Is strong atheism "faithy," dishonest, awkward, or hard to defend?

[Wiploc]

Over at Quora, I ran into a passel of atheists making claims like this. So I'm inviting them over here to hash it out. We may get some new members out of this.

My thesis is that strong atheism is easy and fun to defend, and perfectly honest.

I don't claim that it's the only honest position; I have nothing against weak atheists. (I do think it is tactical idiocy for strong and weak atheists to attack each other.)

 

[Ford]

If you take the position that the burden of proof is on the theist, then yes, strong atheism isn't all that hard to defend. I say there is not god...prove me wrong.


Is it honest? I suppose that depends on what you consider honest. I've met plenty of theists (as I'm sure we all have) that honestly and sincerely believe their god exists.

I'd chalk that up as a draw.

Awkward? In the context of a society like America where most people adhere to some sort of religion, then I'd say holding to a strong atheist position can be socially awkward.


Faithy? If by this you mean that some strong atheists can be a little too forward in trying to "convert" people to the proposition that god does not exist, then yes.

 

[Wiploc]

Hey, Ford, thanks for jumping in.

If you take the position that the burden of proof is on the theist, then yes, strong atheism isn't all that hard to defend. I say there is not god...prove me wrong.

If Sara says, "I believe there are no gods," and Joe says, "I believe there is a god," then their burden of proof is equal.

If Sara says, "There are no gods," and Joe says, "There is a god," then their burden of proof is equal.

Is it honest?

Guy over at Quora said that strong atheists are either stupid or lying. (I invited him not to come here.) And several others said something about weak atheism being more honest. I don't get it.

I suppose that depends on what you consider honest. I've met plenty of theists (as I'm sure we all have) that honestly and sincerely believe their god exists.

I'd chalk that up as a draw.

Right. Whichever position you take, strong atheist, weak atheist, theist, you are being honest so long as you actually believe in that position.

Awkward? In the context of a society like America where most people adhere to some sort of religion, then I'd say holding to a strong atheist position can be socially awkward.

I think the suggestion is that it is awkward to take any position that you might have to defend. That seems to me to be overly cautious.

Faithy? If by this you mean that some strong atheists can be a little too forward in trying to "convert" people to the proposition that god does not exist, then yes.

I'm guessing that the suggestion is that if theists hold their beliefs by faith rather than by logic, then strong atheists must be in a similar situation.

 

[bilby]

Over at Quora, I ran into a passel of atheists making claims like this. So I'm inviting them over here to hash it out. We may get some new members out of this.

My thesis is that strong atheism is easy and fun to defend, and perfectly honest.

I don't claim that it's the only honest position; I have nothing against weak atheists. (I do think it is tactical idiocy for strong and weak atheists to attack each other.)

Strong atheism is exactly as "faithy", dishonest, awkward and hard to defend as is the assertion that Santa Claus definitely does not exist.

Declaring certainty about the non-existence of the impossible is not a problem for me; I am as happy to assert that Gods do not exist as I am to assert that square circles and married bachelors do not exist.

Of course, like many arguments in the theological realm, it is possible to find loopholes by re-defining what qualifies as a deity. Emperor Hirohito existed, and is considered to have been a God; Joe Stalin existed, and is considered to have been a God too. Some theists define their Gods in such a way as to force them to be compatible with observation; Personally I regard such Gods as unworthy of the name, in the same way that a Cat is unworthy of being called a Dog, unless you bastardise the definition of the word 'Dog' with the explicit aim of including cats.

As a minimum requirement, I hold that an entity can only be considered to be a God if it can generate exceptions to physical law, or can routinely bias genuinely random events in favour of a goal. I am completely confident that no such entity is possible; and I am equally confident that any entity not meeting this definition falls outside the reasonable range of definitions for a God.

Of course, that minimum requirement allows us to imagine a very wide range of fictional Gods indeed - and as history shows, a very wide range of such Gods have been proposed. The existence of any of the sub-set of 'worshipful' Gods - those who deserve and/or reward the respect or worship of humans - is impossible for a considerable number of independent additional reasons, even if we were to allow the initial definition to be stretched even further, to the point of including hyper-advanced intelligences that work within physical law, but use technology so advanced as to inspire quotations from Arthur C Clarke.

In short, I am completely certain that none of the myriad entities ever proposed as Gods by anyone, actually exist outside their imaginations, except in those cases where their definition of the word 'God' includes entities (such as Hirohito, Caesar or Stalin) that have no supernatural qualities, in which case I reject their use of the word 'God' as simply erroneous.

