Technically, is agnosticism the only valid option?

Quite right. But that’s the Christian God – a 2000-year old invention of the same level of naivety as Greek mythology. And there are certainly some aspects of it that are anthropomorphic, just like the earlier mythological gods, because one sees paintings and statues of the Christian God all the time, not to mention being represented as a disembodied deep well-modulated voice coming out of a burning bush.

I notice that Richard Dawkins and many other strong atheists do the same thing: they deny the existence of God by attacking the silly mythological creations of organized religions.

The point is, however, that one can develop more abstract and much more rational, scientifically compatible definitions of God that are not so easily dismissed. Agnostics implicitly acknowledge this. Devoted atheists refer to this as “bullshit”. :wink:

“None” assumes that you have a basis on which to define what the evidence must look like.

No, they are not, but for some reason you keep bringing it up. Perhaps you didn’t claim that I ever said it (I didn’t) but you must surely be under the impression that somebody must have said it, else why keep mentioning it?

No, it does not. It’s simply not directly detectable. So are a lot of things. So is any past or future, the state of a place 100 light-years away right now, the presence of dinosaurs, or the state of the Big Bang at 10[sup]-10[/sup] seconds. It doesn’t stop us from building useful models to describe these things and to test our hypotheses about them. Indeed certain information not being directly detectable is deeply entrenched in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and even (arguably) in Schrodinger’s illustrious cat.

No, that’s one common application of the prefix “a” and one meaning of “atheist”, but there are others – hence the distinction between weak and strong atheism, or what is sometimes called negative and positive atheism. Strong atheism, simply stated, is the explicit denial of the existence of any God, and it is indeed a belief system, the kind that drives one to write books with titles like The God Delusion. Someone with the belief that you describe should probably call themselves “agnostic” to avoid ambiguity. The term “gnostic” alludes to the possession of knowledge, usually spiritual knowledge like personal knowledge about the existence or non-existence of God, so “agnostic” means that in that respect, “I ain’t got any”. But people use words in different ways, and meanings change over time. I certainly prefer “agnostic”.

The one thing missing from the religious types is evidence. I would love for you to show me a scientific break through that arose from a hypothesis that there was zero supporting evidence for in the first place. The religious run their lives on belief in that which there not only is no supporting evidence for but there Cannot be supporting evidence for.

A tangent but you should check out Thinking Fast and Slow
The voluntary part is in question to a fair degree. I can’t remember the particular chapter but the human brain is wired to believe and it takes effort to doubt.

Then construct one, that there is evidence for.

Naah, it comes pre-loaded.

Of course it does - it tells me stonkloads about you - such as that you’re the kind of person who has no problem calling themselves an atheist, which is a very informative data point.

It’s never been neutral - it wasn’t neutral when it was the Greek term for those who deliberately blasphemed, and it wasn’t a neutral term when it was repurposed by Enlightenment philosophers.

Hell yes. Especially the latter.

Baggage based on common past usage.

As an example, someone who calls themselves a “deist” likely has done a bit more introspection than someone who just calls themselves a Southern Baptist…

By “not so easily dismissed” do you mean impossible to dismiss, or just that it’s harder to dismiss?

I’ve yet to encounter a rational definition of god. Any god that is indistinguishable from no-god is bullshit. There’s no rational reason to be open to the existence of such gods except in the trivial “open to anything not impossible, if supplied with evidence”-sense.

For some definitions of agnostic this is all they mean, but I agree whole heartedly with those who consider that a useless definition. You may pat yourself on the back for not falling in the “100% sure”-trap you perceive some atheist to fall into, but I’d much rather be suspected of believing that instead of being believed to be open to the capital G god of global monotheism, which is what a majority hears when you say agnostic.

Someone did. I even quoted them.

No, it’s not detectable and never can be. It is unknowable.

So are all these things God?

If not, do you agree that “God is that which is unknowable and unknown” is a bullshit definition of God?

Which we can do with definitions of God, too. So I don’t see the problem here.

You do realise Schroedinger’s Gedankenexperiment was intended to ridicule that notion, right?

You know Him and Her as love.

I can’t begin to imagine why Dawkins et al waste their time considering the validity of religion as practiced by billions.

