I don’t know if we disagree SentientMeat, I was trying to indicate that (to me, anyway) my atheism is a pragmatic or commonsensical position, and not a faith position at all.
And I think we agree there is no evidence against us being in the Matrix (and necessarily so), or whatever, and we reject these things as not reasonable possibilities.
The apparently more neutral, and faithless, position of agnoticism is untenable to me (for the Pandora’s Box that it necessarily comes with).
Sure, TGU, I guess I’m in danger of using the word “faith” in too broad a sense, as Mangetout warned about.
I am merely pointing out that if one refuses to come off the fence, stating that one simply cannot bring oneself to say B(¬G) - I believe God does not exist - due to lack of evidence for such, then one must similarly perch oneself on that garden partition when it comes to faeries and Matrices, much to the amusement of anyone with an ounce of common sense.
I’ve always thought that faith=hope.
e.g. “I have faith that the Redsox will beat the Yankees”. You do not know for sure if they will win but you have a strong hope or feeling that they do.
Therefore I find it misleading that strongly religious people call it their faith. They must be past the “faith” or hope stage and on to the “belief” stage. They know it to be true and believe it.
Same for atheists. They “believe” there is no god and believe that to be true. You wouldn’t say they have faith that there is no god.
I would leave faith to the agnostic depending on what they “hope” to be true. An optomistic agnostic might say “I have no proof one way or another but I feel there might be a god and sure hope there is is”. I would say he has faith.
Or he might say “I have no proof one way or another but chances are there is no god. If there is I don’t want to go to hell for not believing, so I hope there is not, and chances are there isn’t, so I should be safe.” I would say he has faith that there is no god.
Hampshire, I’ve never heard of anyone equating faith with hope. If someone says that he has faith that the Red Sox will beat the Yankees, he’s not saying that he hopes they will, he’s saying that he believes they will. No, the definition we’re working with here is “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.”
Those damn mutant atheists! They lack “WWJD-29”, the faith-expression gene.
AM still reading through the thread so pardon me if this has been addressed.
**
Not-A is not identical to anti-A
Lack of evidence is not identical to evidence of lack.
The true skeptic will not take the extra step of stating that something for which there is no positive nor negative evidence does not exist. The true skeptic will say that he neither accepts nor rejects the existence. The dogmatic and the narrowminded will not be able to understand the difference between “not accepting” and “rejecting”. **
[/QUOTE]
As a card-carrying skeptic, I disagree.
Lack of evidence DOES equal evidence of lack…UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THE EVIDENCE IS NOT LACKING.Existential claims must be validated according to rules of inference.If someone tells me not to leave my house because werewolves are waiting to rip me apart outside, I cannot possibly disprove the claim that werewolves are waiting outside my home.
According to YOUR reasoning, I must sit in my house and fret about what to do since I cannot make a decision either way9to accept or reject the claim).However, I have not observed any such thing asa “werewolf” adn have absolutely no reason to think any such things are outside my home.IF I act as though everything claimed to exist, may in fact exist(or is just as likely to exist as not exist) then I could not do anything but veg’ out.
The rational skeptic does not deal in certainties but rather likelihoods.I am not certain that Wile E. Coyote is not a real coyote but I think the possibility is as unlikely as I am able to comprehend.Bigfoot is somewhat more likely to exist than Wile E. Coyote, according to what we know about the universe, but is still not lilkely enough to warrant such an inference as “sasquatch exists and runs around leaving tracks all over the PNW”.
Occam’s razor is quite the handy tool for analyzing exsitential claims.
Dogface seems to be an adherant of what I believe is called radical skepticism(the position that everything shares equal likelihood of being true/false).Radical skepticism is an untennable position because in order for the proponent of such to even argue that position in the first palce he must “make a decision”/“take a stance” on the issue of whether he exists at all and is indeed communicating with other similar creatures via an existing keyboard or what have you.
