So, are you memetically “unbound”? Does anyone else have this characteristic besides you?
BTW, your sentence suggests that you are the opposite of “desperate”. What does it mean to be the opposite of “desperate”?
In other words, a purely abstract system, that was devised for its practical application, just like I said. Good to see you agree with me.
Well, duh - you were taught about them as fact. Before they became common knowledge they were dismissed as easily as you dimiss all the arguments that show you’re wrong here. Check your history.
That you are claiming you can prove this. And arguing it in the shittiest way possible, I might add.
We have been explicity talking about proving and disproving all this time - despite your slimy bullshit attempt to pretend otherwise now. What the hell do you think “undisproveability” is talking about? Your opinions?
It’s a grounding in shoveling bullshit, is what it is. You wish you could prove that no gods exist. You claim you can prove no gods exist. And then when the fact you can’t prove no gods exist gets shoved back down your throat, you suddenly pretend you’re just talking about practical applications and not proofs all of a sudden.
All your prior posts are still here, you know.
SNIP because you’ve gone incoherent in your refusal to discuss supernatural things when you’ve explicitly built them into the definition of dieties. Here are some high points though:
Yeah, I’m the confrontational one here.
And denying the point without cogently refuting it? How very dogmatic of you.
You have two options: prove it, or concede. Or yell and whine and shriek. Three options: prove it, concede, yell and whined and shriek, or fallaciously declare victory a priori based on nothing and look like a fool. Four options.
Something else you don’t understand - or do understand and are willing to grossly misrepresent to “prove” your point to yourself.
Be honest - you reject the FSM out of hand because you wanna. Pretending that it’s impossible for a fraud to be successfully perpetrated has nothing to do with it, except in post-hoc lame justifications.
You typed this with a straight face?
Pretending you belive this, it also holds for non god-like things too, right? Since you steadfastly refuse to define the term. So, if you convince yourself that there are no unicorns, then you’ve therefore argued against all animals that you don’t already know exist, right? You’ve proven that your current knowledge is complete and perfect. No need to disprove dragons separately, or black swans, or platypi - you just KNOW they’re not real.
When you find yourself saying ludicrous, deranged things in support of your point, it may be time to back off, or slink off, or whatever else it is one does when they’re philosopically opposed to admitting they’re wrong.
You’re new to this whole “god” thing, aren’t you? The actual, correct definition is “anything anyone calls a god”. There are certain trends but nothing is certain, and here’s my proof: Egyptian pharohs were considered gods. Mortal, killable, non-omni, non-benevolent, at least partly physical, and accepted by all as existing.
Whoops. Guess we’re all theists.
Now it’s your turn to declare the pharoahs weren’t gods, despite the prevailing beliefs at the time (which are all that ever determined what gods were, historically speaking). Which behooves you to come up with a definition that excludes them - and try to get me to accept it.
Myself I’m cool with it - my styrofoam cup is a god because I say so. You don’t like it, you come up with a definition that I can accept. Because mine here presented is based on the historical use of the word, with is all the backing I think I need.
It was (a subset of) merriam-webster’s definition - since when did it become something that you were including or excluding things from? This has gone beyond goalpost removal to being revisionist history. Doesn’t the cognitive dissonance bother you?
Regarless, if you want to start including things in a definition, now’s the time. But the more you attempt to restrict the meaning of the word, the less it’s going to have to do with reality. Well, the unrevised reality everyone else but you is living in, anyway.
That no gods are undisprovable. Haven’t you been paying attention? To yourself?
No - the debate with the one atheist who refuses to accept the terms of debate (and terms of reality) is pointless. Debate amongst others can continue.
But I’m okay with doing pointless things now and then - hence I still respond to you.
Yeah, see, how is this supposed to play out? We both think the other person is, shall we say, ‘confused’ about who bears the burden of proof here (possibly because you’ve forgotten/retconned that you’re arguing the positive claim of complete undisprovability). So where do we go from here?
I know where I go from here - I tell you to look up burden of proof. And then sit back satisfied that everyone but you will agree with me as to who is right.
“As well as it does against the omni”? Wouldn’t that depend on a variety of factors? A diety that was (due to some magical overriding “law of justice”) unable to grant salvation to persons who have not been tested and passed the test is pretty much completely clear of the POE due to that restriction alone. Not to mention one of the ways to de-power an omni is to make them less omni-benevolent; perhaps as in “cares about souls, but not human mortals”. And yes, I’ve seen both arguments used - with the main error being that the person making the argument denies that this makes the diety non-omni.
No. Just that anything that interacts with our universe is not outside our universe, is discoverable.
No. Not at all. I just think those are the interesting properties of a god, not “hey, something I just made up that doesn’t interact with anything in any way, and that’s its only property”, to pull an example out of this thread.
No. That’s definitional for the Universe - it is a closed system. If you can interact with the rest of it, you’re part of it.
When it comes to the god delusion? Definitely.
Lots. More every day.
“Content”? “Complete”? I know, here’s a pair - “assured”.
begbert2, I’m not going to continue replying to your hostility in this thread - clearly you think the Pit would be a more appropriate forum. I just want to point out that calling your *opinion *bunk is not the same as your outright hostility. A hostility I think I’ve only once approached, with that stupid “Mr On Point” jab, for which I apologise.
And I have merely called your arguments bullshit, not you personally. If I am the kettle, you are the pot.
I’m going to pretend a moment that you’re not fleeing from debate, but just fleeing from hostility. In which case, the followign questions should be sufficiently non-hostile:
-
Do you feel that the definition of “god” should reflect historical usage, to the degree that it at least approximates the set of things that have been called gods (such as pharoahs and watchmakers)?
-
How would you define the word “supernatural”? Do you feel it should reflect historical usage, which probably hasn’t traditionally been literally “things that don’t exist”?
