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

[Timsup2nothin]

Not really. You're still pretending that a negation is a positive statement. You won't be the first and you won't be the last, but it still makes no sense. The idea of an affirmation implies its opposite, but you are trying to claim they are the same thing. It maketh no sense.

I think there is something in there that you could distinguish, between negation as a positive statement and negation as a lack of affirmation. There may be two different words for the general case in some languages, but not in mine. But the best example I have found uses the word like, because there is a readily evident difference in meaning between "I don't like" and "I dislike."

 

[Farm Boy]

If it does not move you, it has no position?

 

[Arakhor]

It would mean that all of the currently practiced religions on Earth are false.

"Let there be light" could easily be a description of the Big Bang, if one felt so inclined. Science as we currently understand it can no more prove the existence of God than it can disprove it and attempting to do so puts you in the same category as creationists trying to prove that Genesis did happen exactly as written.

The only definition of atheism I use is the first one here. The second one I regard as a conceptual sleight-of-hand to shift the burden of proof away from theists, where it belongs.

The existence of the Judaeo-Christian God, at the very least, is not a falsifiable concept. Demanding proof either way is thus a complete non-starter.

 

[Traitorfish]

Atheism is not a belief-system, but belief-systems can be atheistic.

I-it's not that hard, guys.

Speaking for myself I am certainly embarassed by Dawkins and his ilk, though less because they "proselytize" and more because they don't know anything about philosophy or history and have horrible politics as a consequence.

There's an extent to which they don't know anything about philosophy or history because they have horrible politics. People draw up their own reading lists in accordance with what they assume to be worth reading.

 

[stinkubus]

If we let the creationists words mean anything then, yes, we can spin ludicrous interpretations of them which would give them credit for knowledge they wouldn't have any means of acquiring.

 

[brennan]

Is there some reason for not using a negation simply as a negation?

there is a readily evident difference in meaning between "I don't like" and "I dislike."

A scale of positive to negative opinion is not quite the true/false dichotomy we are talking about.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I can (and boy do I appreciate you giving me permission there, oh knowing authority figure) freely make such substitutions, but still no one does. There aren't people relating personal experiences with fairies, or unicorns, or your strange sandwiches.

True, they were told from childhood to privilege god over fugnagglesachswatches, so they do that. They still can't present reasoning why that is justifiable though.

Your argument is comparable to three guys standing around a heavy object

No, it isn't. A "heavy object" has properties in physical reality. It constrains anticipation. There are things you expect to see in reality when someone says "heavy object" and things you don't expect to see. If it's physically in front of you, the doubt is even smaller.

You are actually describing a random fantasy object, something that literally none of the three guys can detect or verify experimentally. One of them asserts it must be a 300 ft diameter popcorn kernel...but nobody can see anything at all, including the person asserting that. The debate about whether they can lift it rages on (?), but there's nothing actually there.

So why does the popcorn kernel theory win? I'd understand if they actually couldn't see each other because it blocks their view. But it's not there. Why?

 

[Arakhor]

If we let the creationists words mean anything then, yes, we can spin ludicrous interpretations of them which would give them credit for knowledge they wouldn't have any means of acquiring.

Thus the mere existence of the Big Bang says nothing about the nature of God.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

If I don't think x exists, then when someone opines that it does and I disagree, my position is entirely unchanged, except that I now know about this thing someone else believes in. No affirmation has taken place.

And neither is theirs. And if neither of you is a proselytizer that's basically the end of it. This whole thread started from a typical gnostic atheist dropping yet another anecdote about her adventures in proselytizing.

 

[Farm Boy]

Is there some reason for not using a negation simply as a negation?

A negation is a negation. A denial is a position. It is a plead of some small significance in court, for one. One that is often affirmed.

 

[brennan]

Which of course you didn't comment upon because you don't care and don't publicise your opinions?

A negation is a negation. A denial is a position. It is a plead of significance in court, for one. One that is often affirmed.

Again with the false comparison. We're not in court and the term 'denial' is loaded.

 

[stinkubus]

It tells us the Judeo-Christian God can't exist because it supposedly created the universe in seven days, not billions of years. If some deity did manage to create the universe in a manner that is consistent with the Big Bang then it CANNOT be the Christian God!

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Is there some reason for not using a negation simply as a negation?

A scale of positive to negative opinion is not quite the true/false dichotomy we are talking about.

The point is that "I don't like" lands at the origin point on a scale of positive and negative opinion, while I dislike falls clearly on the negative side from the origin. Similarly "yeah, god, just don't care one way or the other" isn't a negation, where "there is no god" is a negation.

Which of course you didn't comment upon because you don't care and don't publicise your opinions?

No, I blasted her. Because I don't really encourage proselytizing by anyone, but I particularly discourage it from the gnostic atheists because I find them particularly offensive.

