Atheism, Evidence and the God-of-the-Gaps

[abaris]

You saw the photo.

Hitler visited the Weimar Nietzsche because he had read Nietzsche and admired him. The Aryan race was a twisted version of Nietzsche's "superman". Hitler understood with chilling clarity the moral implications of a Nietzschean world without God. Once he had attained power, he created the concentration camps to implement the Darwinian law of nature that would bring about the elimination of the unfit and the creation of a civilization that was fit for the master race.

So, yeah, Hitler's "final solution" was all about doing "what was best for his people without regard to other populations." and the connection is obvious.

Nietzsche > Hitler > Auschwitz

But noooo...according to the stuff I'm told in the "Why Be Good?" thread, atheism (and the death of God) has nothing to do with this whatsoever.

I guess Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (to name a few) just weren't as evolved as the rest of you.

You know I was going to ignore that when you first mentioned it, since I didn't consider every idiocy worthy of a reply. But you're coming back to it. And never was the old saying more fitting: si tacuisses philosophus mansisses

I don't suppose, the name Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels rings any bells with you. How about Georg Ritter von Schönerer? Karl Lueger? Guido von List?

How about Brigitte Hamann?

How about reading Hitler's actual speeches and most of all his book "Mein Kampf". Too much effort?

I get it, you take the first item from the apologist lunchbox and blow it out your ass.

[downbeatplumb]

What is a definition of God that you would accept?

What is your definition of "God", Randy? You're the one who believes in it, so you're the one who needs to define it.

Indeed what god means seems to be ever changing.
So Randy which flavour of mythical being do you favour?

[Longhorn]

Regarding the presuppositions Randy keeps talking about

It's actually theists that are more often guilty of committing presuppositions than atheists, mainly because most believers were taught to believe from a very young age (not to say indoctrinated) and for this reason have not come to believe by examining the evidence and reaching their conclusion, rather they were taught the conclusion and later began to search for arguments supporting it (confirmation bias*). I have never met and would be extremely surprised to meet a person who had become a believer because of Kalam, Pascal's Wager or the argument from design; instead, reasons for believing are predominantly emotional, not rational, with the logical arguments serving as a confirmation of the already held belief, whereas most atheists have either been believers themselves and later rejected the conclusion by examining the reasoning, or never accepted the conclusion at all. This does not mean that atheists presuppose that god does not exist-weak (agnostic) atheism is the default position on the god claim: accepting the possibility of a god existing, but rejecting the definitive belief that one exists without compelling evidence, which is the default position on any such claim.

IOW, theists formulate arguments working their way back from the conclusion they had already accepted as true without the supporting reasoning, while agnostic atheists do not, because they haven't accepted either conclusion (god exists vs god doesn't exist), and thus it is more common for a theist to presuppose than for an (agnostic) atheist. QED


* http://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/confirmation_bias.htm

[Esquilax]

Regarding the presuppositions Randy keeps talking about

The ones he keeps bringing up solely to discredit us and make himself feel better for his failure to adequately argue his position?

I mean, I don't wanna take away from what you've written, because it's pretty dead on, but I fear it's wasted because I doubt it's going to stem the flow of utterly baseless accusations of presupposition, because they aren't being made on the basis of any informed conviction on Randy's part. He doesn't know us, he's certainly not able to get into our heads, and so he has no basis at all for these presuppositional labels... and yet he keeps making them. He keeps making them even when he's corrected or clarified by others, which tips his hand.

[Longhorn]

Oh, I'm aware. I just have a compulsive need to clarify misconceptions, otherwise it won't let me sleep.

[Crossless2.0]

*Crossless1 mounts his hobby horse and glares at Randy*

It drives me to distraction that you and countless other dipshits who obviously have never read a single book by Nietzsche -- let alone all of his books, in the order they were published -- then besmirch the man with guilt by association because Hitler (whose reading skills and intellectual honesty seem on a par with yours) thought he understood the couple of Nietzsche's books he may have read.

You have to be utterly ignorant of the works in question or dishonest in a way I hadn't yet credited you as being to suppose that Nietzsche would have been anything but appalled and disgusted by the Third Reich.  Two points: (1) Would anyone who consistently railed against Bismarck's regime and all forms of nationalism (while extolling the need for people to become more cosmopolitan -- to become 'Good Europeans') have welcomed Hitler's regime?  Think, Randy!  (2) Nietzsche, nearly alone among major 19th Century European intellectuals, was outspokenly anti-anti-Semitic.  Quite simply, the Holocaust would have broken his heart.

Yes, Otto, apes read philosophy.  They just don't understand it.

Then again, you didn't actually read it, did you, ape?

[TheRealJoeFish]

Oh, I'm aware. I just have a compulsive need to clarify misconceptions, otherwise it won't let me sleep.

I choose to imagine that, when you say "it" here, you mean a big scary clarification monster who lives behind your bookshelf.

DON'T WORRY TWIN. YOU CAN DESTROY THE CLARIFICATION MONSTER.

[Esquilax]

Actually, since it seems to be an ever increasing favorite of Randy's, let's discuss presuppositions, shall we? Let's talk about the accusation of them as argumentation:

Say you went skydiving, and you're telling your friend about it. Your friend doesn't believe you, and your response is "oh, you only don't believe me because you have a presupposition that I don't skydive." Have you proved that you went skydiving? Have you advanced your position in any way? No, you haven't. You have, in actuality, committed an informal fallacy called the appeal to motive, wherein you attempt to argue a point by merely showing the possibility of malevolent motivation, without actually demonstrating that this motive is present, or responsible for the conclusion your interlocutor has come to. Given this, it's little more than an ad hominem fallacy, where attempts to impugn the arguer take the place of rebutting the argument.

And in Randy's case it's even funnier, because he doesn't know any of us in enough detail to actually sketch out our character sufficient to even deduce such motivation, especially in light of the fact that every conversation we've had with him has been geared around our disbelief of his claims due to the context in which those interactions take place. When Randy points his finger and says "you just have a presupposition!" then the correct response is simply to ask him how he came to that conclusion in the first place. The only evidence he has is that we won't believe his arguments, and "you won't believe it!" is a terrible reason for holding the conclusion "you have a presupposition against it!"

See, there's two possible consequences of that: if one truly believes that there is no reason other than biased presuppositions to disbelieve the claim being made, in light of the additional reasons being given in the posts here, then in actual fact it is the accuser who has the presupposition, that the argument they have made is inherently believable and that anyone who disagrees does not actually believe the reasons they've given for doing so, they just have this bias against the argument. There's certainly no evidence that the accuser has that we don't genuinely believe our reasons for disbelieving, and hence no rational path to concluding that the presupposition exists. The accuser shows his own bias in making the accusation amid a dearth of reasons to come to it.

The other possibility is that other reasons for disbelieving can be thought of by the accuser, in which case he has no reason to discount them in favor of the presupposition accusation without evidence. Either way, this is lazy projection on Randy's part, nothing more.

[Mister Agenda]

Many atheists say that all arguments for the existence of God rely on fallacious “God-of-the-gaps” reasoning.

Those 'many atheists' are wrong, there are many arguments for the existence of God that rely on other fallacies.

[Cato]

Just finished my daily check of this thread to discover Randy's God is still missing. I expect more of the same tomorrow.