This and other stuff you’ve said is exactly why we get pissed of by agnostics. Your definition of atheism is nonsense, and when real atheists say what they believe and don’t believe you profess confusion. Perhaps your definition is wrong?
Theists love to define atheism as the certainty that there is no god - since that strawman definition is easy to refute. In over 40 years of online debate I’ve met exactly one person who holds that position, and he was a nitwit.
The problem with your very first statement is that no atheist who has considered the data would say it - because there is no definition of God contained within it.
There is no X,Y and Z which makes it obvious that god is not a grad student, or a deistic god, or the god of the intelligent species who really matters in the universe.
I’m certain that Jesus is not God.
You’re an atheist.
No, I’m Jewish.
I’m certain that the monotheistic God of the Bible does not exist.
You’re an atheist.
No, I’m a Hindu.
We might say things about certain gods, not all gods though.
Now, for the special pleading. Even using a loose definition of knowledge, that we have no knowledge of the existence of God is different from it being impossible to have knowledge. God can pop in any time.
Maybe Taylor Swift is in love with me. I have no evidence that she is, and only a lack of evidence showing she is not. But I can’t say it is impossible to know whether she is in love with me. She can pop in any time. (Slightly less likely than God showing up, I know.)
We can’t know that no gods exist - some are unknowable by definition, some are good hiders. We can easily know if some Gods do exist. They just need to show up. If you do enough experiments the p value that the hypothesis that no gods exist is true gets pretty high. But never to 1.
Speaking personally, my behaviour in the possibility of the existence of some kind of Deist god or gods that have no interaction with the universe is the same as my behaviour if that weren’t possible. So I would agree with your statement - by default, but it’s correct in my case.
The only thing I can figure is that you’re using “claim” in a different way than I would in this context. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is not a “claim” in the sense of a hypothesis to explore experimentally.
If everyone were a deist, there would be no atheists to do the preaching. However, my point is, if every non-atheist were an agnostic, it SEEMS like the atheists would be doing even more of it.
Why do you keep insisting that I am a deist?
If that was your point, then, yes, I missed it. And I’m still missing it because I don’t see what it has to do with anything that I have said. I don’t know how many more ways that I can say that I am agnostic, and by that I mean there is no particular God or Gods that I “believe” in. There is also no refutation of the entire infinite set of imaginable (or unimaginable) deities that I “believe” in. In the specific cases of Judeo-Christian deities, I strongly disbelieve because the deities they’ve imagined are ridiculous.
If there were a specific definition of God that I “believe” in, then I would not call myself agnostic. If I were convinced that none of the infinite set of imaginable/unimaginable deities actually DO exist (and I don’t mean in a scientific sense), then I would call myself an atheist.
I don’t think this is a valid analogy. If you were on Alpha Centauri and said you believed that your team HAD, in fact, won the championship, then I would think you were using the same definition of “believe” that I am.
If what you mean is what I think I’m reading, then I wholeheartedly agree with you.
I think you’re making invalid assumptions about what I think. To the extent that I am making a leap here, it would be along the lines of “If there are multiple Gods that exist, then the statement that There Is a God would be true.”
Since you are focusing on what I think, I’ll also offer this: While the set of imaginable/unimaginable Gods may be infinite, I would only find a subset of those interesting to consider. The fact that I am unwilling to dismiss the existence of God(s) does not mean that I am unwilling to dismiss the existence of the Christian God. However, that decision on my part is a combination of philosophical and scientific thinking. The Christian claims a God “doing” things in the world that I see no evidence of. Also, the Christian god is lame.
From a pragmatic standpoint, I agree with you. However, I believe that that pragmatism is a good way to try to live the life my perceptions provide me. I am not convinced that pragmatism guarantees revelation of all that, er, “exists”. Therefore, I cannot reject the deistic God in the sense that I believe you reject It.
That being said, I fail to believe in the deistic God because I have yet to see a plausible motive for its actions.
I think this is another analogy that doesn’t entirely work. We also don’t run around talking about flying whales that breathe methane and live in a galaxy near the edge of the universe. I’m just not convinced that this is relevant to the discussion.
In terms of the impact of religion (which, for me, is a totally separate topic), what bothers me is less the way it might affect what we imagine, and more the way it encourages what I call “magical thinking”. The fact that I don’t think science can refute the existence of God(s), does not mean that I reject scientific inquiry. While keeping in mind that I don’t see everything, for the world that my senses reveal to me, I think science is the only way to successfully “proceed”. That is, I am pragmatic in regard to my perceivable physical existence.
