fast

Would you go as far to say that a theist's failure to substantiate their claim (that there is a God) therefore means the claim is false? Likewise, would you say that an atheists observation that a theists claim has not been substantiated therefore means that the atheists counter claim (that there is no God) is thus true?

I'm not so sure I can quite go that far. What I can do is observe that the theist has failed to substantiate their claim, and because of that lack of substantiation, I can therefore (and with integrity) both lack belief in the existence of a God and believe that no God exists.

Biff the unclean

It goes beyond failure to substantiate. There is a failure to attribute. There is an entire litany of identifying characteristics of what makes up God. But these characteristics are not attributed to anything, they are just given the name “God� and left to their own.
This process of a description existing independent of anything being that’s being described is a common occurrence. It’s called “fiction.�

The observation I’m making is that Theists not only proudly proclaim that they do not actually know that their claim is true they will happily explain to you why it is not possible for you to know that it’s true. That’s close enough to false to satisfy me.

And frankly the conversation has never gotten past this point of “claims.� They have never produced a God so that we could see if it were real or not (my simple yet elegant experiment) so we can’t actually talk about a God as the word is meaningless without something to pin it to. All they have produced is a claim. A claim of possession of information that when they explain to me why I do not have it they are simultaneously explaining why they cannot have it. This is again an open admission that the information is fiction.
A positive counter claim would not then be that there is no God. It would be that “this God story is total bullshite.� An Atheists observation that a Theists claim has not been substantiated therefore means that the Atheists counter claim of bullshite is thus true.

Bobinius

See below. This is how we differentiate 'existence' from 'non-existence'. Of course, if you want to deny this conditional, you will have to explain another way of discriminating between a state of facts where God exists and where God does not exist: a non-existant God has no observable effects. So go ahead, give me the criterion.

PS: We do not infer this conditional. It can be proven really easy using truth tables.

Alf

Not only that but simply stating "I believe there is a god" makes an implicite claim that "God exist". If you didn't you would essentially say "I believe there is something but I know it doesn't exist" which is clearly irrational and you should submit yourself to the nearest loonie bin.

So unless you are a complete loonie - in which case we don't have to take you seriously - you ARE making a claim that "God exist". Implicitely if not explicitely. Thus, we relate to that claim.

If seebs is saying he is making no claim that god exist then the default is that God does not exist and he must agree to that. If he doesn't, it is because he makes the implicite claim that God exist. Thus he IS making a claim. Wether he actually explicitely makes it or not makes little if any difference.

Not really. it IS a counter claim but it is yourself who somehow submit that someone - not identified - has made the claim that "X exist". The claim that "No it doesn't" is always a counter claim because it is generally the default position. If nobody ever claims "X exist" it is not a claim at all that "X does not exist" it is simply the default position. So, insisting that "X does not exist" is always a counter claim and somehow the person insisting on it is deluded and thinks that someone did make the claim that X exist. It still is a counter claim to the deluded person's imaginary opponent who he imagine made the claim "X does exist".

I am not sure exactly what type of theist he is but if he is a theist then he implicitely makes the claim "There is a god". You cannot be a theist without making that claim.

For one thing it isn't that important of a difference. Claim or counter claims are both claims per se. The difference is that the person making a claim must first argue his case. If he doesn't the counter claim is by default declared winner. If he does argue his case, the person making the counter claim must then argue HIS case. If he doesn't then the person making the claim is by default declared the winner. If he does, then the ball is back to the person making the claim etc.

So yes. The theist is the one who makes the original claim and if seebs doesn't want to make any claim then the atheist is by default winner of the argument and does not have to argue or prove his case. It is sort of simple that way. So if seebs doesn't want to make any claim then the debate is over. There is no god as seebs understand it.

Also, be aware that for any such debate, you may reach the conclusion there is a god or there is not but in either case it is never a generic god. It is always the god that the two sides agree upon. I.e. some form of definition. Any third party can always say "But you didn't prove it for MY god, I still believe that MY god exist". Of course, then that person who is probably a theist will then start a new debate and argument.

