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June 1, 2011 at 11:45 am (This post was last modified: June 1, 2011 at 11:46 am by Arcturus.)
(May 31, 2011 at 6:49 am)diffidus Wrote: 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!
I am not going to address the epistemological issues, given that other people would probably do so. I just want to point out that atheism is NOT the belief that no god exists, the rather the lack of belief that a god exists. In this respect, most atheists are agnostics to the deistic god, in that they cannot rule out with absolute certainty that no god exists. Talking about agnosticism would be akin to preaching to the choir.
//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! //
(Sorry I'm new to forums and as such do not know how to quote a portion of a post)
I am not going to address the epistemological issues, given that other people would probably do so. I just want to point out that atheism is NOT the belief that no god exists, the rather the lack of belief that a god exists. In this respect, most atheists are agnostics to the deistic god, in that they cannot rule out with absolute certainty that no god exists. Talking about agnosticism would be akin to preaching to the choir.
(June 1, 2011 at 7:08 am)diffidus Wrote: To not believe in God implies the belief that God does not exist.
Wrong, lacking a belief in god is not the same as claiming that there isn't one. I as an agnostic atheist am not claiming anything. No assertion made, I simply lack belief. It's not to difficult to understand.
Gnostic atheists are those who claim there is no god.
Agnostic atheists admit to not knowing whether there is a god or not but ultimately reject the idea.
If what you are saying is true, then we all here poses a belief (assertion according to you) that Santa does not exist.
Atheism is not a religion, it isn't faith-based. Atheism in it's most basic sense is the lack of belief in the existence of god. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do not believe in god, it doesn't get much simpler than that.
Diffidus
That's not quite what I said. Claiming that God does not exist is not the same as believing that God does not exist.
Imagine saying to a crowd of people, ' I believe that cars do not exist.' Do you think it would mean anything different to the crowd if you stated, 'I do not believe cars exist.'??
Both sentences have an oject which is a car. The car is a conceptual idea that we are holding in our mind and the predicate, namely, that cars don't exist, is a view that states a belief about the car i.e. that in the real world it does not exist. Unless this can be shown to be a fact, such as, the internal angles of a triangle in Euclidean geometry add up to 180 degrees, then it must taken as a belief.
Thank you for your definition of agnostic atheist, I had not seen this before. However, even on this definition, if you do not know whether God exists or not then there is no firm basis for rejecting the idea and, therefore, the act of rejecting must be based upon an act of faith.
June 1, 2011 at 3:36 pm (This post was last modified: June 1, 2011 at 3:47 pm by Ace Otana.)
(June 1, 2011 at 2:07 pm)diffidus Wrote: However, even on this definition, if you do not know whether God exists or not then there is no firm basis for rejecting the idea and, therefore, the act of rejecting must be based upon an act of faith.
You don't need any knowledge or understanding to lack belief in something. We all lacked belief in god from birth. Babies are too young to understand and take things on faith, yet they lacking of belief in god (according to you) is faith-based?
You lack belief in Santa do you not? Would you also say that lacking belief in Santa Claus is also faith-based?
I lack belief in god due to lack of evidence and credibility. I do not believe in god. I really don't think that such a being exists, but at the same time, I don't claim to know that there isn't such a thing. I just can't bring myself to believe in it.
Science often rejects claims, it doesn't do this with faith. If you claimed there were pink elephants hiding under the moons surface, this claim will be rejected unless you can support the claim.
Theists make the claim that a god or gods exist but fail to support such claims. So I reject their claims as nothing more than baseless assertions. Rejecting the claim that a god exists is not faith-based.
Do you not reject tooth fairies? Do you not reject magical pixies? Do you not reject magical flying rabbits?
We don't need absolute knowledge to reject an idea or claim.
Quote:believing that God does not exist.
The word 'believing' doesn't fit my position. I lack belief. How can one believe in lack of belief in X?
I have no belief when it comes to religion. Only lack there of.
You don't need faith to lack belief in anything. Unless you can point out where the whole faith thing comes in? From birth I was an atheist, so when in my life did I unknowingly took a leap of faith?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - Carl Sagan
Mankind's intelligence walks hand in hand with it's stupidity.
Being an atheist says nothing about your overall intelligence, it just means you don't believe in god. Atheists can be as bright as any scientist and as stupid as any creationist.
You never really know just how stupid someone is, until you've argued with them.