The word God, like the word Werewolf, refers only to a fictional construct. It cannot be correctly used as a literal description of an actual entity. A pantheist might declare 'God' to be synonymous with 'Universe', and then say that as the universe exists, so therefore does God; But I reject this as the sophistry it clearly is. If we already have a name for an entity, then nothing is changed by using 'God' as a synonym, and the word can simply be discarded.

 

[Kharakov]

My thesis is that strong atheism is easy and fun to defend, and perfectly honest.

Only if you're God.

 

[Testy Calibrate]

Over at Quora, I ran into a passel of atheists making claims like this. So I'm inviting them over here to hash it out. We may get some new members out of this.

My thesis is that strong atheism is easy and fun to defend, and perfectly honest.

I don't claim that it's the only honest position; I have nothing against weak atheists. (I do think it is tactical idiocy for strong and weak atheists to attack each other.)

I'm a strong atheist . not Atheist at all though.

 

[DBT]

Atheism is as strong as the absence of evidence for the existence of a God or gods. As there happens to be no available evidence for the existence of a God or gods....

 

[fast]

If Sara says, "I believe there are no gods," and Joe says, "I believe there is a god," then their burden of proof is equal.

If Sara says, "There are no gods," and Joe says, "There is a god," then their burden of proof is equal.

I'm not quite sure if I have a good handle on this. I follow what you're saying. I'm just not as sure about how to approach this as I used to be. A claim is a claim is a claim, but there is something about a "there is not" claim that stands out as might having some material differences to "there is" claims despite the similarities. Maybe we should be cautious in how we treat denials versus assertions and careful not to bastardize (to use a word by another here) the distinction.

If I approach the grand table and stand before my peers and make claim that no danger is approaching, then sure, I probably should very well be prepared to back up what I say should I expect another to take stock in what I say.

I don't intend to say that my claim (that no danger is approaching) is not an assertion, but it seems to me that my claim is most certainly a denial. It seems that never would I have approached the table had there been no initial "there is" claim/assertion in the first place. I may very well be making an assertion or claim of my own when I say there is no danger approaching, but additionally, I am denying (and not merely disagreeing with) the purported truth of the other parties claim.

Of course, and this is where sophistry can be cancerous to the topic, as one might argue that each is the denial of the other. So, I look to the order. "There are" claims seem to highly outnumber the "there are not" claims coming out the gate. The "no there's not" rebuttals just don't seem to precede the originating "there are" claims all that often.

So what? Yep, a claim is a claim is a claim, but a claim that hinges on the claim of another is different in a way that might be important. Treating only the latter as denials such that only the latter hinges on the first and the original never hinged in the first place, I think there's a case to be made to dismiss the notion that they're six or half dozen the other--there's something unequal about the opposing claims ...

Does this have a trickle down consequence?

It's too late to make this fully comprehensible, but I saw your post and wanted to throw a word in at ya.

 

[Clivedurdle]

This goes back at least 2500 years and the question is this universe made of stuff or god stuff.

I see stuff all the way down - eternally. No gods.

How that stuff evolved is fascinating, like spacetime appearing like water forming from hydrogen and oxygen.

No gods though!

 

[Underseer]

I cannot prove with absolute certainty that faeries don't exist.

That's because the existence of faeries is a non-falsifiable claim. If I tried to prove that faeries don't exist, a faerie proponent could play an endless series of games that always leaves open the possibility that faeries are real, and that is enough to prevent disproof. For example, a faerie proponent could simply say the faeries were in the cupboard while I was searching the shed. I would have to be omnipotent to know for certain that faeries don't exist, as that would allow me to search every square inch of the universe simultaneously.

The existence of faeries is a non-falsifiable claim. This means that it can't be disproved even if it is in fact false, but it can be proved if true. This is why the burden of proof has to be on the person making the positive claim.

But yeah, technically, I can't say that faeries definitely do not exist. Technically, I have to take an agnostic stance with regards to faeries.

This doesn't mean belief in faeries is rational nor reasonable. An unsupported non-falsifiable claim does not deserve to be taken any more seriously than any other unsupported non-falsifiable claim, but I still can't say I am absolutely certain no faeries exist. If someone says that faeries are both squares and circles, then I can certainly say that particular conception of faeries cannot exist because it is logically impossible, but I cannot say with certainty that faeries in general do not exist.

So I do think that rejecting the claim that faeries exist is a defensible position, but claiming that faeries don't exist is not a defensible position. The latter is unprovable and invites others to play childish rhetorical games.

 

[dystopian]

Strong atheism isn't 'faithy', dishonest, awkward, or hard to defend.

First, a definition of the terms: Weak Atheism is the lack of belief in a God; Strong Atheism is the belief that a God does not exist.

