus is a real person living at the North Pole? Not at all. Is it possible? Sure, it’s possible, but in my opinion the likelihood is extremely small.
I don’t understand how one can base a belief on evidence that is admittedly not convincing. WARNING! ANALOGY AHEAD (may not mirror subject at hand in every conceivable way): If you were on a jury at a murder trial, and they put on a lot of evidence that was all obviously bogus, would you still send the defendant up the river?
Only if I get to be the Not-Banker.
To comment on your dismissal of value for ‘proving’ a negative.
When maintaining larger systems, it might ‘prove’ vital to the ‘health’ of that system; that a smaller portion be removed.
To reach a reasonable conclusion, research is conducted, where one basically ‘proves’ that something needs to be severed and/or removed, annihilated…
Corperations can be saved by ‘proving’ that entire budget divisions are not only valueless, but apply negative value to the larger ideal of the ‘meta’ system. Removing a limb from a body has served much the same function in history; sometimes being necessary to preserve the life of an animal.
This same sense of energy preservation creeps into philosophic reasoning as well. If you are in constant pain in life, it may seem reasonable to explore your options…
Does the act of suicide trigger a series of events which are more undesirable than life (in an absolute sense)?
I this instance, the ‘life’ being maintained is a ‘lack’ of. This ‘life’ is a lack of suffering and pain… which takes great form when one is exposed to vast quantities of pain and suffering. (much like people refer to atheism only becoming illuminated when religion exists, otherwise it rests as a ‘non-belief’).
If one digs, and cannot find compelling rational reasons why suicide is a negative argument in contrast to their reality, and the ‘meta’ structure they wish to maintain, then it will present itself as being negatively proven in the sense of a positive argument.
This issue can grow stronger and more articulative when one is soley interested in ‘truth’. My experience with binary logic holds that those who are interested in truth will find that nihilistic forms of reasoning are superior than other forms. This is largely a result of one unique property of ideas associated with nihilism (like oblivion) – these ideas require no energy to subsist, survive and / or thrive. Like darkness itself, it just is … supple, giving… there is a strong omnipresent / omnipotent aura about darkness, about oblivion. There are no pretences, there are no agendas, there are no frieghtening suprizes, debts or violations of trust to expect around the corner. In an evolutionary sense… speaking about fitness in life seems silly, when it strikes one as so obvious that death is so much more fit than life to ‘exist’
When one is in great suffering and pain, the ability to solve this negative problem in a positive sense can validate their intuitive decision with logical corroboration. The amount of energy one saves by solving this problem is remarkable ! This problem that seems so negative to ‘you’, conserves so much energy, if the negative can be proven. For some, this proof is priceless … as priceless as omni-science might be for others. It is just simple inversion and relativistic methodology that yeilds these truths…
Like the person who gossips about people gossiping all the time… or talking trash about someone who talks trash about others, these ideas all have a vast array of inescapable reflections and projections, inversions and nullifications that basically make all of us seem silly, and yet equally profound )
It goes back to the comment about the ‘respected’ atheists being the ones who don’t preach about it. There is a fundamental human respect for integrity of non-hypocrisy, being what you say - rather than projecting your being by saying it, and in the process consuming ‘something’ to do so.
Since nihilism doesn’t have a desire and requires no consumption (in fact doesn’t consume anything … and once complete doesn’t create more or less of itself, or anything) to ‘survive’ binary arguments tend to default to nihilistic inversions of materialisticly positive arguments.
The number of paradoxes involved are half, since the ‘life’ of the idea or state requires zero resource to ‘survive’ indefinitely.
It is very similar to the articulation of atheism vs. agnisticism.
-Justhink
To add a little more…
The energy saved by believing in a God, or in materialism or nihilism tends to be infinite in nature…
Why bother inventing something when you may be able to invent invention itself? Would then the process of invention be ‘selling out’? If you invent invention, you have collapsed an entire system that people use as a resource of meaning … by taking a ‘positive’ step; you have nullified a vast segment of the species to which you feel kinship with. While in limbo … you are not achieving anything materialistically…
Basically, if you win you lose (because so many others ‘lose’) and if you lose you lose – from a materialists perpective of life.
I believe the same to be true for theisms as well… who really wants to go to heaven knowing that loved ones are burning in hell? But then again, who doesn’t want to be in heaven?
(assuming any of this – oblivion, heaven, hell, materialism is actually relevant)
These are conditional states and arguments. You can always reverse the polarity of an argument by changing the type of pressure each value is placing on a particular body. Just as you can see me as evil, I can easily reverse the polarity and paint you the same, using your own system of values in logic (only inverted). Then it becomes a matter of arguing wether reality is 4/5ths or 5/4ths … when both can be arranged (conditionally) to be a whole, and equally arranged to produce other odd figures to argue about.
