Sure I do.First of all, as I explained, the rational skeptic must necessarilly proceed from certain useful assumptions(i.e. that matter exists and that I exist etc.).Once I accept that I in fact exist and the universe is not just the dream of a sleeping child or some equally useless idea, then it becomes relatively easy to evaluate the likelihood of a two-dimensional coyote who routinely violates the laws of physics and orders rocket-skates from A.C.M.E. to hunt Roadrunner rather than buying food.
We are not talking about unadarned assertions.If you will go back to the post I made to which you are replying with the above, you will note that I made it quite clear I was assuming the common Abrahamic “God” which IS adorned with certain traits(omniscience, omnipotence etc.) by which I can(to great extent) guage it’s likelihood) and the relevance of O.R. should be obvious in any case because there is no need to invoke ANY deity to explain the universe’s existence.
Your problem can be explained in terms of the Sagan example. Sagan is correct to assume that to empirically explore the universe, we need to place some assumed constraints on our exploration. However, it would be wrong to assume from that fact ANYTHING about what does or does not, or is likely to, exist. It tells us something about ourselves, and our limitations, but it doesn’t tell us anything about existence itself.
Sagan is pointing out that all we have in empiricism is a particular sort of net, with a certain size mesh. However, we can’t then assume that anything too small for the net mesh to catch doesn’t, or is less likely to, exist. Empiricism grants us some conditional ability to gain insight about the world around us. But it can’t be grounds for limiting logical possibility in the universal sense, just because it’s what we’ve got.
Those traits are unadorned. By adorned, I mean adorned with any sort of falisfiable condition that could link them into our empirical machinery. Without that, you have no grounds to guage likelihood. It’s like claiming that you know the odds of rolling a 6 when you don’t even know what numbers are on the dice, or even if we are playing with dice in the first place.
O.R. is relevant to explainations, or proofs of God via things like design. It isn’t in the least relevant to the direct question of whether something exists or not. O.R. is a means of attacking certain lines of argument as relying upon unecessary or cumbersome assumptions: NOT for attacking certain logical possibilities outright.
“Likelihood” is perhaps a poor choice of term here, I suggest. What I thinkGodless is expressing is that strength of belief or disbelief is not simply binary. We live our everyday lives by assessing what we strongly feel to be the case, such that the needle on our “belief-o-meter” swings far in one direction, and what we feel is dubious, such that the needle hovers around 50-50.
It is entirely reasonable to think it incredibly unlikely that there are faeries in one’s garden. I would suggest that one can even reasonably claim “There are no faeries in my garden”, despite no evidence for such claim, only a resounding absence of evidence for the claim “There ARE faeries in my garden”.
Now, which of the sceptics amongst us cannot say that they believe no faeries reside in their garden? Assuming that none of us are this smirk-inducingly fatuous, I would appreciate the sceptics who have scoffed at my jumping off the fence on the side of No God to explain the difference to jumping of the fence on the side of No Faeries.
Are you arguing that the only reasonable conclusion to the acknowledgement of the logical possibility of a god is (at worst) agnosticism? And that to climb off that fence into the garden of atheism amounts to an act of faith?
But it is a logical possibility that the whole of our phenomenological world is an illusion – so it would seem that you must therefore argue that belief in anything is an act of faith.
For me to believe that I am The Great Unwashed, aged [mumble-mumble], employed by HugeTechnoCorp, resident in Hell (that is, Birmingham), West Midlands, England is an act of faith?
For me to believe that I exist is an act of faith?
For me to believe in the law of the excluded middle is an act of faith?
For me to believe that agnoticism is the only non-faith position is an act of faith?
Well, if you broaden “faith” to such an extent then (as a matter of faith) I’d have to agree with the OP.
But I don’t think such a broad definition is justified, or, useful. It is the Pandora’s Box of Acceptance Of All Things “Possible” that I mentioned earlier. As a belief position it is crumbles before the great gods of common-sense and pragmatism.
I believe the existence of a god is a logical possibility, however, I am an atheist (moreover, I consider myself to be an evangelical atheist, though I’m a lousy evangelist).
