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Quote:think your argument about magical pixies and pink elephants is just the usual attempt to trivialise a serious point.
Using Easter bunnies, pink unicorns etc. is not to draw the discussion into the ridiculous, it demonstrates flawlessly why your argument fails. You find these examples trivial, yet you cannot and will never be able to 100% disprove the existence of one as long as you will live. By your own definition of agnosticism you have to be agnostic towards all of the above.
Below is the work of Carl Sagan, who explains into great detail the triviality of this certainty you say we must hold for being an atheist.
Carl Sagan "A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.
"Where's the dragon?" you ask.
"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.
"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."
Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."
You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.
Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."
Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.
Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.
Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.
Diffidus:
I liked the Carl Sagan story. I agree with most of it. He is saying that he does not believe the Dragon is in the garage because he cannot find a measurement which confirms it. But he has reached an Agnostic position which is that he is keeping an open mind. He is not claiming that the Dragon does not exist.
I am always a little suspicious, however, of an argument that uses Dragons or other magical devices since, like rhetoric, it is attempt to trivialise an issue. Why not say, what he really means, that some people believe that God exists in the world but we have no measurement to detect Him at present (or maybe never).
The problem with using a fire eating dragon is that nobody is actually claiming this in reality. The problem with 'God' is that it is a concept that is held by billions of people.
Scientists believe in the concept of 'dark matter' even though there is no way of directly measuring it. Does this mean that it does not exist? I myself have an open mind, I am, if you like, Agnostic to the concept of dark matter. I think Agnostic people are just people with open minds but I detect in Atheists a greater certainty as if the decision has already made and the options closed off.
(June 1, 2011 at 5:25 pm)diffidus Wrote: I liked the Carl Sagan story. I agree with most of it. He is saying that he does not believe the Dragon is in the garage because he cannot find a measurement which confirms it.
What he is saying is that if there is no recognizable difference between an invisible, untouchable, and undetectable dragon and no dragon at all, why believe that there is one?
Quote: But he has reached an Agnostic position which is that he is keeping an open mind. He is not claiming that the Dragon does not exist.
And neither do we, why can't you grasp that concept? We are not saying it does not exist, we are saying we see no evindence for one so we don't believe in one.
Best regards,
Leo van Miert
Horsepower is how hard you hit the wall --Torque is how far you take the wall with you
June 1, 2011 at 6:54 pm (This post was last modified: June 2, 2011 at 2:16 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(May 31, 2011 at 6:49 am)diffidus Wrote: When I say Agnostic, I mean someone who recognises that there is simply not sufficient knowledge to rule out, with 100% certainty, that God exists.
For me, and Atheist view must be dependent upon a scientific view of the world i.e. that it is based upon a combination of empirical evidence combined with scientific understanding. This gives us an ever deeper understanding of nature and the universe in which we live.
........
On this basis, for me, the only logical position is one of the type of Agnosticism that I have defined. Atheism must rely, hugely, upon a good dose of faith!
Scientific view of the world is such that in principle, not just in practice, there will never, ever be sufficient knowledge to rule anything out with 100% certainty. Using the logic you applied above, the only logical position on anything, including whether you were born out of the sphincter of an alligator, is agnosticism.
However, if you apply agnosticism to any particular god, but not to your parentage or mode of birth, then that strongly implies either:
1. You've been sold a special pleading style of world view in which you, possibly overawed by the magnitude of stupid devotion in others, treat the trivial possibility of god's existence differently from the trivial possibility of your being born out of the ass of an alligator.
2. or A fundamental lack of grasp of the very quantitative, not qualitative, nature of certainty in all knowledge, and therefore you entertain non-sesnsical objections from the stupid devotee purely because the non-zero nature of infinitesimal possibility where it applies to the particularly interested devotee's worship has been pointed out to you, where as the non-zero nature of the possibility that you were born out of the ass of an alligator has not, because you fail to see that qualitative similarity of their mathematical insignificance.
Saying one is "agnostic" rather than "atheist", when the two mean exactly the same thing is a cop out, often to avoid the negative connotations of atheism.
The OP's first argument is full of holes, and I think they should definitely refer to a dictionary before making a statement.
Christ on a cracker, another one of these? Oh the glory of simply saying, I can neither confirm nor deny. Atheism and theism mean the the lack of belief in, or belief in a god/s respectively. No one can completely dismiss the existence of anything, however instead of retaining an infinite amount of possible entities, on a scientific basis we have to at least categorize them by probability. Can you imagine marine biologists going out to tag hammerhead sharks, while looking for the elusive leviathan? That isn't how the world works. People can make casts of big feet all they want, but until they provide a carcass or live one, bigfoot doesnt exist. Should we hold off on passing judgement until no one believes anymore? Is there any purpose to that? 1000 years ago, everyone believed in dragons, did that make dragons more likely? Not at all. Lose the superiority complex dude, actually read definitions. I do not believe in X is not a claim of knowledge. I don't believe in a lot of ridiculous beings that humans have made up, and I am just as comfortable saying that a god is just as likely to exist as a leprechaun. Until someone proves otherwise, both are equally bunk.
"In our youth, we lacked the maturity, the decency to create gods better than ourselves so that we might have something to aspire to. Instead we are left with a host of deities who were violent, narcissistic, vengeful bullies who reflected our own values. Our gods could have been anything we could imagine, and all we were capable of manifesting were gods who shared the worst of our natures."-Me
"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men." – Francis Bacon
(June 1, 2011 at 11:51 pm)tavarish Wrote: Saying one is "agnostic" rather than "atheist", when the two mean exactly the same thing is a cop out, often to avoid the negative connotations of atheism.
The OP's first argument is full of holes, and I think they should definitely refer to a dictionary before making a statement.
Sorry tavarish ( and others ) but the two don't mean the same thing.
An agnostic says it is not known if god exists.
An atheist disbelieves in god...period.
The atheist position is a stronger statement as to the improbability of god's existence.
I can't get the attraction for adding agnostic before atheist. How many times on this site do we explain the atheist position to the religious by stating atheism is no more than not believing in god?????
Would the site logo be better for changing the wording to " agostic atheist forums "? I think not.
A man is born to a virgin mother, lives, dies, comes alive again and then disappears into the clouds to become his Dad. How likely is that?
I thought agnosticism had nothing at all to do with theistic/atheistic belief structures and related to the certainty of knowledge?
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
(June 3, 2011 at 5:21 am)tackattack Wrote: I thought agnosticism had nothing at all to do with theistic/atheistic belief structures and related to the certainty of knowledge?
can I refer you back to my post 15 which may help.
A man is born to a virgin mother, lives, dies, comes alive again and then disappears into the clouds to become his Dad. How likely is that?
A man is born to a virgin mother, lives, dies, comes alive again and then disappears into the clouds to become his Dad. How likely is that?
