Rather than hijack this thread, I actually went ahead and started a GD thread about it.
I’m a five. There is a certain fanciful part of me that can’t seem to let go of the idea of gods. In the end the rational part of my mind reins in the fanciful part. Of course, the fanciful part of me wants there to be gods so we (as a species) can kill them and take their place, so I certainly have no reason to worship anyone or anything.
Bit agressive, don’t you think? Are you angling for a toaster oven or somesuch? 
For me, I’ll go with 6 point something or other… and agree with a fellow Doper who said (quoting from memory): I’m technically agnostic, but an atheist with regards to any religions I know of.
6.9ish. I am essentially certain that there is no God, but as a man of science I cannot conclusively prove his absence. Voted 7 in the poll though.
Oooooo! I was just hoping for the set of steak knives. A toaster over would be awesome!
Let’s play “You don’t try to tell me that you know more about my beliefs than I do, and I’ll do you the same respect.” I don’t want to be told that I’m a waffly atheist any more than you want to be told that you are a Christian who isn’t trying hard enough. It’s not cool.
The continuum between “belief” and “atheism” never really made much sense to me. How can I have an opinion of something I don’t know, have no way of knowing, and which has absolutely no impact on my life? It’s like having a strong opinion on what color underpants you thing Barack Obama is wearing tonight- you just have no way of knowing, and it doesn’t matter in any real way, so anything you come up with is just going to be meaningless speculation for no reason.
But agnosticism doesn’t cut it for me, either. Unlike a lot of you guys, I think it’s pretty obvious that most religions acknowledge to some level or another that “God” is about metaphors and find ways to talk about the big things in life that we don’t have the linguistic capacity to handle.
Hinduism is the most elegant example- it’s sometimes a “We just worship the tree down the road” animist folk religion, sometimes a monotheism style heaven’n’hell religion, sometimes a fairly unreligious set of rituals an cultural practices, sometimes an incredibly complicated and nuanced body of philosophical thought, sometimes an identity that is free from any particular set of beliefs…it’s all these things and more, at once, with no contradiction. Some levels of Hindusm communicate a concept of “God” that is a wonderfully elegant set of self-aware metaphors for understanding death, human connection, the crazy existence of the universe, the passing of time, etc. This is a concept of “God” that makes pretty good sense to me, although it also runs the risk of being so diffuse as to be meaningless. Other levels of Hinduism say stuff like “Now you have to go chant to a statue or you go to hell.” This is a version of God I don’t really “get,” but in ways isn’t it working off the same set of metaphors, the same sets of truths? If you are not self-aware of the metaphors you are working with, does that somehow make them less valid?
Christianity puts on a lot more pretense and is less self-aware, but I think it has all of those aspects that Hindusim has, as well. The Christianity of a Guatemalan peasant half-infused with old Mayan gods is different than the Christianity of the fire’n’brimstone middle American is different that the Christianity of a Catholic priest in it for social work is different than the lady who go to church on holidays and prays when something bad happens is different than some of the more difficult and complex bits of Christian philosophy- which can and do get atheistic and metaphorical plenty often. I’m actually pretty certain that on the deepest, darkest, most hidden level, very very few people anywhere truly believe in a man-in-the-sky God, even if they will never fully realize that. But they are using this man-in-the-sky God metaphor dealy to talk about some real things that are going on that nobody anywhere has any good way of understanding (How can we make sense of death? What exactly are we supposed to be doing with our lives? What the hell even is consciousness, and is it a good thing?) and so is that what God is about?
In all of that is a lot of stuff that can be called God, a lot of truths, a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem really true, but may be operating as truths…and just a whole hell of a lot of stuff going on.
I don’t really see any good way to define “God” that isn’t either so narrow or so broad as to be meaningless. It’s undefined and undefinable, so there just isn’t any point in worrying about it too much.
Aha! So, you don’t believe in a God or gods in any literal sense.
Atheist.
I can’t make absolute pronouncements about anything, but the chance of an actual god existing is at least as unlikely as me suddenly being thrown around in time by some random event.
No. I have no idea what “God, in a literal sense” even means.
How would I know God if I saw it? “Omnipresent” seems to be a big criteria, for example, but what would that even look like? How is something omnipresent or not omnipresent? How would you know if it is or isn’t so? It’s not even a concept that can be held in your head, much less ever even approaching being verifiable. Omniscience? What, in practical terms, does omniscience refer to? I get the concept, but how does it work? What does it look like? I don’t think there is any answer to it. It’s a concept that makes sense, but doesn’t have any actual meaning- like the superintelligent shade of blue. Does a superintellegent shade of blue exist? I have no idea what that is even supposed to mean.
Pretty much everything related to God is like that- the words make sentences, but they don’t actually refer to anything that can be meaningfully talked about. It’s just a lot of vagueness, self-referentiality and non-sequiturs. The answer isn’t “yes” or “no,” it’s “I lost you a long time ago, buddy.”
I also think it’s pretty ballsy for people to say “Oh, but my definition of the God I don’t believe in is the one true definition of the God that doesn’t exist.” We can define God as narrowly or as widely as we like so that it always exists or could never exist, but that doesn’t give any of it any actual meaning because it’s an undefined word that can’t be thought about, perceived, verified or even really communicated.