Obviously, I disagree.
When have I ever fled from debate? But yes, just the hostility - and not just yours - when I find myself mirroring hostility, I think it’s best for me to step back, too.
Yes - well, yes on Pharaoh. I don’t think anyone’s ever worshipped actual watchmakers, it’s just an (easily dismissed) analogy.
And as to your previous point about Pharaoh - the Egyptians certainly didn’t consider Pharaoh mortal. He was an incarnation of one god in life, and returned to be united with another in death. His ka was immortal. No, he wasn’t omnimax, or even close, but I never said god had to be. He *was *considered to wield supernatural power, especially the all-important ma’at.
Any phenomenon that directly contravenes pure physicalism, especially clear violation of physical laws.
Now there’s a leading question if ever I saw one. But I’ll tackle this anyway - in considering whether something *was *considered a god, sure, we should use the worshippers’ understanding of what was supernatural - and their understanding of what contravened nature . But in deciding for ourselves whether something actually is a god, we should definitely use the modern sense. In my case, that means yes, the supernatural doesn’t exist. Ditto any other non-physicalist explanations. I reject dualism. I reject spirituality. I reject metaphysics. I reject qualia, and P-zombies, and the homonculous, and solipsism. I reject non-verifiability. I’m willing to entertain separate debate on any and each of these, but for a discussion on why I’m a hard atheist, it’s sufficient to note that these are my bases, and then discuss why no god so far proposed to, or encountered by me, meets my standards.
So no, it’s not about absolute proof, or general undisprovability - it’s about what *I *consider undisprovable or not. That’s all that affects *my *certainty, and that’s all I came into this thread to dispute - the idea that there are no hard atheists. So - any god that appeals to a purely non-material existence is disprovable for me, because it violates physicalism. Any god that hides its traces perfectly is disprovable - verificationism. etc., etc.
Well, yah. 
Fair 'nuff.
So you disagree that definition of “god” should reflect historical usage regarding watchmaker gods.
Um.
I don’t think I can accept your definition of “god”, then. There’s a class of things that have always been called gods (always) and you reject them from that label…why? Because one of the four definitions in m-w includes the word “worshipped”? I think not.
To me this reeks of assuming your conclusion, of stacking your deck. You know you can’t disprove non-interventionalist gods, and you want to be able to say you can disprove all gods, so you’re throwing watchamakers out of the set of ‘gods’ to make everything work. Seems kind of like delaring that non-birds can’t fly, and then declaring that bats aren’t non-birds in order to make that work.
On the other hand I’m well aware that you’re not deliberately equivocating. You’re hitting yet another of the problems with terms like ‘atheist’ - we’re virtually never talking about all theoretical gods. We’re usually just talking about the god believed by the guy across the table. So, functionally, only gods that are worshipped matter, since who gives a crap if a non-interventionalist god that nobody worships exists? By definition it cannot effect our lives, either directly or via the beliefs of its worshippers.
But we’re doing the agnostic/atheist debate now. And here, it’s not about functional effect; it’s about knowability, even of watchmakers. If you don’t wanna engage in this debate you don’t have to, but that’s what’s going down in here.
And in the context of this debate I can’t accept a definition of ‘god’ that arbitrarily doesn’t include watchmaker gods and noninterventionist gods. Such gods have always been explicitly included in this debate, and you can’t validly remove them now on a definitional technicality - especially one based mainly in your own opinion.
Sounds like you’re trying to true-scotsman pharoahs out of the god category, a breath after admitting them, by declaring it’s not the (extremely verifiable) physical walking talking pharoah that’s the god, but instead it’s instead the pharoah’s (unverifiable) ka that was immortal.
And I’m actually kind of fine with that, believe it or not. (What, you think I want to have to a theist, due to pharoahs? :smack:) I’d even be fine with you then proceeding to make an argument that human neurology proves there are no souls in any functional sense and thus the pharoah can’t have a ka, completing the process of removing the physical pharoah from godhood. This would be okay because the argument would be based on evidence and not definition.
Though there are potential flaws in the anti-soul argument, if you don’t presume a non-trickster god. Plus you might be a little hard pressed to prove that all pharoahs had normal human brains rather than magic fairy radios instead (though it would be easy to argue and in some cases you could dissect mummies - though again, trickster gods.) So even then, you can’t really know.
Fair enough. Out of curiousity, what would happen if we verify supernatural effects, and thus scientifically prove the existence of a nonphysical plane that exists external to and contains our universe? Clearly we’d rewrite the laws of physics to account for the effects of interventions from this external plane, but would you allow the external nonphysical plane to retain the label of ‘supernatural’, or would you redefine it as ‘physical’?
This is a bit similar to the question of, if there were shown to be parallel universes (perhaps populated by parallel people but with goatees), would you declare the universe to actually contain all the parallel ones too on the basis of the declaration that the universe is everything, or would you allow the terms of the usual model for this situation to prevail?
So, you reject some things, and based on those rejections you consider other things proven to be false and reject them too. That’s the normal way of things, but if we ignore some subtleties it’s the same thing people do when they reject evolution because they reject the idea that the bible might not be literally true. As you (here) note, the certainty of your derived conclusion is derived from the correctness of your starting assumptions, which of course is debatable, and not provable.
Actually there are chunks of this thread that are about absolute proof, or general undisprovability - and there are chunks about mere belief and certainty thereof. Such is the nature of debates invovling the term ‘agnostic’, which has completely separate definitions along each of those lines, which describe different sets of people.
As to whether there are no hard atheists - it kinda depends on your definition of “hard atheist”, doesn’t it? My definition of all the term has always been a person who thinks it is provable - that they have absolute certatinty at a provable level. That is, what’s been called a ‘strawman atheist’ in here.
