I think each person has their own complex filtering system made up of their emotions, intellect , conscious thought and their subconscious as well. These are affected and formed by their upbringing and their personal experience and choices. It’s not surprising that people come to a wide variety of conclusions. It’s also a matter of timing. Each person uses their own filtering system and volition to decide when to embrace something and when to let something go.
Knowing our own filtering system is imperfect might help us have patience and try to understand others. It’s great to discuss and share ideas and sometimes confrontation is necessary. The hard part is getting our egos and emotional attachments out of the way so genuine progress and learning is more important than an imagined personal victory.
We can all be grateful the SDMB is here to help us in that end.
I’ll agree that they were in no way arguments. But I think you may be being too generous. If they were questions, what was their purpose? They had no bearing on whether I was right or not. But they seemed to me to imply he didn’t believe that that I was right, but wasn’t coming out to say how he understood it. Instead he was questioning my background rather than my argument.
Here’s someone else who thought he was actually saying I wasn’t correct.
I didn’t see Czarcasm state anything of the kind. He asked what my credentials were. But I too, took the impression that he was *critical *of my argument. (To be distinguished from *criticizing *my argument. Which he didn’t do.)
Czarcasm didn’t do what Marley23 did; which was provide an example I could respond to about my argument. Marley23 correctly stated that quantum mechanics says that observation changes outcome. But, by saying what he thought my argument was about I was able to respond that that wasn’t the aspect of quantum mechanics I was discussing. (incidentally, I may have been a bit snarky myself when I said that was the *first *thing you learn about quantum mechanics. It’s true, and it’s also about the only thing most people know about it, but, Marley didn’t deserve that tone, since he actually responded to my argument in a way that I could answer.)
Yes, imaginary numbers are a useful intermediate tool to get predictable results. We can observe their consistent behaviour and take this as evidence of existence, even if we can’t observe them directly. Where the consistent observable behaviour in what you’re describing?
I think you misunderstand. What PBear was saying is that atheism is an absence of belief, not necessarily a positive belief that gods don’t exist, just an absence of belief that they do.
I’m honestly surprised at all the atheist “flavors.” I really had no idea there were so many. Some positions really do seem more agnostic than atheistic. And some seem to be saying that there is absolutely no God, not even stated as a “belief” in no God, but stated as an absolute fact. I also find PBear’s “we don’t believe in God” to be distinctly different from Diogenes’s “atheism is an absence of belief.” And I suppose that asking all the atheists how they define atheism could be a thread unto itself, with all the usual arguing.
And to complicate matters even more I just discovered the term “agnostic atheism.”
Humans have an infinite capacity for lumping and splitting and viewing the world with slightly different filters or bringing slightly different perspectives to their understanding and there is no reason why atheists should be any more monolithic in their worldviews than theists are in theirs.
You could wander over to the IMHO frum and have a look. I cannot say that there has definitely been such a poll, but I would be a bit surprised if this has not yet already happened. (You will also find similar “surveys” of atheist identification and self-identification in GD, but they tend to be mixed into threads with a fair amount of bickering with some theists over what they believe.)
It seems to me that if there can be no true “atheist”, as some have argued (because nobody really *knows *that god doesn’t exist), then there can also be no true “theist”. After all, while a theist may *think *that god exists, he can never be absolutely certain. Faith does not trump reason.
If there are no true atheists, then we’re all agnostic.
This is false. “Ist” means “believer;” we’re talking about beliefs here. Not knowledge and reason, which can be a completely separate. It may be possible to give up religious beliefs due to reason, but I doubt people can arrive at them through reason. That’s the main reason Pascal’s Wager is a failure.
There are technical definitions for these terms and then there’s popular usage. Technically speaking there are the following definitions:
Atheism: Lack of theistic belief.
Atheism is usually broken down into two types:
Weak Atheism: Lack of theistic belief, but without a positive belief that Gods absolutely don’t or can’t exist.
Strong Atheism: Positive belief that God absolutely does not exist.
Agnosticism: belief that it’s impossible to know whether God exists.
In popular usage, agnosticism tends to get used to denote weak atheism, even though there is a technical distinction (agnosticism is a position on what it’s possible to know, not actually a statement of theistc/non-theistic belief in itself). It is technically possible to be both an agnostic and a theist (“I can’t prove God exists, but I believe it anyway”) or an agnostic and an atheist (“I can’t prove God doesn’t exist, but I don’t believe it”).
Popularly speaking, though, I think it tends to get broken down into three positions:
“I believe God exists” (theist)
“I believe no God exists.” (atheist)
“I don’t know/can’t decide if God exists.” (agnostic)
Because these terms are not necessarily used or understood the same way, it can lead to confusion and misunderstandings in these kinds of discussions.
To be really pedantic about it, agnosticism is the belief that it’s impossible to know, not just a lack of knowledge per se. Technically speaking, if you believe it’s possible to know, then you’re not an agnostic, even if you’re wrong.
And to complicate matters even more I just discovered the term “agnostic atheism.”[
: An agnostic atheist is atheistic because he or she does not believe in the existence of any deity and is also agnostic because he or she does not claim to have definitive knowledge that a deity does not exist./QUOTE]
In about 30 years of discussing this on line, (yes, before there was an Internet) I have seen only a handful of atheists who would not fall into this category, and most of them hadn’t thought the issue through. (One or two were meatballs.)
To follow up on Dio’s post, atheism is a statement about belief while agnosticism is a statement about knowledge. Thus they are orthogonal positions about God. In discussing agnosticism we also have to be clear about what our definition of knowledge is. (I took a Theory of Knowledge class in college so I’m more sensitive about this than is healthy.) I happen to think that is is possible to know that some God exists, but not that no god exists in general. A lot of atheists disagree. I do think it is possible to know that certain gods, with logically contradictory characteristics, do not exist.
It is all made even more difficult by the thousands of definitions of what a god is out there.
Ohhh, but there’s also another one to add to Diogenes’s list…
Apatheism, (sometimes referred to as “apathetic agnoticism” or “pragmatic atheism”)…
and…
For some reason this one really gave me a huge chuckle. It occurs to me that Christians (and atheists) can’t rightly argue with or convert anyone who doesn’t care one way other or another.
Ah-ha!, there it is again!.. “no God”…
haha… toldya
I phrased it that way intentionally to show how a lot of people use these terms in ways which don’t necessarily match their technical academic definitions.
As a child, I believed that the moon was, in fact, made of green cheese. After all, that was what I was told.
Pretty soon, however, I figured out that it couldn’t possibly be true.
I also figured out that the whole Santa story didn’t make sense, and stopped believing that a fat guy in a red suit with a white beard flew around the world in one night to give kids toys.
I don’t think that faith can arise through reason- but I do think that reason can displace faith.
