Atheist vs Theist

[bilby]

Why an unsupported claim that includes an extra, unsupported and unevidenced, entity should be held up as less unlikely than the same claim without the extra entity, I cannot say - it makes no sense at all, but for some reason, some people find it more convincing.

It's bizarre to me that people find this 'god' idea compelling. I mean, if you were disposed to dismiss the idea of continental drift as obvious nonsense (and many were when it was first proposed), would you honestly find the hypothesis more convincing if it included the belief that the continental plates were pushed by gods, angels, or ghosts?

That is because you are better at questioning the rationality of other people's basic assumptions than you are at critically examining your own. From this agnostic's perspective, at least, I see little rational difference between these positions. The facts are more or less the same either way, and there's no idea to support either model of how the magic of existence works. You can call it God, Fred, or the meaningless void, but at the end of the day, the source of the universe makes very rational little sense. Because the universe itself doesn't. However it is characterized, the creation of the universe involved something happening - matter being created or destroyed - that is so alien to our understanding that we can only talk about it in ill-fitting metaphor. The universe is strange. It is a very strange fact. That you find an atheistic framework for considering it more comforting is down to your experience and biases, just as other people's biases inform their emotional responses. Your perspective isn't better or worse than anyone else's. There can be no real thing as a better or worse response when no facts whatsoever are known.

But that's simply not true.

The response 'no facts whatsoever are known.' is objectively better in such circumstances than 'no facts whatsoever are known, but I like to think X.', for all values of X.

An atheistic explanation is better than a theistic one, in exactly the same way that an afredistic explanation is better than one that invokes Fred. A list of all the things that might be involved but we don't know because we don't know anything, would be infinite and futile. But even that would be better than invoking God, while ignoring all the other infinite collection of things that we have zero reason to imagine are involved.

And none of this is, could be, or should be 'comforting'. If I want comforting, I will hug my teddy bear. Cosmology is about understanding, not comfort.

 

[steve_bank]

Scientific cosmology is following where the facts lead regardless of religion or philosophy. Christians call that atheist scince when it conflicts with their interpretation of scripture.

Young Earth Creationism is clearly refuted by routine science. And that would be an atheist ideological attack on religion.

 

[Politesse]

An atheistic explanation is better than a theistic one, in exactly the same way that an afredistic explanation is better than one that invokes Fred. A list of all the things that might be involved but we don't know because we don't know anything, would be infinite and futile. But even that would be better than invoking God, while ignoring all the other infinite collection of things that we have zero reason to imagine are involved.

Well, that's the atheist delusion: thinking that your philosophy is somehow not a philosophy and therefore somehow exempt from the usual consideration a skeptic would apply to a claim.

My answer is and long has been "I don't know"; that's why I don't call myself an atheist, or claim to concretely anything about what does or does not fundamentally exist.

I deeply disagree that arbitrarily picking a worldview and sticking to it as definitive, despite a lack of supporting evidence, is somehow better than infinitely and futilely considering potential hypotheses. If someone ever tells you not to test an idea, they may be talking good politics but they are not talking good science.

And I'm not convinced that science, which is reliant on the uniformity of physical laws and constants to function at all, is necessarily relevant to cosmological questions in any case. If the universe had some sort of beginning or end, science could not logically help us understand it, as short of creating additional universes or ending this one, we have no means to recreating the conditions under which our only sample began.

I absolutely adore science, incidentally. I don't like people who use it as a magic answer-box that they name drop to affirm their personal biases. That is religion... at its worst.

 

[DBT]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

 

[Politesse]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

How is that? That's my self image.

 

[skepticalbip]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

Now that is odd, telling someone else how they think about the subject of gods. Are you claiming some sort of psychic insight? DBT's statement is pretty much exactly how I take the subject - and I consider myself to be an atheist. Are you telling me that I am not?

 

[abaddon]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

Maybe by "people" you mean theists?

Theists keep misrepresenting atheism as the claim "There is no God". By saying "I am an atheist", I have always meant "I am not convinced by theists about their Gods". When I talk about "atheism" I mean to talk about the persons who hold that stance.

The talk in a post above about an "atheistic framework" suggests that, when describing anything, an atheist has to deliberately scratch God out of the picture or bury the idea. Not so.

If you discover an island and describe everything that you see while exploring it, but don't include unicorns into your description, it doesn't mean a blind eye was turned to the unicorns that were nowhere in evidence on the island.

Is the unicorn framework as good as an a-unicorn framework on an island that isn't explored yet? Can you justifiably say "no facts whatsoever are known" about an unexplored island?

