It’s part of my philosophy that you shouldn’t murder. Does that make me an antimurderist? No. Or that I have a whole philosophy about murder? There’s no dissertation bouncing around in my head.
This thread asked a question. I attempted to answer it by pointing out what is natural to humans and how the mind works.
Since you don’t seem to know empiricalism or theory of mind (or don’t care), then I can’t do this. No big deal.
Dio, seriously. I know what these words mean. You keep making “belief” and “knowledge” synonyms.
This thread is getting derailed; I’m stopping.
That’s great. If God is outside the human realm, there is no reason at all to believe in its existence, let alone debate its properties. Which is the atheist position. (Most) theistic gods are not defined to be outside human experience at all, except when some semi-clever theist is debating the existence of that god.
Swipe out “god” with “which we cannot know”.
In Judaism, God is: I AM THE I AM.
que sera sera
God is whatever we define it to be. But…all humans have words for god. It’s universal. God isn’t outside the human experience. That would be like s9hikalnhasism. It’s just beyond human understanding (like space).
Doesn’t prove or disprove God. I was just merely pointing out how useful philosophy is when exercising your right to wail on Creationists! 
That’s just the typical tactic of redefining “god” to be undetectable for the purposes of debate. The two terms aren’t equivalent, if they were, people wouldn’t believe in god.
Show me one believer who agrees with that.
Unknowable is not the same as not understandable.
And now you’re making the claim that god == space. Or not.
Either god is space and thus does exist for all practical definitions of “exist” (even if you claim you can’t understand space and that kind of god is equivalent to the non-existence of every major theistic god, and also not outside the human realm or experience), or god isn’t space and you’re just ducking the question.
Seen similar redefinition tactics before. Not impressed yet.
What you’re giving isn’t answers, CP, but wastes of time.
I’m not too interested in defining words, but I think this deserves an answer with respect to what people who call themselves “atheists” actually identify with. If an atheists says “I know that God does not exist,” it’s along the lines of how any other person would say that he knows that leprechauns don’t exist. In a strict epistemological sense, it’s an unsupportable statement, but practically, everyone knows what you mean. Atheists view the concept of God just like everyone else views the concept of leprechauns. It’s an extraordinary claim, for which no evidence is presented, so the default position has to be to accept that they don’t exist, provisionally.
The claim that a God exists does not have evidence to support it. Rejection of that claim does not require faith or evidence. Rejection of that claim is what makes an atheist.
If this God is, in principle, unobservable, then belief in it is, in principle, unjustified. You’ve just admitted here that there’s no way to justify a belief in this God of yours. Seems like this would be the end of all the Abrahamic religions, but…
So who argues that God definitely doesn’t exist?
Sure, and that’s why no one makes a knowledge claim that God does not exist. At least, not some vague, poorly-defined concept of God. Of course, some formulations have logical contradictions and can be shown not to exist, but in general, no one makes the knowledge claim that they don’t.
Please stop being obtuse. There is zero evidence that the claims of Judaism and other Abrahamic religions are true.
yes, but I don’t see what this has to do with the topic. Atheism is not “anti” anything.
So what? Atheism is not a philosophy.
There is no such word as “empiricalism.” The word is empiricism, and you have not demonstrated that you know what it means.
The worst part is that CitizenPained has claimed to be a teacher in other threads. Those poor students. I hope her tests are better written than her posts.
CitizenPained, you are blatantly misusing very basic philosophical terms and logical principles. Really, this is stuff that my Intro to Philosophy TA would have marked me down for. For instance, you seem unclear on what “atheism” means, or what the null hypothesis is.
ENOUGH!
Everyone back off on the snide comments and attempts at under-the-wire jabs.
There will be no more comments on the efforts of other posters to explain themselves, their ability to think, or their capacity for knowledge.
You can continue your semantic game of dueling idiolects, but you wll no longer make observations about other posters as part of the thread.