Aaaaaannnnddd … you still don’t realize you’re an atheist?
The mind boggles.
Edit: Allow me to elaborate. You’re saying you can imagine any possible definition of “God,” including some definition that essentially trivializes the concept so much (e.g. something like “god is the creative force that exists in humanity”) so that it’s virtually impossible not to believe in it, but also which removes any supernatural component to the definition, and can’t see that this is in a logical sense equivalent to atheism?
If you don’t believe in a supernatural “god” or “gods,” in other words any commonly accepted definition of those words, then you’re an atheist. Trying to grasp any some abstruse definition of your own does not change that, by definition of the word.
This is really simplier than all that.
The default position is atheism. You aren’t born with a theistic belief. At some point you decide you have an idea of God you believe in, whether as part of a formal religion or something you concocted yourself. At the point where you start believing, you become a theist. If you haven’t reached that point (which includes never bothering to think about the issue, or not having any opinion on the issue, etc), you’re a-theist. Untheistic.
I don’t know and am not in a position to choose either side. I just don’t have anything to go on.
So I guess Dawkins’ scale fails me.
- “De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero” sums it up nicely.
I have a longer version I sometimes use which goes “I believe that there is an infinitessimal but non-zero probability of some sort of deity, deities or other sentient supernatural forces existing, but as this existence cannot be demonstrated through conventional means and as this existence is not required to explain the various workings of the universe it seems sensible to assume the non-existence of such force or forces for all practical purposes without requiring a position of absolute non-existence” but the shorter version works too.
I’m a 2 on this scale. I believe in God strongly enough that I live my as though Christianity as I understand is true. In practice, that results in a life that many fundamentalists would view with great misgivings, and that atheists might view as fanatical. I’m at peace with what I believe and how that fits into material reality, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.
Okay, if that’s a two, then that’s me. I pray every day for being able to be 100% sure, but it never happens.
I do have problems with doubts sometimes, but I choose to regard that as part of having OCD, and or due to spending too much time with people who reflexively doubt.
I also agree with the person who said that believing God doesn’t exist is depressing, and that my consciousness plays a huge role in my belief in God. In fact, I sometimes say (probably incorrectly) Cogito ergo Deus exsistit. I think it’s that fundamental.
And a random universe wouldn’t have conscious beings in it. Yeah, it’s not falsifiable, as said conscious beings are required to make the claim. I don’t care.
And then just think of the odds against your being ONE of those conscious beings!!! It’s just amazing. :rolleyes:
For most definitions of god, I am sure he does not exist because the definition contradicts itself or is meaningless.
But in the abstract, I can’t rule out the existence of a god, so I voted option 6.
But I don’t like this kind of scale for two reasons:
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Firstly, it’s wrong to frame it about probability. I don’t believe in gods because I have no reason to – no evidence to suggest they exist. My thought process did not begin with working out probabilities and picking the highest-probability option.
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The importance of the “Is there a god?” question is already ridiculously over-inflated. Seriously.
I don’t care if there’s a god. I care about questions like “What is consciousness?”, “Why does anything exist?” etc. The god question is only important by proxy because some people define him as essentially setting the answers to all those other questions.
But since we have no evidence such a god exists, let alone his properties, it’s just one helluva hijack.
I have trouble figuring out what “supernatural” is supposed to mean, but I see no reason why there couldn’t be any number of “the whole is more than the sum of it’s parts” things. If your mind is going to boggle at someone who does not fit into the categories you’ve decided are important, I’m much much more of an agnostic than an atheist. The existence and nature of God is completely unknowable and with nothing to work off of, it’s pretty dumb and a waste of time to hazard a guess.
If you have trouble with what ordinary words mean, you might try doing some reading. Maybe a dictionary, to start with.
I cast my vote a few days ago as 7, which I stick by. I came back to this thread to express an important point of confusion for me.
There’s absolutely no evidence for the existence of gods. Also, no one comes into this world with a belief in gods; it requires some level/type of inculcation and, depending on ones environment, said inculcation will cause (or promote) beliefs common to it. In other words, people are taught to believe what their peers (or cohort) believe. A child born in the US by Christian parents, given up for adoption, and ultimately raised by Muslims in Yemen, grows up as a Muslim and believes as a Muslim and defends that faith as the truth as fervently as any devout Christian. Although this example is a personal anecdote, I strongly suspect it holds true for any faith.
In addition, children who are raised without any theistic belief will, generally, remain atheistic into adulthood. And then you have those, like me, who were raised in a religious environment, within whom the theistic inculcation just doesn’t take.
Yet people I respect, and who I consider reasonably intelligent, dismiss continually mounting data on why people believe as they do, that should, at minimum, bring one to an Occam’s razor epiphany. It isn’t so much that they believe in a god or gods that confounds me, it’s that they continue to so fervently in light of facts even they are willing to acknowledge. I can understand unenlightenment because of ignorance, but to be aware and to choose to remain unenlightened, for lack of a better expression, astounds me, and I cannot adequately express how odd I find this.