 

[Farm Boy]

Again with the false comparison. We're not in court and the term 'denial' is loaded.

A court is the comparison because there are "oughts" that flow from positions that are determined to either hold weight, or not. Courts exist(at least in part) to find "ises." They're some of the weight-iest ises our society entertains. The language doesn't change that much.

"This is, or this is not" are very much the nature of the business. As are the "is's" we use to build our "oughts" in life. You don't have to publicly deny something to deny it as your position for your oughts. But you can.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

It tells us the Judeo-Christian God can't exist because it supposedly created the universe in seven days, not billions of years. If some deity did manage to create the universe in a manner that is consistent with the Big Bang then it CANNOT be the Christian God!

Once again you seem to be equating "god" with "the christian god" and acting as if a disproof of one disproves the other...not that I think you are being particularly successful in your disproof of either, but neither here nor there.

So, tell us, how would you go about explaining the big bang using only terms recognizable to the average negative fourth millennium human?

 

[Lexicus]

"Let there be light" could easily be a description of the Big Bang, if one felt so inclined.

It would have to be a highly allegorical description and even then you need to stretch your exegesis to the breaking point to sustain it. For example, the universe was opaque to electromagnetic radiation for the first ~377,000 years of its existence. So starting with the differentiation between light and darkness on the first "day" makes no sense right off the bat.

The existence of the Judaeo-Christian God, at the very least, is not a falsifiable concept.

Here I would disagree. All the specific gods that are advanced by various traditions invented by humans are falsifiable, and I would argue actually falsified as well. For instance the Genesis myth is obviously not true, bears no resemblance whatever to anything that actually happened, and therefore the god it describes either doesn't exist or is an "empty concept" where there would be no consequences if it did exist (which is imo effectively the same thing as non-existence, but that's the Pragmatist in me talking and others may have a different view).

Incidentally, this is sort of what @stinkubus is getting at with his point about a God who didn't actually do anything and doesn't interact. If god is reduced to "empty concept" status because god doesn't actually do, explain, or say anything (ie, if god is unfalsifiable) then there is no sense arguing about he/she/it at all; it is essentially accepting the validity of @TheMeInTeam's nonsense-word argument. As well argue about fleelshnabs as a non-falsifiable god.

A negation is a negation. A denial is a position. It a plead in court, for one. One that is often affirmed.

I am genuinely curious, for those who agree with Farm Boy here (I know he won't respond to me but maybe someone else will):

I think we can agree there are any number of gods that we all don't even know about. All of us are atheists here in this thread, the only difference is degree - the monotheists among us are atheists with respect to all the gods humans have dreamt up over the millennia, except one. Many of these gods you don't believe in because you've never even heard of them! Indeed I would hazard a guess that only a tiny fraction of all the gods humans have thought of have made it into the historical record, and of those that have made it into the record most of us are only aware of a relative handful.

Anyway, my relationship with these gods I've never even heard of seems to bear a lot of resemblance to what @Timsup2nothin describes as a "truly" lacking-in-positive-belief atheism: out of sight, out of mind. Don't care.

So let's say I learn about one of these gods I didn't know about. Maybe I pick up a book of old myths, or maybe I'm an archaeologist doing fieldwork and I discover a "new" god that no one has known about for thousands of years.

What about my position has fundamentally changed? Is merely being made aware of a "new" god grounds to say that now I must be engaging in a positive mental act of denial to continue to sustain my non-belief in its existence?

 

[Lexicus]

There's an extent to which they don't know anything about philosophy or history because they have horrible politics. People draw up their own reading lists in accordance with what they assume to be worth reading.

Yeah that's probably at least as accurate as my characterization.

 

[brennan]

A court is the comparison because there are "oughts" that flow from positions that are determined to either hold weight, or not. Courts exist(at least in part) to find "ises." They're some of the weight-iest ises our society entertains. The language doesn't change that much.

"This is, or this is not" are very much the nature of the business. As are the "is's" we use to build our "oughts" in life. You don't have to publicly deny something to deny it as your position for your oughts. But you can.

You're not seriously suggesting that courts are a good way of determining facts? Let alone what ethics we should derive from them.

 

[uppi]

It tells us the Judeo-Christian God can't exist because it supposedly created the universe in seven days, not billions of years. If some deity did manage to create the universe in a manner that is consistent with the Big Bang then it CANNOT be the Christian God!

When someone tells a story about you and it later turns out that the story never happened, this doesn't prove you don't exist.

 

[Lexicus]

When someone tells a story about you and it later turns out that the story never happened, this doesn't prove you don't exist.

If someone told a story about "you" but the "you" in the story bore no resemblance to the "real" you and did a bunch of things that the real you never did, we might be fully justified in questioning whether the story was actually about "you" at all.