It seems that I’m the only person who uses the term this way - but frankly all the other uses of the term suck. They’re useless! They completely lack a functional dividing line between hard and non-hard atheists! As best I can tell there are only four meaningful dividing lines available, which demarcate the points between my categories 1-5: the difference between thinking it’s probable or not, in the theistic or atheistic direction, and wether or not you’ve crossed your threshold of belief, theistically or atheistically. That is, the dividing lines regarding knowability, and the dividing lines regarding belief. I see no other clear dividing lines - what, whether you’re annoying about your atheism or not? Please.
But hey! Now I have you here, and you claim to be a hard atheist and (apparently) don’t claim provability. What do you think the difference between a hard atheist and a soft atheist is?
It doesn’t matter what the difference is, anyone who knocks at my door early on a weekend morning with tracts in hand, gets the boiling oil.
What historical usage? The only “watchmaker god” I’ve ever encountered anyone actually claiming as real is the Christian one, which, believe me, has plenty of other silliness going on. Other than that, it’s just used as a philosophical exercise.
Personally, I leave purely hypothetical arguments well alone. So yes, the only gods that concern me, as an atheist, are ones people are actually proposing I worship. Like I said, I am not an atheist to the purely hypothetical. That would, IMO, be a meaningless exercise.
Everyone has base assumptions. The difference is, I stated mine out clearly.
No, I’m throwing them out for the same reason I’m throwing out the FSM - a pure exercise in metaphysical mumbo-jumbo doesn’t interest me when I don’t even acknowledge metaphysics as a valid field. Like I said, the only watchmaker that’s ever really put forward is the Christian god, and that’s dealt with other places. The watchmaker argument, itself, is trivial to dismiss on logical grounds. It’s been done.
No. That would be dismissing something on its properties or predicates, not its existence. Hypothetical objectsts have no existence.
Like I said, I’m a verificationist - to me, the knowability of hypothetical constructs isn’t undecideable, it’s meaningless.
I’m engaging in the debate, you’re just not acknowledging my base beliefs.
I didn’t make this stuff up sui generis. I’m not the first to argue for a more meaningfull definition of god and proper terms to the debate, or to refuse to debate on the dualist’s terms. I’m sure I won’t be the last.
The Egyptians didn’t seperate the two, I don’t intend to, either. I’m fine with including all of Pharaoh in the category of god.
Of course I’d know. You might not, and I’m cool with you being 99% certain if that floats your boat. But clearly, along with everything else, we’re using a different sort of logic system, aren’t we? I’m quite happy to take certainty from both induction and abduction, not just deduction. It seems you aren’t.
“nonphysical” is a category error. A meaningless expression. Metaphysics speak from the days of Plato that has no bearing on reality.
That depends on if there is any interaction possible (in which case very much our Universe) or whether a purely theoretical construct, in which case, cosmologically interesting but otherwise no bearing on my atheism.
You lost me there - surely it goes the other way?
Not by deduction, no. But like I said before, I don’t believe mathematical logic, that admits only deduction as rigorous, is the only, or even a, right tool for investigating and making decisions about lifestances like atheism. I prefer the tools of rhetoric to dialectic, and I prefer real-language solutions to symbolic ones.
Note that I haven’t really involved myself in any consideration of agnostics in this part of the debate - merely defended my 100%.
What type of proof are you talking about, though? Pure classical propositional or 1st order logic? Because there are other kinds of proof.
I don’t claim to be a hard atheist - I claim to be just an atheist (with 100% certainty). As far as I’m concerned, subcategorizing atheists is a divide-and-discard strategy on the part of non-atheists of various stripes, as well as some atheists. Anyone who calls themselves an atheist is fine by me, even if they admit some doubt, or consider some things unknowable.
I guess I have my actual answer to the OP - atheists, at least, should view agnostics pretty much as we view theists, however that might be.
The historical exercise one.
Who are you accusing of not stating their assumptions out clearly? Watch yourself.
Things have been hypothesized to exist, and then later demonstrated to exist. If you include nonphysical things like scientific laws, this is the entirety of science. Which I think you just threw out in your desire to get rid of the bathwater.
Don’t be absurd - I certainly do acnowledge that you’re packing around a pile of base assumptions. I have even formalized that acknowledgement by suggesting that you assume your conclusion!
What I’m not doing is accepting your base beliefs as axiomatically correct. There is a distinct difference.
Not to be indelicate, but I haven’t seen you do much to argue for a “more meaningful” definition of God - and the only definition you’ve provided includes the dualists’ term “supernatural”. Assuming you’re doing it deliberately, you’re trying to reframe the debate so that you automatically win - or refuse to engage in it. And I won’t play along with the former, and don’t see much point in the latter.
Really. :dubious:
So, you’re a theist then? Or you don’t believe in pharoahs?
I’m just using the logic CORRECTLY. Absolute perfect certainty of knowledge in matters of evidence can’t be achieved, if for no other reason than that you can’t disprove solipsism and the like.
And if you’ve arbitrarily decided to disbelieve in solipsism, then that’s fine - I don’t believe in it either. But thinking you’ve disproved it by axiomatic assertion is an error.
How nice of you to declare that. I hadn’t realized your opinion on the matter before.
Certainly not - read again, and take care with the negatives. There are admittedly a few of them in there.
Your 100% what? There are two orthogonally different continuua to be 100% on: belief and knowledge. They’re related - so closely that I’ve found myself vaccilating within this very thread as to what model should be used to describe them. But they’re not the same. You can have a “100% certain” belief in the nonexistence of any and all gods; excluding pharoahs and styrofoam cups and myself, I have this level of certainty. I don’t have even the smallest shred of belief in the amorphous undefined god posited by the modal ontological argument. (It doesn’t help that the argument is based on a stealthily invalid premise.) In this regard, you and I share certainty of disbelief in most of what people call gods, even the undisprovable ones.
