[QUOTE=newcrasher]
Tell me if you disagree - When the physical body ceases to support life, the consciousness and non-physical aspects of the recently deceased person cease to exist.
[/QUOTE]
Well, I’m not an atheist, but if I were one, I’d respond that I can neither agree nor disagree with that statement, because it presupposes the existence of “non-physical aspects of the recently deceased person.” If there is no soul, the statement is meaningless either way.
newcrasher, your logic goes against the very definition of atheism. Atheist have zero faith in the non-existance of any diety. We also have zero faith in the existance of any religious.
Do you have faith that Santa Claus doesn’t exist? No, you’re just an intelligent human being; there’s no reason to believe he’s anything but a fairy tale, and thus you just don’t give a shit. If he appeared before you, riding a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer, you might change your mind–but till that day you just couldn’t give two shits. That takes no faith one way or the other. It just takes figuring out that people make shit up.
[QUOTE=newcrasher]
…
But as a Christian, I say there is a God. I cannot prove it, so I have to accept it on faith, taking into acount the sum of my experiences in this world. The atheist says there is not a God. Not only is the atheist burdened with the difficult task of wrestling with the existance/absence of God, but they are further stymied by the fact that you cannot prove a negative. By nature, the atheist has more faith than the religious person.
[/QUOTE]
You want to use Faith is the belief in things not seen for this thread.
An Atheist by your definition has no faith in a “thing not seen”.
They only have “Faith” in the non-existence of a thing unseen.
You set the logic to fit your debate and yet it is inherently flawed by your own definition. Please try again.
Jim
[QUOTE=newcrasher]
First, let us agree on the definition of “faith”, at least for the purpose of this thread. Faith is the belief in things not seen.
[/QUOTE]
There are so many problems with this as a definition that any logical argument based on it isn’t going to be worth much. I think Polycarp (whom I have never seen, but in whom I believe) provided the definitive response.
[QUOTE=Polycarp]
The big problem with this is that the OP abstracts one line out of context from the Epistle to the Hebrews, assigns a nebulous meaning to it, and then produces a somewhat sophomoric argument about the degree of “faith” it takes.
Well, dark matter is by definition not observed. Therefore, theist and atheist astrophysicists have equal faith, according to whether they “believe in” the dark matter hypothesis.
Try this on for size, instead: “Faith” is trust, in the religious sense placing trust in a deity and his/her purported promises. The existence of that deity, the validity of those promises, are immaterial to the term.
Now, drawing our parallel: In a good marriage, each spouse trusts his/her spouse implicitly. He/she has faith in him/her. Not religious faith, but the same sort of non-rational (but not irrational) confidence in the good intent, integrity, and loyalty of the marriage partner. (This does not deal with rocky marriages, or with whether the spouses in open marriages are “cheating” by someone else’s definition – as I understand it, it’s possible for a spouse in an open marriage to “cheat” by having an affair with someone outside the bounds of the spousal agreement, even though sex with someone with the partner’s approval is not “cheating.”)
Okay. In a marriage, as finetuned by the above, then, the spouses have “faith” in each other. A very practical humanist use of the term in a non-religious sense. Do you all grant that?
Now, what’s wrong with the OP argument is that it’s saying – “No single people can distrust his or her spouse, because he/she doesn’t have a spouse. Therefore, single people have more faith in their spouses than married people.”
Reductio ad absurdam? Or am I missing something?
[/QUOTE]
Dark matter is a crapy analogy. Dark matter was not dreamed up. It solved mathematical formulae and had gravitational effects.It was an argument that evolved from evidence.
God has no observational evidence. It is superstition.
[QUOTE=newcrasher]
I believe no one can lightly choose to be an atheist. I would hope it would be a decision to which they have given alot of thought.
[/QUOTE]
We are innately born atheists. One has to make either a choice or get proselytized (brainwashed) later to have belief in the fictitious.
[QUOTE=newcrasher]
Since you cannot prove a negative, lets make your position a positive. Tell me if you disagree - When the physical body ceases to support life, the consciousness and non-physical aspects of the recently deceased person cease to exist.
[/quote]
You certainly can prove a negative - mathematicians do it all the time. We can prove you can’t square a circle, for instance. You probably mean that you can’t prove an existential negative.
To say something that I don’t think everyone else hasn’t said, there is a difference between belief and faith. I might believe Rob Roy will win the second race, but I don’t have a lot of faith in it - if he doesn’t win, my world is not rocked.
Atheism is defined as the lack of belief in any god. You don’t have a problem with us not believing in all the same gods you don’t believe in, just with the god you do. Some atheists believe there are no gods, but that’s not required. Few atheists claim to “know” that there are no gods. Maybe a few have faith in this, but it is not required.
It is very similar to how a scientist views a theory. You start by provisionally accepting a hypothesis, and people might go into believing in a theory, but a good scientist should never have faith in a theory. Apologetics have no place in science.