"There might be unicorns! (though I'm not saying I know there are!)" -- that looks like the behavior of someone who's uncomfortable with a world that doesn't have unicorns in it.

 

[Politesse]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

Now that is odd, telling someone else how they think about the subject of gods. Are you claiming some sort of psychic insight? DBT's statement is pretty much exactly how I take the subject - and I consider myself to be an atheist. Are you telling me that I am not?

In this very thread, multiple people, none of them Christian, have identified atheism as an essentially anti-theist philosophy and an act of political agency, have they not?

DBT's definition would make a chunk of granite an atheist. Or perhaps more to the point, a whole lot of people who would not consider themselves to be atheists. Hell, it makes me an atheist.

 

[bilby]

An atheistic explanation is better than a theistic one, in exactly the same way that an afredistic explanation is better than one that invokes Fred. A list of all the things that might be involved but we don't know because we don't know anything, would be infinite and futile. But even that would be better than invoking God, while ignoring all the other infinite collection of things that we have zero reason to imagine are involved.

Well, that's the atheist delusion: thinking that your philosophy is somehow not a philosophy and therefore somehow exempt from the usual consideration a skeptic would apply to a claim.

My answer is and long has been "I don't know"; that's why I don't call myself an atheist, or claim to concretely anything about what does or does not fundamentally exist.

I deeply disagree that arbitrarily picking a worldview and sticking to it as definitive, despite a lack of supporting evidence, is somehow better than infinitely and futilely considering potential hypotheses. If someone ever tells you not to test an idea, they may be talking good politics but they are not talking good science.

And I'm not convinced that science, which is reliant on the uniformity of physical laws and constants to function at all, is necessarily relevant to cosmological questions in any case. If the universe had some sort of beginning or end, science could not logically help us understand it, as short of creating additional universes or ending this one, we have no means to recreating the conditions under which our only sample began.

I absolutely adore science, incidentally. I don't like people who use it as a magic answer-box that they name drop to affirm their personal biases. That is religion... at its worst.

Science has made theism redundant.

Sure, there could be (or once have been) a god (or gods), that did some (or all) of the stuff we cannot explain.

But the stuff we cannot explain is now tiny; And back when it was huge, people gave gods credit for most (or all) of it.

The fact is that when almost everything was a mystery, gods gave scared people some sense of control over the natural world. But in the absence of that history, no modern person would invent a god to spackle over the minuscule gaps that remain - the physics of everyday phenomena on a human scale is completely understood, and there are no gods involved.

Only a moron would proclaim that he was agnostic on the question of whether there were wolves, after the shepherd boy cried wolf millions of times, and now that the entire continent has been searched square inch by square inch, no trace of any wolf has ever been found. To declare that he might yet be proven right, because perhaps wolves are less than an inch long, is just pathetic.

The ONLY reason why anyone would even suggest a god, as a part of the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, is tradition. Nobody would come up with god as a hypothesis from observation and first principles, given access to modern scientific knowledge.

God as a concept cannot, even in principle, answer that question - it just kicks the can down the road.

God is like Dirk Gently's method for solving problems - to find a lost cat, he scribbles gibberish on a piece of paper, and declares that he has just written down the cat's location, and that all that remains is to determine what language he wrote in, and how to translate it to English. Thereby turning an intractable and unsolvable conundrum into a mere linguistic puzzle.

Albeit possibly an intractable and unsolvable linguistic puzzle.

I am under no delusion that my philosophy is not a philosophy. But I am equally under no delusion that any of the god hypotheses ever proposed have the slightest merit. They are all either completely incompatible with our scientific observations, or have nothing useful to say about anything. Or, frequently, both.

I have no certainty about how the cosmos came to be - or even whether it did, or was always there. But I am equally certain that gods have no part in it as I am that unicorns, pixies, fairies, bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster were uninvolved.

Are you agnostic on the question of whether the Loch Ness monster was involved in the creation of the universe? If so, you are certainly not mentioning him or her as a possibility on these boards very often, but god(s) seem to get far more of your attention - which is odd, as they are both equally well supported hypotheses.

Of course, most people are not agnostic on this question. And for the same reasons, should not suddenly claim agnosticism when the hypothetical entity switches to 'god'.

It's not necessary to know the right answer in order to be able to reject some answers as obviously wrong.

'God' is not the answer to 'where did the universe come from' any more than the sqaure root of 6,342,854,632,798,542,691 might possibly be 8. I don't need to know the right answer to be confident in saying that 8 isn't it.

I don't need to know how (or whether) the universe began, to know that the Loch Ness monster wasn't involved. And nor were any of the myriad gods mankind has invented over the centuries.

