Also the “a” of atheism means “without”, not “denies”. “Without theism” is a more accurate definition that “denies god”.
This is why I said it’s a matter of definition. The OED and Merriam-Webster International agree that the commonly accepted meaning of atheist is one who denies or disbelieves the existence of God. The International goes further and adds “or any other diety.”
There is some wiggle room in all the meanings though. I would say that your position is that of an agnostic, i.e. one who isn’t certain but leans toward no diety based on lack of evidence.
I would like to see your logical train from a commonly accepted premise or premises to the position that there is no diety. And the lack of evidence for one isn’t a commonly accepted premise. More people than not think there is abundant evidence for the existence of a diety in the form of the God of the Old Testament. I don’t agree with them because I think that the probability that there is such a diety is vanishingly small.
I am an atheist because to me it makes sense for humans in a former time to invent an explanation for their existence, and it also makes sense for them, with their less evolved understanding of things, to invent a human-style powerful singular being.
In short I am an Atheist because I believe the concept of God was a human invention.
I have other reasons.
That doesn’t make much sense. That means you have to say “I’m not sure” about everything that hasn’t been shown to be true. You can never, ever say “No” about anything.
“Denies the existence of God” is an overtly theistic definition, presupposing the existence is there to be denied. Interestingly, the Cambridge dictionary doesn’t define it that way.
While we’re on definitions, maybe we need to define ‘deity’? There’s abundant evidence that the existence of an interventionist god is not possible.
I agree with your “wiggle room” comment about the definition to a degree- even my American Heritage Dictionary lists the second definition of atheist as “2. Godlessness: immorality.” Obviously, I would disagree that atheists are immoral by virtue of being atheists. Still “a” means “without” and not “denies”.
I identify myself as an atheist (“without theism”) as opposed to an agnostic (“without knowledge”) because I want to declare that am putting and have put some thought into my position. There is a further division among atheists that includes “soft” and “hard” atheists. I seem to be of the soft variety.
I’m not sure I understand your question regarding my “logical train” (of thought) without allowing for the lack of evidence for a diety. My train of thought on the subject begins there and is supported by other things. Lack of evidence for a god(s) certainly is a pretty commonly accepted premise among non-theists.
I disagree that I should reconsider since “more people than not” believe (is that the commonly accepted premise you were asking about?). I do think that more people believe because they were trained to do so from an early age, among other reasons. “More believe” is a poor arguement for belief.
So, not in any particular order, some of my thoughts that contribute to my non belief include “The Arguement of the First Cause”, “Pacsal’s Wager”, “Lack of Evidence”, “Too Many Gods”, science in general, “Occam’s Razor”, stuff like that there.
Really?
So is ‘atheist’ considered a negative insult in America, like ‘liberal’?
My two cents now! I guess I’d qualify as Atheist (but I’m not really concerned with whether or not God or deities exist so much as I am utterly anti-religion. I certainly don’t believe in any of the current official versions of “God”.)
I’d say that yes, most are skeptical. But most are also open to interpreting evidence. My personal experience is that evidence suggests there is great benefit to meditation, and that altered states can be acheived solely through meditation. I think atheists are likely to be naturally skeptical but ultimately more open to these concepts because there is no fear of angering a selfish, malicious, and/or vengeful deity. Just a thought.
Absolutely, on both questions.
This is the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4th edition. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000, p113. The defined word was “atheism” (not “atheist”).
As to the lack of evidence. It has been said many times here and elsewhere, and it is true, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And the statement that lack of evidence for a god is commonly accepted premise among non-theists is a circular argument. Logical conclusions ultimately rest upon assumptions that are taken to be true. Whether they are true or not depends upon the evidence that supports them. However, the lack of evidence for an assumption does not in any way mean that it isn’t true.
I don’t think you should reconsider and didn’t say you should. In fact I agree that it is unlikely there is a diety as assumed in the Old, New or any other Testament. I was only pointing out that claiming a lack of evidence is distinctly a minority opinion and is no better basis for a conclusion that the claim that there is a lot of evidence which is the majority position.
OK
The argument from First Cause leads to infinte regress -------------> ergo there is no diety. Fill in the blanks.
Pascal says even if there isn’t a God, the safe bet is to believe -------------> ergo there is no diety. Fill in the blanks.
Societies have many different gods -------------> ergo there is no diety. Fill in the blanks.
Science offers explanations without a diety -------------> ergo there is no diety. Fill in the blanks.
Ockham’s Razor - to me it seems much simpler and more direct to just say “God did it.” than to go through a scientific explanation.
Preposterous. It’s not really an insult unless it’s considered so by those to whom it is directed. An atheist might take offense at being called a liberal, and vice versa, but I don’t think that’s what you meant. As an atheist, I do not consider the term “atheist” to be insulting.
Well, I guess I wasn’t clear. As an atheist, I don’t consider the word insulting either, but if you’ve ever hear the people I work with spit the word out, there is no doubt that they consider it as, and use it as, an insult to meann that atheisits are evil, bad, and immoral, etc.
Also, I apologize to the OP. My portion of this conversation has veered far away from your question. I can’t speak for all atheists, but this atheist is skeptical of “alternative” stuff.
Well, I guess I wasn’t clear. As an atheist, I don’t consider the word insulting either, but if you’ve ever hear the people I work with spit the word out, there is no doubt that they consider it as, and use it as, an insult to mean that atheists are evil, bad, and immoral, etc.