Also, I don’t think there are many people who want to talk about random deities. There is a fair-sized crowd who want to talk about arbitrary ones.
And people like you who keep insisting on foisting your rejected deistic God off on me.
And right here we have a big sticking point: How can Science even begin to refute, or even look for, something if it is not given a proper description of what it is supposed to be refuting in the first place? The proverbial Jell-O being nailed to the wall at least has color and flavor.
Because there are an infinite number of hypothetical entities, the null hypothesis must be the default.
Atheist: I see no evidence for a God, so I conclude there isn’t one.
Agnostic: I am unconvinced by your reasoning.
Atheist: ???
If we don’t take the null hypothesis as the default, epistemological consistency forces us to provisionally believe EVERYTHING. Clearly that’s an unworkable way to live.
Pragmatism is a useful way to justify science, but it is not itself science.
Yes, you’re free to say “Well, I reject Pragmatism!”. There is no a priori reason to choose Pragmatism as your epistemological stance. But if you reject Pragmatism, then the question becomes “Well, what IS your epistemology?” What philosophical framework do you use to justify your beliefs about the world? What gives you confidence in the correctness of your beliefs?
Now, most people don’t go to the trouble to work through the ramifications of their epistemology. They just believe what they believe and get on with life. But if you’re going to advance an argument about the knowability of God, then you need to establish an epistemological foundation for the discussion.
You say “we [agnostics] are reminding you that the decision to be pragmatic was (philosophically) arbitrary”. Well, yes, no argument there. But while adopting Pragmatism may be arbitrary, it’s also consistent. It’s a level playing field that treats all claims about reality the same way and holds them to the same standards of justification. You seem to be espousing a piecemeal approach to epistemology where you pick and choose different standards of justification according to the beliefs you wish to hold. That’s both arbitrary AND inconsistent.
Kierkegaard doesn’t really seem to have chosen - he was a Christain Universalist, probably the most accommodating kind of Christianity there is. But he was raised a Lutheran, so I don’t think the question “which God” ever really was a big deal for him. I think “why God” was more his thing.
But hey, they do say philosophy is a “rigorous academic discipline”, so I’m sure, as a philosopher, he covered that “which” somehow.
Pragmatism doesn’t say that you don’t know anything, but rather that knowing is contingent upon utility. We don’t know what things ARE, rather we know what things DO. So ontological questions about the world such as “Does X exist?” is “Is Y true?” are meaningless within a Pragmatic framework. (Or rather, such questions should be understood as shorthand for “Is it useful to posit that X exists?” or “Can Y be provisionally justified?”)
This is a great point. In fact, even if a god shows up in front of me and demands I tell the world of this miracle, I would still doubt that I was seeing things and hearing voices after a long night - which is a reasonable and plausible explanation. “Goddidit” is an explanation, but it needs a LOT more evidence to be really convincing. In fact, it’s revealing that in most cases god visits us only when we are vulnerable and looking for mental or spiritual comfort (just like most evangelical preachers, actually). She rarely -if ever- appears when life is going OK, when we could sit down over coffee and engage in some fruitful debates and discussions. I suppose religious people interpret this as god helping us out when we need her the most, but again I think the more plausible explanation is that people sometimes see what they wanted to see.
Coming back to possible evidence for god… I would start suspecting the scientific method only if we start to discover systems that are so mysterious and lawless that we can predict virtually nothing about it. We have seen nothing of this sort till date, but if we did discover such a system, it might be seen as the mind of god or something, I dunno. (However even such a discovery isn’t remotely close to what we traditionally understand by “god”.)
First, sorry for implying that you believed in a deistic god. You spent a lot of time on how one was plausible, so I was fooled. If you do not, you are an atheist also. Which does not mean you are not agnostic.
Claims of possibility are not things which can be scientifically tested. They are plausibility arguments. Science can just tell, to some degree of certainty, if a hypothesis has been demonstrated or not. But it not being demonstrated does not mean that it is not possible.
Oh, there would be atheists. I’m just as atheistic relative to the deistic god as I am to the Christian one. I’m just less certain - but I still believe that no deistic god exists.
I never said you accepted the Wager. I did say that the reason the wager fails is that multiple gods must be considered. Further, that only one god is possible is a common belief of Western civilization. This has nothing to do with what you believe or don’t believe.