Of course, if the debate is over "creator of the universe, an omnipotent and omniscient being who is ruler and controls the universe" then if the debate were to conclude "there is no god" then any person who still want to maintain a belief in such a god must provide counter arguments against the last argument which concluded there is no god and thus argue against them.

Another route is of course to ignore the debate and believe anyway, but that would be irrational :-)

Not really. As you can see, once a claim is made, the ball is over on the other side and the roles switch place. Once you have made a claim and argued in favor of it. It is suddenly the person making the counter claim who must argue HIS side. If he doesn't the default is to accept the original claim. In other words, the counter claim is now treated as a regular claim and the person making the original claim can then make a counter counter claim which is to reinforce his original claim.

The idea is that God is defined within the context of this discussion to be a very powerful being and also a being interested in the well beings of humans. If this being is not powerful enough to provide us any help when we prayed for help, there would be no reason for us to pray.

If a theist prays to god: Dear God, please make Martha well and heal her of her illness.

If there was indeed a god and he answered like this: Dear John, I really would like to help you but as it is I am not powerful enough to help Martha so I am afraid you are on your own in this.

What would be the point for John to pray to this god? Why should he worship such a god? Clearly, the idea - and I dare say a core idea - of the christian belief is that god is powerful enough (let us avoid the word omnipotent right now as that is logically problematic) to assist John in his request.

If God has the power and the will to help us, we should see documented results of that power around us. God supposedly want us to come to heaven and not perish in hell. One way he could do that was to make a "Made by God" sign somewhere in the sky or other place where it was easy for us to see and recognize. If you looked up in the sky and you saw in big letters "YHWH" on the sky in a way that couldn't possibly be made by humans it would be a big evidence in support of the abrahamic god.

So, if there is this god and he is so powerful and so intent upon helping us all and caring for us all, where is this evidence? Christians mumble and point to the bible but the bible doesn't prove anything of that sort. The bible prove that there was a bunch of fanatic people who were extremely convinced that their faith was the one true faith and so they wrote stories trying to convert other people to share their beliefs. It doesn't prove anything beyond that.

So,yeah, if there was a god one would expect the world to include signs of the presence of this god. There are none. Hence we condlue there is no such god.

Alf

Alf

And thus he commited a logical fallacy. "I don't know how this could happen" does not lead to "God did it". Antony was wrong.

It is probably not enough. Just getting rid of religious belief does not imply a society where you suddenly have moral and social progress.

It is rather the other way around. As long as there is religious beliefs, the social and moral progress will be limited.

So getting rid of that is a necessary but by no means sufficient requirement to ensure social and moral progress.

That is probably true. I would say "general education" is also important and perhaps more important. Removing poverty is also an important factor. Much of the strife we have in the world is because there is a strife between those who have and those who does not have. Even the strife between muslims and western world can be seen in lieu of this. Of course, it is then wrong of radical muslims to try to destroy the WTC. Their lives does not get better by having the west crumble. It is in this that Usama Bin Laden and his co-horts have got it all wrong. Instead of destroying the west they should rather try to build up and make the middle east prosper. Raising general education level and provide food enough for those who starve and houses to the homeless etc. If you had a world were nobody were really poor and everyone could feel safe and secure, you probably also would have much less strife. Of course, more education is also antithetical to religion and so you WOULD get some strife - just look at the US where many people oppose evolution. I live in Norway and where I grew up people were generally very religious (christian) but nobody in Norway that I know of today - not even among the fundies - would take creationism seriously. A creationist from US would be laughed at if he had come here with his views.

I believe that a good education and a safe environment for kids to grow up in (parents have a home, work and food), would generally lead to downfall of religion and it would lead to a better world. Everyone would be happier.

However, I don't think that just removing religion would by itself lead to a better world overnight. It is a necessary but far from sufficient step towards a better world.

Alf

Alf

Not as much false as it is meaningless.

The point is that you have to attach a meaning to the word "God" before the claim "God exist" makes any sense. If this meaning is itself incoherent then the statement is easily shown to be false but without any such meaning the statement is not false, it is not true either, it is just meaningless. It is a claim that doesn't claim anything and so it isn't a claim, it just appears to be a claim.

If you attach a coherent meaning to the word "God" it can become an interesting discussion. I have yet to meet a theist who does that though.