It could be hard to defend if one were to be a strong atheist across the board; but generally speaking one is a strong atheist in regards to specific god claims. I'm a weak atheist in regards to the notion that "some" kind of god might exist; but I'm a strong atheist in regards to specific gods that humans have come up with; because these gods possess qualities that contradict each other, or because there's claims about these gods that are disproven by logical arguments or empirical observation. As such, it isn't hard to defend strong atheism.

I'm not sure why one would think it awkward; either to hold as a position or to defend. I suppose I'd have to hear what they mean by that before I can address it.

It's certainly not dishonest; if anything it is *more* honest than the atheist who tells others that he's keeping an open mind to the idea of god when in reality he rejects all god claims as impossible except some vague 'hasn't-been-defined-yet' concept of a god that he can't account for yet and thus can't be a strong atheist about.

It's also not "faithy". Is it faith to reject even the possibility of someone one day proving that really, 1+1 was 3 all along? No, of course not. Once you've established that a hypothetical thing's existence isn't logically possible, it doesn't matter if you reject the possibility of one day being proven wrong. The christian god, for example, can not logically exist as its attributes are internally contradicting. Meaning that in order to prove this god's existence, one would have to change its attributes, thereby changing the identity of the god which means that really one hasn't disproven the strong atheist's position on the christian god's existence, one has just created a new god that could be proven and called it the christian god.

Atheists who rail against Strong Atheists strike me as just a small step further than Agnostics who rail against Atheists even though they don't believe in god and are therefore themselves atheists anyway; they just don't want to be thought of as "extremist" by others.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Is strong atheism "faithy," dishonest, awkward, or hard to defend?

Depends on the atheist and how they reached that position.

 

[Sarpedon]

Honestly, to say that we can't decide because we can't prove it is dishonest.

Every decision we make in life is based on incomplete data. Just because we can't prove god doesn't exist, doesn't mean that we can't decide that he doesn't based on the information we have. I am more comfortable with the evidence leading to this decision than that of most of the decisions I make on a daily basis.

 

[Wiploc]

First, a definition of the terms: Weak Atheism is the lack of belief in a God; Strong Atheism is the belief that a God does not exist.

I believe this is the language that has them confused over at Quora. Atheism is not believing that gods exist. Weak atheism is not believing that gods exist and also not believing that gods do not exist.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Weak atheism is not believing that gods exist and also not believing that gods do not exist.

I'd say, for me, anyway, that it's not believing that gods have been proven to exist and also not believing that gods have been proven not to exist.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think it is indefensible. The question regarding the origin of the universe is indeterminate. To say outrightly that there is no creator seems about as bad as saying there is one, though not as bad as saying there is a personal creator that has spoken to man and given them commandments and what not.

Simply put, our existence, god or no god is highly illogical. Existence makes absolutely no sense.

That said, there is absolutely no evidence for a creator, so it would be the less arbitrary (and more reasonable) position to have, regarding such a nonsensical and indeterminate question.

 

[Bronzeage]

I don't know about "faithy", but it can damn sure get preachy.

 

[Wiploc]

Weak atheism is not believing that gods exist and also not believing that gods do not exist.

I'd say, for me, anyway, that it's not believing that gods have been proven to exist and also not believing that gods have been proven not to exist.

Plantinga has said that he cannot not believe in god. He would believe in the teeth of the evidence, even if god were proven not to exist.

So let's distinguish what we believe from why we believe it.

- Theists believe (for whatever reasons) that gods do exist.
- Strong atheists believe (for whatever reasons) that gods do not exist.
- Weak atheists (everybody else) do not believe (for whatever reasons) either way.

And then you could, if you wanted to, divide weak atheists into groups based on what their reasoning is.

 

[dystopian]

So let's distinguish what we believe from why we believe it.

- Theists believe (for whatever reasons) that gods do exist.
- Strong atheists believe (for whatever reasons) that gods do not exist.
- Weak atheists (everybody else) do not believe (for whatever reasons) either way.

And then you could, if you wanted to, divide weak atheists into groups based on what their reasoning is.

This wording is a bit too broad for my liking. It doesn't seem to allow for overlap between the groups. I'm a strong atheist about specific gods; but a weak atheist about gods in general.

 

[Perspicuo]

Atheism is impossible to defend philosophically.

That's why atheists I admire (Dawkins, Dennet, Harris) are actually empiricists requiring evidence, and suspend any belief in the deity (i.e. any of the myriad deities available on the beliefs market) until then. And good luck with the evidence since the other obstacle is the self-contradicting theologies and the mounting evidence on the lack of effective power of the deity or any of their promises (actual no-kidding-yourself miracles promissed to followers).

I'm a proud agnostic = weak atheist = empiricist.

Note: I know that Agnosticism is a statement about knowledge or a lack of knowledge, while Atheism is a statement about belief or lack of this, but for all practical purposes they're the same.