Both sides are pointing out the mistakes of the other side-where is this imbalance you speak of?
This is pretty much purely semantical. If someone said “there are no invisible/nonobservable fairies”, would you jump on them for incorrectly declaring that they can prove a negative?
Essentially, “there is no god” in this context means “there is no evidence for your specific bearded guy in the sky who your holy books claim made these interventions in our universe”.
To hold their words to an interpretation that’s semantic to a silly degree and logically impossible is just playing the silly semantics/philosophy games that theists always hit in these debates because they know they can’t argue on substance.
No, science cannot prove God’s non-existence because the supernatural is beyond its scope. You’re citing entirely the wrong reason for why science cannot prove God’s existence.
The qualified, “to the extent that anything can be proven not to exist” is indeed important, but it’s ultimately irrelevant. It amounts to saying that we use science to disprove God’s existence to the same extent that we can disprove ANYTHING. That’s a mighty strong claim, to say the least.
Smithee’s statement said nothing about “asserted to be unobservable.” Rather, his claim was that God’s existence has been disproven to the extent that ANYTHING can be disproven. You’re tacking on extra verbiage in order to make the claim more palatable – a reverse strawman, if you wish.
I already cited the imbalance. Atheists pile on theists for supposedly making scientifically inaccurate statements, but when a theist points out the scientific inaccuracy of an atheists claim, it is greeted with a response like “Good job arguing against a strawman argument that no one with any scientific background has made.” An honest atheist would simply acknowledge that his teammate had said something stupid. Instead, the theist’s rebuttal is treated as something that should never have been uttered, despite the atheist’s error.
By declaring something beyond natural/super natural, you automatically put it beyond any sort of reason or observability or bounds of logic. Anything goes.
How is that a strong claim? The default assumption of anyone scientifically minded is to simply not invent things out of thin air. If there’s no evidence of something at work, no phoenomina that we need a hypothesis to explain, then there’s no reason to create the attributes of something.
I think he’s just throwing it into the same boat as anything else we generally accept not to exist lacking any reason to think it does. Why is God special in this regard?
It’s a semantical distinction that our own atheists are quick to emphasize. They refer to “hard atheism” (the belief that there is no God) and “soft atheism” (a mere lack of belief in God). Some of them have been quite strident in making this distinction.
So when an atheist draws this distinction, it’s considered valid. But when an theist points out the difference between belief in absence and an absence of belief, it’s considered “purely semantical.”
Actually, you are.
Science cannot prove God’s existence because Science does not deal with blind speculation and wishful thinking. When you add the “supernatural” to the equation, you are merely adding more blind speculation and wishful thinking.
I think it’s invalid either way. Both terms are really just exploiting a semantical misunderstanding. I don’t think even the hardest of hard atheists is actually implictly claiming “I know everything there is to know about existance, and there is no possible room for some sort of god-like entity”, what they’re saying is more in line with “almost certainly your specific beliefs about a bearded sky dude are wrong”.
It’s not really a distinction worth making, because so few people subscribe to “hard atheism” as defined as logically impossibly proving a negative.
I want to add that “God” tends to take a very specific image depending on the dominant religion of your culture. So when someone says “there is no God” they’re generally saying “whatever you think of as God, with your specific creation stories and rule books etc. doesn’t exist” rather than “no entity that we don’t/can’t understand” exists. A lot of the confusion of this thread comes from, again, that double definition of God.
He’ll have to come back and tell us which definition of God he was using. The tri-omni god can easily be disproven from evidence, and I think even the bi-omni God can be disproven. The God of the infallible Bible can be, given that it is full of errors. The God that oozes through the cracks can’t be.
But I’ll dispute that the supernatural is beyond the scope of science. Science can, and has, studied the supposed projection of the supernatural upon the natural world. What Rhine did was definitely scientific. Looking for traces of the Flood is scientific. Studying folk culture to see if anyone noticed the sun stopping is scientific. That the Bible keeps coming up short has nothing to do with a supposed weakness of science.
