Give us a break with the attempt to pin down definitions. Us atheists do not have an authority figure or divinely inspired tome to base our beliefs on. Many of us don’t think gods exist. Many of us think we KNOW god doesn’t exist. Many of us don’t entertain the supernatural at all. Our strength consists of freely thinking anything and everything to do with a god and thus, will be as varied as there are members to our (non)organization.
Dawkins in his book “The God Delusion” proposed a scale of belief where absolute disbelief and absolute belief are on opposite ends. Even he himself falls just short of absolute disbelief, which is where I’m at. I think it would be useful if someone can dig that scale up because I can’t find my copy of the book, but people will get nowhere trying to claim a definition on behalf of atheists and using that to lambast our beliefs
Feynman’s point was that scientists are sometimes susceptible to the same cognitive failures as all human beings. A hallmark of the scientific method is that it acknowledges its mistakes and corrects them. A hallmark of religious belief, on the other hand, is to make a virtue of cognitive failures.
Your perverse conclusion from Feynman’s anecdote seems to be that the group that is characterized by acknowledging and trying to correct cognitive mistakes is the group making more cognitive mistakes.
Consequences certainly. I don’t go to shul anymore. But non-trivial ones? Stalin and Karl Rove are both atheists, and I think you’d agree that their moral and ethical belief systems are very different. Is your lack of belief in Zeus a belief system? What are the corollaries of that?
My brother-in-law calls me closed-minded. He is LDS, and I’m an atheist apostate.
I contend that an apostate has at least at one point demonstrated great open-mindedness. I had examined my beliefs critically and completely changed my life around. He clings to the same worldview that was pushed on him since he was an infant, and he dismisses any critical information as “lies from Satan.” And yet he tells me that I’m closed-minded??
Except that there is no atheist dogma to enforce, and that in the US at least most people arrived at atheism from religion from being open-minded. In the West at least no one dies from rejecting a religion these days, but people do get ostracized. Just look at how religions have splintered over disagreements on small things. Open minded belief systems don’t push out those who disagree on the details. Do you see atheist sects? Of course not. We may disagree about lots of stuff, but that is okay.
I think this is worth following up. It seems to me that “open-minded” can mean two significantly different things.
(1) Open to accept any evidence presented, without prejudice
*(2) Undecided on an issue, where two or more possibilities have probabilities significantly different from zero given current evidence.
*
I’m not advocating anything with regard to the English language here - I think I’ve used it to mean both things myself in different contexts. But we need to be clear about what we mean in this conversation.
For example:
I’m not open-minded in sense (2) about homeopathy. We have looked hard for evidence, found none, and there is no plausible physical mechanism. It is not a virtue to maintain a neutral “open-minded” position in sense (2) of “maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, we just don’t know”. On the other hand, in the unlikely event that compelling reproducible evidence emerged that there is some “water memory” effect, I’m open-minded in sense (1) to changing my mind.
It is true that he is using agnostic to mean wishy-washy, which isn’t correct. And we’d have to know what open-minded means. Salvation by faith or by works? You can be open minded on this issue and still be Christian either way. Open minded about the divinity of Jesus? A bit iffier. Open minded about the existence of god? The moment you lack belief you become an atheist (weak variety) - though you can switch back five minutes later.
But your analogy implying that atheists are close minded by word substitution doesn’t work because of the lack of a rigid or any statement of faith. An atheist doesn’t even have to believe that no gods exist, or a certain god. I can think of lorts of potential gods I lack belief in but don’t have any evidence for believing don’t exist.
In certain cases, like Galileo, the church does a very scientific admission of error. In others, they don’t admit error, but correct obvious mistakes through rather suspicious new revelation - like the Mormons deciding that blacks can be ministers after all.
I don’t mean that. I mean atheism is still mostly self defined for individuals themselves due to lack of religious authority on the subject. I doubt most of us took a philosophy course and categorized our beliefs into an existing system.
