Simple question – maybe.
If I were to ask any of you if you acknowledge a deity, how could you avoid a “yes” or “no” answer? You either do (yes) or don’t (no).
Without the need for endless philosophical debate and convoluted “proofs” of one position or another, I think that is the essense of what it means to be a theist or an atheist.
I agree. An really, that is really based on the KEY utility issue: the whole POINT of distinguishing one group from another. It’s not simply to draw silly lines and divisions.
It’s to note what a person will concede in a discussion. If they already believe in god (theist) then they can have a certain sort of discussion that takes the existence of god as a premise. If they can’t concede that point, then potential discussions need to start further back, on more basic premises that do not simply assume the existence of a god.
Do you take A to be true? Or does it need to be proven to you?
In this case, the fact that someone will say “I take not A to be true” is irrelevant: all that matters is if they will or wont take A to be true. If not, it hardly matters if they are unconvinced, or convinced of the contrary: they still need to be convinced of A if any proper claims about or related to the truth of A are to be supported.
Yes, but is it really a “silly line” to distinguish between person A who believes for sure that god does not exist, and person B who believes that the universe is a 100-sided die with 99 sides saying “god.” I think it simply confuses the issue to insist on using the same term for both beliefs. There should be a way to distinguish people who believe in nonexistence, people who believe the question is tantamount to asking if invisible, intangible dragons exist, and people who believe the question is similar to guessing the roll of a die. Perhaps antitheist could cover the first, athiest the second, and agnostic the third.
—Yes, but is it really a “silly line” to distinguish between person A who believes for sure that god does not exist, and person B who believes that the universe is a 100-sided die with 99 sides saying “god.”—
Regardless of whatever idiosyncratic thoughts a person migt have about the possibility of god’s existence: the question remains: are they willing to grant the existence of god a true? Are they willing to take the AFFIRMATIVE step?
—I think it simply confuses the issue to insist on using the same term for both beliefs. There should be a way to distinguish people who believe in nonexistence, people who believe the question is tantamount to asking if invisible, intangible dragons exist, and people who believe the question is similar to guessing the roll of a die. Perhaps antitheist could cover the first, athiest the second, and agnostic the third.—
These are entirely different beliefs: not distinctions based on a single belief (the god claim, which is the whole POINT of even having these distinctions). There is no reason why one cannot mix and match these positions. An atheist can also be an antithest. An atheist can also be an agnostic.
Apos, while I don’t necessarily agree with you, you make me smile admiringly with your consistency and steadfastness.
But an antitheist could not be an agnostic. Therefore it makes sense not to put both beliefs under the same term.
Imagine a world where nobody can be absolutely sure of anything. Nobody could believe in god without any doubts. Or, maybe everyone who believed without doubt disappeared. Therefore everyone in the world is an athiest according to you. Does this mean there is no reason for debate in this world? Do people who believe in the nonexistence of god have no argument with those who believe that god almost certainly exists, but may actually be just an extremely powerful physical being? I just don’t see your terms as beneficial to debate. I see them as excluding people from the side they would naturally be on. It seems arbitrary to me that you insist that absolute certainty be a requirement for a god claim. Actually, I do not think unfaltering belief should be required to make a god claim. What if god exists such that it is impossible to have absolute belief in him? Your terms arbitrarily deny such possibilities.
Nightime
Do you acknowledge the existance of a diety?
—But an antitheist could not be an agnostic. Therefore it makes sense not to put both beliefs under the same term.—
I don’t know what you mean. Under what same term? They are both descriptions of different things.
My car is blue. It can also be large OR small (but not both). However, it’s size doesn’t change it’s color.
—Imagine a world where nobody can be absolutely sure of anything.—
Ah: ok. So we’re talking about the real world then? 
—Nobody could believe in god without any doubts.—
This would have to be a characteristic of the people in the world: not the external world itself. No matter how uncertain the outside world becomes, absolute belief cannot be precluded unless it is precluded by the psychological makeup of the people. But I still think you’re confused, because you keep emphasizing this concept of “absolute,” which is totally foriegn to the terminology I’ve used. I am not classifying anything by it’s “aboslute” tendancies, i.e. absolute proof, absolute belief. The distinction is: believe or not.
