Thanks for creating a forum with real debate!

[jstrodel]

Full stop. Who here has asserted "I do not believe any gods exist" and argued for the non-existence of god? I have not. I personally have only claimed that your own argument lacks merit, by virtue of it being fallacious and claiming conclusions that do not follow from the argument. In other words, my claim is "I do not believe your claim that god exists" and my justification for that belief is that you have failed to meet the burden of proof. It is not a knowledge claim because the truth value of it is unknown (and no truth value has been asserted by myself) - I consider it an unanswered (and quite possibly unanswerable) question.

Fair enough, but this seems like a very legalistic way to deal with epistemological issues. When you say, "your argument" are you referring to to claim that atheism, which i would define as "language aimed at proving that God does not exist" requires the same epistemological standard as K=JTB? I would agree that the statement "I do not believe your claim that God exists" is not a knowledge claim about whether God exists or not, so the sense of justification that it requires is not K = JTB for K of the existence of God it is K = JTB for K = JTB for K of "I do not believe your claim that God exists".

But to disbelieve a certain claim is to make a negative claim about that claim, and you could fit that sort of weak atheism/agnosticism into the above formula. It still requires the cultural, scientific, technological, linguistic, philosophical justification for the categories of defining K = JTB or something similar for the proposition "your claim that God exists is inadequate, unjustified, fallacious, etc". These are all epistemological notions, whether you think K=JTB is a transcultural, universal value or not, and some sort of culture and ideology will always underlie the sense of justification of negative claims of knowledge for religion.

How about this:
1. "I do not believe your claim that god exists" -
With that unanswered/unanswerable question you are free to use language to express things related to this proposition, and it is a proposition if you understand it as a fact about the world, rather than the act of believing (which would be a non-rational factor)

Perfectly rational. You are refuted. That is not to say that your conclusion is necessarily wrong, per se, but your argument does not support your conclusion, and therefore your argument can be dismissed, and your conclusion treated as nothing but your own opinion.

That I have not made a competing claim does nothing to buttress your argument.

You have shown that it is possible to have a weak form of atheism which does not require knowledge of a proposition of whether God exists or not. I will acknowledge this. But, as I mentioned above, you still require propositional knowledge of the state of affairs in the world such that "I do not believe your claim that God exists". To not believe my claim is to believe something, to reject the claim is to believe something about the nature of rationality and epistemology and many different things about human cognitive functioning, about all the relevant issues, etc.

Nothing that you have said has refuted this. You have shown an example in which it is possible to make a claim which requires a sense of justification which does not require a sense of justification for the question of whether God exists. This does not answer the central tenets of the argument, which is that atheism presupposes the worldview necessary to reject theistic claims, if rationality is a condition imposed upon the process of belief rejection.

You have minimized the question that atheist discourse minimized the question that justification is required for the proposition "God does not exist" and that the language of atheism commonly expresses not only the epistemological tools and cultural ideology necessary to reject "a claim that God exists" but to express the philosophy underneath atheist discourse that really says "God does not exist", whether they consider themselves weak atheists or not.

A weak atheist is an atheist who is always a weak atheist. If someone says they are a weak atheist but they switch to strong atheism here and there to make their points, I would say that they are doing something that is similar to lying. Language should always reflect the sense of epistemic justification that the words signify. Imagine a doctor who has never performed open heart surgery saying "I KNOW THAT I CAN PERFORM OPEN HEART SURGERY" when he does not. Imagine the damage that someones false, unjustified knowledge could cause. I do not at all mean to target you personally in that, only to share what I believe to be an objective and self evident principle of being a decent human being.

If atheists wanted to be consistent and moral people, they would always "proportion their belief to the certainty of their conclusions", and this would be reflected in everything they do, so they would be atheists not only in debating people, but atheists from their heart.

Speaking of calling names, I would appreciate if you would desist from implying that I'm lying.

I did not mean to imply that you are lying, only to trace out the contours of what I believe to be a moral philosophy of epistemology. Appreciating the nature of dishonesty and truth is close to the heart of what epistemology is, not something that belongs to scholars but something that is part of the human experience.

I apologize if I have offended you.