I suppose that I am expressing the value one can find in a ‘negative’ argument; the rationality of this process.
-Justhink
Apologies for chain posting … stuff just keeps occurring to me when I take a cigarette…
On the idea of beliefs vs. non-beliefs … it can also be seen relativistically.
Is a person who has never touched a piano in their lifetime playing the piano?
Songs are comprised of pauses as well as notes…
Do we not say that someone who pauses in the middle of a song, for a measure, is not playing the piano? Adding the value for rhythm is simply adding another key … in this sense, when I pause in a song, I am playing the 89th key. So… how does one decide when I am not playing the 89th key, when I am not pressing one of the other 88? These insideous thought viruses take on a life of their own once recognized… as if something came from nothing, and simply by one perspective; everyone on earth follows the same ideology; whether they want to or not.
You may not want to believe in God, you may find it impossible to believe in God … but you do believe a great many things about God. Nihilists cannot find a reason to believe in anything … and yet it is hard to deny that they believe in all sorts of things, a frustrating stasis. Atheism is clearly more hypocritical than nihilism since all nihilists are atheists but not all atheists are nihilists… beliefs tend to be intertwined in such a way, that to discard one… means to discard them all with the same logical pattern. This reductionism is where nihilism is found. All of these veiwpoints have their logical corruptions, playing counter-intelligence off one another in a dance that basically leads to stasis to data flooding when one tries to absorb it all at once…
-Justhink
—The use of agnostic in the sense you claim is highly irregular is not - it is, in fact, a common and accepted usage of the word.—
Oh really? Is that why Huxley’s definition is front and center the first definition?
And when the second relies on the nonsense of “true atheism” whatever that is? Dictionaries are guides to common usage (and often faliable and biased ones at that), but their definitions are not assured of coherent semantics. I challenge you to actually respond to my post and explain how agnosticism is a middle position between theism and atheism, given that atheism, as most atheists use it, means having a lack of belief in god. Given that agnosticism concerns knowledge(gnosis), not belief.
—Justthink: Atheism is clearly more hypocritical than nihilism since all nihilists are atheists but not all atheists are nihilists…----
To equate atheism with nihilism is to make the horrendous mistake of slander. It is like claiming that “if you do not believe the things I believe, you therefore believe nothing.” I cannot imagine a more presumptive statement.
Atheists are defined as such because they lack ONE PARTICULAR BELIEF: theism. That’s it. It’s a negative definition in the sense that it tells you what someone is not, not what they are. It doesn’t tell you what sort of person they are, and most importantly, it tells you nothing about what other things they may believe.
Many atheists know all sorts of things about the various god claims there are in the world. However, those claims do not number among the claims that they believe are true.
—Mangle: I’m that atheists may be forced into taking up a position of believing that there is no god because they are not left alone by theists (if they were left alone, then they could quite merrily UNexperience the absence of belief, but that isn’t the case; they are frequently presented with beliefs that they reject; I suggest that this might result in a position of belief in the contrary).—
I don’t know what you think you mean by “unexperience the abscence of belief.” Lacking a belief has nothing to do with not hearing the claims, no matter how many times. It simply has something to do with not seeing any reason to believe them. Some people DO react negatively to pressue to believe, and defensively reject those claims without having sufficient evidence to do so. And this reaction formation IS misguided.
But it no more defines atheism than beign black or Jewish defines atheism.
—There’s a question on the table in another thread as to whether hard atheism might be the least tenable philosophical position to hold in that it denies a positive existential statement.—
If generalized, it is untenable for exactly one reason: it is a conclusion based on no known evidence or argument.
—It’s not a matter of that. The perceived inability to prove a negative is a recent myth. Even the assertion “you cannot prove a negative” is self-contradictory. If you cannot prove a negative, then how can you prove that you can’t?—
At best, you are merely mistaken here about what’s at issue, at worst I suspect you of being disingenuous.
As I hope you well know, the noted problem here is proving an existential negative in the abscence of a deductive disproof. It is not impossible in theory, but impossible in practice to disproove a claim like “god exists” or “unicorns exist.” To disproove these claims would require knowledge of all existence: something no one has.
It is particularly difficult in the case of “god” because the concept of the entity is so vague that one barely even knows what they are looking for.
This is why the burden of proof lies entirely on the claimant in such situations.
—As Alston said, you can’t deny Descarte’s “perfect being” without first presuming that the existence of a perfect being would be possible.—
One can, of course, simply see no reason to think that “perfect being” is a meaningful concept. Any sort of being, aside from a self-contradictory one, is “possible” in the sense you are using. But before we can discuss what actually exists, we need to know what we are discussing, and “perfect being” just doesn’t cut it.
Do not fall into the trap of thinking that just because a proposition is grammatically correct, that it must be litterally meaningful.
