Slashdot Mirror

...no it's not. Absence of faith in a God is Agnosticism, that is, "while possible, I do not have faith in the absolute certainty of God". Atheism is exactly that -- Anti - theism, that is, "I am sure that there is no God", or, as you say, "I have faith in the absence of a God".

Uh, no, that would be more akin to anti-theism.

P.S. Atheism and theism are dichotomic. If you believe in at least one god, you are a theist. Otherwise, you are an atheist.

Agnosticism is about epistemology -- it's the position that you can't know for certain whether or not god exists.

Theism/atheism is about ontology.

Theism is believing gods exist.

Atheism is believing god does not exist.

Most agnostics are either atheist or theist. There are few agnostics who leave the existence of god in that quantum state of both existing and not existing.

See this:

Many people who adopt the label of agnostic reject the label of atheist — there is a common perception that agnosticism is a more “reasonable” position while atheism is more “dogmatic,” ultimately indistinguishable from theism except in the details. This is not a valid position to adopt because it misrepresents or misunderstands everything involved: atheism, theism, agnosticism, and the nature of belief itself. It also happens to reinforce popular prejudice against atheists.

Atheism means there is no possibility of the existence of god. None, nada, absolute zero. The "supernatural" is a crock.

Any believe that says there "might or might not be a god" is agnosticism. Agnostics (look up the origin of the term) simply say there is no way of knowing for sure either way. Hence the hedging of bets with weasel words.

The third state is theism - certainty in the existence of one or more gods. An "almost certainly there is a god" is not a theist - that's also an agnostic, because they admit to not knowing for certain. To say "almost certainly no god" is also agnosticism, not atheism. You'll never see an atheist such as myself use such phrasing, except to mock it.

Is it still "agnosticism" if one concludes from sampling the effectiveness of prayers asking for divine intervention that there is a six or even nine sigma limit on the possible existence of an interventionist supernatural being, with the attendant belief that that essentially precludes the physical relevance of the hypothesized being, even if it does not categorically disprove the existence of it once and for all?

Yes, that's agnosticism - it claims that there is a certain uncertainty as to whether god exists or not.

That is, is can one describe the use of "almost surely no god" as a statement of atheism, or is it simply "hardcore agnosticism"? Does it really matter? Dawkins uses "almost certainly no god" quite often. His background in zoology, ecology and population genetics involves quite a lot of statistics.

Agnosticism.

The "Atheist Bus Campaign" calls itself atheist, yet its signs generally say: "There's probably no god". Are they really agnostic? Does it matter?

The sign is agnostic.

Also, what's the difference between an agnostic who does admit the possiblity of a god or a godless universe (without committing to either, perhaps due to insufficient evidence) and an agnostic who insists that one must include both possibilities because it is not (logically, or perhaps physically) possible to preclude the godful condition?

Nothing - they're both nervous about the final outcome :-)

What's the difference between the second type of agnostic ("it is not possible to preclude the godful condition") and an atheists who accepts that in the long-term absence of any three, four, five or even six sigma events that are most easily explained by the existence of a supernatural being, that there is no god?

Both are agnostics - the so-called "atheist" you posit would accept the existence of god under certain events. A true atheist would, upon being presented with seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the existence of god, say "You've been fooled. There is no god. Now go review your evidence and find your error." A true atheist, upon being visited by a "being" or "presence" that claims to be god, would say "fuck you, liar" and spit in its' eye. It's only a "god" if you believe it is ... same as cavemen would probably think we are gods. Fortunately, we're at the point where we can bootstrap ourselves to the realization that god doesn't exist, only stuff that we haven't worked out the science ... there is no "supernatural", no "magick", just stuff that, given enough resources, we can duplicate. Would that make us gods, worthy of being worshiped? Of course not.

And why would ANY god need to be worshiped .. or even want to be worshiped? It's degrading to both parties. What a fucked-up concept.

Atheists aren't those who are looking for an abolition of religion (they couldn't care less, provided it doesn't interfere with them). Anti-theists on the other hand, are.

