As I mentioned earlier, I think his distinctions are excellent. I feel I must volunteer this, though. I think that the weak atheist could easily be placed into the agnostic category. Which would give us two flavors of agnosticism: those who say that they do not know if there is a god and those who believe we cannot know if there is a god.
Although I understand the argument for keeping what we call weak atheists in the atheism category, for me the whole thing would be easier to understand with two flavors of agnosticism. One reason I don’t think this will be well received is that the true strong atheist likes having the weak atheist in the atheism category—for cover. I makes it easy for them to profess that atheism means lack of belief, of which they are one “strong” flavor.
As I said earlier it’s not easy for people to feel trustful toward those they don’t understand. So I think that strong atheists would take a big first step toward their goal if they were willing to do as I suggest and carry the banner of atheism alone. A discussion would start where definitions wouldn’t change with each conversation. And that would bring people closer to understanding and acceptance.
I’ll also add, for the record, that I think that atheists, strong or weak, can be, and are, every bit as moral as theists.
No, since every non-idiot who considers that there is possibility that they’re wrong (ie. that one cannot know) is an agnostic, theists or atheists alike. I’m saying weak atheists think god absence is only slightly less likely than god presence, while strong atheists consider absence as far more likely than presence. I’d call someone who considered both equally likely (as per cosmodan’s definition) merely undecided. They could not be called theist oratheist because they’re just as much of either.
Agreed (given that both theistts and atheists can be, IMO must be, agnostic also). I’d also add Undecided: Has no preference for either belief or belief-not.
Me too, and I’m as strong an atheist as one can reasonably be (ie. No matter how unlikely I consider gods, I’m still agnostic).
Because the evidence for one is all around you.
Why is your belief-not contingent on the number of believers, in a kind of reverse argument ad populum?
So like me, you believe there’s no such thing, yes? I don’t understand how that requires “effort”.
Of course, but the fallacy is that the negative has nothing to do with it. The scope and properties of the subject are what matters, not the positive or negative phrasing of the proposition. In the case of atheism, those examples in which belief-not is different from not-belief are similarly irrelevant.
Good, so we agree that the evidence against this God’s existence is still contingent on natural-first OR (which many theists reject)?
Evidence is neither true nor false, propositions are.
Agreed – glad you’re tossing out most of that Theory of Knowledge module along with me.
My hope is that “weak atheists lack belief but don’t believe-not” will be similarly corrected.
That would be me.
Well, it would only have to rise somewhere above 50% for you to become theist. That’s how I’d, personally, distinguish weak atheism from strong: the weak is turned theist by miracles, while the strong considers these evidence of Hoaxmaster aliens or future technology. Can you see how I’d be in a similar minority to those Young Earth Creationsists who now effectively believe in a Hoaxmaster god?
But, yet again you have now introduced FURTHER OPTIONS. If the question was phrased “Do you believe that any other number than 7 will come up?” you could say “Yes, and therefore I believe that 7 will not come up, ie. I don’t believe 7 will come up.”
We don’t know anything, ever: When I say “I believe Liverpool will not win” I *still don’t know they will not win. Please, can we eject this irrelevance once and for all?
Just, please, answer the question I ask, not the different one you’d like to answer. Given binary exclusisvity (ie. no ties), believing Liverpool will not win is equivalent to not believing they will win: AGREED? How could they possibly be different, since there is no situation (given no ties) in which one could be true but the other false?
But there is no X in this situation. And in the atheist case, atheists are 0ists but neither 1ists or Xists, yes?
Of course. A die is more likely to throw a non-6 than a 6, but the chance of number being thrown is the same.
Yes: I ascribe a probability of <50% for each team.
Agree.
Yes, what’s the problem? For 10 teams, P(ti)=0.1, ie. <50% so I don’t believe (=believe not). However, P(t1 or t2 or t3 or t4 or t5 or t6) = 0.6, so I believe that that group will contain the winner. Where’s the contradiction? Again, I think you missed this obvious truth: Of course <50% probabilities can add up to 1.