Now, if your God stays in the supernatural world and never has a measurable impact on our natural world, then there is indeed nothing to study. But I wonder why you think you have any glimmering of what God wants from us. Even God inspiring us can be studied, since we can collect the impressions of all those supposedly inspired and compare them. There is plenty of scientific study of things that exist only inside our heads, after all.
So, I don’t give much support to your attempt to hide God in the supernatural realm.
Well, deists or agnostics might think this way, but they wouldn’t say “there is no god”.
And atheists (who generally don’t make statements like that either), don’t just disbelieve specific gods. They lack belief in all gods by the normal definition of “god”.
I don’t need to go through all the religions one by one, and hear about the wonderous properties of god X before deciding that I don’t believe in X: I don’t believe in any of them by default.
Of course, you could define a “god” that exists: e.g. “God is love”.
But this is just typical weasling. Regardless of statements like “god is love”, 99.9% of theists believe in a sentient supernatural being that carries out actions that affect humans. And I don’t believe that there’s any evidence for such an entity.
Back to the OP: “Is religion just wish fulfillment?”
Well, it might be…
If all religions promised us the same desirable thing. But they don’t. Not all religions promise us any kind of afterlife at all. Many a devout Jew has followed Mosaic law without expecting any kind of life after death.
**If the religions that promise pie in the sky when we die made no unpleasant demands on us. **But they do. If my beliefs were mere wish fulfillment, I’d be going to a church that promised eternal life for sitting on my butt, watching football, listening to music and eating pizza. Instead, I believe in a religion that puts demands on me, that requires me to do things I’d rather not do, that prevents me from doing things I’d LIKE to do. That’s not a dream come true. Laziness and selfishness come naturally to most of us (myself most definitely included). Altruism doesn’t. My beliefs are sometimes a great comfort, but not always. Sometimes, they lead me to ask myself tough questions, like “Am I really living up to my professed ideals?” The answer to the cliché question, “What would Jesus do” is not always an easy one, to put it mildly.
**If Non-belief weren’t just as convenient for many of the people who embrace it. ** If there IS a Heaven for the just and a Hell for the wicked, yeah, that’s awfully convenient for those of us who fancy ourselves “just.” But if there ISN’T, well, THAT’S’s awfully convenient for the wicked, too. Whichever of those propositions is true (for now, I’ll just assume that those are the only two possibilities; we’ll leave aside reincarnation, et al.), it’s the fulfillment of SOMEBODY’S wish!
I agree with your essential point: religion isn’t just about wish fulfilment (for one thing they generally include threats also).
But as I pointed out earlier: the most successful religions are those that give their followers busywork and arbitrary restrictions.
You’ll never hear someone say “I wish I wasn’t a Muslim; then I wouldn’t have to pray 5 times a day” because it’s doing activities like that that makes one feel a part of the religion and give a warm fuzzy feeling.
What I’m saying is, for the religious minded, the demands of religion is something they “LIKE”.
If you give people a placebo that they have to taste, they actually report better outcomes if you give them a liquid that tastes bad and bitter. There’s some expectation that the worse it is going down, the better the payoff will be. I wonder if that’s one of the things at work here.
It can demonstrate claims about them to be impossible according to known physical laws; which is about as close to disproof about entities with no evidence for their existence as science can get.
Yes. The maximally-vague God that gets brought up in arguments like this is not the God that most ( any ? ) people actually believe in. It exists primarily as a defense against sceptics, and is abandoned the moment they aren’t arguing.
Makes sense to me.
He didn’t claim it was the “traditional” definition. He said this:
After Contrapuntal said what I quoted him saying above, you said this:
You said “no, it isn’t.” That’s not saying it’s not the definition?
You haven’t proven this. Your own cite says that it comes from the French athéiste, and then goes into the etymology of that word. None of this proves anything about the traditional usage of the word atheism. And again, other cites say differently.
