Not *just *name-calling. It’s still an accurate description. Whether it’s from intellectual conviction or just fear of being wrong, agnostics are fundamentally neutral in the debate. Hence they contribute nothing of real value IMO, but continually wish it to be known that really, all our stances are wrong, and it’s all really fence too. In other words, they want to be neutral, but they want to be right, too.
Just the atheistic position - I don’t hold with all this strong/weak/H,P,S divide and conquer crap. There is no God, there can be no God, I believe it, I think it, all of these apply.
What do you mean by “atheism is the default position”? Logically the correct default? The natural position taken by humans prior to cultural influences?
If you mean it’s the logical default position: prior to the discovery of atoms, would it also have been the correct default position to believe that there are no atoms, there can be no atoms? Or do you think that the postulation of atoms is reasonable, due to their non-supernatural nature, and therefore it would be ok not to take the no-atoms position as default.
If someone came along and postulated the existence of “atoms” with zero evidence of any kind to back it up and nothing to point to that requires the existence of atoms to work, I’d say the logical default should be to dismiss him until he can find something to support his claim, yes.
Well, this goes back to the definitions - using begbert2’s definitions I can’t see a massive practical distinction between philosophical agnostics and common agnostics - both are claiming that they simply don’t know. The difference seems to be that the Pagnostic claims it’s impossible to know whereas the cagnostic claims they don’t know, for now.
Although there might be some common ground for cagnostics and satheists, since satheists don’t completely and totally deny any possible existence of God, since it’s a big universe.
No sleight of hand, I was using ‘claim’ to mean espouse, if you believe something you’re likely to espouse it. Perhaps the wrong word.
Anyway, I’m not sure I like this idea that belief and knowledge are completely separate. Theists could get by on a blind faith, but I’m not sure anyone goes by ‘blind unfaith’. Knowledge, for the most part, informs belief, you need at least some knowledge about the claim before you believe anything about it. Although this could be further broken down into ‘real world’ knowledge that agnostics claim is unknown/unknowable, and atheists claim points to God’s non-existence and a ‘spiritual’ knowledge that theists hang their hats on.
Although taking an example, Dawkins says on the 1-10 scale on uncertainty about God, 1 being absolutely sure God exists and 10 being absolutely sure God doesn’t, that he is about a 7 as it would be unscientific to make blanket claims about the universe.
However, he says the same thing about leprechauns; he can’t be 100% sure they don’t exist but believes that they don’t. This goes back to what I was saying earlier, and what has been discussed since (about how rare hatheists are) - both satheists and agnostics of all stripe admit that their is a gap in their knowledge. But satheists are willing to come down on one side, whereas agnostics generally maintain an uncertainty.
So, if this brand of atheist met this brand of agnostic, the degree of uncertainty on which to base belief about God seems to be the sticking point. I admit on first impression it seems like the agnostic has a more sensible claim, it’s a big universe and we have a mammalian brain that has trouble comprehending quantum physics. But then the atheist can merely counter with any claim; since we don’t have total knowledge we can’t form certainties about anything. Which is true in scientific terms, but in practicality would render life some sort of existential nightmare where everything is an uncertainty. Yet only the God claim seems to enjoy this status in (most) circles.
I’ve read a Latin philosopher who supported the concept of the atom over 2,000 years ago, and while he was correct in that they exist he was correct for all the wrong reasons. If a bunch of people shoot pistols randomly you don’t give the guy who lucked out and hit the bullseye an award for marksmanship. So, I’m with you.
Soft atheism, lack of belief, is indeed the default principle. Just not believing in gods no one has ever conceived of seems plenty good to me. When theists think they have provided either evidence or arguments for some particular job, we can just say no, or we can give some good reasons why their evidence and arguments are invalid. If this were a simpler problem we could lay out some rules and watch them try to justify the God hypothesis and falsify the null hypothesis of no God at some reasonable level of probability, but in the real world we need to do better than that.
Yes - entities, multiplication, necessity, you know the drill.
No. Hell, even chimps have superstitious beliefs, I hear. I think we were religious before we were ever human.
Not that that matters.
Before atoms are postulated, there is no position . How else? But if you mean before there was proof, no, because yes, like you say, atoms as postulated are a physical phenomenon, hence knowable in a way deity isn’t. So Democritus’ postulate for atoms already gives us logical room on the “exists” sides of the fence - our default position should still be “no, [whatever] do not exist until you give us *some *proof, even if it’s a coherent thought experiment”, but in the case of atoms, the very idea of atoms and that first thought experiment are identical. And coherent. The idea of God, not so coherent.
A better analogy is Multiverse Theory - interesting idea, but *fundamentally *unknowable, by definition. “Multiverses do not exist” is the logical default position, even if it’s not the place most cosmologists lay their hats nowadays.
See now, that’s not my understanding of the definitions of the terms. There are three categories of atheists:
people who lack a positive belief or positive disbelief in any god.
people who have a positive disbelief in all gods, but not certainty about that.
people who have a certain positive disbelief in all gods.