And then there’s certainty of provable knowledge, which nobody can validly attain about conclusions which derive from evidence. No, not even you. Despite accepting premises as certain - if that was all it took to achieve certainty of knowledge, a theist would be correct in taking “God exists” as a premise and that would be that.
Much of what you’ve said in arguing with me has been addressing this latter sort of 100% certainty - including your incorrect statements about other kinds of logic being able to definitively answer the question that has defied answering for hundreds of years. (Seriously, if it could have been done it would have.) You now seem to be edging towards the first type of certainty. When you get there, you will find the arguments from me strangely suddenly absent.
Damn! I was hoping when you said “I came into this thread to dispute - the idea that there are no hard atheists” that that meant you had some insight into what the stupid term actually meant. The search continues…
Er, which kind of agnostics? A lot of them are also atheists of some stripe. Given that, it would be weird to criticise their dogmatic belief in diety (my usual reaction to theists - that and throwing rocks).
I’m not who you addressed this question to, but I’ll put in my 2 cents. Your argument is pretty much what made me an atheist. I was certain there was a Christian God, but there were other people who were certain that there was a different God. Why was I so sure I was right? If they could be wrong about their God, despite being absolutely certain that they were right, then why couldn’t I be the one who was wrong? I reasoned that certainty in and of itself is no help in knowing if your viewpoint is correct. Since there are N religions, I had a 1/N chance of being correct; not very good odds. You have to look at the evidence. But the evidence was circular. God exists because it says so in this book, and we know that’s right because it is God’s word. That really makes no sense what so ever. At that point I thought, well may they are all wrong and there is no God. That made everything simpler. No need to explain why bad things happen to good people, or what the meaning of life is, or what happens when we die, etc.
So to me, your observation is an argument against God, not for him. If different people are certain about mutually exclusive beliefs, then certainty is not a guide to know if a belief is valid.
Like I said, irrelevant to my atheism.
Everyone else. No-one else has come out and said “I’m a materialist” or “I’m an idealist” or “I believe in Cartesian duality” or the like.
The laws of Physics don’t “exist” in the same sense that gods are purported to exist. I’m talking about things that are considered real, here. Phenomenal objects, not ideals or abstracts.
I’m not asking you to. But you do have to argue from my axioms to my conclusions, or argue the axioms if you want another thread, in order to show that I’m incorrect.
No. The automatic win is a handy side effect, but it’s not the point. The point is to get theists to enumerate the properties of the god(s) they actually believe in. Something they steadily avoid being pinned down on, but, IMO, the only meaningful god for an atheist to refute.
…and I don’t see much point in ongoing debate with a fellow atheist about what theists believe. Let them come up with the definitions.
Are you taking the mickey? Of course I believe in the existence of Pharaohs. I just certain they weren’t actually gods.
Don’t have to - verificationism.
Verificationism isn’t arbitrary. It follows principle of parsimony quite handily.
I thought we were getting past the sarcasm.
Aah, I see it now. I don’t agree it’s the same thing, though, as they’re going against the phenomenal (ha) evidence against a literal Bible, whereas verificationism and physicalism both have strong support.
Certainty.
True enough - but “God does not exist” is not my starting premise. Hell, “only the natural exists” isn’t even my starting premise. Parsimony is. You’re welcome to argue against it as a starting principle, and I agree that initial choice is somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t think that affects the certainty of conclusions.
It did, years before my time. But some habits die hard. I blame the Analyticals.
Sorry, no. I dispute all terms other than plain atheist on completely idealogical grounds, not semantics.
Good Luck.
That doesn’t affect the statement. If they call themselves agnostic as well, they’re in the way.
It’s not (just) the deity belief (or lack or indecision) that needs criticism, it’s the refusal to pick a side. Harms the Atheist Project, don’tchaknow?
The question of whether such dieties may exist is irrelevent to you, but it’s hardly irrelevent to the question of whether such speculated entities can legitimately (if abstractly) be referred to by the term “god”, don’t you agree?
Ah, I get it. The reason you’re not hearing much of that is because such opinions are unnecessary and irrelevent to the “knowability” debate, because they’re opinions. They’re beliefs.
Remember, there are two separate debates here. One is about knowability: whether it can be proven beyond the possibility of error. The other is about belief: whether an individual should give credence to the idea.
These are separate debates - and we’re actually kind of mostly not having the ‘belief’ debate here. I mean, we could - but it would be tough to have it between us two, because we’re in complete agreement (albeit for different reasons). We don’t believe in gods*, either one of us. If we had this debate, though, which other things you believe like materialism or idealism or cartesian duality would be extremely relevent, as they inform your beliefs.
In questions about the absolute knowability of things, though, such opinions are non-sequiters, unless you can prove them to a certainty of knowability. Which you can’t (and neither can I). So they don’t merit mentioning.
- er, give or take me, cups, and (maybe :dubious:) pharoahs.
Irrelevent and you’ve missed my point. Science is about speculating about the existence of something, and then trying to verify your speculations. By flatly asserting that speculated things don’t exist you are kneecapping this process - you are flatly declaring that knowledge cannot be expanded by the scientific process. After all electrons were once speculated objects too, you know.
I’m fine with you not believing in gods or unicorns or magic. But the reason we don’t believe in them isn’t because they’re speculated. It’s because they’re speculated and nothing so far has turned up to make us think they’re anything more than speculation. Emphasis on the so far - at any point they could cease to be speculative if they elected to turn up and give a press conference. Which contradicts your assertion of absolute knowledge of their non-existence based on their speculative state alone.
I would have to if I wanted to change your belief that gods don’t exist. But I don’t have to if I just want to change your apparent belief that you’ve definitively proven they don’t exist.