Sitting on the fence and calling yourself purely agnostic is just foolish and spineless if you ask me.
I don't believe in 'God' for the same reason I don't believe in little red riding hood, or a yeti, or the loch ness monster etc.
Being an atheist does not require faith, because it is not making any absurd claims which require proof. It is the default position, just like the default position is not believing in all what I have listed above.
From the OP's retarded logic it must take 'faith' not to believe in Bigfoot.
(June 1, 2011 at 2:07 pm)diffidus Wrote: However, even on this definition, if you do not know whether God exists or not then there is no firm basis for rejecting the idea and, therefore, the act of rejecting must be based upon an act of faith.
You don't need any knowledge or understanding to lack belief in something. We all lacked belief in god from birth. Babies are too young to understand and take things on faith, yet they lacking of belief in god (according to you) is faith-based?
You lack belief in Santa do you not? Would you also say that lacking belief in Santa Claus is also faith-based?
I lack belief in god due to lack of evidence and credibility. I do not believe in god. I really don't think that such a being exists, but at the same time, I don't claim to know that there isn't such a thing. I just can't bring myself to believe in it.
Science often rejects claims, it doesn't do this with faith. If you claimed there were pink elephants hiding under the moons surface, this claim will be rejected unless you can support the claim.
Theists make the claim that a god or gods exist but fail to support such claims. So I reject their claims as nothing more than baseless assertions. Rejecting the claim that a god exists is not faith-based.
Do you not reject tooth fairies? Do you not reject magical pixies? Do you not reject magical flying rabbits?
We don't need absolute knowledge to reject an idea or claim.
Your argument regarding babies does not count. This is because babies are not aware of the concept of God. It is clearly non-sensical to ask someone if he believes in a concept he has not heard of.
I think your argument about magical pixies and pink elephants is just the usual attempt to trivialise a serious point. I find this argument crops up a lot in this forum and it is a pity, since there is a clear difference between a concept that billions of people claim exists and one in which nobody would assert.
I do agree with your last point: you do not need absolute knowledge to reject an idea or a claim but, if you do not have this knowledge, then you are making a judgement which is based upon incomplete knowledge which absolutely requires belief. In effect, what you are doing is, given your state of knowledge, you think it extremely unlikely that the concept God exists in reality and therefore you form the belief that He doesn't. This is a valued judgement and could possibly be hopelessly wrong.
I would sincerely like to declare myself an Atheist, but because of these (admittedly slightly academic) difficulties I would feel it a compromise to adjust my position from Agnostic, in a sense, almost committing the same sin as religious brethren.
I must admit, however, that I am decidedly more atheist than theist.
June 1, 2011 at 4:40 pm (This post was last modified: June 1, 2011 at 4:42 pm by Ace Otana.)
Quote:Your argument regarding babies does not count. This is because babies are not aware of the concept of God.
It doesn't matter if you're aware of the claim or not. If you lack belief in god, then you lack belief in it. Simple.
When I became aware of the god claim, I remained unconvinced. So is this where I took that leap of faith for which I wasn't aware of?
Remember, I'm not claiming anything. The burden of proof is not on me. Theists make a claim, I as an atheist reject that claim due to lack of evidence and credibility. No faith involved.
Quote:since there is a clear difference between a concept that billions of people claim exists and one in which nobody would assert.
Numbers count for nothing when it comes to what's real or not. This is nothing but a populum argument, for which does not work.
A lie is a lie even if everyone believed it, a truth is a truth even if no one believed it.
Numbers count for nothing. God is no more supported or credible than any other imaginary being you can think of. Until you can give us real reasons as to why god should be more considered than any other imaginary character, god is nothing but a joke like everything else.
Quote:but, if you do not have this knowledge, then you are making a judgement which is based upon incomplete knowledge which absolutely requires belief.
No. I am making judgement based on evidence and credibility. For which theist claims lack both. Knowledge does not need to be complete to make judgement of what you know now at this point in time. If evidence were to be found for a god, then reconsideration will take place. But until then, it will remain rejected due to lack of evidence and/or credibility.
Quote:and therefore you form the belief that He doesn't.
No. Theists make the claim that a god exists. They believe in this god thing, I do not. It takes faith to believe in something without anything to support it. I lack belief.
Here is another way of putting it, I with-hold judgement on the existence of god. Lack of belief is a default position, we all start off with this position. I'll continue to with-hold judgement until I see good reason to believe in this god.