The third category is a strawman, as you note.
My understanding was that the terms for these were:
soft/weak atheist
soft/weak atheist
hard/strong atheist
You are saying they are
soft/weak atheist
hard/strong atheist
?
It’s my possibly incorrect opinion that the reason there’s a strong/weak distinction among atheists at all was to be able to differentiate real atheists from the strawmen. It’s a practical and useful distinction.
The distinction between categories 1 and 2, on the other hand, is practically useless - it mainly describes the infants and the three adult people in the world who have never heard of God. The rest of us form some kind of opinon, if only a very uncertain one - even the self-professed agnostics, in my opinion.
Question: I ask somebody “Do you believe in any god”. They respond, “No.” That’s a positive assertion of disbelief - does that make them a hard atheist? If not, what does?
The absence of observable godlike things in the universe is evidence. The existence of a better explanation (people have imaginations) is also evidence - if I can explain that the dent in my car was from an accident, then that’s evidence it wasn’t caused by aliens.
There’s ample evidence - some of it weak and none of it proof (well, none of it proof against non-omnimax non-interventionist gods anyway), but it is evidence nontheless. So this namby-pamby version of “hard” atheism which requires less certainty than the level I have that your computer is not red - that’s easily justified by evidence, and in fact all atheists hard or soft (except for the never-heard-of-it atheists) are actively basing their opinions on that evidence, hard-atheist style.
Ok you believe God does not exist. Are you certain?
I’m not really laying down a trap, btw: I’m just fleshing out Voyager’s short list of ultra-hard atheists. Or not: you said you were ok with uncertainty earlier, but I interpreted that to be a report of general temperament.
Fair observation. I generally counter with a variant of Pascal’s Wager. For working purposes I might believe that it won’t rain tomorrow (90%+ probability where I live) or that I have sufficient supplies in the fridge for dinner tomorrow (higher). But I’ll withhold judgment on whether Mugabe will lead Zimbabwe in Dec 2011: I simply don’t have enough information.
With the Supreme Deity it’s a little different; it’s driven by my stronger preference not be in error and my comfort in suspending judgment. But again, if I had my concerns regarding consciousness and mathematics addressed that could shift the balance. I am comfortable with dismissing the possibility of Leprechauns, at least according to certain definitions of Leprechauns.
I imagine that a plausible soft atheist response to the preceding would be, " …whatever".
But strong atheist is a good term, and it seems silly to reserve it for a position that no one has. Your first set of definitions is used by the set of theists I mention. They use soft atheism and agnosticism interchangeably, since not knowing or being sure is an acceptable position to them, and try to claim that everyone else who claims to be a strong atheist has a logically unsupportable position.
Beliefs about God are fairly unimportant in the big picture. If you believe God doesn’t exist (or even claim to know it) but say you simply lack belief in all other gods, you are still a weak atheist. I think it is perfectly reasonable to not be ready to believe there are no gods considering the size of the universe. That is different from the not being aware position.
Really? All atheists will say no to your question, but if you ask them if they believe there are no gods, some will say yes and some will say no - basically that they don’t have enough evidence yet to feel comfortable having that belief.
Which Loki? The one from the Eddas, while (sometimes) an Aesir, is hardly a God, and therefore not really under consideration for me as an atheist, more of a historical curiosity. He’s a mythical character with no evidence of being worshipped, AFAICT. But I’ll play:
How is Loki considered to be unknowable, or “nonundisprovable”? He clearly has effects on the physical world, a physical existence, properties and attributes. He’s never, ever described as purely supernatural, or “spiritual”. So he is, by my reckoning, knowable.
No, no, no. I’m not having that. I think without the development of language, we’d never have had religion. Where would religion be if we hadn’t developed writing? There’d be no “official” god books. Religion is just a rationalisation(ha!) of stuff we couldn’t understand.
Neanderthals buried their dead, but the jury’s still out on whether they had proper language. Like I said, chimpanzees appear to have an incipient “spirituality”, for want of a better word.
Ask the Inca.
We’ve been able to draw pictures long before we could write - look at Trois Frères or Venus figures or the Çatalhöyük-Levantine bull cult.
That’s too simplistic, IMO. It’s also something we’re kind of predisposed to, cognitively and physiologically, from our innate, often cognitively overriding, abilities of pattern recognition and pareidolia to the effects of entheogens on our sensoria. Yes, there’s definitely the “explaining the unknown” aspect to it, but there’s more to it.
I tend to agree with this. I was watching Gangland on history channel and thinking about the people describing all of the meaning behind their particular gang symbol tattooed on their body, which of course was just randomly (or not so randomly) chosen by the founder just 10 years earlier. But our brains are so relationship/fill in the blanks/experience/pattern based that the symbol was now intimately tied to all kinds of emotional experience, etc. etc. giving it meaning for that individual.
I think it’s reasonable to believe pre-language humans did the same thing.
Silly’s all relative; if it provides a handy way to shut up the “you’re an atheist, so prove that god doesn’t exist crowd” by saying “I’m not that kind of strawman atheist” without having to go throught the whole entire above thread in every theological argument, that’s useful enough for me!
