Consider a child who is raised in a community of atheists. They never tell him that some people believe in a thing called “God”. He has no knowledge whatsoever of the concept.
Does it require faith not to believe in something you’ve never heard of?
It’s possible. However praying to or worshipping such a god would be rather pointless wouldn’t it? Rather like talking to a brick wall. It’s simpler really just to act as though he doesn’t exist and go about your business accordingly … .
Cegstar, you have been asked by Voyager which “god” you believe in. I think it is a valid question, because you are asking if it takes faith to disbelieve in the god you apparently believe in. Also, it seems perfectly fair and right that we ask you if it takes faith for you to disbelieve in all the other gods.
But it doesn’t; there are quite obvious gaps in our knowledge, and we can’t even see anything beyond the observable universe. As well, innumerable things across the universe have been destroyed in the billions of years since the universe began, and all traces of them destroyed by the passage of time, which means we’ll never discover them.
The universe only makes sense if we assume there are things we haven’t discovered yet; that’s why scientists haven’t collectively said “OK, we’re done; time to go into another line of work.” Not to mention historians and mathematicians and quite a few other people.
Read my OP again. I’m asking about strong atheists.
Who cares? I’m not talking about worshipping or praying? Do you not understand the topic?
It’s not a valid question. My personal beliefs have nothing whatsoever with the discussion I attempted to start.
If I have a belief the way a strong atheist does that no other gods exist, then it may. I’m trying to decide:
“That’s not what I’m trying to do. I simply asked a question in an attempt to see if someone will confirm my supposition or give me a logical reason to drop it.”
Since you guys can’t help but get so defensive and find this need to jump on the foolish theist, can we pretend that this is a question asked by an atheist?
Sure, but how that relates to atheism is unclear, or at least requires such a huge expansion of the word “belief” as to make it useless. It would be like the belief that there is no silent horde of zombies sneaking up behind me as I type this stems from my devout faith. Does one need faith to believe a nuclear weapon isn’t hidden in one’s coffee maker? Does one need faith to believe that putting on one’s eyeglasses won’t cause Sudden Decapitation Syndrome, or SDS? By assuming the atheists work on “faith”, you make “faith” a meaningless concept, as though “faith” was the simple state of not living of constant terror of everything that could possibly or impossibly occur.
Well, I’d argue that an eternal deity and an eternal afterlife and all the eternal aspects of most religions violate certain demonstrable aspects of thermodynamics.
And although the rival concepts of “Hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin” are facetious, Zeus (even though Czar’s use was also a bit facetious) was quite seriously and devoutly worshipped by humans for centuries. Polytheism generally was part of human history long before the monotheistic Zoroastrian and Abrahamic faiths took hold. Recognizable Judaism is, at best, about 4000 years old, with Zoroastrianism probably a few centuries older. Human societies (using the development of agriculture as a starting point) are about three times older than that. Modern humans were polytheists a lot longer than they’ve been monotheists.
What this boils down to is that if you can’t explain why you don’t worship or believe in Zeus, then why should an atheist explain why he doesn’t worship or believe in God? If unbelief in God is an act of faith, surely unbelief in Zeus is as well and Zeus has been around longer, in terms of human history. He’s out of fashion now, but perhaps that simply means humanity has lost its way and may yet return to his altar.
And I’m not attempting to talk down to you though the SDS reference was, I admit, a tad facetious. 
I think I see the problem. In your second sentence, it should read,“Since there is no evidence that there is something to believe in…”
Does that clear everything up for you?
I don’t think you got my point. Voyager said he lacks belief in God right now “since we live in a universe that makes sense without one”.
My point is that the universe seems to make sense without all sorts of things we don’t know about. I can’t imagine that this would be a reason for an atheist to lack belief in God. But this is really a subject for another thread.
I’m way to exhausted to continue tonight. I’ll get back to you all tomorrow.
If I may, you seem to be defining “hard atheist” as someone who would say “I believe with all my heart and against all challenges that there is no God and won’t rest until I convince others or the same.” Such people exist, I’m sure, but they’re not representative of everyone who has concluded that there is no evidence nor need for God and acts accordingly.
Well, I’ll make an effort to be neither defensive nor jumpy. If an atheist had asked the question, my first thought would be that he’s only pretending to be an atheist (and it wouldn’t be a first on this board). I’d be a bit more open had it been phrased like:
If that was the form of the question, I can see posters talking about the need for some individuals to control others using conformity as a weapon and how this happens in all social groups, etc. It wouldn’t turn on how the words “faith”, “belief” or “hard” were defined.
But I’m just speculating on this.
Untrue; we have no such evidence. What we have is a distinct lack of evidence that he does give out presents.
I suppose I can answer this because I have no belief in god and I believe God does not exist.
For the record, “God” covers the Christian/Jewish/Islam god Yahwah, as well as Zeus, Mars, Juno, Shiva, Krishna, Vaal, Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Great Arkleseizure or Jeff the God of Biscuits.
Being a “strong atheist” I don’t normally use the word faith because it is in fashion to use this term with religious connotations.
If you would like to agree that faith only means “confidence in”, then sure, feel free to say I have faith in my non-belief in god/s. It makes no difference to me.
I think a better word to use with “strong atheists” would be certainty. I don’t have faith the sun will come up tomorrow, I am certain of it. I don’t have faith the forces of gravity will bring the ball I toss in the air to the ground, I am certain of it.