Careful: better phrase it as “I think that group will not contain the winner”. We’re now considering groups, not individual teams.
No, both groups are then equally likely to contain the winner. Again, be careful with the precise question you’re asking if you don’t wish to misrepresent me.
What’s the problem? I would then simply believe that that group would contain the winner (ie. that the other group wouldn’t, ie. I wouldn’t believe that the other group contains the winner, etc. etc.)
Whoops what? I have said time and time and time and time again in this thread that I understand the difference between not-belief and belief-not where there is a third option. But gods either exist or not. “I don’t know” is a non sequitur, not a third option – think about that carefully. It’s not even a third option in “I do or don’t think there’s a god” – the third option there is “I have no preference one way or the other”, which is not said by atheists.
That one can believe-not without not-believing for a given team? Of course: you can ascribe precisely 50% (for whatever reason). But that wasn’t my question, if you remember. It was, given that you believe a given team will not win (for whatever reason), ie. ascribing a LESS THN 50% chance, that is equivalent to not believing they will win. It is a far simpler question than your example (whose relevance I don’t fully grasp, but I hope I’ve walked you through it to your satisfaction.)
Like?
Then he wouldn’t be an atheist, since that requires considering gods’ absence more likely than presence.
Agreed. Can we agree that perfect indecision is a different matter to atheism?
Here’s the crucial falw in this distinction. You can ignore the rest of this post except this if you like:
What’s the difference between weak atheist and undecided? Neither has a belief in god.
But they’re just as much theists if they think god’s presence is as likely as absence. If they can’t bring themselves to say “there’s no such thing as god, I reckon”, why not class them as theists?
And just to clarify my own definitions[ul][li]Agnostic: Admits they might be wrong. (Belief-O-Meter needle anywhere except 0% and 100%)[/li][li]Theist: Considers god more likely than no god. (Needle >50%)[/li][li]Atheist: Considers no god more liekly than god. (Needle <50%)[/li][li]Undecided: Considers absence and presence of god equally likely. (Needle = 50.000 … %)[/li][li]Weak atheist: Considers absence only lightly more likely than presence (such that *eg.*miracles could push the needle past 50%).[/li][li]Strong atheist: Considers absence so much more likely than presence that miracles would be taken as evidence for a simulation instead.[/ul]I don’t understand why atheism is claiming the undecided position, nor why considering absence more likely than presence isn’t “believing there’s no gods”.[/li]I’m happy to let it lie here - I’m sure it will come up again.
I don’t see it as undecided. The person I describe has decided that there isn’t enough evidence to believe {be a theist} They may be the non idiot you describe and understand that new evidence will come and beliefs will change.
And since atheism can be described as a lack of belief in god{s} this person qualifies.
I think the point being made is that it can be said by a weak atheist.
I think we’re splitting hairs unessicarily but I think this is incorrect. A “lack of belief in god” can be acurately described as atheism.
I don’t think belief is as linear as 0 to 100% and besides , nobody’s perfect.
Who is claiming there is a difference? I don’t see any crucial flaw since undecided qualifies. Beisdes that, as I pointed out earlier, I don’t think undecided is accurate.
No they’re not. A weak atheist may waffle between agnostic and atheism from day to day but being a theist does require positive belief.
I have little problem with your definitions here. I think perfectly undecided would have to be incredibly rare but I maintain that anything other than a positive belief can qualify as atheist.
Let’s face it. There are as many shades of atheism and theism as there are people. My friend at work has described himself as an atheist but will speak of the possibility of reincarnation and other extraordinary phenomenon.
My experience has been that many people in the US reject certain concepts of God and in that regard I have a lot in common with them. Many people believe in some concept of God but would be hard pressed to really define what that concept is. That’s the I believe in something …crowd. Others haven’t encountered any concept of god they can accept and find it unnecessary to look for or consider any concept.
I think what the OP has pointed out is that there is a widespread misunderstanding about atheism and perhaps there needs to be more public discussion about it to help folks understand. Look how often people here on the SDMB consider atheism some sort of belief.