Question: Do you believe in god or not?
--
Atheism is in it's most basic sense, lack of belief in god or gods. Nothing more, nothing less. No faith required. You don't need faith to lack belief in anything. If it takes faith to lack belief in god, then it takes faith to lack belief in ANYTHING!
You are demanding special treatment a little. Otherwise known as 'special pleading'
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - Carl Sagan
Mankind's intelligence walks hand in hand with it's stupidity.
Being an atheist says nothing about your overall intelligence, it just means you don't believe in god. Atheists can be as bright as any scientist and as stupid as any creationist.
You never really know just how stupid someone is, until you've argued with them.
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.
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 3:56 pm)Napoleon666 Wrote: Sitting on the fence and calling yourself purely agnostic is just foolish and spineless if you ask me.
I don't believe in 'God' for the same reason I don't believe in little red riding hood, or a yeti, or the loch ness monster etc.
Being an atheist does not require faith, because it is not making any absurd claims which require proof. It is the default position, just like the default position is not believing in all what I have listed above.
From the OP's retarded logic it must take 'faith' not to believe in Bigfoot.
Diffidus:
Firstly, there is no such thing as the default position. If there were, then it is more likely that it would be belief in such things as Santa and Red Riding Hood, since children believe in all sorts of things. You can't really have a default position about a concept that you have never heard of. Once you come across a concept, you can then decide whether you believe it exists or not.
The general argument about Red Riding Hood or Pink Unicorns is somewhat of a red herring. Not many adults believe in such things and in many cases the inventors freely admit that they made them up. I think this is an attempt to trivialise the issues and it is a pity since it obscures what could be quite pointed argument.
Religion is different. Billions of people believe in a Deity of one form or another and provide evidence in the form of written statements such as the Gospels of the New Testament. To refute these people requires knowledge of the facts, otherwise, all you are saying is that you believe thay are wrong.
Sitting on the fence, as you call it, is actually a very uncomfortable place to be. There is something in the Human pysche that likes resolution. It is frustrating not to be able to resolve an issue. That is why the Agnostic position is actually quite courageous, since anyone who subscribes to it, remains true to the actual state of Human knowledge and refuses to be bullied into taking a, possibly, erroneous view.
June 1, 2011 at 5:13 pm (This post was last modified: June 1, 2011 at 5:19 pm by reverendjeremiah.)
(June 1, 2011 at 7:08 am)diffidus Wrote: Logically the statement ' I do not believe that God exists' is exactly the same as ' I believe that God does not exist'. Trying to pretend that one statement is different to the other is self delusion. To not believe in God implies the belief that God does not exist.
Logically my ass. Here, lets see how that "logic" stands out.
I do not believe that goblins exist
I believe that Goblins do not exist
I do not believe that Unicorns exist
I believe that Unicorns do not exist
I do not believe that Martians exist
I believe that Martians do not exist
Honestly, you are playing favoritism and then using semantics to play your game.
I do not believe I am amused by your antics, and I believe your antics have not amused me.
(June 1, 2011 at 10:12 am)Admiral Ackbar Wrote: Read an interesting argument regarding the atheist/faith debate recently. It goes something like this:
- Universal negative requires absolute knowledge
- Universal positive does not require absolute knowledge
Atheists believe that there is no god and to make this claim they must be omniscient, i.e. all knowing. If they are not omniscient they are basing their belief on a certain degree of faith. Whereas theists do not have to be omniscient to know if god exists since they would only need to scour the universe up to the point where they actually discovered a god.
So essentially, the atheist requires more faith than the theist.
Now, I think there's a fundamental flaw with the argument, however, I'm not completely sure. I mean, to me it seems like the argument would only work under the pretence that there is a god to be found. If there were no god the theist would have to continue their search until they, too, had reached absolute omniscience.
Gah, I can't articulate what I mean because I'm not even sure what I mean. I just know that in my head it seems flawed in some way.
HMMM...let me try.
There is no such thing as Unicorns = Faith
Unicorns exist! = does not require absolute knowledge.
Therefore..it is very likely that unicorns exist, and those who deny their existence should be scoffed at for their silly faith.
Eventually you will realize that many Religions are starting to realize that "faith" is a butt load of bull... so now they are trying to brush the words "faith" and "religion" onto the atheists.
