Is Atheism a Belief System? (split from the Political Views thread)

[Farm Boy]

Then eff it, son.

Good to go!

 

[El_Machinae]

In Good Omens, they often explained away questions about God by insisting on him just being ineffable

 

[Farm Boy]

Insufficient is insufficient.

Don't <SNIP> me. I bother to listen.

<SNIP> is also <SNIP>.

Self defined. Complete.

Dead. Reconciled.

Self-sufficient, we might say!

The pun is clever, but it holds no sway, bright as the morning may be.

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[Timsup2nothin]

The Logical error is assuming that this is proof of God. It is an infinite leap of faith to go from suspecting that there are unexplainable phenomenon all the way to believing that you have interacted with the creator of the universe

So you are recommending option a then?

By the way, exactly when in the question was god defined as "the creator of the universe"?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Except that my worldview allows for the possibility of Jesus rescuing me from driving off a cliff, so no work on that needed.

Mine does too, but I still think in the actual event I might do some serious assessment.

 

[cardgame]

By the way, exactly when in the question was god defined as "the creator of the universe"?

By the process of growing up within a cultural tradition that defines it as such. If you mean otherwise, you'll have to specify.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

By the process of growing up within a cultural tradition that defines it as such. If you mean otherwise, you'll have to specify.

If I grew up in a cultural tradition that defined dung beetles as candy bars I wouldn't consider that definition binding on you.

 

[Kyriakos]

Atheism is a belief, yes, though it rests on estimating if a god existing is probable. That said, "god" can mean various stuff, not just the biblical version. Imo the biblical one is highly unlikely to exist, unless we do not grasp all sorts of crucial stuff.
That said, i, as an agnostic, think that if some god exists it likely doesnt have a consciousness or at least isnt conscious as we mean it.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

You seem intent on missing the point.

I've only written one post in this entire thread (until now), so I don't think I'm "intent" on anything. But you haven't really given me much to work with there anyway, so never mind.

 

[Akka]

Not at all. I understand the basics of science. That wasn't the point.

Let's ask a hypothetical...

If you were driving, lost control of your car, and went off a cliff...and your car returned to the road and a guy walked up to your window and said "That was, as we say in the trade, your personal 'come to Jesus' moment. Congratulations." Would you:

a) Drive back off the cliff to see if it was a repeatable experiment.
b) Log immediately into CFC and try to convince us that it really really happened.
c) Accept that your world view needed a little work, but figure it would be best not to try to explain why to anyone else.

When it happens, I'll think about it.
The problem is that so far in my life, something as ludicrous never happened*, and when people explained me their "personal experiences", it was always something much, much, much less spectacularly incredible, and always something that could simply be easily explainable by a regular cognitive bias.

A rather more apt (and real-life) example would be :

Someone comes to you, and say "man, God really does exist. You know, during this last flood, we were a group of people in this building, and we saw the water rising, and we started to pray. Then soon after the water stopped rising, and once the flood was passed, we noticed that it rose just RIGHT UNDER the electrical system. See ? This is just too much of a coincidence, you can't deny that "something" is up there."
Suddenly, it isn't so ridiculous to cast a doubt on the reliability of said proof. Because suddenly, the example isn't so comically big as to be unmistakable with anything else.

Basically, you just chose purposely exagerated examples in order to be able to pretend that the other guy's opinion is dumb, because only someone dumb could be in denial of something so obvious. The problem being, said opinion didn't stupidly form by ignoring blatant supernatural cases, but by noticing that all these supernatural cases were never actually so clear-cut to fit the kind of example you give.


* Notice that I've had at least one case of experiencing something that I can only describe as "supernatural", that I'm totally unable to explain. The thing is, it's not some comic book event like your example, and I neither ignore it nor file it under "IT'S GOD !". I file it under "unexplicable" and wonder what thing we do not yet know could explain it.

 

[Kyriakos]

The debate on god -much like most other debates- has been on rather non philosophical and crude terms for almost 2000 years now.
Merry christmas

 

[Moriarte]

option d) - Accept that your drug taking habits are way out of line, fall on the knees, thank heavens for the miraculous rescue, make an oath to the almighty to never take LSD again.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Mine does too, but I still think in the actual event I might do some serious assessment.

Yeah, I have to acknowledge that that's true for me. My worldview holds that open as a possibility, but I'm sure it's occurring as an actuality would in fact floor me. Still, I like my first answer; I'd hope my core response would be gratitude. I wouldn't want to be among the nine in "Were not ten made whole?" But your hypothetical wasn't directed to the likes of me in any case.

 

[Kyriakos]

Basically:

Ancient greek theories on god:
-hidden and unknown
-unity of the cosmos
-different plane
-may not exist, but can't be proven not to
-other type of consciousness alltogether

Judao-christian view:
Angry father who'd rather kill you than let you do stuff he dislikes.

 

[El_Machinae]

So you are recommending option a then?

By the way, exactly when in the question was god defined as "the creator of the universe"?

We can define any god you want into existence, then. Sure. Of all the ones I have seriously looked at, I find that there are Hindu variants I have no problem with (unsurprisingly, with a long history of thinkers, you'll eventually discover an idea that seems just fine). There are a handful of Jesus's professed teachings that I find fine as well.

As to the answer to your question, I would bet it's a function of the long-term influence of the Greek Philosophers. There are absolutely many faiths where the gods are a function of the universe's laws rather than the Uncaused Cause.

But let's just be clear what your scenario is: it's very good evidence that the universe operates differently from how we assume. I have no problem with that. There are swaths of people who would find it sufficient evidence of more than that. I've heard murmurs of 'hallelujah' in church when people tell some supernatural story, because they go on to make leaps that are just not warranted.

