Atheism

We don’t have enough information to know. Our universe might have come from nothing with no first cause - but it also might have been created by some grad student in another brane. We can’t talk with certainty about things beyond our event horizon - and this kind of is.
What I do know for sure is that it was not created by any god humans have talked about - unless that God is a big liar.

No, it doesn’t. If five minutes ago you would have asked me if I am with the belief that birds called Smoky Honey-Eaters exist, I would have answered “no.” If you would have asked the follow up question, “So, you actively believe there are no Smoky Honey-Eaters”? I would have told you that that’s not true. I have no belief that they do exist, but they might; there are many species of birds I have never heard of.

The definition of strong atheist that I’ve seen is one who actively believes that there are no gods, as opposed to simply lacking belief in gods. By your definition there would be more like 99.999% weak atheists. I’ve only seen one atheist who claimed he really knew no gods exist with certainty, and he wasn’t really all that bright.

You could JUST SO HAPPEN to have never encountered the idea of a god, or say “eh, maybe, but probably not.” This is passive disbelief. Or you could say “I do not believe in god” (even if you leave a tiny shred of room for being wrong), that is active disbelief.

There is an even stronger claim though that was central to what x-ray and I were talking about before, and that’s positive disbelief.

Positive disbelief is much stronger (and I think obviously so) than passive disbelief. It’s a common thorn in math and science, too.

A lot of people mistakenly say “you can’t prove a negative”, this isn’t actually true. It’s just that in most cases it’s intractable (and yes, occasionally impossible). Take for existence the claim “there are no currently living naturally purple haired cats”. This claim could be disproven by rounding up every single cat on the planet and checking its hair color. This is also, obviously, a completely ridiculous and entire impractical endeavor.

Instead, I passively disbelieve in naturally purple haired cats because I lack evidence that they exist, and my knowledge of genetics and my incredibly thorough experience at looking at cats on the internet tells me that this is, at best, extremely unlikely. But I do not and cannot say for certain that there are no purple haired cats until I can either:

  1. Round up all the cats and show none are purple (after all, there could be some freak feral cat in a cave somewhere in Mongolia)
    or
  2. Provide some reason it is, a priori, impossible to have a purple haired cat.

This is why it is important to distinguish between the two. Passive disbelief (or even very weak active disbelief) requires little effort and is pretty close to the default logical state. Positive disbelief requires special empirical or logical knowledge of the situation to be true. Some mathematicians spend tons of hours thinking just disproving (very complex, technical) statements. This is why physicists need billion dollar experiments just to tell them a small handful of potential models aren’t viable. Saying something truly, definitely is not the case is a much stronger claim than saying something is not the case until you’re proven wrong.

It’s an inclusive “or”, it could be one, the other, or both. Most Christians are atheists with respect to every god on the planet except for Jesus/God/Holy Spirit, for instance. A Christian is an atheist with respect to Thor. Self-described atheists tend to be atheists for the vast majority of things the vast majority of the world’s religions would term deities (or, as a common statement goes, “exactly one more god than Christians are atheists of”).

Yeah, I admitted I was wrong about the strong atheist claim later on. I maintain that at least in my dialect my use of “assume” was correct though crosses arms.

Let’s start a petition on whitehouse.gov about getting an emergency shipment of cosmology books released to those debating these topics.

First, scientific proof is a misnomer. Science just provides provisional understanding about things, which can be changed with more data. Proofs without errors always stand.
Second, no one says that all matter came from nothing. In fact matter is what happened to the energy of the cosmos when it cooled after the Big Bang, You know e = mc**2, right?
Third, what happened before the Big Bang is likely to always be unknowable, though we can have plenty of theories. So no one who understands this claims to know what happened before time.

Third base!
(Sorry, those of us of a certain age can’t resist that straight line.)

Sorry, just trying to catch up.

I myself transitioned from weak to strong. Weak is a safer position because no one can really complain about you lacking belief unless they tell you why you should believe, while it makes some sense to quiz you why you believe there are no gods.
The common, and incorrect, definition of agnostic is pretty much equivalent to weak atheist - so I appreciate those who use the correct term.

ETA: I see you got that one too!

I’m pretty damn sure that the omnipotent and omniscient variety of God does not exist, because I consider the concepts to be logically self-contradictory. A triangle with five angles cannot exist, for somewhat the same reason.

As for smaller gods, godlets, spirits, ghosts, and ha’nts, I’m comfortable with “weak atheism.” But when you posit an entity that “knows everything,” strong atheism kicks in, big time.

Third base!

^ See post 347. :slight_smile:

It’s only a contradiction if he has all three of the big omnis. He could be omniscient and omnipotent but just be kind of an apathetic (or depressed) dick. He could be omniscient and omnibenevolent, but lacks the ability to do much about it (other than giving people hope though putting his son’s face on toast, of course).

Well, okay, omnipotent and omnibenevolent is till a contradiction, since omnipotent kind of entails omniscience (I guess he has ultimate power but doesn’t know how to use it?). But still, it’s only when you get to that cross section of “loves everybody and wants everyone to be happy” and “knows everything and has unlimited cosmic power” that you get into contradiction territory.

Dammit! Scooped by Voyager!

I’m at work, doing multiple shows throughout the day, and sometimes I open a reply window and then can’t finish what I’m typing for a while. So sometimes I get ninaj’d.

Real atheist here - I do not believe that physical matter came out of nothing, nor do I believe there was a first cause.

You can doubt all you want, it doesn’t matter to me.

I usually called my grandfather “Grandpa,” but the soldiers who served alongside him typically mentioned his rank or his last name.

Where the hell did this “omnibenevolent” bullshit come from? I never even heard that term until very recently. And for good reason, in a universe where being benevolent to one person/tribe can yield a detrimental result for another, there is no room for omnibenevolence.

By the same token, omnipotence is logically unworkable, because exerting power requires relinquishing power. The third omni is actually “omnipresent”, which I think would mean extratemporal – how could it exist everywhere and not also everywhen? Combine this with omniscience, and you have a being that already knows everything that will happen, which would imply a deterministic universe, something a great many believers would object to, because that cancels out “free will” (on which subject there is another thread).

So, if someone asks me “Why don’t you believe in god?”, I think I have a pretty strong case for “Why should I?”

I agree, atheists don’t really exist. But God does. Now that we cleared up the definition of atheists…what should we tackle next.

Same question.

You do realize that koufax was trying to be ironic, right?

Your inability to understand how a dictionary works? Your arrogance in thinking you have the right to give new definitions to words that already have well-established definitions? Your habit of supposedly agreeing with someone, then dumping said agreement in the toilet just a couple posts later?