Atheism is the state of being without a belief in a god or gods. No more, no less.

This state of mind incorporates no agenda. There is no dogma for atheism, no book or agenda or canon that says an atheist "must" be ok with religion, or not. Atheism doesn't define "couldn't care less" any more than it does "cares a lot" with regard to anything, including the lack of belief itself.

In the terms you're throwing around, an atheist might be anti-theist, or not. This is not a consequence of atheism, however. It is a consequence of how the individual sees theism -- which I suspect is in turn a consequence of how theists and the doings of theists have impacted the life of the individual, and those the individual cares about.

I don't believe in a god in the same way I don't believe in unicorns.

All knowledge is contingent: at some level you have to believe things such as the past is a predictor of the future, that you can trust your senses, and so forth, in order to make any progress. Without such starting points it's hard to see how you could develop any kind of worthwhile philosophy.

There are an infinite number of things that might be or about which I might be mistaken, but I'm not going to act as though they do exist without good reason. I don't see atheist logicians and philosophers as being closed minded on the subject, they are just unconvinced by the arguments in favour of faith. Moreover, they explain precisely the problems with the arguments for theism as presented.

I was not mounting an attack on your religion, nor anyone else's.

Malc had constructed a strawman argument about atheism ("if we are as nature made us, how can we be responsible?"). I tried to point out that the same strawman can be applied to theism ("if we are as God made us, how can we be responsible?")

I have spent 36 years failing to grok religion (it fascinates me precisely for that reason) so there may well be something I've missed.

What does not believing in a god have anything to do with morality? More importantly, what does believing in a god have to do with morality? People were moral long before people created the god hypothesis. Just because we're made up of molecules and are a result of evolution doesn't mean that we can't be moral. False dichotomies and fallacious presuppositions are not evidence to support that theism is any more moral than atheism. That's like saying since I believe in Santa Claus I'm more moral than somebody who doesn't because I know that if I'm good I'll get presents. Patently ridiculous! Also, should it matter if you shot somebody in the face when you were drunk, or sober? It should matter that you shot somebody in the face.

Is personal responsibility compatible with theism? If I'm just as God made me, then it seems to me that God wanted me to be what I am. If God made me so I had a propensity to violence and no ability to control it, then what right do men and women have to judge me?

It really doesn't matter if you consider me a creation of God, a bag of chemicals formed by randomness and natural selection, or both, or for that matter something formed out of the FSM's sauce. Either I get a free pass because of what I inherently am, or I get assigned some sort of responsibility for my actions.

Now most religions do combine a belief in personal responsibility with a belief in God, but that's not inherently so. Predestination has a long history on Protestant Christian theology, for example. Scientific explanations do not get into personal responsibility, because that's not the sort of thing we can objectively observe. There is scientific evidence that people can change their behavior, at least to some extent, when held responsible for it, and that's the closest you'll be able to get.

According to mainstream Christian Theism, at least...

No, because we are "made in God's image", we can infer things about him and how he feels about his creations from our own creative nature. God's an AI hacker on a grand scale -- if we had no free will, we'd be nothing but relatively boring scripts, not a successful AI program.

And while God _does_ allegedly intervene in the world sometimes -- we call these "miracles" -- he limits most of his involvement to just keeping the system running. Again, this surely makes sense to any hacker.

(Oh, and for randomness's sake, think about Tron. Flynn=God, Flynn-in-the-computer=Jesus.)

How can atheism NOT equal determinism? What enters into the equation to allow free will?

How is theism any different. Einstein said "God does not play dice". I think that's as valid a statement whether you think of God as a real entity or as an atheist's metaphor for nature.

You can argue for or against determinism, from both theist and atheist perspectives.

Quantum uncertainty says that God does play dice.
Chaos theory says that even if God doesn't play dice, it's so difficult to determine the future given your observation of the present, He might as well be.

