Oops!!
In the previous post, I meant to say “heliocentrism” and not “geocentrism” in:
Sorry. 
I’ve given a justification of this in the very part of my post you’re quoting – ‘I’ve given a positive construction of an atheistic world view via reasonable assumptions.’, i.e. following the process of making reasonable assumptions from observations, you arrive at an atheistic world view without ever having to say anything about faith. This is explicit in the OP, along with another definition of an atheistic world view that doesn’t rely on the notion of lacking faith: ‘Everything is, in principle, accessible to reason’.
I’d give the definition of faith as:
“Believing in something that can neither be verified nor submits to Occam’s razor.”
Half Man Half Wit, it seems that the lengthy second paragraph in the OP (where you twice present atheism as “the absence of all faith”) is unnecessary.
The first paragraph basically says nothing. The Note at the beginning is patronizing and suggests that your post is the first long “important” post on SDMB.
The rest … well … has some interesting definitions.
As you point out, you merely wish to illustrate why you think something. You’ve accomplished that.
It’s okay, I got it. No, I’ve never personally verified heliocentrism, but I know that I can read books explaining the principle and that I could, were I willing to invest the time and spend money on telescopes, verify it myself. Further, I trust (and if you’re thinking about implying this trust is comparable to religious faith, save it) that NASA has launched probes that have traveled through the solar system, based on a heliocentric model.
Geocentrism was fine, but limited. One could draw up charts that would track the sun and moon and five known planets reasonably accurately, but it becomes impossibly complex when trying to go beyond that. Similarly, one could confidently believe in a flat Earth and lead a long, productive life, provided one never needed to travel more than a few miles from one’s village of birth.
I figure religion can be greatly streamlined by dropping most of the useless crap associated with it, and if it eventually gets replaced by something more useful, so be it.
First, let me say that I agree with you, not just on the issue of heliocentrism, but on the issue of atheism. However, I think that the issue of faith is not so clear-cut.
When I composed my question to you, I thought about the NASA missions, and it’s clear that a denial of those missions would involve some bizarre conspiracy theory. But, what about the average person’s acceptance of heliocentrism in the 1800’s? What would that have been based on? Because scientists said it was so?
The average person, even today, cannot even come close to explaining the technical details that led to the acceptance of heliocentrism. (Your comment about the greater accuracy of heliocentrism suggests that even you might not be aware of them.) So what is that acceptance based on? Trust? How is that trust distinctly different from faith in God? (There are differences, but some of them are not obvious.)
There are many books explaining the “nature of God”, and, up until fairly recently, the majority of scientists (and still, today the majority of the population) believes in the existence of some form of God. Why go against the “experts”? Because other “experts” say otherwise? Because personal experience trumps the experts?
That’s why I asked about your personal verification of heliocentrism. Yes, you *could *verify it – or, at least, you’re pretty sure that you can. Do you have faith in yourself? – but you haven’t. And yet you still accept it. Hard to dismiss those NASA missions, right?
But that’s not the reason why scientists originally rejected geocentrism – Uranus was discovered 55 years after Newton’s death, and Newton was born just after Galileo’s death.
Why does the average person accept heliocentrism, and how is that acceptance fundamentally different from a faith in God?
I don’t think so – I included it because for the most part, and in the correct etymology of the word, atheism is taken to mean ‘not believing in god’, but I use it in a somewhat broader meaning, i.e. independent of whether the object of faith is god or anything else supernatural; also, very often you hear that this ‘not believing in god’ is the same as ‘believing in the non-existence of god’, which it isn’t. I merely wanted to be clear on that.
Well, it says what I’m out to do – provide reasons why I think atheism should be the default stance in looking at this world.
I’m not really sure how you’re taking that from it, but it’s certainly not what I meant. It’s just that there’s been similarly lengthy OPs in the past, where the first couple of responses merely were along the ‘TLDR’-line, which is kind of understandable since long blocks of text are hard to read on a screen, especially in a forum format.
In fact, I’d been thinking about whether or not I should submit the whole thing in a larger font size, but I thought that looked stupid and stuck that note in front instead.
Thanks. 
However, you (and others making similar arguments) are essentially right in pointing out a degree of ambiguity in the meaning of faith; there, Sage Rat’s definition of it is very concise and down to the point, and I’d tend to agree with it.
But, Occam’s razor itself contains a certain degree of ambiguity, in both the commonly used form of ‘everything else being equal, the simplest explanation is best’ and the form more true to the original, ‘any explanation of a phenomenon should be free of elements not pertaining to it’, or ‘entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity’. The first form doesn’t specify what exactly is meant by ‘simple’ (certainly, on the face of it, ‘god did it’ seems much simpler an explanation for the universe than the body of knowledge of science, thought that kind of just sweeps the complexity under the god-rug), the second form has the same problem with the word ‘necessity’.
