Even if you grant that, you still have The Encyclopedia of Philosophy to contend with, as well as the definitions cited by Merriam-Webster. On top of that, you also have the etymology provided by Merriam-Webster, which clearly shows that atheism is not mere “absence of theism.”
As I said, I am fully aware that some atheists use the term differently. In fact, I explicitly stated so in my previous postings. The point is that they are co-opting this term illegitimately, watering down its accepted usage. What they claim to be “atheism” is already described quite accurately as “non-theism,” and so there’s simply no need to water the term down.
Let’s try extraterrestrial intelligence. Very few (non UFO) people would say that they know ETs exist. Relatively few, I hope, would say they know they do not exist.
Now, say you tell me you believe that ETs exist. I can enumerate all the stars in the galaxy, and ask you for each one if you believe ETs exist around it. You’d probably say no, since you have no evidence at all. But when I ask you if you believe that no ETs exist, you can rationally say no, since you also would say that you wouldn’t necessarily say you don’t believe that ETs exist around a star I mentioned. So, you have a lack of belief in any ET, but do not believe that no ETs exist.
That is not to say that you would lack belief in ETs around some stars - like neutron stars or young red giants.
Atheism is quite similar. I can say I deny the existence of a god under certain definitions. Point to any god you define, and I will at least lack belief in it. I might not be willing to say I believe there is no god, and I certainly should be unwilling to say I know there is no god, unless the definition of god is evidently contrary to fact or contains contradictions.
Hardly. It is a good reason not to believe in the infinity of unlikely but logically possible possibilities. It is a perfectly good reason to disbelieve in God (s). It’s only inconvenient for theists, who have no rational reason to believe in a god. Occam’s Razor points out this problem, which is why they don’t like it.
No. One position, which some take, is that the supernatural cannot exist by definition, since anything that happens is natural. I don’t think that is helpful, since it is logically possible that things can happen which cannot be addressed by science, or which in some way violate scientific laws without being amenable to being a part of a new one.
Occam’s razor just says that the supernatural is unnecessary since there is nothing that needs to be explained by it. Give me something, and use of the Razor might lead us to a supernatural hypothesis.
I’ve addressed both of those points already. Etymology does not control current meaning. Non-theism is a perfectly good term, but it has not been accepted in general circles, while the term atheism has come to incorporate that meaning.
There are lots of words which have taken on meanings different from their origins - sometimes we’ve just got to accept it.
I call myself a Deist. Really, I’m an agnostic, in a sense. I don’t know whether there is one god, many gods, a few gods, or no god. You could call me an “atheist,” or “godless,” in that I am unaffiliated, but “atheist” typically means one who favors the idea that there is no god, & “godless” implies a certain lack of reverence in general, while “agnostic” means “one who claims not to know.”
Now, I avoid labelling myself “agnostic,” because a) I do believe in some things; b) I don’t subscribe to radical skepticism; c) lots of people have doubt, & just saying you’re agnostic is a terribly vague & generic self-description; & d) calling myself agnostic doesn’t repudiate those who think everyone is either a Xtian or an atheist.
So I call myself a Deist, because that is what I am inclined to believe.
Even if I’m bluffing when I claim to have confidence in it. But hey, the Christians & atheists are bluffing, too. Deep down, all honest people are agnostics–a little bit.
Well then, let us speak logically. Could you talk me through the propositional logic of believing A vs. not A? If I consider A unlikely, this is equivalent to considering not A likely. Thus, believing not A is the same as not believing A since A nd not A are mutually exclusive, yes? For example, believing Chelsea will come first is equivalent to believing that Liverpool will not come first. Not believing Chelsea will come second is equivalent to believing that someone else will not come first. Again, surely you would say that you believe there’s no such thing as ghosts?
Unless we discuss the natural explanations themselves, ie. the cosmology and evolution and cognitive science and all the rest of it. Like we are doing.
No, you’re just asking different questions, that’s all. I believe in ET (ie. ascribe >50%) somewhere, but for any single planet, I don’t believe in ET (ie. I ascribe <50%) there. Belief in not is still equivalent to lack of belief. (The only ‘difference’, such as it is, comes when there is no evidence or fact whatsoever which knocks my Belief-O-Meter needle off the precisely 50% default, such as “Do you believe I’m feeling hungry?” or something. This is the only case where a lack of belief comes arbitrarily close to believing the negative, ie. the ‘difference’ between 49.99…% and 50%. If agnostics are so indecisive that they [i[could not even guess*, then perhaps that is arbitrarily close to a difference between agnosticism and atheism, although that is arguably precisely the same difference as between atheism and theism).
Most Christians do not actively ‘believe’ that there is no Ganesh, they simply lack faith that there is.