Questions of absolutes, or at least degrees of certainty, are questions specific to epsitemologies: none of which terms like “theism” or “atheism” can presume (especially since a given person may not even HAVE an epistemology). One’s own reasons FOR belief, personal cases and subjective burdens of proof, which differ wildly from person to person, are not relevant to this level of definition: and thus neither is “absoluteness.”
—Therefore everyone in the world is an athiest according to you.—
If there were a world in which no one had heard of the concept of god, we would have a world full of atheists. Likewise, if all theists suddenly disappeared (perhaps taken up in an expanded rapture?). Likewise if all people above a few months old died.
—Does this mean there is no reason for debate in this world?—
No: there is plenty of reason for debate on just about anything. Even if there are definately no theists, atheists can still argue the theist position in the name of learning.
But as soon as someone ends the debate in their mind, and starts believing that god exists, a theist is born. For theists, taking this step is generally considered a GOOD thing, which is one reason why many theologians now concede that atheism is a lack of belief.
—Do people who believe in the nonexistence of god have no argument with those who believe that god almost certainly exists, but may actually be just an extremely powerful physical being?—
Yes they have very legitimate arguement with each other. I’m not exactly sure what you mean with the latter group though, because they are pretty clearly theists: thus destroying your own example.
—I just don’t see your terms as beneficial to debate. I see them as excluding people from the side they would naturally be on.—
I don’t understand: that’s nonsense. You can only meaningfully call it “excluding” if you AREN’T using my definitions anyway (how else could you conclude about which “side” they would “naturally” be on), in which case, what’s your problem?
People who believe in gods, for whatever reason, are theists. People who don’t, for whatever reason, are atheists. If nothing else, my definitions at least TAKE PEOPLE AT THEIR WORD as to what they believe, without trying to cut apart their reasons a priori. So where’s the “unnaturalness” of it all?
— It seems arbitrary to me that you insist that absolute certainty be a requirement for a god claim.—
How can we possibly have a productive discussion if you say things about me which are not true? I never said anything about any requirement of absolute certainty. I said: belief. There is a god claim. Will you affirm the claim as true? Or not? Your reasons are your own (and can’t possibly be factored into terms like “atheist” and “theist” because they are far far far too diverse among different theists)
—Actually, I do not think unfaltering belief should be required to make a god claim.—
Again: when did I say anything about unfaltering belief? All I said was that the characterization of theist rests upon whether or not someone says they believe in god or not. How could you possibly argue otherwise? I would have thought that, at least, the definition of theist would be uncontroversial, but now you seem to be advocating that something other than a person’s own admission of belief be the determinant!
—What if god exists such that it is impossible to have absolute belief in him? Your terms arbitrarily deny such possibilities.—
Nonsense. I haven’t made any sort of insitence on “absolute” belief. I said: you have a belief or not. Just like you have an apple or not. Either you are willing to affirm the truth of god’s existence, or you are not. Why you do, and what your threshold is for whatever epistemology might underlie your thinking (and there might NOT be one!!!) is your own bussiness, and doesn’t enter into atheism anymore than it enters into theism.
I was over it before I entered the thread, believe me.
Also, Apos, I think what we’re saying here is that you present us with a bifurcation. You can reduce it down to: belief or not. But this is not the only distinction here. In fact, I think many people would claim that such a dichotomy doesn’t really represent belief at all.
To take your apple example.[ul][li]You have apples in your hand. []In your pocket. []At home, though you are now at work. []At a grocery store you intend to stop at. []Money in your bank account which you intend to withdraw to buy apples at the supermarket. []And someone who doesn’t like apples. []And someone who doesn’t know what apples are. And someone who likes apples but they are unavailable.[/ul][/li]
The exclusive or… bah. I can’t stand my own inclination to apply it everywhere. Can we reduce all propositions to an either-or state? yeah. Can we, from either-or states, reassemble the propsotions back to their “belief-state”? I don’t think so. We lose some information when we bifurcate these sorts of choices.
It is not as if “God” is as simple as an apple or a ball or the color blue. Do I acknowledge apples? Do I acknowledge math in the same way? I’m not even sure “acknowledge” applies to apples in the way it would to god…
—In fact, I think many people would claim that such a dichotomy doesn’t really represent belief at all.—
Sigh: that’s only because you insist on trying to capture all sorts of different beliefs in the one distinction. Look at your supposed attack on the analougy: a jumble of different sorts of distinctions, some of which aren’t even relevant to the distinction of whether one presently holds an apple or not, and others which can easiy be classified as one or the other.