—Nighttime: I said that if you accept evidence as valid, meaning that it does suggest that god exists, then you are not an athiest.—
No. You are now confusing the issue. The only thing that matters to the atheist/theist distinction is the abscence or prescence of belief IN god. Missing that distinction is what leads people into the confusing realm of talking about percentage of belief. What matters is simply the word of the person in question: do they believe in a god (theist) or not (atheist)? What the requisite criteria of a “god” are is their call.
Reasons WHY a person might be willing to believe or not are interesting, but knowing them is not necessary to know the atheist/theist distinction. Case in point is this interchange:
—I find the evidence lacking, but I still think it lends some probability to the existence of a god. By your definition I am an athiest, as is anyone who is not absolutely sure of god.—
I don’t know about blowero, but you seem to be misreading the distinction. What is important, at least by my definition, is not the degree of probability, but simply whether or not YOU believe or not, REGARDLESS of the effect of that probability. I am an atheist: but if new evidence comes into light that incresaes the likihood that god exists, it may be sufficient to make me believe, or it may not be. Either possibility is valid, but accepting the evidence as valid does not necessarily mean deciding the case. Because at least in my case I try to follow the Liberal Scientific Method for assessing claims of truth, whether it is or not should depend entirely on the the weight of the evidence itself.
However, even then we have a problem: knowledge is not belief. It’s certainly possible, for instance, that someone could have the knowledge that Vishnu exists, and yet really just can’t believe it, believing in Allah instead. Knowledge is one possible determinant of belief (we think it is, still not knowing much about how our own minds work), but it is not the only one, and certainly not a necessary oen to make belief happen or not.
—Athiesm means that you do not believe the evidence increases the probability of god at all.—
No. Again, this puts the distinction in an unstable place other than simply talking about having a belief in god (theism) or not (atheism). This is a question not of probability, but rather of actuality. More importantly, it is NOT a question about external objective reality (does a god exist or not), but rather about a person: “do YOU believe in a god or not.”
Degrees of evidence can be important for SOME people’s belief… but not everyones. Some people are perfectly happy to believe regardless of evidence, and that’s fine. Some people do not know why they believe, but they just do. And that’s just as much a belief as any other.
Regardless of why, what matters is not the degree of evidence anyone thinks is necessary, but simply whether a belief is present or not, regardless of whether you or I think it should be or not.
I said:
Blowero said:
I said:
Blowero said:
I said:
Blowero said:
I am flattered you think all my points are worth repeating, even to the point of using my analogy, but perhaps you could repeat me without implying that you are arguing against me?
The question is, if athiesm is a lack of belief, then what constitutes belief? I have doubts about almost everything, even things I can see and touch. Despite these doubts, I have some belief in these things. I have varying amounts of belief in different things. To me, a lack of belief would mean that you have no belief in something. Therefore, athiesm to me means that you have absolutely no belief in god. You are right, it may have nothing to do with evidence. But if you have a little belief in god, although not enough to come right out and say “I believe in god”, I still think that glimmer of belief would mean that you are not an athiest. I guess this is just a matter of definitions though, and of course nobody has to accept mine or anyone elses.
Um, I deliberately parroted what you said (“It’s nice to see that you are getting what you wanted out of my post, even if it wasn’t there”). I did this in order to point out the irony of you criticizing me for misreading your post, when you then turned around and did the same to me. You really didn’t get what I was doing?
As for the other two examples you cut and pasted, I did not repeat you. Sorry if you think you have copyrighted analogies that use trials.
My point was that atheists do not necessarily reject evidence of god/s out of hand, but may consider the evidence and find it insufficient to believe in god/s. In our trial analogy, it would be like holding the trial, and finding that none of the evidence passes muster. It would NOT be like dismissing the trial before considering any evidence. This is the distinction I am trying to get across, and I am asking whether you are of the opinion that all atheists “dismiss the trial” before it gets started, so to speak. It would be much simpler for you to say either “Yes, this was my point”, or “No, this was not my point”, rather than play little cut & paste games which have nothing to do with the issue at hand. I’m trying to understand your point. If I appear to argue against you when we are actually in agreement, it is because you have yet to communicate a coherent idea.
Yes, I would agree with this.
And here is where we are getting hung up, and where I was unsuccessfully trying to get some clarification. How are we defining: “accepting the evidence as valid”? “Valid” in the sense of being worthy of consideration, but not necessarily proving that god/s exist? or “valid” in the sense that it DOES tend to prove that god/s exist?
Except I’m going to have a problem with that, not accepting your second statement as a given, which was my whole point.