 

[steve_bank]

An atheistic explanation is better than a theistic one, in exactly the same way that an afredistic explanation is better than one that invokes Fred. A list of all the things that might be involved but we don't know because we don't know anything, would be infinite and futile. But even that would be better than invoking God, while ignoring all the other infinite collection of things that we have zero reason to imagine are involved.

Well, that's the atheist delusion: thinking that your philosophy is somehow not a philosophy and therefore somehow exempt from the usual consideration a skeptic would apply to a claim.

My answer is and long has been "I don't know"; that's why I don't call myself an atheist, or claim to concretely anything about what does or does not fundamentally exist.

I deeply disagree that arbitrarily picking a worldview and sticking to it as definitive, despite a lack of supporting evidence, is somehow better than infinitely and futilely considering potential hypotheses. If someone ever tells you not to test an idea, they may be talking good politics but they are not talking good science.

And I'm not convinced that science, which is reliant on the uniformity of physical laws and constants to function at all, is necessarily relevant to cosmological questions in any case. If the universe had some sort of beginning or end, science could not logically help us understand it, as short of creating additional universes or ending this one, we have no means to recreating the conditions under which our only sample began.

I absolutely adore science, incidentally. I don't like people who use it as a magic answer-box that they name drop to affirm their personal biases. That is religion... at its worst.

Atheism is not a philosophy. Atheists may have any number of beliefs and philosophy. There can be odd contradictory combinations like paganism and philosophical Christianity...

It is what you do as an atheist that defines who you are. Politics, morality, philosophy. Being atheist says only a rejection of deities.

My general philosophy is free thought. There is no one effective worldview, too many aspects and varibles to reduce it to obne vision or paradigm. One does need a basic working paradigm to work from. It can change over time.

The BB theory does not start at time zero. There is no theory that in any absolute sense defines an organ or end to the universe. Science, philosophy, and religion on cosmology converse to the same unanswerable questions.

Where did I come from, why am I here, is there an end to all this....

I do not adore science, I appreciate it as a useful tool.

 

[DBT]

Now that is odd, telling someone else how they think about the subject of gods. Are you claiming some sort of psychic insight? DBT's statement is pretty much exactly how I take the subject - and I consider myself to be an atheist. Are you telling me that I am not?

In this very thread, multiple people, none of them Christian, have identified atheism as an essentially anti-theist philosophy and an act of political agency, have they not?

DBT's definition would make a chunk of granite an atheist. Or perhaps more to the point, a whole lot of people who would not consider themselves to be atheists. Hell, it makes me an atheist.

Conviction or absence of conviction requires a mind that is either convinced or not convinced. If someone is convinced in the existence of a God without adequate evidence, that is a belief held on the basis of faith.

 

[skepticalbip]

Now that is odd, telling someone else how they think about the subject of gods. Are you claiming some sort of psychic insight? DBT's statement is pretty much exactly how I take the subject - and I consider myself to be an atheist. Are you telling me that I am not?

In this very thread, multiple people, none of them Christian, have identified atheism as an essentially anti-theist philosophy and an act of political agency, have they not?

Not exactly. Many have stated quite anti-religious views however. This is understandable as religions can turn theists into insufferable beings. Hell there are religious Christian theists that hate Islamic theists (and vice versa)... does that make the Christian theists (and Islamic theists) atheists? Hardly. It is the other's religion and what it has done to the believers they control, not their respective gods, that they rant against.

So that would make three very different -isms that you are confusing. Anti-religion would be opposition to organized religions. Anti-theism would be opposition to gods. Atheism would be indifference to the idea of gods. So it should be obvious that someone can be both atheist (no belief in gods) and anti-religious, Theist and Anti-religious, theist anti-theist or atheist and anti-religious, religious and anti-atheist, etc, etc... mix and match.

DBT's definition would make a chunk of granite an atheist. Or perhaps more to the point, a whole lot of people who would not consider themselves to be atheists. Hell, it makes me an atheist.

I doubt it would make you an atheist since your posts seem to assume there is some supernatural force that interacts with our reality.

 

[Politesse]

DBT's definition would make a chunk of granite an atheist. Or perhaps more to the point, a whole lot of people who would not consider themselves to be atheists. Hell, it makes me an atheist.

I doubt it would make you an atheist since your posts seem to assume there is some supernatural force that interacts with our reality.

???

What force, exactly?

 

[DrZoidberg]

There are recent and past arguments by Christians that atheism is a relgion with a dogma and thenrest. I see it as a weak attempt to turn the table.

As far as I know there are no schools where you study atheism. It can be touched on in secular philosophy. Atheists do adopt secular traditions like humanism, but that is not an 'atheist' philosophy or belief system.