My atheism is most certainly not an act of faith, it is an act of observable truth – there are no fairies at the bottom of my garden, only weeds; the IPU is nothing but a rhetorical device to illustrate a point for the hard of thinking; concepts of god(s) are happy fictions, socially acceptable delusions, irrational superstitions, wrought by ancient and unsophisticated peoples, carried in the minds of a myriad generations like a virus, feeding on the inescapable phenomenological gaps of human knowledge, often as fairy-tales designed to keep the masses in check, often as a badge of honour or distinction, but always as a matter of dull faith in the denial of the blindingly obvious.
IMHO (heh), I was mulling over this question, and I guess to break it down to basic principles, I am currently hypothesizing that Faith is the stuff which is used to fill the cognitive gap between that which is believed and that which one can provide or observe proof for.
For example, while I do admit that there is a remote possibility that everything surrounding me is actually the hallucinatory product of my disembodied brain sitting in a pan full of jelly on an alien spaceship while otherworldly beings stick probes into me, a vast majority of the empirical data I observe suggests that this is not the case, and that I am actually sitting here in a cube farm on the third floor of an office building avoiding my work-- therefore the space between my belief in my state and the proof I have of it is fairly small – this belief requires little “faith” to bridge the gap.
As a counter-example, my belief that human beings are innately good and that mankind is moving in a positive direction is admittedly less easily proven, therefore it takes a greater “leap of faith” for me to come to that belief given the shoddy proof at hand.
Following this postulated definition, I would have to say that atheism, ie the absolute conviction that there is no God, is a matter of faith as well, as is the belief that there is no IPU sitting up on cloud 9, for the same reason that my reality not being the dream of a brain in a bucket somewhere is also a matter of faith-- you simply can’t prove it one way or the other, and it takes a nibble of presumption to state it as absolute matter-of-fact. I would, however, say that atheism requires considerably less faith than a belief in God does, simply because the delta between belief and proof is diminished.
So if you take faith as a matter of padding in the cognitive dissonance between belief and proof, I’d say faith is pretty widespread. Granted this is a very philosophically bent definition, and people who have a lot more faith (or, well, mathematics) than I do might have an entirely different explanation of it.
I both agree and disagree with Great Unwashed on this one – I do Believe that atheism is a matter of faith, and that all things are possible… but it also allows the Faithful to be manipulated by those who would take advantage of their increased suspension of disbelief, regardless of what it is that they are allowing themselves to believe in-- the existence of a God who needs your pension fund, a righteous war, capitalism is good, Harrison ford is clever, children are adorable, etc. The Pandora’s box is a good point, too-- I think that there are a large number of such assumptions that people simply must have faith in merely to get along in the world-- you are a human, living in a society of similar humans, on earth, who needs food and can’t fly, and it’s bad to kill other people for their used Lotto scratchers-- people who lose their faith in these things tend to end up dead, in jail, or the loony bin. So faith is also perhaps a defense mechanism to keep us from getting too loopy, the squishy padding on the walls of our minds to keep us from driving ourselves insane with sheer possibility and mistrust of the “reality” around us.
When will you understand that empiricial data is simply that, empirical data. There are things out there that we have not even begun to comprehend, or to imagine. Just because you can’t see something, does not mean it must not exist. The point of view you are endorsing is not simply atheism, you’re endorsing extreme skepticism and materialistic views. You fail to put belief in anything until adequate proof, according to you, has been revealed, and you believe that the only things that truly exist are those which are physically tangible. Atheism is simply a run-off of those beliefs.
The reason that it requires faith for an atheist to not believe is because, once again, there is no concrete proof of the existence of a non-tangible entity called God or the non-existence of non-tangible entity called God. Any belief that is unsubtantiated by concrete proof can be considered a belief that requires faith. Regardless of how “silly” you find points of view such as theism and soplisism, the point still stands that there is no empirical evidence supporting or contradicting either view, since all observable events act in accordance with both those views. For me to believe that I exist is an act of faith?
For you to believe in yourself is not really an act of faith, Descartes already did this one for you, “I think therefore I am”. For me to believe in the law of the excluded middle is an act of faith?
It depends actually, if you read up on properties, relations and propositions, and the various viewpoints on them, you’ll realize just how complex a question that is. Basically, there is a law of excluded middle, but where would you say that it exists? How is it that when we put the words, “Law of the Excluded Middle” on the scree, that both of us immediately know what we are talking about, when the law is anything but concrete. For me to believe that agnoticism is the only non-faith position is an act of faith?