Theists are barely a blip on the radar in this thread. This debate is about the different kinds of non-beliefs - notably including agnositics. And they’re talking about all the gods. Even the silly ones! (Okay, they’re all silly - even the intentionally silly ones.)
I get that you’re used to defining atheists relative to theists; that’s the normal way of it, since you can’t throw a rock (heh) without hitting a theist. But this thread and this debate ain’t about them. It’s about agnostics. And about any atheists who are so bold as to claim not to be a philosophical agnostic even as a secondary designation.
Here’s what I was responding to:
Excuse me, but I’m not exactly getting a clear picture of your position here.
From your link: “Verificationism is the idea that a statement or question only has meaning if there is some way to determine if the statement is true, or what the answer to the question is.”
Here’s a fun thought exercise: tell me, is there some way to determine if the statement “A statement or question only has meaning if there is some way to determine if the statement is true, or what the answer to the question is,” is true?
Also, materialism isn’t verifiable (not strongly, anyway). Whoops.
Verificationism sounds silly and logically incoherent to me. (Literally - in any logical system you don’t get to take a syntantically coherent idea and declare it meaningless due to external factors - and you certainly can’t go from ‘meaningless’ to ‘proven false’. No, not by any system of logically coherent analysis, don’t even try to handwave it.) It sounds more like trying to formalize the process of abdicating from debate and declaring victory - by declaring that your opponent’s position is “meaningless”, even in cases when it clearly isn’t.
I reject your premise of verificationism. You may believe it if you like - people may also believe in a sky god that bench-presses unliftable rocks; it’s a free country. But it’s uncompelling debate.
No, we were getting past the hostility. Sarcasm on the other hand is currency in trade on the Dope; have you read any of the columns?
Not support that makes them certianly true, from the perspective of knowability. Whether they’re enough to compell belief or have enough evidence to compel belief in them is not the question. (Though if it was, physicalism does have strong support.)
WHICH CERTAINTY?
About 92.5% of the entire agnosticism/atheism debate is caused by the unfortunate fact that we use the same terms for knowability and belief - despite the fact they’re separate and distinct continuums. Lots of self-proclaimed atheists assert certainty of belief. Agnostics believe they’re talking about certainty of knowabilty, and challenge them. Sparks fly, and this thread is started.
I earlier in the thread tried co-opting and redefining terms like ‘confidence’ and ‘certainty’ to distinguish between the two continuua that way, and got slapped down hard. So now I just have to ask - like I just did to you. “Certainty” alone is obviously no answer, so care to try again?
Everyone knows that Occam’s Razor isn’t a proof, so it won’t be much of an argument. You’re simply wrong if you think you can acheve certainty of knowability from it.
HA! Wow. Damn. How does one respond to this? Sure, I objectively know you’ve just grandly overestimated the argumentive force of parsimony, but it still sounds like a combination of revisionist history and fantasy, referring to some as-yet unmentioned secret proof that all the rest of us philosophically agnostic atheists aren’t privy to. Which is to say, virtually all of us.
In the way of what? And you do realize that virtually all atheists will concede philosophical agnosticism when you twist their arm, right? Until I met you I didn’t think there were any ‘strawman atheists’. Heck, I still find it hard to believe. You’re seriously causing me cognitive dissonance here.
There’s an Atheist Project?
One slightly paranoid but not entirely unjustified way to view theists is as a threat - to people’s rights, progress, science, education, or one’s personal safety; whichever. Personally I see very little in agnostics that’s even remotely comparable to this; at worst they’re an annoyance because they occasionally challenge us with an emphatic but flawed argument. (Kinda like you’re doing here.) From what worldview are the two groups equivalent?
What about people who are so bored with the whole idea of god that it does not factor in our lives at all? I spent a long time mentally debating it when I was a kid. I had to get over a bunch of Catholic Training. Now ,I find the idea not worth fighting over. It is like arguing about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. They were fictions invented to get you over when you are a kid. They are pretty harmless to children. But when you get old enough to think for yourself, you toss those silly concepts away. God is just another one of those silly ideas that you should grow out of.
OK ,mom and dad used the church to get me to understand the difference between right and wrong. The Golden Rule would have been better and would have done less harm. But that was long ago and does not matter anymore.
Your level of interest in the subject is a third separate continuum from belief and knowledge.
Some might assert that you can be so disinterested as to not even have an opinion on the subject at all; that you can lack belief either way due to not caring. I disagree - I think that you develop beliefs subconsciously. Not that having the belief/disbelief forces you to assert it - or even to dredge it up out of your subconscious and think about it.
But regardless, what should we do about such people? A nifty term has been proposed for them if thier (passively held) belief is atheistic: apatheists. Which probably covers most of them if we assume that’s using the definition of ‘atheist’ that includes belief-agnostics too. And how should we treat them? Well obviously they should be lined up and shot for their lack of interest in the debate. Or possibly envied for having lives so untainted by the effects of religion as to be able to dismiss the subject casually. One or the other, I think.
I agree, but like I said, the bolded bit makes it merely an intellectual exercise, not relevant.
Understood - but I still think baseline assumptions feed into one’s position on knowability and certainty.
I think knowability is not the same as certainty. While I don’t claim 100% knowability of all phenomenon, I do claim 100% certainty of the existence of a particular class of phenomena.
I think you’ve missed mine.
I’m not just flatly asserting they don’t exist. What I am doing is making an assertion about the class of things that can be shown to exist, and declaring that the only class that can be shown to exist. Science can only show us the physical, because that’s all science works at. OK, that’s not true, science can also show us that the non-physical doesn’t exist (ever since Einstein overcame Aether theory). The definitional aspects of Universe I also point to, are a separate issue and arise more from philosophy than Science, but serves as a nice counter to the “outside but interacting” explanations, too.