And what does faith mean to you? I think it is more than belief in things not seen - it is also belief in the face of countervailing evidence. Plenty of examples of that in Christianity.
It’s worse than a crappy analogy; it’s false. The idea of dark matter was introduced specifically because observations demanded something to account for virtually every aspect of large-scale structure we see in the universe, which happens to strongly contradict what could be predicted if only EM-radiating matter existed. The only marginally viable alternative anyone has been able to come up with that I’m aware of is a modification of gravity itself; and even the modified gravity proponents admit their models require some form and amount of dark matter, though it could be rather mundane, like the neutrinos already included in the Standard Model and known now to have small mass. There are also very good reasons to look for physics beyond the Standard Model that readily accomodate, and even demand, particles that have precisely the properties one would expect of the lukewarm dark matter that seems to pervade the universe, namely axions, sterile “right-handed” neutrinos, and perhaps even superpartners of the known classes of particles. Belief need have nothing to do with it. Dark matter is essentially required if anything we understand about the laws of physics at all hold outside of our region of the galaxy, which every observation indicates is the case. It’s a thoroughly evidence-based dilemma.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Dark matter is a crapy analogy. Dark matter was not dreamed up. It solved mathematical formulae and had gravitational effects.It was an argument that evolved from evidence.
God has no observational evidence. It is superstition.
[/QUOTE]
I think the real problem is that “things unseen” is obsolete, coming from a time when the only things known to exist were seen. That’s not true anymore - we’d have to expand this to belief in things without physical evidence or something like that.
It takes no faith at all to believe in the existence of a planet detected by its gravitational influence.
[QUOTE=stpauler]
We are innately born atheists. One has to make either a choice or get proselytized (brainwashed) later to have belief in the fictitious.
[/QUOTE]
I do not buy that statement, I think we are innately born questioners. We do know enough to be atheist or religious. We almost universally want to know more.
I am sure a devout person would consider Atheist brainwashed. I would say religious people are indoctrinated into faith.
What Atheism has in its favor, is it is usually achieved by logical thought and belief in God is not logical. Logical thought is not enough to prove beyond doubt that God does not exist, but at least it is simpler to argue the merits of Atheism.
Jim {I am not positive there is no God, I remain comfortably agnostic, all you believers seem a little weird to me.}
Wait a minute. If faith is the belief in something that can’t be seen, can we also say that it’s the belief in something that can’t be proved? If this is the case, then both the atheist and the christian (or whatever) would not want their beliefs to be proved, as this would destroy their faith. Then wouldn’t the athiest be more comfortable since as you say a negative cannot be proved? The poor christian has to live everyday in fear of his ideas being proved, robbing him of faith and only leaving him with mere mundane, scientific knowledge. If this is the case then the athiest has chosen a solid, undisprovable belief (im sure thats not a word), while the christian’s faith could be destroyed. That to me is a stronger faith.
[QUOTE=Spidey]
Wait a minute. If faith is the belief in something that can’t be seen, can we also say that it’s the belief in something that can’t be proved? If this is the case, then both the atheist and the christian (or whatever) would not want their beliefs to be proved, as this would destroy their faith.
[/QUOTE]
Interesting. I know of no atheist who wouldn’t be happy to have his beliefs proved - the problem is we accept that this is impossible (not undesirable.) However, a very common Christian position is that God is not evident in the world because strong evidence of his existence would destroy faith. (Despite Biblical counter-examples.) That’s one of the cases where if you started off with a blank slate, you’d expect a believer to wish for strong evidence of god so that more would be saved. The only reason I can think for the standard position is as an explanation, somewhat desperate, of why the world looks just like one without a god.
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
I am not positive there is no God, I remain comfortably agnostic, all you believers seem a little weird to me.
[/QUOTE]
Bear in mind, most self-identified atheists don’t consider themselves “believers” (in the nonexistence of God); many who use the word “atheism” are actually closer to what others would term a form of “agnosticism”. See this introduction to atheism, for example.
(I always like to say I’m not an “agnostic” because I’m not that closed-minded. I mean, sure, I don’t have any knowledge of God now, but it seems presumptuous to say that it’s impossible that I should ever come to have knowledge of a God or gods.)
How many times does this utterly fallacious and ludicrous assertion have to be ground into hamburger around here before it stays dead? This might be the lamest of all apologetics, even more insipid than the Wager or the Trilemma. At least those other two think they’re proving something. This “atheism is a faith” thing, though, just smacks of desperation and projection.
I don’t remember who it was but somebody around here once said that calling atheism a faith is like calling baldness a hair color. That about sums it up, I think.
Newcrasher, change the word “god” to “elves.” Would you say it requires more “faith” to believe that elves exist or to not be convinced that elves exist?
[QUOTE=MEBuckner]
Bear in mind, most self-identified atheists don’t consider themselves “believers” (in the nonexistence of God); many who use the word “atheism” are actually closer to what others would term a form of “agnosticism”. See this introduction to atheism, for example.