Why? The truth is not unknowable (though it will take four years.) Is it because the belief is not that they did win? Same thing as if I didn’t hear the results for an hour after the game ends, I could still have the same level of belief for something which has been resolved.
What do mean about dismissing the existence of something? Do you dismiss the existence of a teapot orbiting Saturn? I’m happy to provisionally dismiss the existence of lots of things.
But except for the fact that historically god belief has been around for a while (and perhaps we have evolved a need for god belief) there is no more reason to discuss gods than there is to discuss your examples. The real purpose of the IPU was to make this exact point.
Religion encouraging magical thinking is a very good point.
But let’s talk about science refuting the existence of god. First, this only makes sense if there is a strict definition of the God you mean. Second, there must be some experiment or research which can distinguish the god case from the non-God case. For instance God[A] created the universe 6,000 years ago. if true, there must be no evidence of things over 6,000 years old. So it fails.
However, the hypothesis God** created the universe a long time ago, whatever we learn, and then has never interfered is one where there is no experiment which can verify or refute it.
The null hypothesis is that there no gods unless evidence of one is presented. So the null hypothesis is that God** does not exist, and it is up to adherents of God** to demonstrate his existence. But, they say, God** by definition has no evidence. Then why do they believe in him? The simplest solution is that they are making God B up.
pre-science they had pretty clear definitions of God. God might be unknowable in total, but he sure created the world, made the flood, and had a son.
Once science started refuting chunks of the story it got more complicated.
The Flood is such a part of our culture that I’m sure 99.9% of Christians 500 years ago believed in it. That it has been refuted now so that a good chunk do not in no way invalidates this. It is like a kid, finally getting that Santa does not exist, claiming that he never really believed.
I don’t think it can. I’m one of that kind of agnostic who (at least, currently) believes the answer is probably unknowable. For me, personally, it seems so likely that the answer is unknowable that I ordinarily spend very little time thinking about it.
We’re generally in agreement. However, I don’t need to choose one of the binary pair “I believe there is a God” or “I believe there is no God” in order to work out a way to live. I acknowledge that I don’t know and probably never will.
I also don’t know whether there exists a unifying model for the universe. However, if I live long enough, one day I might. And it’s possible that it could turn out to be something that actually affects whether I think the God question is “resolved”.
Yes, but I’m not doing that. I’m, er, pragmatically accepting that for most of the questions that matter to me, pragmatism (and, thus, science) are the most workable course. I’m also not adopting Pragmatism as a kind of religion. I’m not making that leap that says, “I need pragmatism to get along, therefore pragmatism is the only paradigm that I’m willing to think in.”
I just don’t see this as an either/or in quite the way you suggest. To me, Pragmatism is not so much like a wife to whom I must pledge my eternal troth. It’s more of a means to a great many useful ends.
If I want to predict the movements of the moon, I’m not going to get anywhere without building on a Pragmatic foundation.
If I want to determine whether God exists, Pragmatism doesn’t get me there (and, clearly we differ on that point). And I’m acknowledging that part of the problem is my failure to define God/identify which of the infinite possible Gods I want to evaluate. By the way, I don’t blame that failure on Pragmatism. I blame it on the limitations of my brain.
I trust pragmatism/science from the Big Bang until the universe collapses or reaches maximum entropy, over the entire volume of the universe. Outside of those time/space boundaries (or even whether there is such a thing as “outside of those boundaries”), I don’t really have any beliefs, only questions.
I would say that I believe that the existence is God is a) not known and b) probably not knowable. But I wouldn’t say that I’m advancing it as an argument. All I’m saying is that I am unconvinced by the Pragmatic argument for the nonexistence of God. So I would say I’m not so much making an argument as waiting for someone to come up with one that I find convincing.
I don’t see anything here that I disagree with.
I don’t think that it’s as haphazard as you describe. I pick Pragmatism within the bounds I described above, and I don’t really have an answer for the rest. But it’s not based on trying to find a justification for what I want to believe–in fact, I’m specifically declining to believe in the 1 or the 0 (and no, the 1 doesn’t mean one monotheistic God). It’s based on using a hammer to hammer a nail, but not using a hammer to fix my watch, because I don’t think that will work.
But you act that way, right? You also act as if no pixies exist, but would never say that. But you might if people at work started collecting money for the pixie relief fund.
I don’t think I have the time or the energy to try to be both. Besides, everything I see suggests that atheists REALLY dislike agnostics, and I already have my quota of reasons to dislike myself.