Ah, I noticed it had been about two weeks since we had this argument. :rolleyes:
Sorry that people find the IPU objectionable - somebody in one of these threads always does - I think it’s funny. And it does have a purpose. (Personally, I’m fond of quoting a friend of mine and saying “the Magical Pixie Fairy.”) Noone Special’s post pretty much covers my feelings on the subject.
Nonsense. That’s not how the burden of proof works. Lack of evidence is just what is says, no more, no less. The burden of proof adheres to CLAIMS. not to any particular existensial state of something. The default/skeptic position is not “A does not exist” but “there is no reason to think that A exists, though no reason to believe that it doesn’t, either”
What can be confusing is actual evidence of a lack, but that is a semantic confusion. For instance, the fact that New York is still standing is good evidence that it has so far lacked a giant nuclear explosion. However, that lack is evidence only because of the DEDUCTIVE chain of reasoning we can draw from both the knowledge that NY still stands, and the properties of giant nuclear explosions. You cannot draw a deductive chain of reasoning when all you have is a plain, unadorned existensial claim with no falisification offered. There is nothing to deduce WITH.
I consider myself Agnostic, but not for the reasons Skankweirdall posted. Namely, that after seeing the evidence on both sides, “I don’t know which to believe.” It is not that simple to me. I’ve seen evidence from many sides, read about different religions and deities, and determined that, while there are some good ideas, none of these deities exist. I don’t rule out the possibility that there is something beyond, I just think that if there is, we misinterpreted what it was. And I think that as long as we hold onto the old ideas, we will never get closer to the truth. Which I don’t claim to know.
I have a teacher this semester (in one of my psych classes) whose favorite saying is “choosing not to believe is a belief”. He doesn’t understand why this irritates me, and we got into a semi debate over my beliefs (in his eyes). He seems to think I am just mad at god. Mainly because I refused to relent.
On the same thread, but on another vine, why is it that I have to take credit for all the crappy things I’ve done in life, but when I want to do something good with myself, I am told that “see there must be a god, he’s acting through you now” Why can’t I have full, equal credit for the good things I do as my own doing as well? Anything negative is viewed as human, anything good as god’s work. Yes I realize I’m generalizing, and that not all Christians hold this view, just this has been used against me in debates a lot lately.
OH, and BTW, I have a lot of Faith, just none in God.
Was there Brownian motion in the 18th century? I say it always existed, and therefore there was always evidence of the atomic nature of reality.
In which case evidence may exist for God, faeries or MEBuckner’s planet - we just haven’t found it yet. Absence of evidence does not mean something isn’t there.
And, as I understood it, radical scepticism does not mean assigning equal probabilities to all statements, merely admitting that none can have zero probability given that logic, maths, evidence and reality may all be nonsense fed to us by Descartes’ Deceiver.
I don’t perceive this tactic as unreasonnable nor as an attempt to piss off people. Actually the IPU example isn’t an attack but a very good way to explain why atheists like me don’t believe in god(s). I’ve actually as much reason to believe in God than to believe in the IPU. Since anybody can easily perceive why I don’t believe in the IPU (since they don’t, either), they can understand why I don’t believe in God, either. For the exact same reasons. I don’t believe in God in the same way christians for instance don’t believe in fairies, and I feel the same about the christian god than about Zeus and Odin.
I see no objective reason for believers to feel a comparison between their own beliefs and a forgotten belief (like trolls) or unexisting belief (like the IPU) as an insult. In my opinion, it’s the best way to convey my feelings about religions. If you know why you don’t believe in trolls/ Osiris/ the IPU, then you understand (or at least should understand) perfectly why I don’t believe in God.
Theist have a tendancy to make a difference between currently existing and (still currrently) generally accepted beliefs and others, so introducing a “special plea” for the first category of beliefs, and IME assume that in the mind of an atheist, this difference also exist. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t.
So, to answer the OP, well…perhaps my atheism is a “faith” in the non-existence of God, but then, I’ve also an exactly similar “faith” in the non-existence of trolls, and the overwhelming majority of theists share my “faith” in the non-existence of unicorns, and Norse gods. There’s really no difference in my mind, and once again, making this kind of comparison is IMO the best way to help people understanding my state of mind and my way of thinking about current religions.
