(October 9, 2020 at 12:22 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote:(October 9, 2020 at 11:20 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: Gnosticism and anosticism is about knowledge.
Belief just means opinion.
"Is it your OPINION that there are gods?"
If you have no opinion, then you are a non-believer and so, you are an atheist because that is the default position.
This was a discussion point back on the Amazon boards. Some person was adamant that atheism was NOT the default position, because if it was, the word "atheist" had no meaning.
This person claimed that an atheist must explicitly consider and reject a particular god concept to be an atheist with respect to that god. Atheism means "rejecting a god claim" to this person. Therefore, a baby cannot be an atheist, or the word has no meaning. Likewise a plant cannot be an atheist.
That's a matter of definition and definitions don't exist in reality. For example, grams and pounds. Grams and pounds are definitions made by humans and they can be changed. What can't be changed is the mass of a proton or some lump of vanadium. A proton and the lump of vanadium's mass are real.
I don't know what that guy means by reject. Does he mean test and eliminate? Because that is what gets done in science to hypothesis. You test your hypothesis and either it passes and then on to the next test and more and more tests. As soon as some test fails, that hypothesis goes to the trash bin.
I don't know. Perhaps there is a god that created all this reality 10 seconds ago. I can't test that and so, I can't eliminate that god.