I get that, I really do. I agree there are things that are speculated where I can’t point to their speculative nature as proof - unicorns would be a good example, actually. Other than the mystical aspects, a unicorn is a pretty plausible animal, isn’t it? I would never say a unicorn is a definitionally impossible thing.
So you can see it depends on the properties of the speculated thing, whether it is dismissed out of hand or not.
In the case of the ones I’d dismiss out of hand, any such action would completely contradict their own stated properties, though. That’s what I mean by needing tighter definitions.
Understand - it is not all speculated gods as a class that I’m dismissing - it is those where the proposer, themselves, admits or otherwise indicates by their actions or situation that they have just made said god up. This is the reason I don’t particularly feel the need to argue against the FSM, for instance, or Cthulhu. I already know, with 100% certainty in the correctness of my knowing, that they are not real gods. And not from deductive logic, but merely from studying human nature, fiction and induction based on past examples. But 100% certain, none the less.
I don’t entertain even the slightest doubt that your cup is a god for the same reason.
Proven to myself, sufficient to have certainty. This wouldn’t work for someone who thought induction and abduction lack sufficient rigour, but then, I’m not an Analytic, so that’s OK by me.
They may be, but I’m not. Like I said, I’m only an atheist to gods theists actually believe in. They’re the only ones that matter, or really need to be disproved. Call it my Atheist Rule 1, if you will. “Believe it before I disprove it.”
Like I said - 100 certainty
I’m not understanding your confusion - I admit the Egyptians would consider Pharaoh a god, and not just after death, so I admit that Pharaoh while alive meets the definition of a god - to be disproved for the purposes of my atheism. That’s what “Pharaoh is a god” means. I disagree that Pharaoh is very convincing as a god, and therefore don’t personally believe him to be one. I believe in Pharaoh’s existence, but not his property of divinity.
E(P) = T, D(P) = F.
Nope. That Godel, what a bugger, huh?
Strongly enough for me. I think modern physics does quite a good job, actually. Simply put, it takes a physical thing to make physical things do things. There are no “?” factors in the laws of physics, nor are they missed. There’s no need, or proposed mechanism, for the non-material (that also interacts with the material). So absent any properties that allow it, it’s just an empty hypothetical.
De Gustibus. It sounds right up my strongly Continentally-influenced alley, and has for years.
Like I said, I’m not an Analytical. Classic logic is not the only mode of debate, decision making, or even proof. In fact, sometimes it hampers the very real goals of debate. That’s the verificationist position.
I don’t think because you declare a concept meaningless, you win the debate. But the point is, if there’s no way to prove something, there’s really no way to win or conclude the debate. So take the *completely *non-interventionist, property-less being - neither side can prove squat about it, can they? So dismissing the debate on verificationist principles isn’t declaring victory, it’s refusing to debate at all.
But the question I think you’ll ask is, how can I then be certain, if I haven’t bothered to disprove that god? And my answer would be - hello, made up deity, see Rule 1.
That’s how I feel about debating purely theoretical gods with poorly-defined property sets.
Firstly, sarcasm coming after hostility is not the same as friendly sarcasm, and secondly…If Cecil jumped off a cliff, would you?
But I’ll try to take it in a better spirit, this has been a lot better than before, I’m quite enjoying it.
Maybe I’m more binary in my certainty, that could be the problem here? If something has enough evidence to compel belief, I find myself throwing myself behind it completely. As in - 100% certainty.
But that’s irrelevant, as I don’t *think *I’ve alleged complete knowability for physicalism or verificationism (*especially *the latter, since it’s a *choice *of approach to debate and proof, not a law).
But the point is, once that framework is accepted, knowability in other matters becomes possible. Because I think knowability only occurs within a reference frame - certainly, I admit there are things that are unknowable. It all depends on their properties.
But understand, I’m not dismissing all gods as knowable - I’m dismissing those gods with well-defined properties as knowable, and I’m dismissing others, without such, as meaningless - not unknowable, but merely poorly-defined. And a third set (your cup, FSM) as not worth the trouble, I suppose.
Ahh, I see the problem - 100% certainty of belief and 100% certainty of knowability, if that helps.
Parsimony isn’t a proof, it’s an axiomatic foundation from which proofs are derived.
Are we going to have to define knowledge, here? Because I hate delving into Kant and Wittgenstein if I don’t absolutely *have *to.
No, I’m saying that the philosophical argument about the existence of god is a done deal, something that should have been considered settled long ago. But then, we use different definitions of proof, so I doubt you’ll agree. It’s not a secret history, it’s there in a line from Kant to Wittgenstein to Dennett.
The abandonment of religion, of course.
That’s why I don’t run around twisting arms. As long as they claim to be atheists, they’re on my side. When they argue against me as agnostics, they’re not. So, one can be both, but if one attempts to question someone else’s atheism, or divide atheists by labelling, or the like, how is one really helping?
Sorry. But I do think it’s because we have completely different starting assumptions and value completely different types of proof and logics.
I was being humourous. We’re far too disorganized for that.
Agnostics keep open the crack of doubt for theists to slip their gap-gods into. Their very existence heartens those theists who believe we all are up for convincing. So, in general, they contribute to the general annoying effect of living in an overwhelmingly theistic world. It’s their prerogative, sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to view agnostics as on my side, because they’re not. They’re not fellow non-theist travellers. They want the benefits of nontheism (being seen as more rational, thoughtful) without the social risks of outright atheism. It’s pretty much the philosophical equivalent of dating sites’ “Spiritual, but not religious”.
Sorry for wandering away, RL intervened.
I am 100% certain that 1+1=2 and that the sun will rise tomorrow. I am not 100.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000% certain.
As an agnostic, my belief threshold varies with the substantiveness of the question. I believe that it will not rain next Saturday, though the odds of fair weather are probably in fact under 90%. For the potential serial killer lurking at my door the odds are better than 99.9% against, as well they would have to be for me to step outside.