There are people who identify as atheists but belie in some sort of higher power. They may believe in ghosts.

There is an old myth of a spirit in a volcano. I reject it, and I suppose that makes me an
a-spirit-in-the-volcano-ist. The difference is that a volcano myth does not pervade our politics and culture and does not impact my life..

For me because Christianity is so pervasive in the USA I study it to understand it. Beyond that I do not dwell in atheism. I do not read books on atheism. I have no idea who's who in atheism.

There is a whole culture of atheism with competing factions. As I see it that is just human nature. Religion, unions, politics all the same dynamics.

The difference is the Christian claim to moral authority in ancient texts of unknown authors.

Atheism could disappear and there would still be theism. If theism disappeared there would not be much call for atheism. Atheism is a reaction to theism.

You're over-thinking this IMHO. "I believe in God because of a religious system that I have followed that has brought me here. It must be the same for atheists. Hmm... What corresponding secular institutions are there which promotes faith in atheism? Aha... [insert something secular]. That must be it".

To a hammer everything is nail. To a theist every belief will probably be a religious belief. I think that's the extent of this. It's not deep.

 

[Wiploc]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

It's what we mean by the word.

People who identify as atheists overwhelmingly prefer this definition.

If you look at how obstructive theists like to pretend we use the term, , then, yes, you get something different; but if you look at how self-identified atheists tend to use the term, you'll find nothing absurd about it.

-

Note: I'm not calling you an obstructive theist. I'm noting that much of the protest against the second-most-common usage of the word "atheist" is affected: People don't like it, so they pretend not to understand it.

 

[abaddon]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

... but if you look at how self-identified atheists tend to use the term, you'll find nothing absurd about it. ...

Yes. And big emphasis on the word "tend".

It's not just theists that lump atheists together and 'totalize' about them. Some secularists will say "we atheists need to" when talking about secularist activism, and that's why it looks political. Some naturalists will say "we atheists believe that" when discussing naturalism, and that's why it looks ideological. There's nothing about atheism that necessarily excludes either religion or supernaturalism.

When theists go on about "you atheists" or "atheism is (self-contradictory or false or whatever their point about something else is)", they'll ignore any post saying "you need to name the philosophy you're arguing against because its name is not 'atheism'"... and they always ignore the helpful hint. And they ought not to.

Also agnosticism and atheism are not exclusive. There are agnostic-atheists and gnostic-atheists. They're not non-overlapping categories, nor two different degrees on one scale. Rather they're two different scales: one about knowing (or lack of it) and the other about believing (or lack of it).

 

[skepticalbip]

DBT's definition would make a chunk of granite an atheist. Or perhaps more to the point, a whole lot of people who would not consider themselves to be atheists. Hell, it makes me an atheist.

I doubt it would make you an atheist since your posts seem to assume there is some supernatural force that interacts with our reality.

???

What force, exactly?

How the fuck would I know what you are thinking? Your posts frequently imply that you believe that there is something more to the universe than is addressed by science. Sorta like those that are into that Wiccan thingy where the practitioners actually believe they can cast a spell to influence outcomes to their will, apparently through appealing to "universal powers".

 

[Politesse]

Atheism is simply an absence of belief/conviction in the existence of a God or gods based on the absence of evidence to support such a conviction. That's all.

An absurd definition if you look at how people actually - ever - use the term.

It's what we mean by the word.

People who identify as atheists overwhelmingly prefer this definition.

If you look at how obstructive theists like to pretend we use the term, , then, yes, you get something different; but if you look at how self-identified atheists tend to use the term, you'll find nothing absurd about it.

-

Note: I'm not calling you an obstructive theist. I'm noting that much of the protest against the second-most-common usage of the word "atheist" is affected: People don't like it, so they pretend not to understand it.

I'm sorry, but its really just in arguments over the definition that this particular definition surfaces. Usually people mean, for all intents and purposes, that God does not exist.

 

[Wiploc]

It's what we mean by the word.

People who identify as atheists overwhelmingly prefer this definition.

If you look at how obstructive theists like to pretend we use the term, , then, yes, you get something different; but if you look at how self-identified atheists tend to use the term, you'll find nothing absurd about it.

-

Note: I'm not calling you an obstructive theist. I'm noting that much of the protest against the second-most-common usage of the word "atheist" is affected: People don't like it, so they pretend not to understand it.

I'm sorry, but its really just in arguments over the definition that this particular definition surfaces. Usually people mean, for all intents and purposes, that God does not exist.

That's far fetched. Implausible. I don't believe that you exist in a universe so different from my own.