I know these things because of what is in the reality around me.
Tomorrow if I throw a ball in the air and it keeps going up into space, my reality would have then changed and I would need to assess the current situation. If this means changing the rules of what I am certain of, I can do that. I’m not just an atheist, I’m also a realist. I would not close my eyes to a real event just because I was certain it would never have happened yesterday.
If someone (or a group of people) told me they pitched a ball into the air from earth and it hit the moon, I’d have quite a time believing that as my reality doesn’t allow for such things. I would need proof.
If a group of scholars investigated the claim of the ball hitting the moon, documented the event, and how such a thing could be reproduced (and other scholars were able to reproduce it), then I’d believe such an event was possible.
Same would hold true of a god. My reality does not allow for the existence of a god. BUT, if I woke up one day and came nose to nose with the Great Arkleseizure, then the rules of my reality have changed and I would need to adjust to the new rules.
But, like the ball and the moon, my reality does not allow for the existence of God just because someone on TV says it’s real (offering zero proof on the matter).
I once met a fellow who called himself Santa and he did, in fact, hand out presents.
Several Christmas mornings I found presents under the tree and the tag on the present said it was from Santa. To this day my mother says she didn’t place those presents under the tree. They were from Santa.
My mother also once told me there was a god that lives in the sky and when I die, if I’m good, I will go to heaven and live with him. I’ve never seen anything in my life that backs this story up.
I don’t believe in Santa or god, but I have more personal evidence at the moment to believe Santa might exist. With god, I got nothing.
An athiest is as “strong” as the evidence to the contrary is weak 
I think you’re getting hung up on what people actually believe in.
A theist look at the world, sees both evidence that their god exists and that it doesn’t (as well as where there is a lack of evidence) and concludes that their god exists. There’s a gap, evidence-wise, between what they see and their conclusion; it’s faith that fills that gap.
An agnostic looks at the world, sees both kinds of evidence and the lack of the same, and concludes that they aren’t sure. There’s no faith needed there (There are of course agnostics who believe the existence of god cannot possibly be known, but I won’t get into the differences here).
So, athiests. A strong athiest might look at the world and see the evidence, and conclude that not only are there no gods, there cannot possibly be any gods. That takes faith; there’s no evidence that no gods can possibly exist, so it’s a leap of faith rather than logic. These kind of athiests are relatively rare, however.
On the other hand, you’ve got athiests who look at the world, see the evidence, and say that on the evidence, they don’t believe in any gods. That’s the difference. Saying that there cannot be any gods requires faith; saying that *the evidence does not support the existence of gods * doesn’t. And, indeed, you’ll find a lot of athiests who are willing to say “If there was some good evidence a particular god existed, i’d be happy to re-evaluate my position”. I’m one of them. But as I do not see any evidence that convinces me of a god’s existence, I do not believe. No faith required. 
Please go back to the Wikipedia article and note the section from which you took this quotation. It is the first entry under the section labeled COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS. You seem to be laboring under exactly the most common misconception regarding the definition of Weak Atheist. It is explicitly rejected under the first category of Strong Atheists in the list of potential attributes for that group:
There probably is a point at which one can say that even an atheist is going overboard (and thus faith.) But simply saying that there aren’t any deities is pretty easy, since there’s evidence to show that there isn’t.
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We apply Okham’s razor to creation. Whichever theory requires more magic is less likely to be true. If it takes magic for the universe to come into being then it takes more magic for deities to spring into existance and for them to magically create the universe.
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The evidence for deities of some sort is people reporting having “religious experiences.”
Well firstly, both through interviewing and brain scans, it appears that a religious experience is a chemical reaction that can be perfectly well simulated by drugs. Essentially “Religious Experience” = Endorphins, which are released whenever our body finds itself exposed to some sort of social encounter that it feels should be reinforced, healthy living, or other such things. So what people have labelled as religious experiences appear to mostly be an evolutionary trait to encourage certain human behavior that promotes healthy decisions.
Secondly, it’s unclear how much of humanity actually experiences “religious experiences.” There was a thread (I though recently, but that I can’t find now) about certain branches of Christianity where people fall into the walkway and start spasming. True, it’s possible that this one branch of Christianity has actually gotten close enough to The Truth that they have stronger religious experiences than others. But given that other religions also have sects which produce similar spasming, it seems more likely that the people are doing this all by themselves. So how much of religious feelings are self-induced in order to fit in with the prevailing social ideas isn’t terribly clear.
- About one in twelve children will vary from the religion their parents’ held, but otherwise they take on the tradition. But similarly, atheist children are atheists eleven out of twelve times. So again, applying Okham’s razor, it seems a lot more likely that people believe what they were told to believe as children.
No. It depends on what justification the strong atheist gives. If they present a rational argument for why they think no gods exist, then no, they are not employing faith.
The same goes for theists too, by the way. The reason we say so many theists have lots of faith is because THEY SAY THEY DO.
You said in your OP “The definition of a strong atheist is generally one that says that the atheist not only lacks belief in God, but believes that he doesn’t exist.”
How does this not apply to most modern people’s stance on the existence of Osiris or Loki? You are saying most people do not believe that Osiris or Loki do not exist? Please explain.
Just because most people believe that Osiris and Loki don’t exist doesn’t mean that that isn’t a faith-held belief.