I think I can choose. Belief isn’t quite an emotion. Could I disbelieve that 1+1=2? Probably not, but with sufficient thought, I might be able to formulate some minuscule degree of doubt.
To be honest. Agnostic= Atheist in training/remission. OR Agnostic = Theist in training/remission. It’s SUCH a social distinction.
My parents were Catholic (I guess they still are I don’t know they never go to church or talk about it). Either way. I went To catholic school for k -12. Hell I was an alter boy (no jokes please). So it turned out the people I socialized with were (GASP) mostly religious. I’d see them at mass we’d hang out etc etc.
Anyway moving on.
Around 20 I pretty much stopped believing in God, but wasn’t really ready to spring that on my friends/family. Agnostic was a nice stepping stone to not believing in god. So i’d say “I’m agnostic.” Eventually they stopped asking or it stopped coming up. Which brings me to my next point.
I am not atheist. As far as I can tell the word “Atheist” is pretty much just used as derogatory by theists (see Bush, George W.). If someone says “do you believe in god?” I say “no”. “AHA you’re an atheist.” “I am?”. It really is for theists basically the same word as “faggot.” I’m not offended by it I’m just not a fan.
Then they say to me “you can’t prove god doesn’t exist.” Which I largely ignore because it is the stupidest statement to ever come out of someone’s mouth. I don’t have the burden of proof and I never have. I don’t have to prove anything doesn’t exist. Sorry off-topic a touch just a pet peeve.
So as far as I can tell agnostic = I don’t want to get involved or I don’t want to get judged.
while atheists don’t believe in god and basically just hijacked the term for ease of communication, social gathering , self identity or any mix of those.
Sad part of all this is I know too many people who say “I’m atheist” but still believe in astrology, horoscopes, ghosts etc etc. Which is why I don’t like it as a blanket term.
Also to add.
I’d wager a good number of agnostics tend to leave the crack open because they most likely don’t believe in god but do in fact believe in: Aliens, Bigfoot, Psychics, The wheel DOES HAVE a memory, charms, homeopathy, get rich quick schemes, Karma, Wicca, Ouija Boards, Tarot cards, magic stars, the mayan prophecy, scientology, time travelers, crop circles, 911 conspiracies, the illuminate, telekenetics, Pyramid power, Planet X, moon landing hoaxes, Intelligent design(rare), Pascal’s wager (good one) etc.
Pretty curious, this, in combination with the end of the post where you’re positing the agnostics to be on the wrong side of a social battle of sorts. If so, then that would inherently make the intellectual exercise relevent, since it’s the foundation of the argumentive divide.
They certainly feed into belief, but it’s fallacious to presume from an uncertain assumption (like parsimony) to a postion of certain knowability.
The class of apparently-invented ones that you mention later? Dodgy. More anon.
Science can only show the nonphysical doesn’t exist in cases where the non-physical thing in question would inevitably have a specific predictable reaction detectable in physical matter (or energy) if it existed. “Outside but interacting” becomes undisprovable when the entity in question has volition enabling it to avoid acting when it can be observed by non-starry-eyed people. Bonus points if the entity is tricky. (Omnibenevolent beings of course lack the volition to refrain from interfering.)
You were doing great for a while - there are certainly some gods that can be disproven based on their described properties, notably any that are supposedly able to do logical contradictions. But you’re wrong in stating that what stupid fallible people believe and invent is a basis for certainty against, for the simple reason that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Certainly, the FSM was made up - it’s been admitted as such by its inventor. But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t accidently describe something that actually exists. Does it seem likely? Certainly not. It’s also vanishingly unlikely that you’ll look at the stopped clock at the precise nanosecond that it’s displaying, either. But it remains possible.
Of course, the odds go up if you count yourself correct if you’re right to the nearest minute. The less specific your requirements the better, really. Which actually makes the undefined philosophy gods the best bet at all - they’re shooting for a target a half-mile wide. You created the universe? You win! Sure you’re like nothing we could ever imagine but you’re technically God. Obviously this breaks down when they start presuming other properties about their deity, drastically (and fatally) so if they leap to something omnimax and christian, but so long as the invented thing remains theoretically possible, it’s still, well, theoretically possible. At least in a stopped clock sense.
And looking at your unicorn example, you’ve also got some severe special pleading going on here. Even putting aside the unintended comedy in “Other than the mystical aspects, a unicorn is a pretty plausible animal”, unicorns are still made up. Easily as much so as Zeus and Odin, and from the standpoint of whether they actually exist (which removes intent), as much so as the FSM as well. So why do they get a pass and Zeus doesn’t?
Certainty of belief, sure. Certainty of knowability, not so much - not because induction or abduction are flawed, but because your analysis is fallacious in thinking that you can arrive at certainty from uncertain premises or misapplied logic (the latter being exemplifed in your basic assertion that all things invented or speculated are false).
Agnostic Rule 1 is “We’re not limited by your arbitrary and unfounded restrictions on the debate”, I believe.
Of course, this does come back to nibble them in the 'nads: if you loosen the definitions enough, my styrofoam cup becomes a god without supernatural elements. But the agnostics don’t have to get quite that loose with their restrictions to still be reasonably talking about gods that nobody worships, whether you like it or not.
Not that you can disprove all the gods people have worshipped anyway - the evidence gets pretty stale after a few hundred years, when you’re not talking about events of literally cataclysmic or absurd proportions. You can show that the earth didn’t flood and that you can’t fit the entire animal kingdom in a small floating box, but you can’t prove that knocking on wood didn’t used to improve your luck a little. You can only show it doesn’t work now. (Blast all that cold iron!)