Accepting both your premises, sure, you are right - Huxleyian Agnostism does not represent a middle ground between belief and non-belief. But your premise is flawed, since many people who self define as agnostics have no idea who Huxley is or what the technical definition of agnostism is. They use the word to mean “undecided” or maybe “don’t care” and sometimes “probably not, but I’m keeping an open mind” and, at least once in my experience “if I’d admit to being an atheist, it would distress my Grandmother.”
Maybe in your experience no one uses the word in anything but its Huxleyian sense - in my experience the non-Huxleyian agnostics are far more common.
I’ve got a simple analogy.
I believe what I consider the most elementary system of rules that explains the things I observe.
I believe rocks fall because all rocks I have seen unsupported have. I don’t believe that people can turn walls purple by the power of thought, because I think someone would have mentioned it by now if there was any convincing evidence. I don’t believe in ESP (here it comes) for the same reason. I’ve examined the evisence a bit more people because more people believe it, so it seems more likely theres something I’m missing. I believe ESP doesn’t exist, not in a specific anti-ESP way, but because I don’t believe anything there’s no evidence for. I reserve judgement to change my mind if more evidence appears.
Half the people I meet believe in God. Is God analogous to ESP?
I think athiests who say “I don’t believe that there is no God, I just don’t believe that there is” mean that they don’t believe [sensible things]+[no God] they believe [sensible things] which includes the absence of God. We feel (and are wrong about many theists) that theists believe [sensible things]+[God] which annoys as much as [sensible things]+[ESP].
Whether God is supported by the evidence is a matter of factual debate, so lets have another thread about that.
—Dangerosa: They use the word to mean “undecided” or maybe “don’t care” and sometimes “probably not, but I’m keeping an open mind” and, at least once in my experience “if I’d admit to being an atheist, it would distress my Grandmother.”—
But this just seems to re-inforce my point: agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive. Nor does agnosticism, in any sense, answer the question “do you believe or not.” If one is undecided, then obviously they have yet to profess belief, to take the step that makes one a theist. Belief is an action. Lacking a belief is prior to taking the aciton of holding it.
The problem is that most atheists are “undecided” too, as well as “keeping an open mind.” And they resent the centuries-long slander against them to the contrary. Most atheists would be happy ALSO calling themselves agnostics, and many do use that word in polite company.
My own grandmother told me that I should call myself an agnostic “because it sounds nicer.” That may be, but here discussing the actual matter, we have the luxury to avoid censure and stigma and discuss things openly and plainly.
—The question is, if athiesm is a lack of belief, then what constitutes belief? I have doubts about almost everything, even things I can see and touch. Despite these doubts, I have some belief in these things. I have varying amounts of belief in different things.—
And, as it should be, YOU are the one that decides when YOU have a belief in something. It’s that simple.
—To me, a lack of belief would mean that you have no belief in something.—
Yes, I lack the belief that theists profess. I can clearly identify what theists say that they believe, and note that I do not have this belief.
—Therefore, athiesm to me means that you have absolutely no belief in god.—
I’m not sure what the modifier “absolutely” means here. Either you have a belief or you don’t. Either you are willing to say “I believe in god” or you aren’t.
—You are right, it may have nothing to do with evidence. But if you have a little belief in god, although not enough to come right out and say “I believe in god”, I still think that glimmer of belief would mean that you are not an athiest.—
I think it SHOULD rest on whether one has a belief in god or not. And note here that we aren’t looking litterally at what a person would feel comfortable saying, because many people feel scared to admit what they believe. If we let the distinction rest on what a person would litterally be willing to say, then whether the same person was rightly called an atheist or a theist would change in different environments. We are primarily concerned here about a person’s honest, unforced appraisal of what they believe.
I don’t think the size should matter, since I’m not really sure what the “size” of a belief is anyway. If someone says that they have a “glimmer of belief in god” I think that counts as a belief in god.
—I guess this is just a matter of definitions though, and of course nobody has to accept mine or anyone elses.—
Sure, but it is important to have some sort of coherent semantic that is consistent accross the varioues words “theist” “athiest” etc. People all to often try to define words in ways that give their own position a special advantage, poisoning the well, as they say.
Ultimately, words are just tools. If someone doesn’t think I, a non-theist, am rightly called an atheist, fine. But they should only do this in the service of a clearer understanding of who I am and in the hopes of a clearer discussion: not as an easy stab at misdirection. All too often, the latter situation is the case. This is often because words come with a whole host of special connotaitons, and by switching them around, people try to pick and choose among them, smuggling in leftover meanings from the words they discarded.
My example of the “one-way atheist trap” above in this thread is one frustrating example. First I’m identified as an atheist simply because I don’t believe in god. Then, because I’m an “Atheist,” I must believe that there is no god. The wide definition is used to catch me, then the narrow definition is used to slam me. Personally, I don’t really care what you call me, atheist or non-theist, or whatever. I just don’t like it when people try to have it both ways against the middle.