But that can be true of anyone, theist or not. Why apply it only to atheism?
And since theism can be described as lacking a belief in an *absence[/]i of god, this person qualifies similarly.
And that is the point I am strenuously disagreeing with.
Then a “lack of belief in god’s absence” can be accurately described as theism.
Good, I assume this means you agree there isn’t. So, if we ask some people who describe themselves as “weak atheists” whether they think god’s absence is more likely than presence and they say “yes”, we have to tell them “sorry, you are strong atheists”. And we can tell people who genuinely don’t think absence is an more or less likely than presence “sorry, you’re now atheists”. I don’t think either group will be particularly enamoured of your taxonomy, frankly.
For crying out loud, AGNOSTICISM AND ATHEISM ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. How many times must I write this?
So long as being an atheist requires a negative belief, I agree.
Why not allow anything other than negative belief to qualify as theist? It seems just as sensible to allow theists to claim the undecided position as atheists, which is why I’m suggesting neither ought to.
I’m saying it is: a belief in an absence of gods, rather than in a presence.
Due to lack of time, I’m going to answer big gobs of this later, but will concentrate on a few crucial points, including the one you feel most important.
That is true. Believing God does not exist implies not believing god exists, which is why strong atheists fall into the atheist category (which is actually an issue with cosmosdan’s definition.
However, not believing they will win does not imply believing they will not win, since you may not believe any team will win, but be neutral.
No, there is an X in the situation. X is not a logic value - it represents the absence of information. To personify the simulator a bit, X means it does not believe the value of a signal is a 0, and it does not believe the value of a signal is a 1. If not believing a signal is a 0 means believing it is not 0, then this means we’d believe the signal is a 1, which is incorrect. Even though real signals take on one value or the other, when we reason about the signals we must include a third case of no information. And god either exists or does not exist - but we must include the case of not believing in one or the other case due to lack of knowledge.
I’m not adding up probabilities - I am making a statement of logic. You are associating disbelief with p < .5. I’m saying that this is not logically coherent.
Say we have five teams, and for some reason you know p for the first 4 is .15, thus p for the fifth is .4. It would certainly make sense to believe that team 5 will win, won’t it, though the probability of it winning is < .5.
quote] Careful: better phrase it as “I think that group will not contain the winner”. We’re now considering groups, not individual teams.
[/quote]
Sorry, I can prove that “group will not contain a winner” is equivalent to “no team t in the group is a winner.” Do you accept that?
Only if you say that a group you believe does not contain a winner suddenly becomes a group you do believe contains a winner with no additional information. I can build up groups like I build up teams. Say there are three groups, each with p = .25, so you believe that none of these groups contains a winner. You combine them, and suddenly you have a group that you believe does contain a winner. It is of course the same fallacy as believing that no individual team will win while believing one team will win. The converse - believing each team will win is equally fallacious, of course. The only logcially consistent alternative is to withhold belief about a teams chances, but believe that one of the set will win - this does not lead to a contradiction.
You’re confusing existence with statements about existence. A signal is either a 0 or a 1, but sometimes when reasoning about it you must assign it an X. There are many applications of this principle in logic and state machine theory.
Your misconception is widespread. There have been studies in behavioral economics (I think some are covered in Freakonomics) that show people tend to assign equal probabilities to options laid before them, even without information. What justification do you have for assigning a probability of 1/n to each team in the Mongolian league? Maybe one is the equivalent of the 1961 Yankees. The only reasonable response to the question of what is the probability of team T winning is “I don’t know.”
I can see two definitions of undecided. The first is - I have no information about gods. Thus, I have no belief about gods. Thus I do not believe in any god, thus I am an atheist - but I don’t believe any particular god does not exist, so I am not a strong atheist.
The second definition involves someone flipping between believing in a god and not believing. Unless you wish to make atheism a function of time, this person is not an atheist - call him undecided. He may not be an agnostic, since he may think that knowledge is possible given information he does not have yet.