Once again, faith is defined as believing in something without any concrete proof supporting your belief. There is no evidence in the world that is contrary to the existence of God. The lack of empirical proof of God does not disprove God, because God by definition is non-tangible. So, because there is no proof to the existence or non-existence of this non-tangible entity called God, a belief in either the existence or non-existence of the non-tangible entity called God requires an unsupported belief. Which is faith.
I’m doing no broadening of faith, indeed the dictionary definition of faith we have been using is “Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence”.
That last bit of drivel is very much located within your ignorance of simple logic. I’ll simply state that different people will do what makes them happy. I don’t always approve of religion, but neither do I disapprove of religion with a broad-brush of vitriol. It exists, and it will most likely always exist. The problems caused by religion are only symptoms of problems already existent in the population of humanity, and yes, sometimes the problems are even exacerbated by religion. But regardless, religion has helped many people in many ways, so don’t just look at the bad. The US government has done many, many bad things, but I don’t see you trying to get that destroyed or eliminated from the world.
My recommendation is that you take up the study of philosophy, particularly logic and metaphysics, since I believe both will interest you highly.
Sorry, but I am an atheist and my belief or lack thereof is not based on “faith.”
Yes, as far as I am concerned, it would be accurate to say that I affirmatively hold a belief that there is no God, at least in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense (I withhold judgment as to whether there is some sort of new-agey metaphysical “god” who exists solely as a spirit and who does not interact with the physical world, since the existence of such a being can neither be proven nor disproven).
However, there’s a world of difference between a belief based on evidence and “faith” (which is usually described as a belief in the absence of evidence or in spite of evidence to the contrary).
I believe there is no God because I have never seen any convincing evidence to justify his existence.
I believe there is no God because the description of God in the Bible contains enough inconsistencies to render his existence logically impossible.
I believe there is no God because there are way too many religions which claim to have been founded on divine revelation and which claim to know the will of God, in spite of the fact that all these religions disagree with each other.
I believe there is no God because the majority of the world’s population does not believe in such a being simply because of where and how they were raised (i.e., not because of personal choice), and it makes no sense that a loving God would consign the majority of his creation to eternal damnation through no fault of their own.
I believe there is no God because bad things happen to good people who pray to God, whereas good things happen to bad people who do not pray (“evil” can be explained away with reference to free will, but that doesn’t explain natural disasters and disease).
I believe there is no God because I am fully aware that man has an inherent predisposition to believe in the supernatural, whether it be astrology, witchraft, magic, ESP, UFOs, or Big Foot, and I see no reason why God should get special status.
Now, if there were any actual evidence for God’s existence, I suppose you could argue that my belief in his nonexistence in spite of this evidence could somehow constitute “faith.” But there isn’t, and therefore my belief is simply that – a belief (which just happens to be supported by the available evidence).
I don’t doubt that there are things undiscovered, but the history of discovery has moved our understanding monotonically away from irrational superstition to a phenomenally complex understanding of the physical world. I wholly expect that trend to continue. (In fact it is the utter failure of “god-inspired” texts to capture any of the real fascinating beauty of the material world that leads me to doubt that those same “sacred” texts have anything useful to say about the posited non-material world.)
Never said it did, what I said was not believing in something that patently fails to manifest itself is not an act of faith.
I don’t find that an unkind characterisation (except that I do believe in some intangibles, e.g. the Pythagoras Theorem), but care to cite me an existing thing that my method denies? Oh, yes, that’s right, gods and spooks, and ESP, and telekinesis, and bottom-of-the-garden fairies. Yes, I deny their existence.
I understand that argument, I think it is invalid, the reason I think it is invalid is because it reduces all beliefs to acts of faith. This would be unhelpful, and indeed would reduce the term “faith” to a wholly meaningless and superfluous tag.
I see no reason to accept Descartes’ cogito ergo sum that does not amount to an act of faith in the broad sense that you seem to insist upon. That was my point, do you see?
I see no reason to accept The Law Of The Excluded Middle that does not amount to an act of faith in the broad sense that you seem to insist upon. That was my point, do you see?