So in other words we’re back to my (powerless) styrofoam cup - I say it’s a god, and you say it isn’t. Er, or rather you say it is a god but it doesn’t count as a god because it’s not divine.
It might be better to say that you simply don’t accept pharoah in the category of gods, because you don’t think they meet the entrance requrement of having some level of supernatural ability or presence.
The tricky part then is proving the cup or pharoah doesn’t have a supernatural ability or presence. “Not very convincing” isn’t “proven otherwise”, not from a knowability standpoint.
Godel has nothing to do with it (and Godel isn’t why it’s false). What’s relevent is, by answering “nope”, you have declared that verificationism itself doesn’t pass muster under verificationism, and therefore can safely dismissed, according to itself.
I suppose that Godel could be inderectly referenced in that if you reject verficationism, you are no longer required to reject verificationism based on itself. But since that doesn’t mean you should accept it, it’s not really as statement that cannot hold a true or false value (as in the core of Godel’s proof). It has an answer that can be self-consistently held: that verificationism is false.
Apologies, but you don’t understand how laws of physics are formed. They’re full of “?” factors, but they’re all unstated and assumed to be insignificant, usually because cases where they influence the results hasn’t shown up in the testing, either due to being too small to measure with current instruments, or because the conditions for the factor to become significant haven’t arisen. “God suddenly decides to stick his metaphysical hand in” isn’t in the equations because the results don’t seem to require accounting for it, not because God doesn’t have a hand to stick.
And let’s not forget that we could be simply wrong in our interpretation of the results. Mabye friction’s not real, and there are actually invisible intangible gremlins running around slowing things down with their little invisible noodly hands. Sure, they’d have have been absurdly consistent in their actions for incredible spans of time, almost to the point of having been deliberately simulating friction all along - but while incredibly implausible, that’s not impossible. Technically.
(Gravity is the best gremlin. How does it work? Heck if I know - but it’s clearly real, and it’s causes are not supernatural, because…well, they just ain’t.)
And your position is that just because somebody believes something, doesn’t mean it’s not silly and incoherent, right? Just checking.
This has nothing to do with classic logic - no logical system correctly applied can disprove extraphysical noninterventionist gods, for the same reason they couldn’t disprove subatomic particles before the technology advanced to make them verifiable. If you think you can disprove them, definitively, at a level of knowability, using any system, then you’re simply doing it wrong.
And then declaring victory. You assert 100% certainty in the knowable nonexistence of, say, the FSM, don’t you? Yeah. There you go.
Rule 1 is absurd in the atheist/agnostic debate. And per stopped clocks, unsupportable by any correctly applied system of analysis.
Then you probably don’t want to debate against philosophical agnostics. Stick with theists - or better yet, Christians. They’re all into that omnimax thing and that scapegoat blood sacrifice thing which makes them easy pickings.
Well, see, Cecil is God (not that God, the other one), so if he takes the leap, it’s clearly the thing to do, see!
Identically, if you accept as a choice of approach to proof and debate that the bible is literally true, then once that framework is accepted, knowability in other matters becomes possible.
In my opinion reference frames like these are games we play - games with specific purposes, sometimes extremely practical ones. We presume our senses are accurate, and so choose to stop for the red light rather than assuming the light is actually green and we’re just seeing it wrong. But when it comes to certainty of knowability, the games lead to false assumptions about the actual state of things, in the same way that assuming the rules while standing on the ground apply in free fall would.
You’re wrong about the provability of the first category due to limited information (depending, one supposes, on the god in question and how meaninglessly you wish to define “knowable”), and “meaningless” and “not worth the trouble” are meaningless terms in the knowability debate.
Then you’re only half wrong - 100% disbelief in the supernatural and attached gods is the correct position, per null hypothesis and lack of evidence and the fact it’s never really the exact time the stopped clock says. (Well, close enough to never not to matter, anyway.)
Meaning that it’s useless in a debate where not everyone accepts it axiomatically, right?
Yeah right. We haven’t even managed to disprove solipsism yet; you think gods are a done deal?
Ah.
Agnosticism is no impediment to the abandonment of religion; a world full of philosophically-agnostic atheists (as in, people like me) would be about as religion-free as you can get.
By correctly identifying the problem - it’s not knowability, it’s belief. It’s credulity. It’s taking the thesim crap seriously. If you accepted the truth that you can’t prove the FSM doesn’t exist, that wouldn’t hurt the ‘atheist agenda’, such as it is; quite the opposite really. When you hold up a wad of noodles up alongside (or above) YHWH, clearly some progress has been made.
And neglecting to twist arms does nothing more than allow you to enjoy a falsely inflated worldview in which more people share youre beliefs. I know theists like that too - what, you mean not everyone’s a christian?
Different starting assumptions, in that you’re wrong about the argumentive strength of yours. I’m fine with all logics though when they’re used correctly. (You’ve noticed that you haven’t actually used any of these other logic types in this debate; merely mentioned them, right? No inductive arguments or the like have graced your posts yet. So why should I pretend that they can be used to support your false conclusion about knowability?)
No doubt! And your 
is noted.
The cracks, so to speak, are real; sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “la la la la la” may allow you to entertain belief otherwise but don’t pretend it makes a difference to the theists, or really anyone but you. And also, philosophically agnostic atheists are no friend to theists; they eviscerate faith. And hold invisible pink unicorns and ambulatory noodle-balls above the theists’s gods of choice.
But you want to know who’s really not on our side? The ones who make atheism look like a dogma of faith with their 100% certainty. There is no more certain way to legitamize theism than to let it draw parallels with the secular.
Me too.
I’m 100.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000% about the math. Only 100% certain about the sun, if you want to put it that somewhat misleading way.
I can’t choose what I believe, but I can foment an environment that encourages one belief or another. Much of the point of churches seems to be to create an enviornment favorable to developing belief in their ministry.