(I always like to say I’m not an “agnostic” because I’m not that closed-minded. I mean, sure, I don’t have any knowledge of God now, but it seems presumptuous to say that it’s impossible that I should ever come to have knowledge of a God or gods.)
[/QUOTE]
Unless you typo-ed my doubts/beliefs appear to match yours but I consider myself agnostic. This could be a different understanding of what the term means.
I have met many Atheist who are sure that God does not exist, that is all I meant by believers, well that and it was a bit of minor humor.
I still think the Op’s logic fails on its own. This does not reflect any other possible arguments from either side.
Jim
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Interesting. I know of no atheist who wouldn’t be happy to have his beliefs proved - the problem is we accept that this is impossible (not undesirable.) However, a very common Christian position is that God is not evident in the world because strong evidence of his existence would destroy faith. (Despite Biblical counter-examples.) That’s one of the cases where if you started off with a blank slate, you’d expect a believer to wish for strong evidence of god so that more would be saved. The only reason I can think for the standard position is as an explanation, somewhat desperate, of why the world looks just like one without a god.
[/QUOTE]
If by “evident”, you mean “conventionally unverifiable”, this is correct. However, I do see the oft-repeated objection that atheists/agnostics stack the deck against believers by demanding too narrow a form of verification or witness (“…more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…”, etc.), and hence are hypocrites, since they obviously “believe” that only means of observation they define as valid should be accepted. It boils down, basically, to criticizing us for discounting the unverifiable merely because we think it is.
I’ve not found a tenable answer to the counter-objection that there are potentially an infinite number of commonly-unverifiable things we could be asked to consider, and even believers do not entertain all of them, apparently selectively employing the same skeptical tools the more “rigid” skeptics employ themselves. Other than a refusal to seriously consider that various forms of epiphany might be mere “tricks of the mind”, I don’t think there is any possible solution to this impasse. It’s hardwired into some, perhaps most, human minds, to think this or that way, and ne’er shall differing minds comprehend the other, I fear.
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
I have met many Atheist who are sure that God does not exist, that is all I meant by believers, well that and it was a bit of minor humor.
[/QUOTE]
Just as a note of warning, becuase someone is sure God (or some other deity) doesn’t exist doesn’t mean they are a “strong atheist.” I am quit sure Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but I don’t actively refuse his existence and would have no particular issue to find out I’m wrong.
All atheists are sure God doesn’t exist. That’s the difference between “weak atheists” and “agnostics.” Agnostics believe that there is possibly some deity, who may indeed be God, they just don’t feel there’s enough evidence to say for sure which on of the human gods is valid, if any.
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Unless you typo-ed my doubts/beliefs appear to match yours but I consider myself agnostic. This could be a different understanding of what the term means.
I have met many Atheist who are sure that God does not exist, that is all I meant by believers, well that and it was a bit of minor humor.
I still think the Op’s logic fails on its own. This does not reflect any other possible arguments from either side.
Jim
[/QUOTE]
Just to give a quick rundown of the technical definitions:
Atheism means “without theistic belief.” This word is now usually subdivided into tow kinds of atheism; “weak” atheism – basically, a lack of positive belief in God without necessarily holding a strong belief that God does not or cannot possibly exist (often conflated with agnosticism, see below) and “strong” athism – a positive belief that God does not exist.
Agnosticism is technically the belief that it is not possible to know whether God exists. Popularly, though, the word has become so blurred with weak atheism that there is almost no practical distinction any more.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Just to give a quick rundown of the technical definitions:
Atheism means “without theistic belief.” This word is now usually subdivided into tow kinds of atheism; “weak” atheism – basically, a lack of positive belief in God without necessarily holding a strong belief that God does not or cannot possibly exist (often conflated with agnosticism, see below) and “strong” athism – a positive belief that God does not exist.
Agnosticism is technically the belief that it is not possible to know whether God exists. Popularly, though, the word has become so blurred with weak atheism that there is almost no practical distinction any more.
[/QUOTE]
That’s a good explanation. As I said earlier, I’m usually a bit sloppy in that I call myself an atheist rather than agnostic because it seems that most people think agnosticism means you don’t know whether God exists or not, rather than you cannot know it. A subtle, but important distinction.
To this day I find the taxonomy of believers and non-believers to be hopelessly baroque and variable. I personally consider myself an agnostic because I certainly do not consider it an absolute given that any form of any purported Creator with attributes qualifying it for diety status is non-existant. I find the entire notion so boundless in its possibilities that I’d rather say it’s utterly unfalsifiable, completely inscrutible on any level, and hence so meaningless as to be unworthy of serious consideration. But, hey, I could be wrong. To some that’s some species of athiest. To other it’s something like a “Tooth Fairy Agnostic”. I’ve no idea anymore, and don’t think it really matters so much.