Um, these examples were chosen to add some colour, and maybe even a little irony to my post, I accept that they may have obscured my position, because you really don’t seem to be seeing – let me restate without either colour or irony:
In the truest sense, we have no concrete evidence to support any of our sensory inputs. (This is a truism so sophomoric I am almost embarrassed to have to s p e l l it out for you.) Therefore, even the most mundane of beliefs can be seen to have some element of faith if you insist on the broadest definition.
As I pragmatist, I reject such a sophormoric view, and declaim that the world is as it appears. Hell, I even admit to the logical p o s s i b i l i t y that I may be wrong.
No faith required.
And likewise, if we accept your arguments, it is an act of faith to dismiss the IPU, etc., blah, blah, blah. If you insist on such a broad definition of faith then I have already acknowledged that I am brimful of the blooming stuff, yea, verily, it is overflowing.
Oh yes you are broadening the definition – right at the point when you say that when I aver the non-existence of an entity that manifests itself in no way that that is an act of faith.
I’m quite proud of that “last bit of drivel” – I was witnessing, did I choose the wrong forum? You know where you can put your comments about “[my] ignorance” though, don’t you?
**What’s happiness got to do with it? I might be happier to believe I was Napoleon, or that Africa has fjords, wouldn’t make me any more right.
**Good or bad, I don’t really care, it is not pertinent to this discussion.
Godzillatemple
You believe that there are inconsistencies in the bible, and all of that, and I agree with you. Therefore you do not believe in the Judeo-Christian God. That alone does not mean you are an atheist, because atheism is a rejection of the possibility of any God.
Assuming I am a deist, my belief is that there is an intangible being out there that may or may not have created us, but it simply watches over us now, not interfering with our lives in any way. There is no concrete evidence disproving or proving him, and so believing or disbelieving in him is an act of faith, for it is belief that is unsupported with empirical proof.
And re-reading your post, you actually already agree with me. I too have problems with the Judeo-Christian God.
Unwashed
What’s the difference between irrational superstition and scientific inquiry? Not so long ago scientists attempted to explain heat by considering heat a liquid of sorts called “caloric”. That became a widely accepted theory in the scientific world for quite a while, until it was finally disproved by Joule.
The point here is that scientists tried to explain the world around them in the best way they could, and so they did. Through testing things, they found that the “caloric” idea worked in some senses, so they accepted it. The difference between irrational superstition and scientific inquiry in this case is that scientific inquiry tested it’s “irrational superstition” with various case studies and experiments. It still started off as an unfounded belief, but they were able to build up experiments to support it.
To iterate, I’m not talking about a Judeo-Christian God when I say “God”.
“God”, means to me, an intangible, omnipotent being. I’m not even so sure of the omnipotent part, but that’s negligible anyhow.
It was not intended as an unkind characterization, it was a characterization I assume you identify with quite well. But the point is you are not just an atheist, you are a skeptic and a materialist. Those together mean that you can not possibly accept the idea of anything that does not manifest itself in the physically tangible realm. That is beyond simple atheism, and so you are not ‘just’ an atheist. Kinda like the Pharisees weren’t just religious, they were fanatical.
An act of faith means that you have no concrete proof to support your belief. My argument was not invalid, after taking as much symbolic logic as I have, I’m absolutely sure that argument is not invalid. Faith means belief in the absence of concrete proof. Meaningless as you think it is, that is what it means.
Descartes’ cogito ergo sum has proof behind it, it’s accepted as a truth because it’s true. It is not an act of faith for that reason. If it was an act of faith, it would mean that one would have no concrete basis for believing it.
Your question about the excluded middle is entirely too broad to be addressed, look into platonism and conceptualism regarding properties and propositions and you will see why. It’s not as simple a concept as you seem to take it to be.
You reject a sophomoric view with little to no proof proving things one way or the other. You believe “not A” with no proof proving either “A” or “not A”, therefore you are exhibiting an act of faith.
It technically is an act of faith to dismiss the IPU, but that’s a particularly trivial argument, almost a strawman, except that it’s the truth of things. I’m not going to reiterate my definition of faith.
God, by my definition, is intangible.
I never really understood what was meant by “witnessing” in that case, I suppose I should look it up.
Ad hominems? -glances around- I see no ad hominem, my recommendation was a genuine recommendation. Learning the basics of symbolic logic and metaphysics is worth most people’s time, especially one who actively professes a view that the world consists only of the physically tangible.