When a proposition implies that we should expect to find evidence, if we look diligently for such evidence and find none, it is a reasonable provisional conclusion that the proposition is false.
“There exists a supernatural all-powerful being that intervenes in human affairs” would be one such proposition.
“Do you believe in God?”
I’ve been asked this as if there is unity among religions, and I should just know the aspects of the particular deity the asker is talking about because, of course, there is only one out there.
Being the open-minded person that I am, I usually respond to such a question with “which god are you referring to?”
It is extremely rare to encounter someone who responds with any indication that there are any gods even possible other than their own GOD. Most just look confused at my response.
Just wanted to say I am becoming highly allergic to use of the term “open minded”, as in “you should be more open-minded about my particular brand of bullshit”.
My argument is that it appears to me that people took Shodan’s response as an articulation of his own views, when he was pointing out the potential logical flaws of Grrr!'s argument as pertaining to Christians.
What, do the vast majority of people on this thread believe that open minded Christians are simply agnostics who lean Christian?
Really?!! And which science “disproves” the existence of God? Or can it be that, as for most Christians, science and faith can co-exist and advancements in science don’t oppose the existence of a deity? Do Christians who believe in evolution, climate change, etc. become agnostics to you?
I find it very close minded to think that someone who says God created the natural world and science being a study of the natural world is a way to deny science as opposed to find no opposition in them.
Grrr!'s original statement (post #21) imputes the ‘open minded Christian = agnostic notion’ to all Christians. And his recent responses indicate to me that he thinks Christians who are fine with science fall into the same agnosticism he articulated in Post #21. So, if not claiming true Christians are full bore anti-science, there appears to be a claim that they are, at least, very anti-science.
Which god are you talking about? please describe the aspects of the god you wish science to disprove, and all evidence you have that supports the existence of that particular god, and we’ll see what science can do.
Absent that very reasonable request, what you are asking is nonsensical.
edited to add: Shades of post #114: Being asked to disprove “God”, as if we automatically know which particular sect’s deity is being talked about .
“Disproves God” was a poor choice of words on my part. Because the stitch is, you can’t prove a negative. If I told you God was born from The Great Invisible Pink Unicorn. There’s no way you could dispute that. And my arguments for the Unicorn’s existence would be every bit as valid as your are for God’s.
But there are things in the bible, even if you take it in the allegorical sense, that are so far off the mark, it does give one a very legitimate reason to doubt the main premise of the bible (God exists).
Your issue, then, is whether religion in general, or Christianity in particular, are compatible with a scientific worldview.
In my opinion, they are not.
Everything that you believe that is supported by sound evidence is, by definition, part of science. Everything that you believe without evidence is, by definition, unscientific. It would be convenient for religions if all matters fell exclusively into one category or other, then we’d have Steven Jay Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” concept, or facile notions such as “sciences answer how questions, religion answers why questions”.
Gould’s “NOMA” is nonsense. It’s obvious that religions have always, in fact, been in the business of making truth claims about the universe. Historically, no evidence existed for most areas about which religion made such claims. As science has progressed, evidence has been discovered, and most religious truth claims have progressively been debunked. Religions have done one of two things: either to stand in opposition to science; or to acknowledge that the scienctific evidence is correct, and claim that the debunked portion of their prior claims about the nature of the universe were obviously metaphors, but that the remaining unevidenced claims of their doctrine (those which are either unfalsifiable or not yet falsified by science) are still literally true.
Highly specific negatives are easy to prove. Negative propositions simply become more difficult to disprove as a practical matter as they become more universal, poorly defined and vague.
“There are no pink unicorns in my living room.”
Easy to prove in a few seconds - provided that we have a clear definition that “pink unicorn” means something roughly horse-sized and not invisible.
This comes back to Czarcasm’s point about belief in “God”. I am an atheist, based on most common definitions of “God”. The more precisely somebody is willing to pin down what they mean by “God”, the more clearly and resolutely I am willing to state my position on the matter. But the burden is not upon me to define the term.