(bolding mine)
Denial that gods exist is the absence of belief.
My very first entry:
How is that not the absence of belief?
I’m not sure what nit you’re picking here.
Ah, that nit. You don’t think it’s fair to define disbelief as lack of belief?
You omitted the first part of Merriam-Webster’s definition of disbelieve.
So what is the act of disbelieving? Well, lets look up disbelieve using Merriam-Webster:
Are you serious? You think he stressed “the” and doesn’t believe that a strong atheist is part of atheism? Really?
Your objection supports my point. If anything, he went far beyong merely asserting that it’s the traditional definition. He said that it’s the VERY definition of atheism – not merely a possible definition, but THE definition. That’s simply wrong.
That’s right, as I’ve said numerous times now. It is not THE definition. At best, it only constitutes one possible usage of the term, and not the traditional one.
My cite shows that the etymology is different from what Contrapuntal claims. As for traditional usage, I’ve already covered that. Heck, one of your own atheist allies posted multiple dictionary entries, all of which agree with what I said.
Which is why I emphasized that a dictionary entry carries more weight than some anonymous website that cites no sources.
Denial is more than just absence of belief, as the proponents of the strong/weak atheism dichotomy here are quick to emphasize. Denying a belief means affirming that it’s false. In contrast, merely having no opinion – or for that matter, a non-committal position – would indicate an absence of belief. The two are not synoymous, as folks such as Dio have emphasized numerous times.
Exactly right. Again, this is a distinction that many atheists here have argued for, as they argued for a distinction between strong and weak atheism.
I cited the definition of disbelief (a different word from the one you cited), which Merriam-Webster defines as the mental rejection of something as untrue. This same source apparently softens that usage when it comes to “disbelieve,” which indicates a lack of consistency on it’s part. In any event, other dictionaries are more consistent and affirm that it indicates an active rejection, not merely a lack of belief. The American Heritate Dictionary, for example, defines “disbelieve” as “To refuse to believe in; reject.” In other words, not merely having an absence of belief, but actively rejecting that belief.
Of course he did. That’s exactly the point. He considers it to be PART of atheism, whereas the traditional viewpoint is that it IS atheism. Obviously, the two claims are not synonymous.
It’s not wrong. It is the definition of atheism. By you capitalizing “the” you are claiming he said it was the one and only. He didn’t.
It’s the definition. Whether or not it’s THE definition is irrelevant.
You have failed to prove what the traditional definition is and what is traditional (however you’re defining ‘traditional’) is irrelevant.
I’m not getting the nitpick of the difference between ‘without gods’ and ‘without theism.’
Where? I didn’t see where you provided anything regarding traditional usage and I don’t get why you think it matters.
Wrong, and I’ve proven it to you.
Not necessarily, and I’ve proven this to you also.
Back to dictionary.com. Take a look at entry #5 which specifically defines deny in the context of belief in gods.
You’re grasping at straws and I don’t believe for a second you don’t realize your position here has been defeated. You omitted the very first part of the definition that said “the act of disbelieving.” I showed you what disbelieve means using the same dictionary. I’ll post it again:
And I showed you what disbelieve means. Relying on just one part of one entry from one dictionary and claiming it’s the only possible definition is showing your intellectual dishonesty. From dictionary.com (two entries):
You don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing inconsistent with words having slightly different meanings. There aren’t only one way to use each word in the English language that’s written in stone.
Why do you keep stressing the word “active”? If I reject a belief, then all you know is that lack that belief but know that that belief exists.
Not getting this or its relevance.
At any rate, not all religions are wish-fulfillment equally. Who would want to live in the universe of Aztec mythology?
Woah - careful with the broad brush there - I don’t make this distinction at all. In fact, I had to be talked down from using atheist in the original Greek sense of “against the Gods even if they exist”, too. As far as I’m concerned , “hard” vs “soft” is semantic nitpicking, and I equate lack of belief with belief in lack from a functional point of view, which is all that matters.