And I answer in seriousness that it's as compatible with Atheism as it is with Theism. If we are nothing more than the creations of an omnipotent and omnipresent God, then where does personal responsibility come into play? I am the raw creation I was built as, influenced by external factors beyond my control. I would never blame a computer for a programmer's error. How do we blame a person for the flaws that Almighty God created them with?

It's simple - whether we are simple biological creations or skin stretched over an immortal soul, we as a species have compassion. No one can say for sure what source that compassion comes from, whether it's a biological advantage for survival of a species and therefore a result of evolution or whether we were imbued with it by an immortal being who created us. That compassion allows us to see that those around us are largely like ourselves, and in general desire to be treated much as we would treat ourselves.

Whether innate compassion created the Golden Rule, or the other way around, is a "chicken and the egg" problem. No mortal has access to that information.

What gets dangerous is when individuals or groups set aside that compassion or lack it entirely, because we are a very clever species at killing one another. When one group, be it a religion, a skin color, a political group, or even fans of a sporting team, sees another group as something below fully human, very evil results almost invariably follow. Differing or lack of religion is merely another "us and them" factor that can and sadly does result in interruptions in our awareness of other human beings as, well, human beings - flawed, mistake-prone people who are prone to self-delusion and self-centeredness. Just like us.

To me this ruling seems to come more from theism than atheism. We are a product of our genes and our upbringing. The argument that someone cannot control their actions due to some genetic trait or because they were mistreated when they were young implies that there is some outside thing, the soul or wherever free will comes from, that has been abused by heritage or upbringing and is not responsible for its actions and should not be punished. Laws are created to bind members of a society to a code of conduct, and people that breach that code should be held equally responsible for their actions. It may be more difficult for this man to refrain from killing people than it is for you or I, but we should all obey the same rules or face the same punishments.

I would never blame a computer for a programmer's error. How do we blame a person for its hardware and programming?

Would you also keep using the same program and let it run even though it continually crashes or produces erroneous results?

Theism is a set of active belief systems with rules, directions, leaders, and so forth. Atheism is not.

You are believing that you don't believe (or you may prefer: that there is nothing to believe) But until there is an empirical proof that validates such reasoning it will always be a belief, which is what an hypothesis or a theory is until it is proven. You believe until you know.

And unfortunately even atheism is unfortunately becoming a dogma.
From my experience the 50% of the people I encounter claiming to be atheist are actually exploding with antireligious sentiments (most of them being misinformed, others just repeating myths and others in the same level of paranoid conspirationists). The other half are actually agnostics claiming to be atheists. The real atheists are really hard to find. I think that a real atheist should conclude that antitheism is simply wrong, from a psychological perspective, I think that religion and the belief in a supernatural entity is simply a psychological need, a essential existential necessity for your psychological stability. Think about your parents, about a son or a close friend who dies, the acceptance that he or she just went to nothingness is really unbearable for most people. But if you are able to be "cold hearted" enough to not shed tears and still claim you are an atheist WITHOUT WISHING there was an afterlife, then let me welcome you to the real atheist club.

Scientology was started as a fraud. I believe Mr. Hubbard had said it was a dare or a bet that it couldn't be done. We have no idea what the originators of Judaism, Christianity or Islam had in mind. We have no way of knowing whether they were out and out lies to control people or if all the major prophets had real visions/hallucinations that they truly believed. Also, the brutality of the religions of old was pretty much par for the course of life of the day. Look at what the Romans did without any belief structure behind it. People were brutal to each other for much of human history, it is naive to imply that the religions of those people should not have been.

What makes Scientology a 'dangerous cult' and any other major religion not one, is that Scientology was started purely as a way to control and manipulate others. The same claim cannot be made for any widely acknowledged religion, what little evidence does exist about the founders of each (Abraham, Jesus, Mohamed) indicates that they truly believed in God (yes, the same one) and that God had spoken to them.

I'm tired of partially informed cynicism being passed off and accepted as informative.

As far as Christians not accepting medical care, that's much more a Jehovah's Witness belief, and I've never considered them to be, or known anyone who has considered them to be 'Christian', although I'm sure some Christians do believe it.

