RE: Athiesm is a Faith?
January 4, 2013 at 5:57 pm
(This post was last modified: January 4, 2013 at 6:02 pm by Mister Agenda.)
Mark, I'm going to try to clarify my positon regarding God and the burdern of proof, in hopes that it will be helpful to you. Learning about burden of proof was a key moment for me in thinking about God. I had been a Pentecostal, then read the Bible through twice, making me an agnostic theist (although I didn't know the term at the time) for moral reasons (I still believed in a good creator God, I just didn't believe the people who wrote the Bible were particularly guided by a being who fit that description).
Never having been taught any critical thinking skills, I believed almost everything: Bigfoot, alien visitations, ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, ESP, ancient astronauts, you name it. I had read a Duke University study that had me convinced that ESP was scientifically proven. Then a few teenagers demonstrated how easy it was to fool those researchers, and when they put safeguards against such cheating in place, their statistical evidence vanished. I started getting a little skeptical after that.
Forward about fifteen years. At this point I'm skeptical about the paranormal, I'm no longer convinced of Bigfoot et al. I thought of myself as an agnostic, though I still leaned theist. I still thought some kind of God was needed to explain the origin of the universe. I wasn't aware of any naturalistic explanations, or even that such explanations were possible. When I learned that there were (finally finishing my BA), I think that was when I finally stopped actively believing in God, but I didn't consider myself an atheist yet. I thought that to be open-minded, I had to keep a space for the concept of God. I didn't want to be one of those atheists, so sure there wasn't a God, because I was sure no one could prove God doesn't exist.
The final straw for me was taking Intro to Religion and Inferential Logic the same semester. My religion professor was up front about being an Orthodox Christian who thought logic was on his side, and I was covering logical fallacies in a nearby building on the same day. It was painful to watch the mental contortions this intelligent, educated man that I respected went through in his efforts to justify his position and holding that spot for God in my own brain was becoming increasingly uncomfortable as well. And then...burden of proof and how it is assigned! It clicked, no more brain strain from trying to hold on to God, it's perfectly reasonable to let go of an idea you can't justify, and it's not being close-minded to reach a conclusion as long as you're willing to change your mind if you learn of a good reason to do so. I did a bit of reading up on atheism, found the defintion didn't require a dogmatic assertion of the nonexistence of God after all, and realized that is what I was, and that I had probably been one longer than I realized.
Which brings us to this: I don't believe in God, but I also don't believe in 'not God'. I think God is highly unlikely, like a lot of other things I can't prove don't exist, like all the other gods and supernatural beings that have been proposed. I could be wrong, and I am open to new information that might convince me. I didn't adopt this position to make it harder for theists to argue with me, I wasn't on the internet and didn't know any other atheists (that I knew of), and though I enjoyed friendly arguments about religion, I kept a very light touch on the subject, because it was real life, and it's not worth a friend to be right. My position is merely that I don't believe in God as a real being because I know that I can't meet the burden of proof reasonably expected of me if I were to assert that no conceivable conception of God really exists. All those 'you'd have to be omniscient' accusations would be justifiable. I am not going to hold any position that I know I can't meet the burden of proof for...and that means I can't be a theist at this time.
Now for reading all that, you get a prize: there are some versions of God that I have a positive belief in the nonexistence of. I'm a gnostic atheist regarding the God of theodicy, it's just the result of generations of people claiming their God is greater than anyone else's until they arrived at a pile of omni-attributes that can't possibly coexist in the same being, and one that can't even coexist with itself. That God is a married bachelor, and the people who believe in it always have to sacrifice one of the legs of their theodicy tripod to do so, which means they don't really believe in THAT God after all, they believe in their modified version if pressed to think about it. I share the burden of proof equally with you if that's your God. That would be a topic for a different thread, though.
Never having been taught any critical thinking skills, I believed almost everything: Bigfoot, alien visitations, ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, ESP, ancient astronauts, you name it. I had read a Duke University study that had me convinced that ESP was scientifically proven. Then a few teenagers demonstrated how easy it was to fool those researchers, and when they put safeguards against such cheating in place, their statistical evidence vanished. I started getting a little skeptical after that.
Forward about fifteen years. At this point I'm skeptical about the paranormal, I'm no longer convinced of Bigfoot et al. I thought of myself as an agnostic, though I still leaned theist. I still thought some kind of God was needed to explain the origin of the universe. I wasn't aware of any naturalistic explanations, or even that such explanations were possible. When I learned that there were (finally finishing my BA), I think that was when I finally stopped actively believing in God, but I didn't consider myself an atheist yet. I thought that to be open-minded, I had to keep a space for the concept of God. I didn't want to be one of those atheists, so sure there wasn't a God, because I was sure no one could prove God doesn't exist.
The final straw for me was taking Intro to Religion and Inferential Logic the same semester. My religion professor was up front about being an Orthodox Christian who thought logic was on his side, and I was covering logical fallacies in a nearby building on the same day. It was painful to watch the mental contortions this intelligent, educated man that I respected went through in his efforts to justify his position and holding that spot for God in my own brain was becoming increasingly uncomfortable as well. And then...burden of proof and how it is assigned! It clicked, no more brain strain from trying to hold on to God, it's perfectly reasonable to let go of an idea you can't justify, and it's not being close-minded to reach a conclusion as long as you're willing to change your mind if you learn of a good reason to do so. I did a bit of reading up on atheism, found the defintion didn't require a dogmatic assertion of the nonexistence of God after all, and realized that is what I was, and that I had probably been one longer than I realized.
Which brings us to this: I don't believe in God, but I also don't believe in 'not God'. I think God is highly unlikely, like a lot of other things I can't prove don't exist, like all the other gods and supernatural beings that have been proposed. I could be wrong, and I am open to new information that might convince me. I didn't adopt this position to make it harder for theists to argue with me, I wasn't on the internet and didn't know any other atheists (that I knew of), and though I enjoyed friendly arguments about religion, I kept a very light touch on the subject, because it was real life, and it's not worth a friend to be right. My position is merely that I don't believe in God as a real being because I know that I can't meet the burden of proof reasonably expected of me if I were to assert that no conceivable conception of God really exists. All those 'you'd have to be omniscient' accusations would be justifiable. I am not going to hold any position that I know I can't meet the burden of proof for...and that means I can't be a theist at this time.
Now for reading all that, you get a prize: there are some versions of God that I have a positive belief in the nonexistence of. I'm a gnostic atheist regarding the God of theodicy, it's just the result of generations of people claiming their God is greater than anyone else's until they arrived at a pile of omni-attributes that can't possibly coexist in the same being, and one that can't even coexist with itself. That God is a married bachelor, and the people who believe in it always have to sacrifice one of the legs of their theodicy tripod to do so, which means they don't really believe in THAT God after all, they believe in their modified version if pressed to think about it. I share the burden of proof equally with you if that's your God. That would be a topic for a different thread, though.
