What came first, the atheist or the theist?

[Tiberius]

in order for me to not believe in the fadgdvaet, i need to first know the concept of the fadgdvaet to deny it. before you mentioned it, i neither believed nor didn't believe in it.

You talk about "not believing" and "denying" like they are the same thing. They are not. Not believing in X is when you have no belief in X. Denying X is when you state categorically that X is not true. Yes, to deny something you need to know the concept, but the same is not true if you don't believe in something. There are no requirements for not believing in something, other than not having a belief in that something.

Your final statement (I neither believed nor didn't believe in it) is a violation of the third law of logic, the law of excluded middle. For any proposition, it is either true or not true. So yes, I'm afraid that either you did believe or did not believe.

the definition of an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in god. so before this concept arose we first needed the concept of believing in god in order to deny it.

before the concept of god was created, humans were not non believers in god, because they had no idea what it was that they weren't believing in. wow, that's one hell of a sentence right there!

You are confusing the actual belief (or non-belief in this case) with a description of the belief / non-belief. Yes, in order to talk about a belief or disbelief, the concept must be known and understood. However, this requirement is non-existent in order to have a non-belief, since anything that is not a belief is a non-belief.

would you say that all monkeys and other animals are atheists too? nonsense. they have no concept one way or the other, neither would humans have.

By the definition of atheism, they are, or at least they appear to be since science tells us they have no advanced thought on the level that we do. You do not need to have know the concept in order to not believe in it. Here's an often used analogy for you:

Does one have to know about the concept of stamp-collecting in order to not collect stamps? The answer is no. Amazonian tribes that have no contact with the outside world and don't have any concept of a "stamp" are categorically not stamp collectors. People who don't have any concept of a God are categorically not believers.

definition of an atheist: someone who denies the existence of god.

before the concept of god was created, people were not denying that he existed, so there were no atheists until the first theist arrived.

That is the definition of a strong atheist, not an atheist in general. Ask all the atheists here if they agree with that definition, and I guarantee that 90% of them will say no. Atheism is the non-belief in the existence of Gods. As long as you don't believe in God, you are an atheist.

Before the concept of God was created, nobody believed in God. Hence, everyone was an atheist.

[fr0d0]

Ah I see an opportunity to roll out my favourite observation... that most atheists are ignorant atheists, and ignorant atheist is the default position. You move from that to informed atheist once you learn what to be a-theist about. Children of theists are also ignorant atheists until they become informed either way.



The trouble is that the definition of 'atheism' isn't restricted as you'd like. If you could insist that the term atheist as defined as a-theism, or a stance in relation to theism, then you may gain some support.

[Cecco]

not believing and denying are exactly the same thing.

definition of believe: to accept as true or real

therefor, the definition of not believing: to not accept as true or real

the definition of deny is: to refuse to believe. so yes, they are one and the same.

'For any proposition, it is either true or not true' - absolutely. but what if the propostion has not been made yet? before the proposition comes to light, true or not true is neither here nor there.

and i don't follow your stamp collecting analogy. you do not need to know of the concept of collecting stamps in order to not be a stamp collector, but you do need to be aware that people collect stamps in order to react with a 'no they don't' should you wish to deny it.

[Tiberius]

not believing and denying are exactly the same thing.

definition of believe: to accept as true or real

therefor, the definition of not believing: to not accept as true or real

the definition of deny is: to refuse to believe. so yes, they are one and the same.

How on earth do you even get to a position where "to not accept as true or real" is (and I quote) exactly the same thing as "refusing to believe"?

The first allows for passivity, since not accepting can either be an active step (i.e. someone looking at the evidence and saying "Nope, I don't believe that") or a passive one, by simply not having any acceptance because one does not know about the issue.

Refusing to believe can only be an active step, because refusing something involves it somehow being available to you.

So no, they are not the same thing. The clue being that the definitions are completely different...I'd have thought that was obvious, but hey.

'For any proposition, it is either true or not true' - absolutely. but what if the propostion has not been made yet? before the proposition comes to light, true or not true is neither here nor there.

