Her pinkness saves

where would "The existence of God is unnecessary" fit?

Dlugar

Unfortunately I don't know of a poll format that would easily allow me to query this sort of information. Fortunately, I don't really care--if you consider the phrase "weak atheist" to best describe your beliefs in any particular area, then pick any of those. In other words, pick any of the cars you drove last week and answer based on that one. My attempt isn't to trip you up and say, "Aha! But I saw you drive a four-wheeled car last week! Buwahahaha!" My goal is only to understand.

So if, say, you are a strong atheist with regard to A, a weak atheist with regard to B and C, and an agnostic* with regard to D and E, then pick either of B and C and answer the poll based on one of those--it doesn't matter to me which one.

* I fully realize that an agnostic, strictly speaking, is also a weak atheist. However, I find that there are some people who would self-describe as "weak atheist" with regard to some gods, and "agnostic" with regard to others, because they feel the label "agnostic" more precisely describes their belief in the latter case than "weak atheist". This, of course, may not be true of everyone.

p.s. I am not a lawyer, nor do I work for the IRS, but I do have an annoying-at-times tendency to try and state things exactly with as little ambiguity as possible. Please forgive me.

Edited to add: if you are a weak atheist with regards to A, B, C, and D, but would never use the phrase "weak atheist" yourself to describe your beliefs in any of those (because you prefer some other terminology), don't answer the poll; I'm only interested in self-describing weak atheists. Thanks.

Dlugar

My poll questions are more on the scale of how probable you think the existence of God is. If you don't care how probable because you believe God's existence is unnecessary, that would fall under "don't care".

joedad

I’m with Howard.

I think the OP and the poll choices are much more meaningful if you give the god a name. If you mean the biblical god then use Yahweh, for example.

I personally see monotheists as weak atheists. They have written off the existence of tens of thousands of gods and spirits. If you used Vishnu in the OP and poll choices, Christians would be atheists.

Dlugar

This is precisely why I didn't use a particular deity. I'm not interested in people who you think are weak atheists, or even people who qualify as weak atheists under some definition. I'm looking for people who self-describe as weak atheists. I don't think any Christians (or monotheists) self-describe as weak atheists, so I'm not interested in their answer to the poll.

I'm interested in people who do self-describe as weak atheists (who would choose that label to apply to themselves because they think it best describes their beliefs), no matter what deity, deities, or gods or spirits they typically use that term with regard to. If they typically use the phrase "weak atheist" to describe their belief with regards to lots of different deities, and their answer to the poll would be different depending on which deity they're talking about--just pick one! It doesn't matter to me.

(And please post about it, because I haven't met anyone who typically uses the phrase "weak atheist" to describe their beliefs in re multiple different deities or groups of deities, and has a different response in this poll depending. I would be most curious to know more.)

Steven Mading

And that's a good thing. I don't ascribe any deliberate malice on your part in the creation of the poll, but the fact that its misleading nature was accidental on your part doesn't change the fact that it *is* misleading and you shouldn't trust the results you see on it. If you want understanding, rely exclusively on the essay-style responses in this thread, and ignore any and all numerical results of your poll. The reason I didn't answer the poll is that I don't want to contribute to the fact that it will mislead you if you try to draw any conclusions from it.

Steven Mading

As a suggestion, here would be, I think, a much better way to arrive at the answer you're looking for, if I'm guessing your intent, and it would work with the kinds of polls allowed by the forum software. Ideally, you should have a checkbox poll (can give more than one answer - then I could say "these are all the descriptions I think fit the defintion of weak atheism instead of strong atheism") rather than a radio-button poll, but that's not possible on the forum, so try this as the next best thing:

Phrase your question as a threshold of definition rather than as a single point that describes all the respondant's unbeliefs in all gods, like so:

"For those of you who call yourselves weak atheists (or those who call yourselves weak atheists with regards to at least some if not all gods), where do you think the cutoff point is between the definition of weak vs strong atheism? What is the highest number on the scale below that you think still fits what you would call weak atheism as opposed to strong atheism?" - You ask that question, followed by something very similar to what you have on your original scale, sorted in order from 1=no certainty up to N=absolute certainty, where N = the number of buckets you want in your poll's histogram.