Surely they would be far wiser spending their time pondering the existence of the type of deity no one believes in but which a tiny minority of intellectuals spend their time mentally masturbating over.

By all means, go for it…
“Unknown and unknowable” is not it.

I don’t know if you’re talking about me, as I’m the one who called “bullshit”, but I’m not an atheist of any stripe, never mind a “devoted” one.

Can one, now?

That they can be convinced that something exists without having to bother to provide any evidence that it exists, and that this “something” can do magic.

Love is a god? I thought Love was a battlefield.

Your answer is nonsensical.

Is “Hate” a god too?
What about “Confusion”? Is there a god of “Meh”?

You expect a on line description of God to someone who does not know God to make sense? :smack:

Whenever you experience Love, you are experiencing not a emotion, but God working and one with His/Her child. It does not matter the faith (or non-faith) of the child, just the heart and the ability of Love to flow through it. At that moment the Father/Mother and child are one with each other. Love is also a coordinated effort of the Father/Mother. It is not disconnected from each other, but purposely and intelligently driven.

There are many gods Czarcasm, I do not know them all. Over the years I have seen a pattern and believe that you also have a god, what is commonly called the ‘Old Testament’ God, one of hate and wrath, which allows you to claim that you dismiss ‘God’ altogether, although you often bring this god up in your postings which sort of indicates that it is your god, as belief in this God is steering your life. So in that yes I would say there is a Hate god.

'twasn’t me.

That’s ridiculous. For one thing if you picked a sufficiently massive black hole you could safely fall into it and know. More to the point, though, a black hole forms according to physical principles, and we should be able to model it in accordance with how well we understand those principles. There are already some plausible hypothesis of what the inside of a black hole would be like, and with better understanding we could no doubt build accurate models and perhaps test them indirectly, like we do with much of science.

No, all those things are areas of inquiry which cannot be directly observed and about which we’ve made informed indirect inferences, and which for some reason you choose to keep using as straw men to conduct a “God” argument.

Not really, but there are better ways of putting it. I favor an approach based on the fact that any scientific description of the universe must always necessarily be incomplete. We can trace the creation of the elements and the stars and galaxies to the Big Bang but that begs the obvious question of where the singularity came from and what governed its properties. We can sidestep the question with the Hartle-Hawking proposal of a no-boundary universe existing in imaginary Euclidian time, but then we have to ask where that came from. We can posit that Big Bangs are occurring forever in some hypothetical multiverse, but that raises more questions than answers. And I would even ask: at what point in this ontological escalation are we longer dealing with the natural world any more at all?

One possible answer to all of those is along the lines of, “don’t bother me kid, go out and play”, but I prefer a more metaphysical exploration. I’m even more bothered by those, like Lawrence Krauss, who don’t even accept these limitations and argue that modern physics has rendered both philosophy and religion obsolete. I just think that that’s astoundingly narrow-minded.

Which we absolutely cannot do with definitions of God, which is the whole point.

Indeed it was. Yet most of the Copenhagen interpretation that he was ridiculing, like quantum superposition and the uncertainty principle, are today widely accepted. Most believe that his attempt to present this as a paradox fails because the cat itself is the detector that triggers the collapse of quantum superposition, so there’s no paradox. Furthermore – and this was my bracketed “arguably” – according to the “many worlds” interpretation due to Hugh Everett, there is no quantum collapse at all, and the cat simply decoheres, emerging simultaneously dead and alive in different parallel universes. So not only might Shrodinger’s supposed paradox be, in a sense, literally true, but it’s another example in my list of things that are not directly detectable but about which we can build reasonable theories and models. “Many worlds” is being taken quite seriously and people like David Deutsch are convinced that this is why quantum computing works. But once again, while we might be able to demonstrate glimmerings of understanding, we are totally at a loss trying to explain the question, “how did it come to be this way?”

What a petty thing to say.

Dawkins isn’t a strong atheist. Or at least his conclusion in “The God Delusion”, which he repeats several times and also uses at speeches, is that “God almost certainly does not exist” - he’s specifically allowing for the possibility that our provisional knowledge is incomplete, and some sort of god is out there, but he sees no reason to believe it’s true.