Darkravel:Atheism is NOT “rejection of the possibility of all gods” it is lack of conviction in the existence of ANY gods.
To dissent from an existential claim when no proof is provided in support of the claim does not reuire any sort of faith.
Rephrasing a negative stance as if it were a positive claim does not make it so.
Look: this is a kind of pointless discussion. If God exists, and has the properties usually attributed to Him (not bound by laws of the universe), we can’t infer anything about him. In fact, we can’t be sure he doesn’t exist. (Note: the law of the excluded middle with regards to existence has not been shown to apply to things outside the universe). God cannot by known by logic.
Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
I think you’re splitting hairs there, it’s more or less the same meaning. But yeah, you’re a bit more correct than I was, I was thinking more the “fundie Christian” equivalent of an atheist.
Robert is more or less right on the nose. Due to the nature of God, nothing can be known about his existence either way.
There exists, and I reiterate, no concrete evidence supporting the existence of an intangible being called God, or disproving the existence of an intangible being called God.
Once again, faith is defined as belief in the absence of any concrete evidence. I don’t think anyone will disagree with me there.
Atheism is defined as above, “the doctrine that there exist no gods”.
So, Atheists believe in “not A”, Theists believe in “A”, there is no concrete evidence supporting or disproving A, and A has not yet been proven or disproven logically.
Anyone proposing to believe in “not A” or “A” have no concrete, logical, or mathematical evidence to support their claims.
Therefore, Atheists and Theists both express faith in their beliefs about God.
That’s a complete argument, premises 1-5, conclusion is 6. Point out exactly where my logic fails please.
Actually, lemme rephrase that, due to the nature of God, any truths about his existence can only be derived logically.
People have been trying it for centuries, both the theists and the atheists, and yet nothing concrete has been reached yet.
With regard to any of the Gods worshipped by the major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, etc.), I can say that I affirmatively believe that these Gods, as described by those religions, do not exist. And my belief is not a form of “faith” but is instead the result of an examination of the available evidence (and/or lack thereof).
With regard to a generic concept of some sort of undefined deity that exists in a wholly nonmaterial way and who does not interact with the universe, I cannot say that I affirmatively believe that such a being does not exist. I can say, however, that I do not hold any affirmative belief that such a being does exist, which I believe still makes me an atheist. I do not “reject the possibility” of such a god, I simply do not believe that such a god exists.
Just so we are clear, I, The Great Unwashed, concede on this thirtieth day of October in the year 2003 C.E., that there is no evidence supporting the existence of an intangible being called God, or disproving the existence of an intangible being called God.
Where we do differ is that I cannot ascribe to the definition of faith as belief in the absence of any concrete evidence, and specifically when you apply that to “non-existential” claims (e.g. there is no IPU) – such a definition means that my unbelief in the IPU, etc, blah-blah-blah, is also a matter of faith.
Now, that blah-blah-blah is an awful long list, in fact it is endless.
That would be bad. It would mean I have an awful lot more faith positions than I have configurations of molecules in my brain.
Worse still, and really this is the clincher – given that we have no concrete evidence of the fidelity of our sense input, we can have no belief about anything that doesn’t amount to faith.
A N Y T H I N G.
You might find it interesting (or possibly absurd) to consider that there is no concrete evidence that our very thoughts are consistent, in fact, please tell me where the concrete evidence exists that the syllogism is a valid construct?
So if I accept your definition I must admit to a gazillion faith positions, including the most banal or mundane (today is Thursday, this is a computer at which I sit. etc., blah-blah-blah).
I call shenanigans, there are no gods, I have no faith.
Now, clearly we disagree, but in the interests of eventually getting off this merry-go-round, please tell me in what way my dismissal of a possible deity differs from your dismissal of the possibility that you are being deceived not only by your own senses, but also by your own mind.
Faith is belief in spite of the absence of any concrete evidence. Atheism, on the other hand, is the lack of belief because of the absence of any concrete evidence.
One does not need faith to disbelieve something for which there is no evidence. It is merely the default state of consciousness. I do not believe in the existence of an Invisible Pink Unicorn[sup]TM[/sup] because there is no reason for me to believe. This doesn’t mean, however, that I somehow have “faith” that it doesn’t exist.