Is Lack of Belief the Best You Can Do?

[drfuzzy]

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The weekend has come and I will not reply for a bit while I attend to other priorities (like craft beer). Nevertheless, I remain interested in your opinions about the blog post. I encourage you to read the whole post; however, recognizing that all of you also have other priorities, I wish to point you to some of the points I found most interesting, to wit:

“If a mere ‘lack of belief in god’ is sufficient to be an atheist, then babies are atheists. You might say “yes, they are, or at least were before religion got its mitts on them!” But on this definition chimps are also atheists. As are dolphins, dogs, and doors. They all lack belief in a god.”

Here I think the author is saying that “atheism as simply lack of belief” is a trivial position. That is the essence of my signature line. That said, I think that most of the time those who insist on this definition do so to avoid the task of defending their actual conviction that god(s) do not exist. Next.

“The only time someone can be said to have a lack of belief regarding a god is before they’ve heard the claim for one. In some minimalist sense this person is an a-theist, but that’s an extremely weak point to hang one’s hat on. After hearing it, they can accept, reject or mull over the claim undecided. But lacking a belief about it is no longer open to them.”

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 Here I think the author is suggesting (as I believe) that those who maintain the “atheism as simply lack of belief” are disingenuous. If someone truly felt that he simply lacked belief, then he would not argue against the belief in God. It would be a non-issue to them.

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 As such, I believe that a non-believer who participates on AF is tacitly a gnostic atheist, even though he expresses otherwise.

“Rationality is the ability to recognise the strength and soundness (truth) of reasons, and to trade in them with other rational beings. If there is evidence for something being true, then it is rational for you to believe it. If there is no evidence for something being true (or evidence against it), then it is irrational to believe it. I imagine that most of the readers that have made it this far would want to say that belief in a god on the current evidence we have is irrational....on an [b]evidentialist epistemology[b] we are rationally required to believe that no such beings exist. And due to the weight of the evidence against them, we can be reasonably confident in saying that we know they don’t exist, too.” (emphasis mine)

Here I think the author makes a serious misstep by conflating rationality with a particular epistemological stance about what can or cannot be known and how. As I have argued elsewhere, much of what we believe follows from existential choices, which themselves are is not amenable to rational scrutiny, as to whether we will take the world as intelligible (or not) and that certain knowledge can (or cannot) be attained. My blog post summarizing this notion can be found here:

http://chadwooters.blogspot.com/2016/03/...f-man.html

But let’s suppose someone adheres to a particular epistemology that leads them to not believe in God. I say to each their own. At the same time I think it entirely appropriate to insist that he apply his epistemology consistently. I do not think that an “evidentialist epistemology” supplies any path that can logically justify opinions about value, morality, aesthetics, meaning or purpose.

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Not . . . quite, Chad.  IF I looked around at religion and found it harmless, then yes, it would be a complete non-issue. And indeed, religions that don't impact my daily life (Buddhism, for example, -- and I find quite a bit of wisdom in "Buddhist scriptures") are pretty irrelevant to me - I have seen no evil come from Buddhism.  (If there is a Buddhist here with a different take on the subject, I'd be interested in hearing it.) But the worst human monsters I have ever encountered in my life have stepped out of a christian church. Churches that once had me brainwashed into accepting the evil that was spewed from the pulpit. So it is personally healthy for me to find good ways to explain why I no longer hold those beliefs and find them damaging.