I’m not trying to say that this is the only distinction, or even the only sort of distinction: indeed I seem to remember repeating about fifty million times things like how atheist and agnostic are not mutually exclusive, but can describe different aspects of a person. The key to atheist/theist really DOES make the most sense if it rests on “affirmation of the belief or not?” No, that doesn’t capture wat color hair a person has, but single definitions can only do so much.
So you’ve discovered the amazing fact that binary distinctions are simplistic. Well, so they are. As I also said about a gazillion times, the distinction theist and atheist tell us very little about a person’s reasons and thoughts ABOUT the god claim. But this is a good thing: those reasons (or lack of reasons) are so diverse as to resist anything but a specific explication. The problem is NOT that “God” isn’t simple: the problem is that “God” and thus theism is too complicated to be captured in anything but a high level definition like theism.
But when you state it as an either/or, you present us with P V ~P, and an atheist is not represented by ~P.
—But when you state it as an either/or, you present us with P V ~P, and an atheist is not represented by ~P.—
Since I use “believe in god” as “P”, yes is it is, especially since I use “without theism (god belief)” as “atheist.” (a= without, theism= theism)
Ah, I stand by, then, the notion that the opposite of having belief in god can be interpreted as not having belief, or having belief not (having no belief). Again, your apples fail to impress how we are supposed to obviously find these divisions when it is quite clear, at least, that people often confuse atheism with an actual belief.
As in, you know, the opposite of every great idea is another great idea? Or, the opposite of every belief is a belief? Which is how atheists are always miscategorized?
The more I think on the issue the more I think that “believe in god” is not a good proposition. Most people, for example, do say they believe in god, but of course if you asked them whether god existed they would say yes; ie- I know P, ie P. Which is to say: P V ~P, god or no god: which do you believe? This is not analyzing it the same way you are which is
which is true: P V ~P, I have belief or I have no belief
which is not usually, IMO, how these sorts of things are discussed.
I was thrown off by finding propositions like “I know that I believe in God” or “I know that I have no belief with respect to God” which are nonstandard IMO. Not that I set standards, of course, but I consider the difference between “belief” and “knowledge” to be a matter of perspective, not a difference in propositions or statements of fact or attributing properties, etc, and so each logical proposition with operators already asks whether a person believes or not something. For example:
[Do you know if] there is an apple on the table? Well, either the apple is on the table or not, so P V ~P. Which do I know (ie which is the case)? I know P. substitute “believe” for “know” as necessary.
So you throw something out there like “you believe in god or you don’t” and you set yourself up for ambiguity like this. If I say I don’t, do I say I don’t believe in god, that I believe in no god, etc.
Perhaps this wil be clearer:
Belief or not: to the theist, the answer is “Yes, God exists.” That is simply how we are inclined to answer questions about what we believe. To the atheist, however, the answer is, “No I don’t have a belief.” This is not a binary response as typically understood. By me, anyway. One is a statement about God, one is a statement about a person.
And, in fact, you’ve even noticed this property back on page two. When the form the answer takes differs, you might start to wonder whether you’ve asked the question properly.
Though, in reading your response on page two, you clearly chose to separate knowledge and belief, though I am not clear why. They seem to represent the same state to me with respect to our concerns here.
—Again, your apples fail to impress how we are supposed to obviously find these divisions when it is quite clear, at least, that people often confuse atheism with an actual belief.—
I well know that people make this confusion, which is why I’ve pointed to several reasons as to why it has happened: the foremost of them being that it is in the interest of theologians to pretend that “atheism” is the major challenge to theism, but then to pretend that “atheism” is the claim that “no gods exist”: a claim that is trivially easy to parody and ridicule. You see this sort of switcheroo happening in countless works of theology, and it all relies upon a carefully two-faced definition of “atheism.”
Likewise, it is often hard for people to understand that a negative definition doesn’t really define a thing in the ways they are used to: they feel that if they know someone is an “atheist,” they should be able to state something about that person. But they have no real ability to do so: anymore than they have a right to state anything affirmative about the characteristics of a non-line-chef. To say that someone is apolitical tells you nothing about what actual views they might hold about anything, even the concept of politics.