Religion is a learned tradition, all infants are atheists. They are not agnostic, as they do not make a claim that the existence of god(s) is knowable.
Strike two. The reason that religious types dislike evolution so much is that it is the scientific explanation for the existence of complex organisms like ourselves that permitted Occams Razor to be applicable to these discussions. Prior to that, if someone brought up Occam’s Razor, there WAS a well-grounded, logical response from religion, which was called “Paley’s Watch.” Basically, it said that if you were walking along on the beach and came across something you’d never seen before sitting on the sand – a watch. You pick it up and look at it, opening it up to reveal the complex assemblage of gears and whatnot that make it work.
Now, do you assume that this device is just a curiously shaped rock, and the movement of the minute and second hands nothing more than coincidence? Of course not – it’s natural to infer from the existence of such a complex artifact as a watch that there was a watchmaker/designer. An Intelligent Designer, as it were. The Paley argument then went on to note that living organisms are staggeringly complex in both form and function, yet we are to believe that they somehow assembled themselves from the rocks and sand and water that we see around us.
Prior to the existence of evolutionary theory this was an INCREDIBLY hard argument for any reasonable person with atheistic tendencies to deal with. All you could do was set forth that you considered it possible that complex organisms like us could have arisen from natural processes, though we did not as yet understand what those natural processes might be. It sounded very vague and not all that persuasive next to the simple logic of Paley’s Watch.
Evolution knocked the Paley’s Watch argument, by far the strongest argument the religious types had, into a cocked hat, and in the years since Darwin and Wallace, the evidence supporting evolutionary theory has grown into a huge mountain of data. (Which is why Intelligent Design fans are now using political muscle to “win” arguments they could not win otherwise.) With Paley’s Watch gone, Occams Razor comes into play on the issue of relgion – perfectly adequate natural explanations exist for the world and the way things work in it, and supposing the existence of supernatural beings or phenomena just aren’t necessary. The Watchmaker is not necessary to our understanding of the world any more. Ergo, no god.
I don’t quite understand why you relate belief to probability. I really don’t get why your threshold of belief is 50%. Why not 60, why not 40?
Whether your belief that there is an ET somewhere makes sense (by your measure) depends on the probabilities you assign to the existence of an ET on each potential planet. You can assign them so low that the sum is less than 50% (assuming the probabilities are independent) or high enough so that it is greater than 50%. (Actually the probability of an ET somewhere is 1 - (product (1 - ET prob on each star)) I submit that how you assign these values will depend on your belief in ETs in the first place, since we just don’t know them. Maybe you believe in ETs based on cosmology, the discovery of planets, and what is known of the origin of life, or maybe you just believe in them . But there should be no default probability of their existence. Assigning a default probability of 50% (if that is what you are doing) leads to all sorts of problems.
I strongly lack belief in any god, having seen insufficient evidence from those who claim a particular god exists. I weakly believe there are no gods, since there might be one who has nothing to do with us. I certainly don’t know there are no gods, nor can I prove it.
I’m half an agnostic (ostic?) in that I think you can’t know there are no gods, even in principle, but can know there is a god, as well as you can anything else.
I suppose you’re right. However, I’ve always used the word “faith” in a way that reflects previous experience. I have faith my husband is going to come home to me every night. He tells me he loves me and he’s come home to me every night for the past 18 years. I have no reason to believe otherwise. Your description is more of a “hope” situation. I realize many people don’t use the same definitions I do when it comes to the subject of religion.
What confuses me is how someone can have “faith” in god, and then when things don’t work out, i.e., prayers aren’t answered, they still have faith. Color me
I characterise belief as the needle of a Belief-o-Meter. If it points to 60%, you are saying that you consider A to be slightly more likely to be true than not A, like when I say “I believe Chelsea will win the Premiership”. None of us can point our needles at 100% or 0%, since that is saying “I know A or not A with absolute certainty”, which any reaonable and open-minded person accepts can never be the case: it is always a possibility, a finite probability, that we are wrong. I characterise “faith” as rather like grabbing the needle with both hands and wrenching it to point where it would not otherwise have done (often at 100%).
But in most real cases there are relevant facts (ie. extremely high probability propositions) which move the needle off precisely 50%. In the case of ET’s, the relevant fact is that we exist and there’s a large number of similar planets out there. I can still assign a low probability of life on any one of them, just as I can believe (ie. ascribe >50% to) the proposition that someone will win the lottery this week while assigning a tiny probability of winning to any single ticket.
Would you say “I believe there’s no such thing as the Tooth Fairy”?
Well, there we differ. I don;t think we can really say we “know” anything when it comes down to it, and that it is simply convenient shorthand for saying that we believe with approaching 100% certainty.
