Why do atheists insist that atheism is a 'non-belief'?

Great Debates
501

Disclaimer: I am not an atheist.
I assume it is a lot like the position that theistic gnostics take: a “belief” is something that one holds to be true without knowing; because it is not a conclusion drawn from questioning but is instead an answer embraced in order to not have to ask the question, a belief is generally a blockade against further questioning.

To be “agnostic” as the term is generally used is to say “I do not know”. A gnostic would be a person who begins with “I do not know” and then seeks to know, by questioning. And the answers received, the conclusions reached, would not preclude continuing to question, a process which could reverse (or otherwise change) the conclusions reached.

To have a “belief”, in the sense of claiming certainty, in the sense of precluding any (or any further) questioning, is to enshrine some conclusions and wall them off from the process of inquiry. It’s a box from which no line leads anywhere else; beliefs are by their very nature not amenable to being reversed or modified by additional information, experience, etc.

I would assume most atheists, especially on this board, place a high value on the scientific method and the spirit of rational inquiry that is embodied there. The scientific method is a gnostic method; science does not have “beliefs”; it contains no conclusion that is enshrined against further inquiry. One can have explanatory theories and working hypotheses but one does not have “proven facts”. Even spectacularly well-established conclusions that are informally regarded as axiomatic are, in the formal arena of science, supposed to be open to reconsideration and reinvestigation.

Note that that is not to say that plenty of individual people who profess to being scientists, or atheists or both, do not enshrine certain conclusions into “beliefs”; they do. In the course of Stoid’s recent thread about whether it is proper to assert as fact that there is no afterlife, this was in evidence. (I am tempted to chalk up much of that to a certain exasperated “oh please not this again!” reaction rather than a formal assertion that, yes, there are Truths in science that should be enshrined and never opened to question).

I would regard an atheist who says “There is no such thing as God; I act on the assumption, well-supported by all evidence, that all belief in God stems from things other than the existence of God, and reciprocally I conclude that there is no God, having seen no evidence or reason to believe otherwise” to be a person who has reached an operant conclusion, not as a person who harbors a belief about the nonexistence of God. Such a person is right when they say it’s not a belief.

Or I would unless that person displayed a fundamental unwillingness to suspend in the formal spirit of inquiry their conclusion and consider the matter anew, while maintaining the claim that they are debating or discussing the issue instead of refusing to do so. THAT kind of behavior actually IS belief-type behavior. It’s got the same walled-off conviction of certainty.

(In the spirit of “oh please not this again”, I don’t think an atheist who declines to debate can fairly be dubbed a “believer in atheism” even if it’s not in evidence that they are not)

502

She would be a shocker of a president but as an Aussie I look with pride at our prime minister, a female,an atheist, living in sin and worst of all a ranga!

503

So who represents the chest-beating bible-thumping populist political factions of Australia, assuming such a thing exists? Steve Fielding? Now picture a whole television network that just loooooves him, and a sizable chunk of the population eating it up.
By the way, Canada had a female prime minister way back in 1993. I don’t know what a “ranga” is, so I’ll just assume she was one, too.

504

Yeah we don’t have many of bible thumping factions down-under. Even Steve is fairly liberal compared to what we see from America but he is part of the party started by the AOG. He has one seat and until now seems to be doing a good job for traditional families. He does not like gays, well he loves gays as people but not their sexuality. At least he is trying to be Christian!

We had the Christian Democratic Party [Call to Australia] who had a couple of seats in a state government but did not hold any balance of power so had small impact. Fred Nile is a loony but people put up with him because at the time he did try to help druggies etc at Kings Cross.

Aussies tend to accept some of these from the right if they are actually doing some kind of community good. Although I do despair the rise of the Life Ministries, Hillsong Megachurches etc.

You scare me with your TV insight.

One view is that due to compulsory voting our pollies do not have to get too extreme. They tend to work the middle that exists between the left and right to gain votes.

We must keep a strong eye on these fundys.

Ranga - A person with red hair, short for orangutan.

505

In 35 years of this I’ve met exactly one atheist who claimed to “know” that there is no god. And he was a nitwit. (And not on the SDMB). Given the large numbers of gods, atheism is not something you can prove to the extent you can say you know it. And you are talking about conclusions being provisional, which I agree with.

An atheist’s belief does not claim certainty. For most of us, it is provisional. The proper magic tricks might well convince me that some god does exist. This way of changing my opinion is far different from what we are usually asked to do, which is to believe and then see if it feels good.
The type of belief that rejects evidence serving to falsify it is far more likely to be found in theists. Not all of them, of course, but given creationism, a lot.

Science may not have beliefs, but scientists sure do, and if you doubt this you have not been around science. Of course the belief is supposedly based on solid fact, but most experimental results can have several interpretations, and much data is far from clear enough to soundly falsify anything. The reason for demanding repeatability is the recognition that a scientist’s belief in a hypothesis he came up with may well cloud his interpretation of the results, and to be valid they must be repeated by someone who is both not committed to the theory but who may be extremely skeptical.

The ideal scientist will quickly withdraw a hypothesis, but it is my observation that the more it has been circulated the harder it will be. I’ve come up with some ideas I refuted myself before telling anyone - nothing easier. If I had gotten a grant for them, quite a bit harder.