I think there’s a rather surprising reason for the problems in getting an exact definition of faith, which is that the notion transgresses the borders between the individual and the group. For an individual, it’s perfectly easy to define faith: it’s a belief in things not in evidence. If he only observes white sheep, to believe in the existence of black sheep would be faith.
However, once placed in a group, the individual faces the puzzling dilemma of whether or not he is to believe claims made by other individuals in that group that he cannot himself verify – for instance, a claim of the existence of black sheep he’s never seen. Would it be faith for him to accept that claim? (There’s strictly speaking another issue, that of claims that are essentially unverifiable; I don’t expect much disagreement when I say that those would have to be taken on faith.)
Well, the problem arose only by placing the individual in a group, so lets look if we can’t derive a solution from this circumstance, as well – and I think that’s possible, at least provided that the other members of this group have a similar inclination to build their world view from reasonable assumptions; because then, the group’s consensus becomes a measure of a claim’s likelihood, or its credibility, and in this context, believing against credibility would be faith.
Let’s look at the sheep again: if there is a large number of white sheep, and a small number of black ones, the likelihood for each member of the group to observe a black sheep is small; however, once they do observe one, they know that black sheep exist, thus, the amount of members of the group convinced of the existence of black sheep will grow steadily, until it forms a majority (well, that’s strictly speaking not guaranteed to happen, but very likely), and thus, a consensus that black sheep exist is achieved. Now, I am most emphatically not saying ‘just follow the majority’, because even in that ludicrously simplified example, the majority started out being wrong; however, if that process I’ve just outlined actually works as I envision it, the number of ‘wrong’ people will gradually decline, giving way to a majority of ‘right’ people.
This is, of course, is a toy model and widely inapplicable in the real world, but I think it at least illustrates the problems with the ‘super-personal’ aspect of the definition of faith and the ambiguities that result from this, in addition to giving an indication to how they may be resolved; in the real world, there would be quite a bit more going into the notion of credibility, some of it again ambiguous (at least to the individual – think of the things a conspiracy theorist finds credible versus a more common sense standpoint), but that’s the catch of living in the real world, were things tend to get a bit smudgy around the edges.
However, this is all only somewhat tangentially related to my main arguments, which mainly take faith as a belief in things not in evidence, or claims not decidable via evidence; the third form, the belief against credibility, is more rarely encountered in religion and more an element of various UFO or Bigfoot beliefs or the like that don’t feature a transcendental element per se.
Hey, nice post!
Seriously. I especially like your distinction between the individual and the group when it comes to faith.
As for this point:
You now have the issue of what is evidence, which I won’t get into now.
I don’t believe in the existence in the God but I still find your arguments weak. One reason is that you redefine “atheism” in a way that confounds rather than clarifies. Also, your definition of “reasonable assumptions” seems to be your definition of atheism.
Much of argument sounds like this:
Faith is bad.
Atheism is good.
Why?
Because atheism is good and faith is bad.
In some ways, your OP sounds like some of the “proofs” for the existence of God, but not as well structured. (Good structure, of course, doesn’t mean that the argument is sound.) These proofs typically have an implicit assumption for the existence of God in one of the premises, so that the conclusion is necessarily: Therefore, God exists.
You spent a lot of time in your OP and in this thread. It would take even more time to analyze your arguments, and I’m not prepared to do so. (Nor do I know why I should.)
You said that you “merely wish to illustrate why [you] think that … atheism is the only valid null hypothesis.”
I merely suggest that you review some of the proofs of God and see if your arguments have similar flaws.
Take care.
Actually history argues against that. For much of human history there was little relationship between power and scientific sophistication. After all Aristotle was the one who offered the four-element theory, yet if I recall correctly his pupil was pretty good at conquest. The Chinese had the world’s most sophisticated science and technology for many centuries, but it couldn’t save them from the Mongols. It’s true that within the last five centuries, western civilization has spread its culture with the aid of technology. Historically speaking, that’s quite unusual.
All that is drifting away from the topic at hand. You and your friends keep wanting to make statements about what any imaginable thinking species would have to think. My problem is that you keep restricting these alternate species to thinking in human ways. The fact of the matter is that we have no clue what an alternate species would think. Their thinking might not even be recognizable as ‘thinking’ to us. Their definition of “something useful” might be completely different from ours. Their species might not feature “rival cultures”. It might not feature cultures at all.
Indeed, there is a somewhat underrecognized epistemological issue at the foundations of this, which is what I’ve tried to get at in my previous post; another example of this would be in court, where guilt has to be proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. However, just as we take the legal system to work reasonably well, on the whole, we can probably live with those slight ambiguities in the definition of faith/the use of Occam’s razor/my ‘reasonably assumptions’.
In the part you quoted, it should not be of any detriment to take ‘evidence’ as meaning ‘direct evidence’, in an empirical sense, i.e. observational evidence.