Here’s a practical example of 0, 1, X. When an IC powers up, it powers up into a random state. Each flip flop can be either a 0 or a 1. I n a working circuit, the flip flop gets a known value by applying a known value at the circuit input and clocking the flip flop - having the clock line undergo a 0 to 1 transition.
Say the output if the flop feeds an OR gate with the second input 0. Now, say the clock line is broken, so the 0 ->1 transition never happens. What is the output of the OR gate?
Only because it was the subject of my sentance. There was no implication of it being exclusively applied to atheists
[QUOTE]
And since theism can be described as lacking a belief in an *absence[/]i of god, this person qualifies similarly.[Only a semantic gymnast.
I understand that. We just disagree.
One does not automatically mean the other. Honestly this seems like a semantic game to me. I don’t believe you intend it that way but I can’t think of anybody who would describe theism this way.
Your assumption is incorrect.
No need to shout. I didn’t say they were.
Then we don’t agree.
A viable suggestion if everyone agrees to let you set the definition. I’m only trying to explain the current definitions as I understand them.
And yet it is the atheists on this board that will argue that it is not a belief but rather a lack of belief. Any ideas why that is?
I don’t see evidence for a Hoaxmaster, or for anything that science can’t explain (someday.) Since there are many varieties of Hoaxmaster, not to mention other gods, I could ignore the possibility. Now, if there were lots of people bugging me about them, I might decide to study them, and get enough knowledge to actively believe they don’t exist. I don’t have a lot of beliefs of any kind about obscure Roman household gods.
Anyone can believe in anything for any reason. Strong atheism (or theism) is a statement of belief, not of how well the belief is justified. I may choose to not not believe until I get some reason to.
??? It’s not contingent on anything, and there are many, mutually supporting, strands of evidence against.
We’re not talking about any team in this specific case: we’re talking about one, single team which can either win or not, with no other options. In this specific case, how can belief in loss not equal disbelief in victory?
Such a person not being an atheist, then, yes?
Then what did you mean when you said “You can talk, loosely, about things being more or less likely to happen”? What is belief other than a general expression of which propositions you think are true and false (without knowing so)?
Hang on, hang on. I told you to be very careful with statements like this if you don’t want to misrepresent me. I can’t know these probabilities, I merely personally ascribe them, and I might do so utterly incompetently (eg. ascribing a tiny chance to the overwhelming favourite).
No, again, be very careful with the question. If the question is “Which single team is most likely to win?”, I choose 5. But that is still not the same as beleiving in 5 versus not 5 (ie. any other team).
GREAT! YES! And that’s exactly the same as a single team not winning being equivalent to someone other than that team winning, like the single case of Liverpool!
But there is additional information: the group has just grown in size.
Because it is a bigger group formed from smaller groups. Yet again, of course <50% probabilities can add up to more than 50%.
I’ve shown that that isn’t a fallacy if belief is defined as a >50% ascription. Yet again, of course <50% probabilities can add up to 100% (one team must win).
What is the contradiction in adding up low probabilities until their union becomes likely?
What? No, you’re confusing these two if you say that “I don’t know” (statement about existence) is a third option for “gods do or don’t exist” (existence itself). There is no third option for “gods do or don’t exist” , agreed? If so, please tell me what it is (preferably without yet another non sequitur analogy).
I agree entirely. Like I said, I might ascribe probabilities utterly incompetently due to a lack of further information. And, to wrest this back to the point, some people IMO ascribe strangely high probabilities to gods’ existence. But that is not the point. The point is that where there are only two exclusive options (like in the case of Liverpool winning or not or god existing or not), then belief in one option is equivalent to not belief in the other, and vice versa. There is a thrid option in the belief (ie. considering both options equally likely, for whatever reason), yes, but that person cannot be classed with the no-believers.
And we’ve agreed that nobody knows anything, really – they just have very[sup]N[/sup] strong beliefs.
How about – I have no belief in an absence of god. Thus I do not believe in an absence of god, thus I am a theist? Hence the undecided position can be claimed by weak theists.