Agreed.
This is interesting. It would never occur to me to think of someone being atheistic on a god-by-god basis. It also would not occur to me that “atheistic” and “less certain” could be used together in this way.
It’s an excellent refutation of the wager, and it’s not new to me. However, I personally reject the wager on enough levels that this approach doesn’t spring to mind first. Particularly when I’m caught off guard by someone trying to convince me to reject something that I’m not even considering accepting. What sprang to mind was, “Why are you lecturing me about Pascal’s Wager?”
My point was that it would be belief that a fact was true, without having the knowledge (nothing to do whether the knowledge might be obtainable). I’m distinguishing it from the “belief” you described which was more of a prediction of the future. At the time you’re claiming belief, the cat is still in the box. I’m saying the cat is dead, but without having checked this fact, you believe it to be alive (or dead; doesn’t matter). To me this is a better (but far from perfect) analogy. If you say, “I believe the cat will die,” we’re back to talking about wagers.
I think it’s extremely unlikely, but theoretically knowable (if not easily knowable). It is so unlikely, that the answer would only be interesting if that teapot did, in fact, exist. In contrast, the answer to whether God exists would be interesting in either case. So, I guess I’d say I’m more willing to dismiss the teapot because I don’t particularly care about the answer. While I can’t say that I really have anything riding on the answer to the God question, I’d definitely care to know, if I could. Not sure if this clarifies anything.
Well, there’s a little more reason. I exist, apparently, as a small, temporary creature in a very large and inscrutable universe. I can’t help but wonder if there is a “why” and, if so, what it might be. Having wondered these things many times, I’ve realized that I don’t know the answer and likely never will. I’ll admit this annoys me, because I like knowing things.
As for the historical context, I suspect that it boils down to endless attempts to find a way to perform magic. I’ll also admit that realizing there really was no magic to be had was personally disappointing. That is, I’m not disappointed that YOU can’t perform magic, but I am disappointed that I can’t.
Agreed.
The null hypothesis and Occam’s Razor DO seem to naturally go hand in hand. Both represent smart rules of thumb for scientific inquiry. However, I can’t help but point out that neither is, in and of itself, dispositive.
Do vaccines cause autism? There sure isn’t any good evidence that they do. And based on the research that has been done, I am comfortable saying, “I believe that vaccines do not cause autism.”
Is there a God? There sure isn’t any good evidence that there is. I am comfortable saying, “I believe there is no God as described in the Bible.” I am not comfortable saying, “I believe there is/are no Being(s) who is/are causing this universe to exist on purpose.” [I’ll note that my care in avoiding being accused of tacit monotheism has resulted in a sentence that no one would be comfortable trying to say out loud.] I am comfortable saying, “I really don’t know, but it doesn’t seem likely.”
As I understand it, that position is best described as “agnostic”. Or maybe that new word I learned, “apatheistic”.
Not just atheistic, but agnostic, too. I would, overall, consider myself to be an agnostic, because in the general scheme of things there are potential gods which might or might not exist, per me. But there are also gods to whom I am atheistic, too, in the specific.
Having a universal standpoint on the existence of any gods is certainly possible, but I would have guessed that by and large those who fall on the non- or uncertain-believer way of thinking would mostly have different positions on different gods. Even if only because the infinite majority haven’t been considered.
Not being an expert on atheism, I’m just going to fall back on the first few lines of the Wikipedia entry:
Not to suggest that Wikipedia is authoritative, but it does have the virtue of being conveniently close to hand.
I’m finding this forum to be teeming with people who claim to be atheists, but deny that this represents their position. And the more we dig into the subject, the more their position seems to match my agnostic stance, with the proviso that they are annoyed by my “special pleading”.
Does that apply to Everett’s many-worlds hypothesis, or to the Hartle-Hawking model of the Big Bang, to Hawking’s imaginary time, n-dimensional spacetime geometries, or any number of multiverse theories?
There’s no hubris. You seem to be predisposed to an atheistic interpretation to an extent that may bias your judgment, though that’s just my impression and maybe I’m wrong. If you read just a little bit further, it also states that this is premised on the belief that “…most theological interactions with cosmology have taken place within the Christian tradition.” Which is probably true, at least within the past few hundred years or so, which would justify such a focus. AFAIK the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a highly regarded resource that is renowned for the quality of leading subject matter experts in both philosophy and the relevant sciences that have been engaged as content contributors. You really shouldn’t throw it under the bus just because you don’t like the theological implications of the first paragraph of one article.