You’re getting the proces reversed here. We observe something. We gather data about it. We attempt to explain how that something works. We test those hypotheses against others. We seek out alternate explanations, or reasons why that explanation is wrong. You only make new assumptions when necessary to craft an explanation. You attempt to falsify those assumptions.

Once upon a time, mankind needed gods to explain why the rains came some years and not others. Why there was thunder and lightning. Why the sun moves across the sky. Those were all poor, incorrect, arbitrary explanations for natural phenomena. In the same way, “bearded guy in the sky” is a bad explanation for the existence of everything. Just as “I don’t know” is a superior explanation to weather cycles or the movement of the sun, “I don’t know” is a better explanation for the existence of the universe than a bearded sky dude, or a giant invisible turtle, or any other arbitrary unfounded explanation. The need for God as part of our understanding of the world shrinks as our knowledge and understanding of it grows.

We craft the explanation from the information we have, and the thing that needs to be explained, and our ability to gather evidence and falsify that explanation. It’s not a given that there’s a god-sized hole in reality that needs to be filled, let alone that it can be filled by completely arbitrary explanations from iron age men. If “God is a sky dude whose favorite color is red” and “God is a sky dude whose favorite color is blue” are equally valid explanations, then they’re not useful explanations at all. So you would be right to say “the blue-loving god almost certainly doesn’t exist” and the red-loving god as well.

As above, “The God Delusion” is not a strong atheist position, or such a thing is meaningless. It is practically meaningless, I think. The distinction between “strong” and “weak” atheists are mostly a straw man. Maybe some teenagers who are trying to sound edgey and rebel against their religious parents are definitive in saying god doesn’t exist, but practically all of atheism comes from skepticism, of which a core tenet is that all knowledge is provisional. Bearded sky dude has roughly the same non-zero chance of existing as leprechauns, dragons, or Russell’s teapot.

As I mentioned previously in the thread, “there is no god” is almost always shorthand for “your idea of a bearded sky dude who hates gay people is almost certainly false”, not “I am absolutely sure that there’s there’s not some sort of vague subtle entity out there hiding in the gaps in our knowledge that could be construed as some sort of god-like entity”

As for the rest - all of the subdividing of the term atheists, classifying weak and strong ones, dancing around the word agnostic - it’s all part of this vast elaborate undue deference that we give to religion. It’s socially unacceptable to treat religion the same way you treat other supernatural bunk - people dedicate their entire lives to serving it and the vast majority of people give lip service to believing it. So rather than treating it like the simple “Does Santa Claus exist?” issue that it really is, instead we get into flowery philosophical arguments about the nature of knowledge and certainty and all the other shit that we would never bring up if we were talking about whether ghosts were real.

All of that shit is the result of straw men by religious people to ascribe beliefs to atheists “you KNOW there’s no god, that’s as arrogant and faith-based as knowing there is a god!” or people trying to avoid the backlash of not believing “oh, I’m not one of those filthy militant atheists, no… I’m agnostic. That’s totally more warm and cuddly”

useless pablum - much like a fortune cookie or horoscope - its so generic as to be useless in any real sense.

You also can’t show that its “purposely or intelligently driven” in any objective measure or manner.

Yes, I know. So why you think I was talking to you, I have no idea.

Highly irradiated smears of basic particles can’t “know” anything.

And we could use the same process on any God with ascribed properties. As we already have done.

Because you’re not telling me what makes “God” a different category of enquiry. Of course we can make indirect inferences about the nature of God…once such is defined.

I’ve never actually read anyone willingly subscribe to the God of the Gaps with such … outright enthusiasm before. It’s refreshing, I guess.

Only if you subscribe to the fiction of universal causality.

And that’s not what “begging the question” means…

Of course we can. We must. Otherwise such a definition isn’t “more rational” nor “scientifically compatible”, it’s just bullshit.

Doesn’t make the thought experiment any less absurd, and a poor choice of metaphor for God.

The “rational, scientifically compatible” definition of which, despite being supposedly so possible to give, you still haven’t done. What is your definition of God?

This is worth emphasising lest it be lost in a fairly sizeable post. I’ve yet to be given a convincing reason why a person’s religious views deserve any greater respect than those springing from, say, a political worldview.