sir drinks-a-lot

WJ,

OK, I agree with you that it makes sense to cover point #1 first. Otherwise, this thread will explode into too many subtopics and debates.

I am not sure I really understand what you are getting at in point #1, so you may need to elaborate. To me, you just seem to be saying "no-one would debate a non-existent being, so every being that people debate must exist." or something like that.

If this is the case, I think the Santa Claus analogies are very relevant. Or you could substitute atsrology, pyramid power, psychic power, karma, etc...People debate the existance of all of these things.

Also, for clarification, which definition of the term "atheist" are you using? It sounds like you might be arguing that only strong atheism is inconsistent. I don't think most of the regulars here are strong atheists.

If you are using the broader definition of an atheist as someone who lacks belief in god(s), keep in mind that the only difference between an atheist and a theist is that the latter holds the belief that god exists. If you want to show atheism inconsistent, you might want to just show that it is inconsistent to lack that belief.

NialScorva

Nial, but thanks for trying.

At least you are keeping an open mind.

Yup, I understand analytic propositions and deductions quite well. I don't claim to know all that much about philosophy, but I did get at least the minimal vote of confidence to be made a philosophy forum moderator on this board. How about you just *use* the terms in their proper setting, and let me worry about whether I understand them or not.

I did not conclude anything. If you reread my previous post, I clarified your misunderstanding on what Ayers said, never once endorsing it as my opinion. In fact, I think that Ayers, in this essay, holds a little too tightly to a strict logical positivism that I do not agree with.

The problem, of course, is that Ayer does make restrictions on what an atheist can rationally discuss, however not in the ways you present. Ayer presents his case from a rather strict position of logical positivism. I read his essay as explaining why a commitment to logical positivism necessarily makes the debate over the existence of god moot. Reread the first couple paragraphs where he discusses the necessity for verification (<a href="http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/v.htm#verf" target="_blank">verificability principle</a>, perhaps?)

However, I doubt that you will find anyone here that espouses the verificability principle or logical positivism to that degree. You are ignoring all the assumptions made in Ayer's arguments in order to shoe-horn parts of his arguments onto atheists in general.

Done and done. I've shown that you take Ayer's argument out of context, and I've shown that Ayer's arguments do not necessarily apply if one does not accept the logical positivist roots of the argument.

For one such as myself who maintains that truth is a function of empirical fact *expressed* linguistic construction rather than the raw empirical fact itself, the EOG debate becomes extremely important and debatable, since it reflects not just on the existence of a hypothetical god, but that it's an example of how we take our linguistic reflections of the world and assume that they define the world.

I can honestly say that I have no such expectations, though in this post and others you seem to believe that atheists spend their whole life just waiting for the right argument to blow them away and roll over on.

I'm not sure how to answer this question...

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: NialScorva ]</p>

bd-from-kg

WJ:

It’s clear that you completely misunderstand Ayer’s position, or you would never dream of using it to support yours. He does not merely point out that the existence of God cannot be proved and stop there. This is just a step toward his ultimate conclusion, which is that the statement “God exists” is meaningless.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from essay cited by Chrestomathy:

As a theist, you must necessarily reject Ayer’s argument, because you are committed to the position that the statement “God exists” is not only meaningful but true. Therefore you cannot use this argument to support your claim that atheism is logically inconsistent.

A couple of related points:

(1) Although a theist cannot be a logical positivist, it doesn’t follow that all atheists are. There are a great many atheists who reject logical positivism, and who believe that the statement “God exists” is meaningful but false. There are others (like Michael Martin) who believe that the statement “God exists” is meaningless, but allow that this is far from being certain or settled, and so argue further that even if it is meaningful it is almost certainly false. Both of these positions are logically coherent.

(2) As a purely linguistic matter, it is not clear that it is unreasonable to say that the statement “God exists” is meaningless and also to say that one does not believe that God exists. After all, it seems reasonable to me to say that I do not believe that there are any married bachelors or square circles.

Thus your argument that atheism is logically unsound collapses in all directions.

NialScorva

This is a good point, one that I think logical positivism has a problem with in general: differentiating truth values for statements of fact verus statements of belief. For example, one could say "There are ten planets." and have full empirical verificability. However, "I believe there are ten planets." can be a true statement about a false statement.

Infinity Lover

Atheism is as logicly sound as you make it. If you need someone else to convince you how to lead your life, maybe that's why you're religious.