Begging the question? I’m just repeating your own assertion back to you – the ridiculous statement you made without basis in post #119, and then again in #144 – which I’ve merely paraphrased for humorous effect, but the meaning is the same: you say that radioactive decay happens without cause, and is proof of the absence of universal causality. A statement that you have not been able to support and cannot support because it is, at best, a conjectural interpretation of QM that is quite probably false. But it’s much worse than that – it’s also useless because it’s a profoundly misguided interpretation of what “random” and “stochastic” means. You’ve used both terms and I’ve pointed out why they carry no implications about causality as you claim. As I said in that post, “There is, of course, a serious argument to be had about the causally deterministic nature of quantum mechanics and indeed of the universe, but neither you nor I know the answer, and neither does anyone else. Yet your glib statement at the beginning of all this implied that you did, and that ‘universal causality was a fiction’.” Your argument fails because the premise is an unsubstantiated conjecture, one which many theories disagree with. Perhaps you’d care to withdraw your ill-considered statement and make an argument that you could actually support.
This point has already been noted, but it bears repeating. It’s absurd to claim “no evidence” when no one has the first clue what the evidence may look like, where it might be found, and whether we have the means to detect it or understand it if we did find it. When science disproves or discounts some theorem based on absence of evidence, it’s on the basis of a specific hypothesis that predicts exactly what is expected to be found. If it’s not found, the absence of predicted evidence is real information. When we don’t have the first clue what we’re looking for, the information content of the exercise is zero.
Why would anyone even think that the limited reality of our perception is all there is to the universe when numerous solid scientific theories suggest otherwise, and why would you think that God would be manifest within the limitations of our perceived natural world at all? The absence of “proof” in this sense isn’t a liability, it’s the very nature of the true agnostic’s view of a God of unlimited possibilities. If that’s not meaningful to you, fine. It’s meaningful to those of us whose epistemology is not solely defined by science. Not surprisingly, any atheist belief system I’ve ever seen that staunchly denies the existence of God always turns out to have a ridiculously narrow anthropocentric view of what God could be, and then thinks it’s accomplished something by demolishing a nonsensical straw man that has all the philosophical utility of disproving the Easter Bunny. I think that’s pretty meaningless.
Claiming there’s no evidence when there is no evidence evident is the *only *defensible position in that circumstance. What is absurd is claiming there must be, or even can be, evidence that can’t be detected. What kind of thinking is that, I ask you? You yourself would not accept such ridiculous logic in any other context - why only apply it to god(s)?
There is no difference between “no evidence” and “undetectable evidence”. None.
You are effectively saying “I refuse to define what I mean by god because that would allow you to disprove it. That thought makes me uncomfortable so I’ll vague my way out of it by claiming there could always be some formulation of a god that you can’t disprove, even though I can’t provide that formulation (or won’t, in case you turn out to be able to disprove it after all)”.
All you are doing here is trying to stave off the cognitive dissonance that a realisation that there is in fact no god possible would cause you, by assuming a set of characteristics of god which are impossible - even for a god. I don’t know what you think you are achieving by such a formulation, but you’re not convincing anyone, I promise you.
I covered this before. This is *precisely *the claim that religion makes, that God meddles in our world constantly. According to the bible for instance the judeo-christian god manifested himself numerous times in numerous ways to numerous people, producing numerous interventions in natural processes (death, flood, burning bushes, et sequitur ad nauseam). We are constantly told this still occurs. Other religions still make the same claims, thanking their god or gods for every fortunate event and asking for divine relief from every unfortunate event. It is impossible, even for a god, to both manifest and to not be manifest. The assertion flat-out contradicts itself.
No, we have a view of what god could be that only encompasses the possible. That’s not narrowness, it’s necessary. Your view of what god could be is so ridiculously wide as to be impossible and, as I’ve shown, is self-contradictory.
Then, to put it bluntly(because I’m damn tired of asking this question over and over again without getting a straight answer), please tell us what the hell it is specifically we should be looking for, because this is the most frustrating game of cosmological hide-and-seek I’ve ever participated in. This coy “You’re just not looking in the right place or for the right thing, and we’re not gonna tellll youuuu!!” shit is for the birds.
I’m just repeating your own assertion back to you – the ridiculous statement you made without basis in post