Your dig about religions not having a grasp on 'truth' is just damned silly. There is exactly the same amount of evidence to support Atheism as there is to support Theism.

If you were to examine and criticize your own beliefs and cynicism as closely as you do the beliefs of others you would find just as many holes.

Here's the distinction, and it's quite the heavy issue:

Religion orders, demands, ordains and directs atrocities. Witch burnings were _specifically_ religious. The inquisitions (papal and Spanish) were _specifically_ religious. The arrest of Galileo and the burning of Filippo (Giordano) Bruno at the stake were _specifically_ religious. The atrocities of the crusades were _specifically_ religious. The list goes on, and it is monotonously consistent.

Now these people were motivated / told / ordered by religion to do what they did. That's the nature of the acts -- they were religious acts. They may also have all liked bread, and sex, but those were not their motivations. So we don't blame the "sexers" or the "breadeaters" for the witch burnings, etc. When you blame a system for acts, you need to positively associate the system's dictates with the acts, otherwise you're just spouting bullshit. Correlation is not causation.

Stalin did not kill people because atheism told him to, hinted that he should, or even led him in that direction. Atheism is the lack of a belief in a god or gods. That's all it is. There is no dogma; no instruction; no direction. It is *entirely* disingenuous to try to blame motivation - Stalin's or anyone else's - on atheism. Likewise, the blowtards of Columbine were not taking direction from Atheism; their pathology was something else entirely (and we would probably find it had something to do with religion, if we actually thought it through... after all, it is religion that dictates behavior, not atheism, and those broken individuals were clearly reacting against something, not for something.)

Theism is a set of active belief systems with rules, directions, leaders, and so forth. Atheism is not.

It's obvious that the electric force operates over cosmic distances, otherwise we would not receive any electromagnetic radiation from distant objects.

Distance and magnitude, then?

That is, we see plenty of light in the night sky, but its effect on our planet and its movement is minimal.

That we ignore these seems similar, to me, to the fact that we still use Newton's laws when we aren't dealing with relativistic speeds or masses.

actually, atheists have some pretty good arguments, if you accept the assumption (belief) that all of reality, all there is, can be grasped by our senses or the extensions thereof we have developed.

I don't know any atheist who asserts this. Indeed, it'd be foolish, as those extensions can be further developed.

But the point was, rather, that whether or not there are good arguments, Strobel didn't seek them out and doesn't address them.

But then you haven't seen any evidence to the contrary either. At best, you could call yourself an agnostic.

That is a matter of semantics, and I will do my best to explain the conclusion that seems universal among those who call themselves atheists:

Theism or atheism is a statement of belief. Agnosticism or gnosticism is a statement of knowledge.

All "agnosticism" means is that you don't know -- it says nothing about what you believe. You could be an agnostic theist -- you don't know, but you believe anyway.

But if you look at the word atheist, a simply means not. I am not a theist -- I do not believe. That does not automatically imply that I disbelieve.

It is similar to a statement we might make about Santa Clause. You can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't exist, but you don't believe him. Indeed, if asked, you might find yourself saying "Santa isn't real. He's just pretend, make-believe."

Thus, by this definition, I believe atheism is the sane default.

There is also the concept of "strong" and "weak" atheism, where a weak atheist is one who simply does not believe, while a strong atheist absolutely believes there is no god. There are not many strong atheists.

Now, I happen to be of the opinion that the various god-claims I have heard of do not exist. I could thus be classified a strong atheist. I do not know absolutely for certain, so I could still be classified an agnostic.

That is: I could be wrong. But I really don't think so.

Your life is far more faith-based than you realize. You go to bed at night in the belief that you will wake up in the morning. However you have no guarantee that you will.

You seem to be intelligent. Can you honestly not see the gaping hole in this argument?

I have gone to bed at night every night for several decades, and every morning, I have woken up. I therefore do not have faith, but trust, and evidence to back up that trust.

I have never had evidence presented for the existence of god. It would therefore require faith without evidence, as opposed to trust with evidence.