Keep in mind, I have no specific objection to 'God' as a concept. It's individual conceptions of gods that will either meet or fail specific burdens of evidence.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

b) Log immediately into CFC and try to convince us that it really really happened.
c) Accept that your world view needed a little work, but figure it would be best not to try to explain why to anyone else.

Something between these. World view would actually need a *lot* of work. It's such a jarring break from anticipated experience that one would have to reasonably question either own mental capacity or settled science outright. If these particular "moments" are even somewhat common (1% of people or less would suffice) you would expect evidence for them available to other people, unless the entity doing them intentionally veils them/deletes evidence in reality and then only reveals to a single person at a time in a deliberate effort to thwart experiments to detect its existence. Which it nevertheless expects people to believe based on singular experiences like your example.

Even from a pure logic perspective, you wouldn't drive your car off again unless you wanted to die. Even if you update your anticipated experience to hold a small chance that you get rescued, most known cases of cars off cliffs hit the ground below. That holds even if one accepts they're not crazy in this scenario and there's a non-zero chance of a supernatural entity saving them. It'd be like playing Russian roulette with 1000+ bullets in there and only one possible empty trigger pull.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Not at all. I understand the basics of science. That wasn't the point.

Let's ask a hypothetical...

If you were driving, lost control of your car, and went off a cliff...and your car returned to the road and a guy walked up to your window and said "That was, as we say in the trade, your personal 'come to Jesus' moment. Congratulations." Would you:

a) Drive back off the cliff to see if it was a repeatable experiment.
b) Log immediately into CFC and try to convince us that it really really happened.
c) Accept that your world view needed a little work, but figure it would be best not to try to explain why to anyone else.

c) And ask god why apparently he arbitrarily interferes to save some lives but lets most people die. If thats the god you believe in its not worth worshipping anyway.
either that or
d) Request voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital

 

[brennan]

Not at all. I understand the basics of science. That wasn't the point.

Let's ask a hypothetical...

If you were driving, lost control of your car, and went off a cliff...and your car returned to the road and a guy walked up to your window and said "That was, as we say in the trade, your personal 'come to Jesus' moment. Congratulations." Would you:

a) Drive back off the cliff to see if it was a repeatable experiment.
b) Log immediately into CFC and try to convince us that it really really happened.
c) Accept that your world view needed a little work, but figure it would be best not to try to explain why to anyone else.

This is called 'begging the question'.

 

[formerdc81]

Why would this hypothetical frighten anyone besides the fear of dying? I don't care if my paradigm of the world is challenged, if I'm wrong....then I need to learn what's true. It's very likely I will be wrong in some way or another my whole life because mankind does not know everything and likely never will. That prospect does not terrify me because I do not come from a philosophical tradition where mankind's problems can only be solved by technical progress. I view it very much in the same manner as a martial artist trains his technique, only when one has mastered a basic technique is one then eligible to train in a more advanced one. If a novice attempts it, he will injure himself. Of course, it is possible to apply modern understanding to learn faster and smarter and better, but it is not possible to skip lessons and is certainly inadvisable to always seek the "easy way out" by finding technical fixes to surface phenomena without fixing them at their core. Doing that only creates replaces new problems for older ones, which to the tech addict, requires even higher technologies to fix. That is a hedonic trap and the only way to avoid it is to first perfect the existing system before gradually updating it, all while accepting the limits of the human condition.

More to the point, science itself is a set of hypotheses, the collected total knowledge of humanity, as verified by the scientific method. However, there obviously exist unstated assumptions built into the scientific method.
1) Continuity. Namely, that the universe is the same today as it was yesterday at some fundamental level, allowing for experiments to be repeatable.
2) Naturalism. Namely, whatever happens must be observable.
3) Mathematical Reduction. Namely, that whatever can be observed can be expressed fully in mathematical or statistical language.
4) Neutral Observer. Namely, that whatever is being measured is measured by observers without an observational bias or that with sufficient repeats by different observers, such a bias can be minimized.
5) Unaware Subject. Namely, that whatever is being measured does not, because of the observation, change its behavior.

In other words, scientific atheism is a philosophical choice. Atheism does not naturally "follow from science" unless you believe the scientific method is the only way to verify knowledge about the world, which itself is a philosophical axiom rather than a provable statement.
Quite obviously, a creator God has no obligation to follow these human rules for discovery. Just as how I, when debugging my programs, can insert values for variables that would never naturally occur in the running of the program, I am sure God can perform miracles in the same way and distort the laws of reality. Such a miracle does not alter my belief structure because I view science is the only a tool for analyzing and understanding the world. It's not the only one, but it is the one most effective for certain types of technical knowledge.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

A rather more apt (and real-life) example would be :

Someone comes to you, ...

This is the problem with option b in the hypothetical. People always seem to want to make "proof" equitable.

c) And ask god why apparently he arbitrarily interferes to save some lives but lets most people die. If thats the god you believe in its not worth worshipping anyway.

And insist that any "good" god should certainly be equitable. Why? Where does the idea that god would have to be working from a plan that meets your petty value judgements come from?

Akka, you immediately reduced real life experience by countering with "someone says." Things that happen to you aren't registered in your file of information as being equal to things you hear about. The hypothetical wasn't in the realm of "heard about." It was in the realm of "happened." Option b was included specifically to differentiate that. The question isn't about how you would respond to hearing about it, the question is about how you would respond to it happening. Those are far from the same thing.

That's why I pester the proselytizers for the non-god, as well as the proselytizers for various interpretations of god. If god wants someone, god can come and get them. If they think that telling other people about the experience is going to "bring them to god" they are most likely wrong. Just like when someone says "well, such never happened to me so it can't have happened to you either" in reply they are most likely wrong.