No need to go that far. Since the theist hasn't made any claim it isn't necessary to show them true. If they do provide a meaning to "God" they often attach such an incohrent mumbo jumbo that showing them wrong is rather easy.

An example will illustrate here:

Theist: God exist
Atheist: What do you mean by "God"?
Theist: I mean the christian god.
Atheist: You mean a creator of the universe?
Theist: Yes. THE creator of the universe.
Atheist: The universe wasn't created.
Theist: How do you know?
Atheist: The universe is all that exist. If anything were to create it, it would have to exist and thus it would be part of the universe. The universe cannot have been created.
Theist: God is not in the universe. He created the universe.
Atheist: Then he doesn't exist. The universe is everything that exist by definition.
Theist: That is not my understanding of the universe. By universe I mean everything that exist except God. God exist but he is not in the universe.
Atheist: Ok, then how do you decipher what is in the unvierse and what isn't?
Theist: God is not, everything else is.
Atheist: That is "special pleading". If god is not in the universe then it is possible other things are not either. How do you differentiate between things in the universe and things that are not in it but yet still exist?
Theist: Well, everything we see around us has only been in existence for a limited time. God is eternal.
Atheist: How do you know? As you say, everything we see around us is IN the unvierse, everything we see around us is temporal and everything we see around us is such that it has existed for a limited time. How can you deduce from this that something has been eternal?

As you can see, as we dig deeper and deeper the irrationality of the theist stance becomes more and more obvious.

Most people have a very simple understanding of "God". It is simply "God as we learned when we were kids". This god belief is clearly false and when most people realize that, they refine this god belief. God becomes more abstract and more removed. Gone is the kind old man sitting on the sky watching over us, instead we have an abstract being that you cannot see, hear or touch but who see everything you do and hear everything you say and know everything you think and who will send you to heaven if you have beeen a good boy or girl. Again, this god belief is also somewhat harder but still moderately easy to show to be false and so they refine it again and again. The "God" that modern day theologians operate with is very far removed from the original war god Yahweh that the tribe of the middle east believed in. The absurdity is when they still claim it is the same god.

Alf

breathilizer

This response is late, but it's better than never, right?

In response to your post, "Without claims of gods first there would be no Atheists." I said "We'd all be atheists."

Your response to this (as well as similar responses from others) is not accurate due to a technicality which was apparently glanced over by everyone. Your original assertion was that there would be no atheists without CLAIMS of gods, and this does not necessarily include IDEAS of gods, such as we currently have ideas of invisible pink unicorns (IPU) but no claims.

So, if some people had an idea of what a god would be, but made no claim of it [existing], then everyone would be an atheist, very much in the same way we are all currently a-IPU-ists, by default.

As for your war/anti-war analogy, we get the same thing; no one ever said that there wouldn't be the concept of gods, only that there would be no claims.

ELECTROGOD

Unrealized ideas? What good are they? Ideas are not always claims but claims that are unsubstantiated remain as just ideas.
There is an understanding on both atheist and religious sides that the IPU is not actually being touted at real but really a parody of a postition/claim/idea. One characteristic of religious claims is that they are not just passing thoughts but actual ideas that people believe/assume/promote because they view it as either a truth or a way to gain power over others by convincing them that it is truth.
Tho without humans all concepts/ideas/claims would also be mute...as the universe was before modern humans...as far as we know. One could say that aliens somewhere have ideas of gods but we don't know this to be true. If it were true and we don't know about it then that would be like someone keeping an idea to themselves...irrelevant to everyone else and usless as a measure of everyone in comparison to that idea.
If I tell you about the IPU or the Flying Spaghetti Monster then you can take a position on it, otherwise there is no position to take unless I present said ideas. If it is meant as a non-sensical example then it is not an actual claim but another kind of idea.
Maybe what is hanging you up is the scope of what I covered (universe without human's ideas/human's ideas in relation to one another).

I'm not sure what you mean when you say: "As for your war/anti-war analogy, we get the same thing; no one ever said that there wouldn't be the concept of gods, only that there would be no claims."