Here's some logic for you...
the logic of atheism, equals the illogicality of religion! It's impossible to be as wise as a god, but there's plenty of people who are just as stupid as God.

(Technicly speaking I'm just a person period. An atheist would be something you BELIEVE I am. I never chose not to believe in God, because that choice only exists if you believe it does

When we are united into seperate groups we end up fighting each other. The dumbest thing you could possibly do with us humans is split us up. How could the diversity of disagreeing groups ever be the result of divine ultimate wisdom?

How could something higher than you, subsequently making you something lower, that divides us, possibly be love?

What you believe in wants you to be honest...
Check?

Certainty and possibility are two different things! That's a ssssubtil difference that can be tempting to disssmisss
Check? How's the honesty coming along.

Believing is treating a possibility as though it were a certainty.

Is that being thruthfull to yourself?

The story of the fall of man clearly warns you, that we are not 100% trustworthy...
Perhaps this would be a good time to HONESTLY ask yourself, if religion could possibly be one of those earthly temptations you were warned about.

We DID start accepting God AFTER and BECAUSE we were tricked by the serpent! And that story IS told in retrospect, from a religious perspective off course, starting out with creation.

I'll stop here...

Hobbs

I'm not sure WJ is agreeing with Ayer's argument. Though it's kind of hard to tell what he means, I think that WJ's point may be that Ayer is an example of self-refuting atheist arguing. In other words, if we, as atheists, accept Ayer's arguments (which we must, because he's an atheist, too, and we of course all think alike), it means we cannot use logic to prove or disprove God. That plus his apparent refusal to see that we are not trying to use logic to prove that God does not exist leads him to conclude that we are being inconsistent: we claim that logic can't conclude anything about God, then we use logic to conclude something about God.

That is one hypothesis, anyway, to try to make sense of what WJ is trying to say. If there is a point behind the muddle, that may be the point. If that is his point, then the response is that atheism is based on a lack of evidence for God's existence rather than a logical refutation of God's existence, so his argument misses the point entirely.

Then again, there may not be a point behind the muddle, and it's all just muddle.

NialScorva

That's what I'm reading him as saying, too. The only problem is that if you accept Ayer's premises, then Ayer is saying that the existence of god is not debatable on logical grounds because it's trivially false: it's not even a linguisticly meaningful statement. It's like trying to solve for "+ 1 - =" in arithmetic. It's not provable or disprovable because the statement is meaningless, it doesn't follow the rules of what is and isn't a valid statement.

Of course, one can still argue two topics. There's the issue of whether "+ 1 - =" is a valid statement in another language game, and there's the issue of whether "God exists" is analogous to this statement at all. Ayer just seems to be moving the debate from "god exists" to "'god exists' is meaningful".

Clutch

No. Ayer was not remarking upon the motivation for discussing a god. He was discussing the semantic status of existence claims about a god. He was not saying that it's a nonsensical course of action to discuss non-existants, but that the existence claims in question are themselves meaningless. Since many people apparently believe otherwise, discussing their meaninglessness is very far from nonsensical, and seems more like a public service.

What WJ seems constitutionally incapable of grasping is that Ayer is not talking about God in any extensional sense. And his failure to grasp this indicates a near-complete ignorance of Ayer and the positivists more generally, since the interpretation of statements with non-referring expressions ('Santa', 'Pegasus', 'God') was among their most fundamental themes. Like all the positivists, Ayer assumed that the reader was familiar with the distinction, made early and often in virtually all their writings, between the material mode and the formal mode of speech: eg, between, respectively, potentially misleading statements like "I believe that God does not exist" and more careful formulations like "I believe that 'God exists' is not true". The latter is what a positivist of Ayer's stripe contends, since if 'God exists' is meaningless, then it is not true. Ayer argues that it is meaningless.

pug846

Since this thread should end up in rants and raves shortly…I’d like to take a moment and send a big FU to both BD and Nial for taking away all of my glorious thunder about Ayer.

That is all.

Edited to add: And for the love of Christ, don’t claim Ayer is wrong (or that he supports your position) without actually having read him.

/me gets off his high horse.

NialScorva

Hey, it's been well over a year since I posted in EoG, allow me an occasional game of disabuse-the-theist-of-his-supposed-philosophical-knowledge.

Tell you what, I'll give you a free abusing on anyone you want in philosophy, ok?

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: NialScorva ]</p>