I'm wondering how, if I profess atheism, I can now profess any kind of certainty in anything. The question's setup follows--the real question behind it is in bold at (appropriately) the bottom of it.
I read and appreciated Ryft's comment on the difference between faith and belief ("Please stop equating 'belief' and 'faith' ") from a little over a month ago. I got from his post that the belief of modern scientists and philosophers is considered to be entirely subjective--belief today is used as describing an attitude, a "seems" not an "is". Here are some words I quoted from his text.
"Contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term 'belief' to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true,"
Insofar as belief is characterized by contemporary philosophers as a 'propositional attitude', he writes, it constitutes "the mental state of having some attitude, stance, take, or opinion
Question: What is a Propositional Attitude? Isn't it the attitude conveying a belief in ultimate, objective reality? Why on earth would you propose something if it didn't have some kind of objective vision to contribute to or fit into? Doesn't such an objective reality require a form, some type of identifiable unity? If there is such a unity of reality, doesn't it have to include personhood (or the phenomenology of personhood and of experiencing other persons) somewhere in the mix of elements it includes (since persons or at least the experience of them are part of reality)? Now, as an atheist, is it possible to deny the fundamental Personal facet of Objective Reality (otherwise known as God), and still retain intellectual integrity in proposing that I believe in an objective reality? If I can't--can I/should I really claim to believe anything, or is my propositional attitude a sort of hypocrisy from what is at its base a kind of nihilism--a denial of the fundamental, comprehensive and knowable unity of reality?
Rephrasing: If I disbelieve in a deity who grounds all facts in an objective context--can I really say that I believe aything else objectively? Does it make sense to say that I believe something could be true in certain circumstances, if those very possible circumstances are uncertain? If there is no place or person where the buck of reality stops, so to speak, and all is possible, then aren't all my theories pretty much equally meaningful--equally meaningless? I'm caught in a mind-set right now where all such speculations of science and otherwise are just that for me--speculations. It's scary--like trying to put together a puzzle with pieces that have no set shape or objective context. Is that the choice I face if I would choose continue in atheism?