I think that question would get you more of what you want. In essence it has people answering with a range rather than a single number. When someone answers "3", for instance, then what that person is really saying is something like "I consider a 1,2, or 3 is what I mean by weak atheism, and a 4,5,or 6 is not."

You could also ask a second poll question to define the bottom of the range too. (At what point is it no longer right to call it atheism of any form whatsoever, not even weak atheism - where is the point where you would start to call it something else entirely? - be careful not label what the "so little disbelief that it's not really atheism" is called, though. Don't call it agnosticsm, for example. That will trip up the people who consider agnosticism to be compatable with weak atheism.

dettus

What hypothetical gods are those?

Why is it that just because something is ill defined all of a sudden it adds a certain amount of reasonableness to that particular claim? :huh: The way I see it is that if someone can't even define what they are talking about it's all the MORE reason to reject their claim.

eta: so it looks like we have 14 weak atheist who are actually strong atheists and 7 people who anwered the question of knolwedge rather than the question of belief.

Dlugar

Wow, I didn't mean to be so opaque! That's not what I'm after at all, but it seems like a very common assumption that that's what I'm after! Now I'm curious as to why everyone seems to assume that's what I'm looking for ...

In any case, I know exactly what the cutoff point is between the definition of weak atheism and strong atheism. It's the proposition, "God does not exist". Anybody, no matter what they believe, is a strong atheist if they accept that proposition and a weak atheist if they don't (ignoring theists for the moment).


So, what am I really after? Let's imagine there's a scale of 0-100, where 0 means you're absolutely certain that God exists, and 100 means you're absolutely certain that God doesn't exist. If you plot all the self-describing strong and weak atheists on this scale, what will you see? My hypothesis is that nearly all the strong and weak atheists will be heavily clustered around the "very unlikely" side, say in the high 90s, with some overlap in either direction. This poll is an attempt to figure out how accurate that hypothesis is.

Now, the self-describing part of this is very important. I think (hypothesis #2) if you were to take everyone who happens to fall under the definition of "weak atheist" and everyone who happens to fall under the definition of "strong atheist", whether or not they self-identify under those terms, you'd find that the weak atheists are scattered by and large all over the graph, without a real clustering anywhere, whereas you'd see a strong cluster of strong atheists again in the high 90s.


If both these hypotheses are true, that opens up a whole world of interesting questions. Why do self-describing weak atheists tend to cluster, whereas non-self-describing weak atheists don't? Do they consciously want to be identified with the other atheists scattered all over the graph, hence the use of the label? Or is that just an unfortunate side effect of the category being so large, and a smaller, more descriptive label than "weak atheist" would more accurately describe their belief? Or, on the other hand, do weak atheists consciously know that self-describing weak atheists cluster, and thus by self-describing as a weak atheist, they know that others will probably see them as being more closely associated with others in that cluster, as opposed to falling anywhere on the spectrum of belief?

Fascinating questions, in my opinion. Of course, your suggested poll(s) would also open up a bunch of other, completely unrelated, fascinating questions, so maybe I'll go that route after I exhaust this avenue of inquiry. Thanks again for participating.

Wiploc

The point is that he wants to hear from weak atheists. If he names a god, he keeps a lot of people from answering. If he names Jehovah, and you are only a weak atheist toward Thor, then you don't get to answer the poll. But if you name the god that you are weak atheist toward, and then you tell us how likely you think that god is, then you are doing us some good.



I'd say most Christians are weak atheists toward other gods. But if you are a Christian who is weak atheist toward another god, then we want to hear from you about how likely you think that other god is. Otherwise, you're off topic.

crc