Also, I apologize to the OP. My portion of this conversation has veered far away from your question. I can’t speak for all atheists, but this atheist is skeptical of “alternative” stuff.
Well, I guess that’s fine for you, but it doesn’t satisfy me.
Of course neither is it evidence of anything existing.
I think there is a considerable difference between saying ‘is there a Loch Ness monster?’ and ‘Is there a God?’
We know a lot about animals and can search the Loch. But we don’t expect the monster to want to reveal itself to us.
Apparently Gods want worshippers. Their priests say Gods have rules and unimaginable power to punish us. Yet somehow no God has ever bothered to show Himself.
I think it is reasonable to ask why God is so shy.
But “God did it” can never be the simplest explanation, because it presupposes the existence of God, who is (depending on your definition of God, I suppose) one of the most complicated entities ever proposed by the human imagination. If you say “God did it,” then you must also, as part of that explanation, be prepared to explain God.
The whole debate about who’s an atheist and who’s an agnostic has been done before, ad nauseum. See Great Debates. It’s not as simple as just looking up a dictionary definition, I’m afraid. A hard atheist says that God does not exist,while a soft atheist says that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that God exists. There’s some overlap between people who call themselves soft atheists and people who call themselves agnostics, and some agnostics go so far as to say that one could never answer the question of whether God exists. (Sorry if I’ve trod upon anybody’s sensibilities, here, but I was trying to be brief.)
I think you’ve lost track of what thie discussion in my threads is about. It’s not a question of atheism, hard, soft or over easy. It is whether atheism, as opposed to theism, is arrived at logically. I think that it isn’t. It seems to me that the idea is gotten because the atheist finds theism absurd or insufficiently supported and a leap is made from that to a rejection of it.
And I haven’t used the absence of evidence to prove anthing’s existence. I don’t see a lot of difference. The fact that no Loch Ness Monster has been found doesn’t prove, all by itself, that there isn’t one although it certainly casts doubt.
Could you cite the place where I said that’s fine with me?
And where are those logical connections you implied you could make?
It is absolutely used as an insult by many religious folk. I have experienced it personally. I have been told that I must be either an idiot or crazy, because that’s what atheists are. I have also been told that I can’t be a “real” athiest, basically because I seem to be a nice guy who follows a moral code. That’s probably more common – the idea that I simply don’t understand what I’m saying when I claim to be an atheist, because I’m not morally depraved enough to be one.
I can ddescribe a logical path to atheism, though I can’t claim that I, or anyone else, has followed it. You start by believing in nothing, and only accept those ideas for which you find compelling evidence. Of course, real life doesn’t work that way. As infants and children, we are trained to accept beliefs before we have the analytical skills or the knowledge base to to make our own judgements.
I was raised Catholic, and I was an altar boy. I became an atheist in my early teens, really as part of a larger psychological journey. Around that time I began to understand that I had been taight a kind of idealized world history-- that we arrived at our current society through unbroken social progress. Perhaps that’s an unavoidable result of training young minds – maybe our brains really aren’t capable of processing grasping the chaotic and arbitrary nature of a more accurate picture of society. Perhaps maturing can be likened to having learned the comforting precision of Newtonian physics, and then being confronted by the counterintuitive and uncertain nature of quantum physics.
A whole lot of people simply don’t want to come to grips with this chaos – it is somehow threatening, and thay can live out their lives in comfort and contentment without a world view based on unvarnished reality. So they do, because they cannot accept that they were raised on a sugar-coated candy reality, and they will never be happy with the spinach, brocolli and dirt salad that real life serves up.
I like to think I’m skeptical of everything, but we all have our blind spots. No doubt at least a few of my beliefs are based on assumptions that I accept so deeply I don’t even recognize them for what they are, assumptions without actual evidence behind them. I think religion is that for miost people. It was for me for the forst 15 years or so of my life. I can’t explain why I started to call myself an atheist at about 12, but I lived with foot pain into my 30’s because I never questioned my father’s lessons on tying shoes. “Tie them as tight as you can pull the laces so your shoes don’t fall off”, he used to tell me. I finally went to a doctor who suggested I loosen my laces, and the relief was like a freakin’ miracle. I just ciould’t make the simple, logical connection on my own because I never thought to question what I was taught as the “right way”.
Maybe that’s the only difference between atheists and theists. If the idea is present when you are receptive to it, you can absorb it and change your world view. Otherwise, it’s like throwing a ball against a wall – it just bounces right off.
Oh, crikey, I haven’t done very well as a font of cool logic in this post, that’s for sure.
Moving this religious thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
Not to answer for someone else, David, but…
The problem here…
…is that these aren’t arguments against god existing…
…they are refutations…
…of popular reasons given as an answer to questions like ‘how do you know god exists?’ If none of the above are satisfactory answers to that question (as they are not for me and many other people), somebody has to come up with better reasons for god’s existence. In the absence of those, I see no reason to assume god exists. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim for god’s existence, and I don’t see a reason to entertain the remotest possibility that that’s the case. I’m aware that I can’t prove I’m right. I don’t need to.
Then you don’t understand Occam’s Razor. If you say “god did it,” not only does that have to be the simplest explanation, but you have to be able to explain what god is, where god came from, and how god did [thing in question], and all that has to be simpler than the alternatives.