But this person can have reached this conclusion based on only a very small subset of possible gods. If I say “I lack God belief” and support it by saying that I’ve been able to reject reasons for god belief presented, and have no reason to believe or not to believe in any others, I agree that there is no belief. If I say, I believe that there are no gods" I’m definitely expressing a provisional belief about things for which I have no evidence. I freely admit to belief in this case.

506

Because something had to set the wheels in motion. And that something could not be of this realm. It would have to be able to operate outside the laws of physics. At some point He/It decided to create what we see. I believe that would require sentience, a mind that would decide to create something, and then create it. At some point, before the universe was created, the idea of it’s creation took hold.

Huh? That post was a response to The Hamster King, Post 417, I think. Did I misattribute it elsewhere?

507

That’s the weak and strong atheist position. I’ve seen it raised on these boards by atheists. And I’ve seen other atheists whine about it when I adopted their terminology in another thread. What I think it boils down to, for some, is that they don’t want to have to defend a position of belief, but on the other hand they want their position to merit the respect of a well thought out one. Kinda hard to have it both ways.

For the record, I’m not accusing you of this. I don’t recall who played these games in other threads, but it’s childish.

508

(bolding mine)

maybe that’s because when I ask for people to demonstrate how QM negates my position all I get is crickets. Since you seem to hold that position, could you provide a simple explanation as to how and why QM conflicts with my premise?

509

Is too.

Wow, this is getting easier.

510

First, thanks for attempting to answer this. My response is that lack of predictability and apparent randomness are no proof for causeless events. It’s even kinda funny that I’m arguing this against the “more scientific minded”. What I mean is, those kinds of terms are what gave birth to religion and to science. Think about an eclipse. There was a time when people said, “Holy shit, what caused that?” And since they didn’t understand the science they attributed it to some pissed off deity and threw another virgin onto the fire. So, I ask you as a scientifically minded person, isn’t the more rational position for you to have concerning QM is that “We just don’t know enough yet to understand it?” Why this rush to accept a principle that science has never seen—causeless events—and call it a day? Why ignore all the previous random events, like tornadoes, lightning, women getting pregnant…? Can you answer that for me?

511

I don’t know that there is some prime mover non intervening god that hardly anyone believes in.

But I sure as hell know there is no YHWH, or Krishna or Zeus or Odin.

I may be wrong, but I get the feeling the religious always prop up this non-descript, prime mover god that is unassailable, and that they themselves don’t believe in just so that they can point and say AHA! :rolleyes:

512

Do you seriously believe that that is what QM is all about? They threw up their hands and called it a day? What part of (very) accurate predictions and experimentally verified results are you having trouble with?

513

What does it matter what they do. The fact remains that before anyone can choose any God, they have to first decide that, philosophically, he is a theist. Granted, most people do not go through this step, but then they are not being thoughtful in the least, so who really care what they say? BUt if one is to argue against them they should be willing to argue against a well thought-out position.

514

:rolleyes: Tell me you’re kidding.

515

I’m also kinda curious what magellan thinks theoretical physicists do all day. I’m quite confident it doesn’t involve throwing up hands and day-calling.

516

That wasn’t your reasoning. Your argument was:

Yet before that you said:

In your first argument you claim it’s irrational to believe something can exist without a cause because of all the things man has looked at there has always been a cause. In your second, you claim there is something that exists without a cause even though that contradicts what you said about it being irrational for there to be one exception. You even said, “you choose a position that has ZERO history of existing.”

Don’t think you’ve contradicted yourself? Of course you have. Now you’re trying to weasel out of it by giving your first cause a special exception, even though it’s an exception “that has ZERO history of existing.”

The IronChariots website has tackled your contention that something had to start everything in motion and it must have been a sentient being, although they did it regarding those claiming this being must be outside of time. I’ll replace “time” with “this realm.”

http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Cosmological_argument

The first quote was attributed to Czarcasm. You said: “So, you choose a position that has ZERO history of existing.” Czarcasm didn’t choose the position you claimed he did.

517

I know, (within the limits of my ability to know things) that there is no YHWH, Krishna, Zeus, Odin, etc., and I could dispense with a pretty long laundry list of things conventionally asserted by / associated with the theistic that at best are grossly distorted oversimplifications rendered in babytalk.

That which I have found adequate (and ultimately compelling) reason to posit the existence of is indeed closer to your prime mover.

It has less to do with explanations of physical phenomena than with explications of meaning, purpose, intent, and the attribution of intentions as well as (minimally) or instead of (more extremely) prior causality as the reason some things are as they are.

Some fragments of it overlap more predictably with conventional religious subject matter (e.g., a process called “prayer” and its efficacy) (albeit with some unconventional descriptions invoked).

518

It matters because it is ONLY of this propped up prime mover non interventionist god that we can’t say for certain if he exists or not. The same is not true of the actual gods being worshipped by religious people.

519

I am not, are you?

520

Well if theres going to be one place on the internet where the deists are gonna congregate I suppose that finding out that place is the sdmb doesn’t really surprise me. :slight_smile: