phlebas

Oxygen can be seen. You just need the right conditions or equipment.

If someone can point out the right conditions or equipment to see God, that might help the theist case some

Vorkosigan

Since religions exist that don't include a definiton of a God, one cannot redefine atheism (strong or otherwise)by replacing non-belief God with non-belief in Religion.

I only meant that many religions do not embrace gods of any kind. They would be atheist.

Which should lead to the only tenable position being that of an agnostic.

It's an extremely well-defended one. But strong atheism is tenable based on the findings of western science.

I don't think theists are helpful becuase they cloud reason and judgement and they can be pretty damned nasty too. By the same reasoning I would say that atheism can be interpreted as unhelpful as this poition is not based on proof which means any observation will be biased by this view.

You seem to be claiming that people become atheists in advance of, or despite, the evidence. Yet most of us are atheists BECAUSE of the evidence, in its negative form (lack of gods or evidence for such) and positive (positive knowledge refuting possibility of the supernatural and alternative explanations for problems once solved by gods).

Strong atheists are not "biased" by our point of view. Atheism, after all, is not a worldview or even a problem solving formula, but simply a lack of belief in gods. In my case it is a denial of their existence, but even then, I do not need an alternate worldview to deny that gods exist.

Vorkosigan

The Messiah

Quote Vorkosigan

You seem to be claiming that people become atheists in advance of, or despite, the evidence. Yet most of us are atheists BECAUSE of the evidence, in its negative form (lack of gods or evidence for such) and positive (positive knowledge refuting possibility of the supernatural and alternative explanations for problems once solved by gods).

-------------------------------------------------

Not quite but pretty close. I agree that the body of scientific evidence allows one to refute the claims of modern deity based religions such a Christianity, but that is all. The further extrapolation that there can never be an explanation for the universes ecistance and structure outside our current understanding, and yes this could include a greater intelligence and/or being, is incorrect. The only thing you can conclude with any conviction is that you do not know. As I alluded to earlier, one can look deeper and deeper into the nature of our universe and find more and more fundamental rules but this reductionism will still leave one with the question of why. I appreciate that just because I ask the question does not mean that there is an answer but I am suggesting that an atheist proclaiming that there isn't an answer has no evidence for this.

Clutch

My thoughts, for what they're worth:

"Atheism" is ambiguous for reasons of the logical scope of negation. There's three morphemes there: not-god-belief. And two ways of carving up the modifying influence of "not". It can be [not-god]-belief, which is strong atheism, or not-[god-belief], which is weak atheism. The former entails the latter, but not conversely. (The latter describing, eg, agents who simply lack the concept of god -- thus failing to believe in the existence of such a thing, on account of failing to hold any views about it, including that it does not exist.)

Two points:

1) The strength of one's atheism is surely a matter of degree, and not kind.

2) These positions can be religion-specific.

Personally I think that the only coherent view correctly describable as "agnosticism", is the view that the evidence for and against some version of theism is equally powerful. To judge that, on balance, the evidence weighs against a god's existence, is to be some variety of atheist. The stronger that on-balance judgement of evidence against, the stronger the atheism.

The availability of mathematically certain non-existence proofs is a red herring in characterizing atheism, then. A religion might be kind enough to define its superhero incoherently, but strong atheism does not require this. A strong atheist simply can be one who reads the on-balance evidence as compellingly against a particular god's existence. How strong varies with how compelling. It would be absurd to characterize myself as holding only "weak" views on the existence of libertarian hippogriffs who do calculus puzzles while flying backwards to deliver pizza to the President of Ecuador -- even though I do not pretend to have a logically necessary proof of their non-existence.

One might be a general weak atheist, saying, "I have been provided with no general conception of the supernatural that would allow me to make sense of it one way or another", while at the same time being a stronger atheist about some *particular* conception of a god, saying, "Whatever it amounts to more generally for an agent to be supernatural, this story says that there exists such an agent who is both perfectly good, and who slaughters innocent children by the thousands -- and that's a risible perversion of the notion of goodness."

Philosoft

I am still unclear about these distinctions you make. An atheist may make strong statments about the nature of the universe but what difference does it make what this allegedly reveals about his mindset if he's demonstrably amenable to a change of belief given sufficient empirical or logical evidence?

If I say, "I believe there is no existential purpose for the universe and that further thought in that direction will prove fruitless," that's not a statment of personal dogma, it's a conclusion based on my assessment of the data. It says nothing about my ability to change my beliefs given sufficient reason.

The Messiah

I think the difference will be in the nature of any following discussion if this flexibility were made apparent, which it is but only about half the time. I think many atheist reserve this to maintain a certain level of conflict. As I mentioned before if all the protagonists made their positions clear there might not be any of the jousting going on these boards and that would probably much less fun.

Isn't dismissing further thought in any direction a definition of narrowmindedness ? Do you really believe that you have sufficient data to draw this conclusion:- 'there is no existential purpose for the universe'? I'm sure we have access to similiar data and I'm not sure, what was it that tipped it over for you?

Philosoft

I'm not getting through. Another approach.

What are my options? Are the statements:

"Based on current data, I conclude there is no existential purpose for the universe. This is subject to change given a radical restructuring of the data."

and

"The data are inconclusive so I will accept the default position and proceed as if the universe has no existential purpose until it can be shown that it does."

really fundamentally different statements? Do they actually indicate significantly different approaches in the ways the individual statement-beholders deal with philosophy and empirical reality?

The Messiah

Yes, the latter contains the words 'default position' being described as the atheist position, which it is not. The default position is 'unknown', it is unimportant whether the atheist position is much more likely to be correct than a theist beliving in an omnipotent God the additional step to believing that the atheist position IS correct, is invalid. The Devil is always in the details!

Jayhawker Soule

Clutch,

I much appreciate your input. With respect to agnosticism, I'd like to know your views on the Strahler quote given by me on the previous page.

Thanks.

Jamie_L

I've come to the conclusion that "strong atheism" is narrowly defined:

Strong Atheism: Believe that it is not possible for a god or all gods to exist.

Weak Atheism by comparisson is simply believing god/gods don't exist, but not insisting that it is impossible for them to exist.

The distinction between "believing god does not exist" and "not believing god exists" is semantic and meaningless in most cases. The one exception: people who have no concept of god (very young children, etc.) can truely be said to "lack belief in god".

Jamie