The proposition has been made though; you made it. You are making it when you ask that very question. You said that people can be in a state of neither believing nor not believing. As I've said, this is a violation of one of the laws of logic. You simply cannot have a position such as that; you either believe or you don't. There is no middle ground.

and i don't follow your stamp collecting analogy. you do not need to know of the concept of collecting stamps in order to not be a stamp collector, but you do need to be aware that people collect stamps in order to react with a 'no they don't' should you wish to deny it.

Yet as I've said, atheism is not the denial of the existence of God. If it was, then I'm certainly not an atheist, and neither are most of the people who claim to be atheists on this forum.

Once you accept the fact that not-believing and denying are not the same thing, you will get the analogy. It is not about denying something, but rather about whether someone believes in it, just as the stamp collector issue isn't about denying stamp collecting, but rather about whether someone collects stamps.

Imagine if you will, that you could look objectively inside someone's mind, and could determine what they believed without having to ask them any questions which might introduce new concepts to them. You can do a simple test to determine what their stance on God is:

1) Do they have a belief in God?
2) If yes, then they are a theist.
3) If no, then they are an atheist.

Simple.

[Cecco]

look in a dictionary. the definition of deny is: refuse to believe. so not believing and deny are the same things.

and yes, the proposition has been made by me, but we are not talking about me. well, you are, but i wasn't. take yourself back to early humanity before the propostion 'god exists' was made, is what i'm saying. to a world before any mind had thought that god exists. those people then neither believed in god nor didn't believe in god.

atheists require theists to exist. atheist is defined by what it denies. look in a dictionary.

[Paul the Human]

Refuse to believe and Do not believe are not the same thing. I do not believe there is a god, I do not refuse to believe it.

[Tiberius]

What you are doing is making the assumption that if one definition is required for another, then the reverse must be true. In other words, whilst it is true that refusing to believe requires not believing (since refusing to believe means you are...not believing), the reverse isn't true. To not believe in something requires you not to have a belief it in; it does not require you to refuse belief in something. There is a clear difference. Perhaps it is you who should look up the meaning of the word "refuse".

In a world where no mind had a thought of God, nobody believed in God, hence there were no theists, and everyone was an atheist. Just because they wouldn't call themselves atheists doesn't mean that they weren't by definitions we use today. All you are doing is moving your argument around in the hope that I will become distracted; I won't. As I've said multiple times now, you cannot have the proposition "those people neither believed in God nor didn't believe" because firstly it violates a law of logic, and secondly, it makes absolutely no sense.

For atheism to be a viable term, yes, it requires theism to exist. However that isn't what we were discussing; we were discussing whether the people who are described by the term "atheist" (i.e. people who do not believe in God) existed before those who are described by the term "theist" (people who do believe in God). It doesn't matter that the word didn't exist; it exists today, and by today's word, those people are atheists.

Take your argument to the extreme and you could easily say that because 1000 years ago there was no such concept as a car, everyone in those days neither owned cars nor not owned cars. That statement is again, ludicrous, since it violates the 3rd law, and it is pretty obvious to anyone with a working mind that people 1000 years ago did not own cars.

[Cecco]

an atheist is someone who denies the existence of god- who refuses to believe in god. and of course you refuse to believe in god! do you not indicate an unwillingness to believe in god? then you refuse to. that last sentence of yours is an incredible oxymoron. (edit - pauls last sentence, to be clear)

[Paul the Human]

No. You are incorrect. I do not refuse to believe in god, as that infers that there is a god and I refuse to believe in him. The way it really is... is this: Theists claim there is a god and I do not believe that claim is true. I am not refusing to believe it. I simply do not believe it. If proof that the claim were true were to surface, I would then stop lacking belief and become a theist... which I couldn't do if I were refusing to believe.

You are mistaken, Cecco. How and why you are mistaken has been clearly explained to you multiple times. I think the issue is that you are refusing to accept that you are mistaken. It is okay to be mistaken and accept being corrected. It's how we learn.

[Cecco]

owning cars? who's talking about owning? believing is what we are talking about. of course your analogy makes things seems ridiculous. and you accuse me of moving off topic to distract! comparing belief in god to owning cars = wtf?

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'refuse' doesn't mean 'blindly reject' paul.