OK, but it might make more sense to call him an ateist when he’s an atheist and a theist when he’s a theist, no?
What is the threshold of electrons per second which constitutes a 1, as a percentage of the maximum capacity?
Others do. Why does their behaviour in “bothering you” or not have any bearing on your beliefs?
You’re not prepared to say “I believe there’s no such thing as Zeus”??
Agreed, but that wasn;t the question. In what way does considering somethings absence more likely than its presence require more effort or bother (or however you’re characterising what’s “worth doing”) than the converse?
Well, I don’t think this is the place for this hijack, but like I said, hoaxmaster believers would point to exactly the same evidence as you in support of their god’s existence. They would have to accept natural-first OR before they saw things your way. That’s what I mean by contingency.
So you agree that undecided people could be called weak theists under your definitions, if only I made them the sentence subject? If not, why not?
See above.
Why not? Is it not just as silly as classifying undecided people as atheists?
OK, so you think there is a difference between undecided and weak atheist – that’s why I asked the question in the first place. So I’ll ask it again: What is the difference?
Then how can someone waffle between atheism and agnosticism, if they’re effectively agnostic all the time. Did you mean “waffle between atheism and theism”?
Even if I make “theism the subject of the sentence” as above?
OK, I guess I’ll just keep argumentum-ing until the ad populum falls on my side.
If I may speak plainly as an atheist, I think it’s a bit of laziness and/or cowardice. They’d like to be the ones sitting, Simon Cowell-like, in judgement of what theists trot out before them as explanations for their existence, not the other way around. Admitting that considering gods’ absence more likely than presence is a form of belief requires them to get down and dirty with cosmology, biochemistry and cognitive science in order to demonstrate how there could logically be an absence of gods. And many of them would prefer to just point to this science rather than make an effort to understand and explain it. Luckily, given the Dope’s mission statement, there’s fewer of those kinds of atheists around here, but that does not prevent the “weak atheist = lack of belief, not belief in absence ” meme spreading elsewhere like a virus.
No I don’t agree with that. I agree that both theists and atheists may go through a belief change. A theist weak or otherwise requires positive belief. An undecided person doesn’t have this. This is not true for atheists since lack of belief is all that’s necessary. I have no emotional attachment to these terms and I understand the points you are making. In reading in Wikipedia I find this
So, if you prefer the term non-theist to differentiate between the undecided and the theist or atheist I’m perfectly okay with that. In fact I wish someone had referenced this pages ago. All I’ve attempted to do is explain the differences as I understand them. The goal is clear communication to promote understanding, not victory through persistence.
See above.
If I remember correctly I’ve seen those who are strong atheists use the “lack of belief” argument. I look forward to you setting them straight.
As far as I’m concerned theist for positive belief, non theists for those few that are undecided, and atheist for belief in no god or gods are good working definitions. How say you?
I certainly prefer definitions that make sense to me, but the goal is to understand the definitions of the person I’m communicating with and to have them understand me.
I am trying right now - Voyager is a moderately strong atheist.
OK for first and last (thus quite rightly giving weak atheists a belief in gods’ absence). But why not non atheists for “undecided”? I still prefer just undecided, really, but so long as the “weak atheists don’t believe not” meme is eradicated, I’ll accept such a compromise.
IMHO **Voyager ** is merely trying to clarify the definitions rather than advocating one. It has surprised me when folks who are obviously strong atheists seem eager to pounce on someone who defines atheism as a belief and correct them with the “AHA!! no it isn’t, it’s the lack of belief” as if that’s all it is. I don’t remember Voyager doing that sort of thing.
It’s hard to move communication forward when bickering about the terms and there definitions. I didn’t coin any of them. I just want to understand how they are commonly used and then specifically used by those I communicate with.
You can be fairly sure I’ll never use “weak atheists don’t believe not” As I said. The goal for me is clear communication and understanding. I understand the weak atheism definition as explained to me and will use it when I’m communicating with someone who holds that same definition. Since you object I will avoid it with you.
I think both are valid. Are far as eradicating it goes,…good luck.