At the contrary, you would definitely be a theist, since you would believe in God.
Again, I disagree.The default/skeptical position would be “There is no reason to believe that A exists.”.PERIOD.The burden of proof being upon the claimant, I am not obligated to say that “A MIGHT exist” or agreee that it is a 50/50 proposition.If there were no reason to say either way that WIle E. Coyote were more or less likely to be an actual coyote, then we could not know anything about our reality and no action we took would be sensible.
True when someone makes a claim as simple as “God exists”.I have no idea what “God” is in this instance and nothing to deduce with.However, when attributes are assigned to this “God”(i.e. omniscience, omnipotence, answerer of prayers etc.) the default status of the claim is not that it is just as likely to be true as it is to be false.
The plain, unadorned claim that “God exists” means no more to me than the plain unadorned claim that “Gbbyrqxral exists”.
You definitely don’t have to say that a new claim has a 50/50 chance of being true without evidence. There should be a name for this fallacy, which I’ve seen more than once. If “might” means there is a fairly large chance of it being true, I think it is okay to reject the use of “might”. If it means only that we have not proven it untrue, then it is correct to use. I think the former usage is more common, which is why hearing “god might exist” sounds so wrong.
It would be nice if theists bothered to define god. The reason some don’t, I think, is that they are doing a shell game on us. Does a superior power exist, they ask? If someone says maybe, they shuffle those shells, and make us pick the hairy thunderer from the Bible. Slick trick!
The default/skeptical position on ANY claim is “I am not convinced, and you must convince me.” “God exists” is a claim, due skepticism. But “God does not exist” is ALSO a claim, and ALSO due skepticism. What you seem to be confused about is the difference between skepticism about any and all claims, and taking a position on the correct option of a binary state (X v Not X).
These sorts of things: “mights” and “50/50” things are irrelevant. You cannot draw probability about something AT ALL unless you have either statistical inference, or evidence about how its state is determined. A skeptic would refuse to speculate on the probability of an unknown and unverafiable proposition.
You WOULD, however, have to concede the possibility of a God existing, unless you can explain why a particular definition of God would be impossible.
You’ll have to explain that one again.
Apos:
What I am trying to say is that it is not CERTAIN that Wile E. Coyote is a made up character.He MAY be an actual, four-color coyote who routinely violates laws of physics and orders malfunctioning, Rube Goldbergian devices from A.C.M.E…
However, the LIKELIHOOD of this being true is as close to “impossible” as I can rationally comprehend.
God, at least the sketchy definitions I have heard, is about as likely as Wile E. Coyote to be real.
THAT is the rationalist skeptic position IMO.
I would never claim that “God does not exist”, but I would assume that THAT claim would be due a much lesser degree of skepticism than the claim that God exists(I am assuming the common Abrahmic “God” above, for the sake of argument) for reasons we have already been over(Occam’s razor, burden of proof etc.).
I would also add, for clarification, that a universe in which anything is possible is, as Carl Sagan made abundantly clear, a universe in which NOTHING can be known.The universe/reality MUST have constraints, even if we cannot say for certain WHAT those constraints are.The only reason I can tell you ANYTHING about my room is because my room has four walls, a floor and aq ceiling and nothing beyond those barriers is part of my room.
If my room were a dimension of infinite proportions where anything imagined could be real or true then the only thing I could tell you about my room would be that it is unknowable.
If the progress of my species depended upon what could be learned about my room then the species could never make ANY progress.
Therefore, if we aknowledge that the universe has constraints, the only sensible way to examine fundemental claims about it’s nature is to judge their likelihoods from a materialist base(as opposed to a solopsist or idealist base).
You have no way by which to evaluate its likelihood.
The burden of proof is certainly NOT a reason to conclude anything about the likihood of anything. I’m not sure I see what relevance O.R. has to a plain, unadorned assertion that’s not trying to explain anything.