Not Prince Hamlet

Wrong. For me, it's a matter of confidence and probability.

I'm not very confident that David Letterman is not wearing a white shirt right now. He may very well be wearing a white shirt. (My confidence = 0.05)

I am very confident that he is not wearing a pink and brown shirt right now. (My confidence = 0.90)

I am very confident that the Christian God does not exist (My confidence = 0.98)

I am extremely confident that I am looking at my computer right now and it's not really a hippo that I think is a computer. (My confidence = 0.99999)

Most atheists will never claim that there is no god, only that such a god is extremely unlikely, and no more likely than a huge number of other equally improbable explanations.

Jeff

sir drinks-a-lot

To whom it may concern,

I just spoke with Dave, and he is, in fact, wearing a brown and pink shirt right now.

Sir Drinks-a-Lot

Not Prince Hamlet

I consider it highly unlikely that you spoke to him. [My confidence that you spoke to him = .05]

Eudaimonist

You can't avoid the issue in this way. You may be sensitive to the issues of confidence and probability, but either you believe that God exists or you don't. Belief is not dependent on degrees of confidence or probability.

Atheism is neither a knowledge claim nor a probability claim. It's not like atheists can be defined as all those people who assign less than 10% probability of God existing. There is no mathematically definable cutoff point. What makes an atheist an atheist is that he or she doesn't believe in God, no matter what the probability or degree of confidence.

Not Prince Hamlet

Wow, that'll come as a tremendous surprise to all the cognitive scientists, artifical intelligence scientists, and psycholgists out there. To think that all along, any doubts I had were fictious and I either know something or I don't know something.

Ok, my middle name is Harvey: true or false?

My first car was a Nissan Sentra: true or false?

The title of my first published story was called "Prayer": true or false?

You obviously must be certain, so are these statements true?

If I told you that my middle initial was "H", does that affect your opinion about whether my middle name is Harvey? According to your line of thought, it shouldn't.

Jeff

Eudaimonist

Not know something. Believe something. Please read my posts a little more carefully.

You miss my point. I'm not denying that you may have differing levels of confidence in a belief. I'm saying that this has nothing to do with whether you are an atheist or not -- that is dependent on belief... not knowledge, probability, or certainty.

[ March 22, 2002: Message edited by: Eudaimonia ]</p>

Not Prince Hamlet

But belief is even less certain than knowledge. And frankly, I consider knowledge to be just a belief with greater suggestive evidence behind it.

I don't think there are many things that can be truly known, only believed very strongly. Remember cogito ergo sum. To prove knowledge of even one thing is very difficult.

Jeff

Danya

I know I am female. I know I have three children. The list goes on.

Jeremy Pallant

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas = Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. A mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you don't fit its definition, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very ravenous.

Not Prince Hamlet

Danya,

How do you know?

Jeff

[ March 22, 2002: Message edited by: Not Prince Hamlet ]</p>