[ /Moderating ]
To Diogenes the Cynic, I point out that you assume, wrongly, that I am a theist, and so your “sky fairy” derision is misplaced. You make the mistake of assuming that if one sketches the outlines of an issue one must thereby be a partisan of whichever side seems to “win”. I also, for example, believe that Gadaffi is right about the Rebels and right about the U.N… I am not, however, pro Gadaffi, as the overall weight of my beliefs and sentiments on the issue involves more than whether or not Gadaffi can make a case for himself. Similarly, Noam Chomsky is a Zionist, and anyone who reads anything else into his critiques is wrong.
I am agnostic, and would lump in what you call “atheism” as agnosticism. It seems to me that you’re an agnostic wearing an ill fitting atheist’s costume.
As for your blunt statement that you think I don’t know what “theology” or “theism” mean, I would say, “physician, heal thyself”. Wherever you look, along the broad boulevard of civil conversation, “atheism” is understood as the theory or belief that g*d does not exist. It seems to me that you mix up what looks, at first blush, like a linguistically apt expectation of what “atheism” should mean, with how the word is most often used, both casually, and academically.
As for the suggestion that putting atheists in the theistic camp is wrong headed because this standard would lend credence to Smurf believers, you are right. This doesn’t mean that Smuf believers are likely to become respectable any time soon. But it does mean that theism happens to be in an epistemological category whereby human knowledge claims amount to null. If this were not the case, the matter would have been settled by now.
Looking at what makes Smurfism and Theism different, though, is instructive. I’m not sure what Smurfism entails, but I can tell you that Theism has to do with first causes of the universe. I feel enmeshed in jungly undergrowth any time I try to get to the heart of the matter on this point, and usually have to resort to violent hacking and thrashing just to get out alive, generally creating more heat than light. Rather than subjecting myself to the experience or others to the spectacle, I’ll defer to whoever, among the Theists, might like to take it on.
I would expect Dio to say that he’s an agnostic atheist, like most atheists would, if they’re getting technical about it. Many agnostics (most, probably, though not nearly all) are atheists.
Atheism is about what you personally believe (or don’t believe) regarding the existence of god(s). Agnosticism is about what you think or believe you can KNOW about god(s).
I am both agnostic and atheist. They are not opposed. People commonly confuse agnosticism with weak atheism.
Incorrect. Atheism is the lack of theistic belief. It is not a assertion of the negative, it’s a lack of assertion of the positive.
I am using the word exactly how it’s used academically. Popularly, it gets commonly misunderstood (as you are doing).
Theism belongs to no epistemological category at all. It’s just an assertion.
Smurfs created the universe. Now how is that assertion different from saying a sky god did it?
You don’t actually think First Cause is a persuasive argument anyway, do you?
What is “the heart of the matter?”
That’s not “my logic”. It’s the consensus view of what the word means, both as used in common discourse, as cited in dictionaries, and as used by academics whose business it is to know what the word means.
The English language is full of words that don’t quite mean what you’d think they might, based upon syntactic parsing. Claiming that “atheism” means something other than what it means because of a quirk about its prefix is just not interesting.
That is not how the word is used academically. I know that for a fact.
Exactly. It’s that simple. After months of an ongoing discussion with my conservative Christian sister I asked her what person I should trust to tell me what to do in regard to my immortal soul, and how would I know if that imperfect human was correct?
Then you have been misinformed regarding the nature and the meaning of the word atheism.
So you assertion is that atheism means what the most people think it means? So if enough people don’t understand the correct meaning of a word, trier incorrect notion becomes the meaning?
I guess there is some truth to that, but it’s understandable that some people still use the original and more technical definition. When engaged in a discussion it’s good to know how the other person is defining a term. Unless their definition clearly incorrect. In this case , it’s not. A lack of belief is the classic definition and atheism is not akin to a religious belief.
Not necessarily. From Merriam-Webster:
I’ll agree that, when taken as the name of a philosophical position, only 2a is applicable. But in English, words mean what people use them to mean, and though I think that is frequently counterproductive to discourse, there’s no denying that many people use atheism as JoeMonocole has been.