—This is not analyzing it the same way you are which is
which is true: P V ~P, I have belief or I have no belief
which is not usually, IMO, how these sorts of things are discussed.—
Sure it is. The central preliminary issue in any discussion about god is whether or not we can take something like “god exists” to be true: i.e. will you affirm the god claim? Or not? If someone states “well, you musn’t have sex with other men, because god hates that,” then I can reply “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in your god: you’ll either have to convince me of the existence of your god before that line of arguement will work, or you’re going to have to argue your case in a different way, from different premises on which we can both agree.” The central issue there is that I don’t believe: whether or not I just lack a belief, or believe not, the fact remains that I will have to be convinced before that arguement is going to go anywhere.
—[Do you know if] there is an apple on the table? Well, either the apple is on the table or not, so P V ~P. Which do I know (ie which is the case)? I know P. substitute “believe” for “know” as necessary.—
We can’t just substitute it as necessary. In the case of belief, I can maintain this claim (that I believe there is) regardless of whether I can prove to you or anyone else that there is an apple on the table. No amount of my failure to do so would ever convince anyone that I didn’t believe there was an apple there, as long as I maintained that there was.
In the case of knowledge, however, people are quite right to challenge whether and how I came to “know” anything about there being an apple on the table. My failure would thus legitimately lead people to challenge my claim to have knowledge of the apple being there.
—If I say I don’t, do I say I don’t believe in god, that I believe in no god, etc.—
You could say either, just as you could elaborate further on almost any distinction.
But that you might also “believe there is no god” is a lower level distinction in terms of whether or not you accept the god claim. (Which is, after all, the WHOLE POINT for having these terms at all in the first place).
If you don’t recognize the central importance of the god claim in even making these distinctions necessary, then of course this is all going to look strange to you.
—Belief or not: to the theist, the answer is “Yes, God exists.” That is simply how we are inclined to answer questions about what we believe. To the atheist, however, the answer is, “No I don’t have a belief.” This is not a binary response as typically understood. By me, anyway. One is a statement about God, one is a statement about a person.—
It’s not clearer because you pulled the same darn trick that people have been pulling over and over in this thread: asking and answering all sorts of different questions of different people.
“Do you believe?” is a yes or no answer. But asking someone “So, does god exist?” can get a yes, a no, an i dunno, or a whole host of other responses. Just because you can squeeze the answer to both questions into one sentance, and then in the contrary example fail to attempt this squeezing, doesn’t prove anything. The atheist could have answered “No, I don’t believe. I have no reason to: I have no idea if any god even exists” The theist could have answered “Yes, I believe, despite not knowing if god really exists or not.” But these answers, like your hypothetical answers, are the responses of particular theists and atheists, all of which elaborate on the answer to the original question.
Well, let’s say: I find your use of belief uncharacteristic of its use in English as I have encountered it. If I believe P, I would say P is a fact. If I know P, I would say P is a fact. The distinction is interesting when we are concerned with matters of certainty/support, but in this context I find the distinction to have vanished.
I do not find it to be the case that belief is used like you mention here
If you cannot determine whether god exists from the question answered in the affirmative, then I am not sure how to even proceed here. I’ve never encountered a use of belief that was different.
Hell, “I” and erislover are different concepts too, but they both refer to the same person when I use them.
—If I believe P, I would say P is a fact. If I know P, I would say P is a fact. The distinction is interesting when we are concerned with matters of certainty/support, but in this context I find the distinction to have vanished.—
Then you are simply summarily writing out of the picture countless theists that DO make this distinction.
—If you cannot determine whether god exists from the question answered in the affirmative, then I am not sure how to even proceed here. I’ve never encountered a use of belief that was different.—
Hunh? The first question was about what a person believed or not. You can’t tell if something exists simply from what a person believes.
Plenty of people believe god exists, but cannot explain to anyone else why: cannot present arguements of knowledge to anyone else. That’s what’s faith is all about. If you reject the conceptual role of faith in people’s beliefs, fine: but don’t pretend that you are being “conventional” in doing so.
Regardless, I’m not even sure what your position is here. Do you even disagree about the definitions I’ve given for atheist and theist in the first place? You recent posts suggest that you do not, since you seem to agree that people wrongly think that atheists have the belief that “no gods exist.”