That’s not quite what I was getting at, and good and bad are things I wouldn’t want to talk about in this context at all. No, my point is that only from an atheistic stance, using what I’ve called my ‘reasonable assumptions’ (which is really just tantamount to saying ‘following the scientific method’), can one arrive at a picture of the world which eventually converges upon truth, in so far as it exists. From a stance of faith, all assertions about the world are, strictly speaking, of an undecidable truth value. This is arrived at from comparing the epistemological nature of faith and atheism, about which I don’t think I’ve made any assumption beyond the impossibility of preferring one faith over another, even if one of them should be true (that’s why I said the exact definition of faith didn’t matter much, as long as the preceding holds).
I hope you don’t mind me being such a stickler, but I feel I’m probably not expressing myself too well (I’ll use the ‘foreign language’ excuse on that again). 
Actually, we merely restrict them to existing in the same physical universe; their manner of thinking plays no significant role at all.
Actually your take on Newton’s career is not backed by historical fact. Here’s a description of a book on Newton’s intellectual life:
I haven’t read the book itself, but that description corresponds to everything that I’ve read about Newton. He was a deeply religious man and he did not at all “leave behind” his religious beliefs when he turned to scientific topics. In fact he viewed all of his discoveries in physics and astronomy as being fraught with religious meaning. He even wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury encouraging him to use the theory of universal gravitation as evidence for the correctness of Christian doctrine.
If I wanted to, I could read up on Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, painstakingly replicate their observations (none of which involved giant leaps of logic) and come to the same conclusions, or at least find no logical errors.
If you can give me a similar connect-the-dots path to your god, please do so.
Is four-elements theory necessary for the refinement of iron? I daresay having people who knew how to make iron weapons was more useful to Alexander than Aristotle’s theories, and it’s unclear to me if someone fully versed in four-element theory would necessarily make a good blacksmith.
You didn’t answer my question. And, you make a bizarre claim. How do you know what conclusions you would come to before you do the observations? Seems like you’re taking a huge leap of faith.
Which god would that be?
Faith in the scientific method?
Given the advances it has given us over the last two hundred years, it seems like it does pretty well. When has a deity changed the lot of the common man?
This just illustrates that common human frailty of holding fixed concepts and an ability to find patterns to reinforce them…even when they aren’t there. Newton may have made some vital discoveries, but I bet he made a lot of wrongful assumptions, as well.
Most education up until fairly recently was led by the church and if you were an atheist, you wasn’t going to get any schooling. Some people have used this as an argument for the good religion has done for mankind, but religion never ever EVER did it for the goodness of humanity. They did it to propagate their beliefs.
Most people who went to church in Newton’s day wouldn’t have even been able to read ‘the good book’, never mind find the time to knock up a theory about a heliocentric universe.
I’m okay with that. Do you have faith in the scientific method? Can you describe what it is? Do you use it? Does everyone agree on what is? Did Copernicus use the scientific method to formulate heliocentrism?
What is the relevance of your “Proof by technological achievement”? What would your conclusion have been two hundred years ago?
According to Half Man Half Wit, only atheism “allows for the increase of knowledge about the world”. How much scientific and technological achievement has been by atheists and how much by theists?
Nothing in any of my arguments denies theists the possibility of technological advancement, at least that I could see. My only contention is that, if you believe in the existence of an omnipotent supreme being or anything like that, there is the possibility that nothing you now think you know has any validity in the next second if that being decides he’d rather do things differently from now on.
People seem to have great problems with this point, so perhaps I’m explaining myself badly; it’s in fact perfectly simple: Let’s go back to sheep once more. You observe a white sheep; you then know that the sentence ‘there are white sheep’ is true. But, you just happen to exist in a world with an all-powerful and somewhat mischievous wizard, who, just as you make your observation, jumps out from behind a tree, snaps his fingers, and all sheep turn spontaneously pink. Now, what you have previously known to be a true assertion is suddenly falsified. And you have to contend with this possibility regarding every assertion in a faith-based world view.
That doesn’t mean that any statement you make can’t possibly be true – if the wizard doesn’t intervene, your knowledge of the whiteness of sheep remains true after the initial observation. But it always has to include the qualifier ‘if the wizard doesn’t intervene’. Even if you had perfect knowledge of the absolute truth in such a world, the wizard could still change everything at his whim. In a world without the possibility of such a wizard, perfect knowledge remains perfect knowledge.
Or science, or much of anything else right? What do you think that means?
I enjoyed the OP and am in the process of reading the rest of the thread.
I’m having a hard time understanding how this is relevant to your points on atheism.
Why is this qualifier any more relevant than “unless an asteroid destroys all life tomorrow” or any other scenario? Does it really say anything about knowledge, what is true, or the logic of atheism vs. theism?
Something like if enough people are banging a drum, eventually the people will follow the beat. Especially if the people banging the drums also have whips to encourage the people.