Reminds me of the Onion headline: “God answers boy’s prayer. NO he says.”
You’re kind of using induction in your example. Haven’t you heard the believers excuse the lack of evidence for god by saying that if there was evidence, there wouldn’t have to be faith? I think they are using faith in a different way from you.
I consider myself an agnostic.
I think it’s impossible, logically or not, to disprove that a deity can exist. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to disprove all deities exist; if you believe in a god that, by its very nature, must manifest itself as a squirrel at noon every day and devour your lunch, it’s pretty easy to prove that doesn’t exist - no squirrel. But I think it’s impossible to say “no deities exist” because I can think of an example myself - let’s say, a deity that created the world, but then has decided that it will take no further part in human endeavours. This deity could exist; there’s not going to be any evidence for it, and the only way you’d know it existed would be for it to go against it;s basic nature. This deity could, actually, exist.
On the other hand, It is possible to prove that a deity does exist; it could come down and say hi, for example. It could submit to scientific tests (Excuse me, uhm, sir, could you, uh, possibly…move that mountain two metres west? -CERTAINLY-). Clearly other people do believe in deities, based on what i’d call “lesser” evidence. I just have a higher threshold of distrust than religious people.
So, yes, I’d consider myself agnostic because a deity might exist; I have no knowledge of such a deity, but it’s possible.
I agree with you on faith. But haven’t you ever bet on a horse (believed it would win) with less than 50% probability? I’d say that, outside of Mr. Spock on ST-TOS, calculations of probabilities in the real world are so fuzzy that an exact dividing line is an example of over-precision. Often I bet you believe something, and then figure out how to get the probability over 50% - subconsciously, no doubt. I see marketing types do that all the time.
I too believe that ETs exist, for much the same reason, but I’d hesitate to even attempt to put a probability on it. With n=1 now, it is better to suspend judgement. Looking for them is rational, since the benefits of contact so greatly outweight the costs of our current search as to excuse a low probability. I wouldn’t want to sink a significant portion of our GNP into the search, however. I realize the probablility of hearing a signal is << the probability of an ET existing.
No - but the tooth fairy is fairly well defined. Small g god is not. I belive Zeus doesn’t exist. I believe the fundamentalist version of God does not exist. But that leaves a zillion others that I can simply not believe in by default.
Which was the thesis in John Maynard Keynes’ first book which I wrote about for my Theory of Knowledge class a long time ago.
I bet not necessarily because I consider the odds to be >50% but because I consider them better than what the bookie thinks. I bet regularly on unlikely away wins in the Premiership, not because I believe that team will win, but because I believe that the bet will be successful more regularly than the odds (which are usually stacked for the home team) suggest.
Agreed, but we can still say our guess even though it might be wildly innaccurate. Again, I’d say a “belief” is a “guess”; an output from the biological computer in our skulls. Whether the output correlates with future input (ie. “is right”) is another matter.
Of course: our beliefs can be affected by all kinds of factors, such that the needle shifts from where it otherwise would have rested.
You think it likely but not certain? Why then, your needle lies somewhere between 50% and 100%. Mine nudges up nearer the upper figure for this galaxy, and practically touches it for the universe as a whole.
Now you’re getting the hang of it! Is “I believe we won’t be hearing a signal in the next few years” an accurate summary?
You wouldn’t stand up and say “I believe there’s no such thing as the Tooth Fairy”?? Is that not the proverbial brain-spilling open-mindedness?
Just like any single lottery ticket, surely?
Clever chap, that Keynes. Careful with his betting, too, although he called it “economics”.
Actually, I would take this as support for the proposition that we live in a simulation (in which some Cartesian joker was, as we say over here, 'avin a larf) before I considered it evidence for God’s existence. I’m afraid there is simply no way I can conceive that you could ever get my needle to point towards God, barring actually manipulating my brain itself. That is not to say I can’t be wrong- of course I might be. It is just that you could never convince me that I’m wrong, so I would personally say that it is impossible to prove that God exists.
If you ever see me in heaven, I’ll be the one checking every wall panel for some kind of holographic projector, or desperately trying to kill myself.
Now I’m with you. I agree that belief is a guess to a certain extent, though it might be wishful thinking also. (We saw a friend of ours believe that her husband was going to beat cancer. That kind of belief serves a real purpose, and goes way beyond probabilities and guesses.
:smack: I must have had a logical inversion error. I would stand up and say that, for the reasons I gave.
Lottery tickets are limited enough so that someone is certain to win sometime. I don’t buy lottery tickets unless the expected value of the ticket is > than its price. And I never believe I’m going to win.
Actually, I’d say that behavioral economics is more relevant for this discussion.