Qua? The entire theist/atheist thing is about beliefs; how can beliefs be unimportant in a discussion of the meaning of the term ‘atheist’? Yeah I get you’re more attached to the orthogonal question of knowledge, but that doesn’t mean that you can validly dismiss belief while talking about atheism.
And nearly all non-strawman atheists are aware that they don’t know about the events in other hidden places in the universe; this has nothing to do with belief one way or another. You’re mixing up belief and knowledge again, mistaking this for a single continuum when it’s actually a venn diagram, with two separate continuums (strength of belief and level of certainty) that are not as rigidly connected as you seem to think. An inability to reach 100% certainty does not mean you can’t hold 100% disbelief.
I maintain that ALL non-theists have disbelief (see below). The ones who reject the atheist label merely consider their high level of uncertainty more important, but there’s no strict dividing on either the belief or knowledge continuums alone that divides what you’re calling “soft” and “hard” atheists. The only difference is that what you’re calling weak atheists wouldn’t use the label at all, primarily identifying as agnostics instead! Gee, that’s a useful label - it only tells us what we already know by the side they’re on in this thread.
I think that 0% belief is synonymous with 100% disbelief. This business with there being a double-ended continuum with 100% Yes at one end and 100% no at the other isn’t about belief; it’s about certainty of knowledge. Which is a separate orthogonal thing.
And you hit the nail on the head when you said it’s about them feeling uncomfortable with having the belief - their comfort in asserting the claim, their confidence in their knowledge is the issue they struggle with, not whether they have the disbelief. You think they don’t have disbelief; I think they do - they sure act like they do. Agnostics as a rule do not fall for Pascal’s wager. To evade this wager requires negative belief - you must at least tentatively disbelieve the various infinite options or else you’d logically have to attempt to satisfy all traditions at once - or at least, as many as you could.
So yeah. When a person claims to be too unconfident to assert their belief that there are no gods, this isn’t because they have too little disbelief. It’s because they’re too doubtful about the certainty/comprehensiveness of their information and so don’t wish to commit either way, lest they be wrong. Which is not the same thing.
I think Voyager meant belief about “God” is unimportant, whereas belief about “god” is important. I don’t think he was saying that “belief” itself is unimportant.
I accept your proposal that we call this other class of atheist strawman atheist. I like it.
Capitalization counted in this case. I’m reasonably comfortable asserting knowledge that God (Western God, under some definition) Zeus and Thor do not exist. I’m not comfortable asserting this about Jefferson’s god, or about some other god I’ve never thought of. The distinction I was making was God vs god, not knowledge vs belief. After all we all, even theists, believe that lots of gods don’t exist. The important question is if there exists some particular god for which you lack this active disbelief - even if you also lack belief.
Lots of people have noted that you either believe in a god or lack belief in a god - there is no middle ground. I’d say the same applies to lack of belief in a god and active belief in no god. I do agree that different people have different levels of confidence in this belief.
I agree there is a continuum about certainty that your belief is correct, and that knowledge and data contribute to where you are in this continuum. But for each of us there is a point where you can say “I believe no gods exist”. Where a person is in terms of confidence will vary. To a certain extent we have to respect their reports of what their beliefs are, though I’m sure there are at least a few atheists sitting in churches, or even in seminary.
I’ll still contend that knowledge and belief are orthogonal, though I agree that both have a certainty scale. Peer review forms in my area now have a box where you state your confidence in your review. This has nothing to do with confidence in the correctness of the reported data, but is about you confidence in your belief about the quality of the paper. Someone on a jury might have different levels of confidence in the accuracy and correctness of the evidence presented (knowledge) and a different level of confidence in his vote on a verdict. These two axes interact, sure, so low confidence on the evidence axis is likely to create low confidence in the belief of guilt axis. Thinking of it, this is a good example, since the default is to acquit, just as the default is to lack belief in any gods.
Som agnosticism might be better defined as where you are in the knowledge axis and theism/atheism reflects where you are on the belief axis.
begbert2, if we get rid of terminology, would you agree that the following are reasonable and fairly distinct categories (each of them allowing for future evidence to alter their point of view as most (but not all) humans behave):
Those that believe at least 1 god exists
Those that do not actively believe any gods exist and that do not actively believe that no gods exist
No, seriously. I didn’t quite follow what you were trying to say, but the distinction seems to be in personal preference and comfort, which are no ways of ascertaining if something is true or not. The satheist would probably as you for what reason you dismiss Leprechauns (or Zeus, or Russell’s teapot, etc.) but not God, when we have the same amount of empirical evidence for their existence - i.e. none.
On simply not having enough information, this goes back to what I was saying earlier; the scientific method is based on the idea of evidence and revision - if some new evidence came up which refuted a theory that theory would have to be amended, as it would no longer explain or describe reality. No theory is immune from this, rendering the agnostic claim of insufficient knowledge of God an obvious but seemingly ultimately meaningless statement.