I am saying that "if there is no concept" and you seem to be saying but "in light of a concept", which is the opposite of what I was explaining.
Sure you can be anti-war if it has been convceived of but not acted on. But if it has never even been conceived of then you cannot have a position against it yet. (what was the early church's position on DVD players? They didn't have one because they were not invented yet nor was it even an idea...yet).
I said that there wouldn't be the concept of gods (or claims or anything else that comes out of human's minds) if there were no humans. I was also saying (in less detail) that if somehow humans were not able to dream up fanciful ideas with an unusual imagination, which our species is known to have, then no person could be described as having no belief in gods (gods being a product of imagination) since gods are known to have originated with humans and those humans would be incapable of having ideas of gods. I didn't think that I would have to go into that much detail and it seems that most of the others who "didn't catch it" must have figured out what I was saying.
But since humans do have such an imagination then the result has been many a idea/concept/claim about gods to which we, as those who realize that gods are products of imagination and who take the "default" position (universe without human imagination), are then measured/labeled in relation to those ideas.
Go back to the definiton of atheist/atheism. It's the non-belief in "gods". It's not the non-belief in ideas that humans haven't thought of before. We can only be called Atheists in light of other's claims that unsubstantiated gods exist. If there were no claims (ideas believed and acted on in some way) then there would be no definition of atheism.

breathilizer

Why do you "quote" yourself if you're going to "quote" yourself "wrong?" You didn't say "concept," You said "claim." Now "excuse me" while I go abuse "quotation marks" on other "sites."

Do you acknowledge that there is a difference between a concept and a claim? (Assuming a yes answer) Good.

Now, if the concept of a god existed but no claim existed, then we'd all be atheists, thus making my statement true, because you were originally talking about CLAIMS, not concepts.

Had you're original statement been that "Without concepts of gods first there would be no Atheists," you would have been right. At least, no one would label us an such. But that's a whole other debate.

You're getting into some moot points about the purpose behind the IPU. We could easily switch to any mystical character you'd like.

The bottom line is that the absense of claims does not necessarily conclude the absense of concepts, and the concept is the only requirement to label someone a believer or a non-believer.

Jagella

I’m not too familiar with directed panspermia. What’s it about? If I understand correctly, some people believe that life on earth started as a result of it coming here from another planet. Is that what Flew believed?

I’m not sure if other people have thought of this too, but I believe that criticizing believing that life came from another planet is a criticism that can be leveled at the creationists. I’ve heard creationists say that it’s ridiculous to look for the seed of life coming from another planet because it doesn’t really answer how life started in the universe. Where and how did life originate if life on earth was merely seeded from space? A very similar question might be asked about a theistic explanation for the origin of life: where did “God� come from, and how did he create life? What is God, for that matter? In the same way that “directed panspermia� creates more questions than it answers, so does belief in a “special creation.�

Oh, and there’s one more point I’d like to make about creationism. Creationists like to claim that living things are so complex that they require an “intelligent designer.� One can conclude then, if living things require a designer, than this designer would need an intelligent designer as well! Not to be easily defeated, creationists will counter by inserting another condition into their original claim. That is, they will claim that living things that had a beginning need an intelligent designer. As a result, the designer (God) is off the hook because he had no beginning, and therefore there’s no need for anybody to have designed God. Do you see the fallacy in this argument? There’s very subtle question begging here. When the creationists claim that only living things that have a beginning need a designer, they have in mind their God whom they believe had no beginning. In effect, they are assuming that God exists when they imply that some living things, or at least one living thing, has no beginning. Very tricky, are they not?

I’m not an apologist for communism, but I don’t swallow everything that people, especially capitalists and the church, have to say about it either. Communists have traditionally been opposed to religion. Why is that? Christians will go on about all the terrible things that some communist governments have inflicted on them, but they leave unanswered a very important question: Why were those communists so sour on religion? The answer might be the oppression and despotism of the church! Communists knew well the political abuses of the powerful religious leaders of the past, and that’s why they frowned on religion. Christians aren’t likely to divulge such information.

Most of the other “hinges� of which you speak are not significant influences in occidental society. Religion, here in America and elsewhere in the West, is the primary stumbling block we face regarding social and moral progress. So to answer your questions, I say no to both.

Jagella