Thanks for creating a forum with real debate!

[jstrodel]

Nor do I have an interest with bandying words with a sophist.

Come on now. You tried to define the rationality of the belief "I do not believe God exists" by seeing the truth of the statement as a proposition that is justified in terms of the belief of the person making the claim. This is what you call "grabbing onto anything possible, no matter how little it has to do with common sense". The rationality or justification of the statement "I do not believe God exists" really has nothing to do with the truth of the proposition.

You are trying to rely on a form of fidism to defend atheism. That is beyond sophistry, if you put Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and Noam Chomsky together and sat down and said "lets talk philosophy", you couldn't get something more contrived, tortured and further from reality than that.

Atheism is the union of the worship of rationality and replacement of ethics with epistemology combined with... fidism? You gotta be kidding me.

Pretty much this. I strongly suspect he's been cribbing material from other sources. If that's the case, at least it would be nice if he cited his sources- if for no other reason than knowing exactly who is being argued against. Then there's intellectual honesty.

I have been influence by Alvin Plantiga and the philosophy I had years ago as an undergraduate. Also a lot of my philosophy comes from mystical experiences that I have had. The argument that I wrote above is not something that I copied out of a book, it is more of a reflection on atheism. I have studied philosophy of science a little bit which is also an influence. I think about things quite a bit and I don't always remember where I get all the ideas from or how they end up back in my head, so I apologize if I have taken anything from anywhere.

http://www.amazon.com/Warranted-Christia...ian+belief

I am proud to say that I am not smart enough to do philosophy by myself, if you want an example of someone who has a much higher IQ but who was dumb enough to do that you can turn to someone like Spinoza. There is more to life than proving that you are smart enough to create a bunch of complex ideas and jumble them together such to create something like mathematical literature that really has no ability to solve real problems in the world and help people.

---

You're conflating belief and knowledge again.

Are you arguing that fidism is adequate concept of rationality, when it applies to supporting propositions? Are you saying that not all beliefs that are involved in epistemic justification must be justified? You realize that you are rejecting classical foundationalism when you do that and saying something that is as radical as advocating for Young Earth Creationism, even more so, something that is self evidently false.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you. I apologize if I am. The way I understand your statements, it seems like you are saying that there are some parts of belief that must not be justified somewhere. I see this as a very serious and obvious error.

You could possibly argue, as Christians do, that all beliefs must have some sense of justification, but it is not necessary for the person believing to actually be a part of the justification, only that the beliefs are justified.

I don't recall saying that. I recall saying that I don't have to justify my belief to you in order to hold that belief.

You sound like a Christian women who is upset because atheists tried to take her faith away and tell her that her mixed argument from authority mixed with reason was irrational (which is exactly what you are doing, and you are not justifying my belief to me because there is absolutely no way that you could justify the rationality of non-belief in God because the method that you use is not scientific, it is a mixture of a great number of things and arguments from authority and guesswork that points to non belief)

For the record, I did justify my belief (by virtue of you not successfully convincing me that your argument had merit). I understand you disagree. It's a free country. Be wrong all you like.

You are using 'justify' in the everyday sense. For that method to yield knowledge, you would have to prove that your method of justification expressed the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge. I do not think that it does.


I think the core of your argument goes like this: It is ok for atheists to have faith