I understand (and really do enjoy) Hume's attack on inductive reasoning -- that past experience does not prove the future. It is, however, the best we have. Considering that you have woken up every day for the past several decades since you were born, if you were asked to choose, coldly, rationally, and logically, based on the evidence you have, do you think it is more likely that you would wake up tomorrow, or not?

Granted, this kind of thing is usually repeated so often as to become unconscious, but the fact remains -- I do not currently have trust in things that I don't have a good reason to trust. I therefore do not have faith.

Jesus made some rather arrogant statements concerning himself and truth.
John 6:35, John 8:12, John 9:12, John 10:9, John 10:14, John 11:25, John 14:6.
Unless all these statements are true, Christians have been following a deceiving and decei

If they have a parallel process that seems just as effective, then by not examining it, you are basically not critically comparing it, not comparing it with reality, not revising the existing methodology or science, and not making the ideas conform to known facts.

But I have - I regularly go to ICR's and Answers in Genesis' web sites. The problem is that 95% of the articles are rehashes of something that I've rejected before, 4% are new but don't make it very far past the laugh test, and the final 1% make me think (like the radiohalos), but in the end I find better explanations elsewhere. I can't claim perfect objectivity of course, but I really do try to give every idea I come across a fair shot at convincing me.

Either one or two of the worlds largest oil deposits were found by Young earth scientist using the young earth BS they cooked up to support their ideology.
But they have bred cows and sheep that can eat grains and cereals that others will not eat or gain nutritional benefit from.

And I'd love to give those ideas the chance they're due, but I would need a citation, a name, which grain or oil field ... something to go on.

Theism is philosophical ... Those are two entirely separate fields ...

I partly agree with this. One way to keep things separate is to believe what science produces, but also that there are additional things as well - this is how most religious scientists deal with the issue. There's nothing scientifically wrong with that, but other people might think it's odd that you believe "relativity explains gravity, but that's true only because Vishnu wills it to be so" or "our minds are clearly based on physical phenomena, but some part of us gets reincarnated" or "evolution has an explanation for why human beings experience love, but I think you also need the Holy Ghost".

Another way is to keep things separate is to simply accept a religion on faith, and completely reject science when they come into conflict. There's nothing wrong with that, but since you're rejecting the mostly widely held (and provably beneficial) philosophical system, the one the rest of us use as a common basis for discussing things, on what looks like a whim, don't be surprised if you get left out of the conversation.

But (for the most part) creationist do neither - they claim that evolution is a religion, or that their faith counts as science. And I know it's frustrating, but science is based on a specific set of assumptions that evolution meets and creationism does not. If you want to change that, you're going to have to convince the rest of us that those carefully-chosen and almost completely non-controversial assumptions need to be changed.

Even the creation verses evolution theories are bunk because we have no empirical evidence ...

There is so much empirical evidence supporting evolution it's hard just to name all of the categories of evidence that we have. Gross morphological, genetic, and molecular similarities among living things forming nested hierarchies are three separate lines of evidence, and the fact that the resulting trees are nearly identical is another. Then there are individual changes that can clearly be seen as a result of common ancestry, like the fact that humans have one less chromosome than other primates, but one of the chromosomes that humans have is clearly the result of two chromosomes fusing (telomeres in the middle, deactivated centromere for one half). Then there's the artificially produced evolution, in the form of human-induced breeding and speciation. Ring species demonstrate speciation in nature, and we haven't even had to look at a fossil yet ...

You are who you are and if someone isn't happy about that, they need to change who they are, not attempt to put others down in order to feel better about themselves.

Well, I do like civility more than most, but

As a religious man who also believes in rigorous science, I appreciate your assessment: "science is about understanding the natural environment around us. Theism is philosophical and addresses the mind and spirit which also explains some of the deeper questions."

Unfortunately, it is my experience that the most militant opponents of religious thinking will suggest that it is inappropriate to talk about things like "the spirit" or to consider anything except for observable evidence to answer questions like, "why are we here?" I've spoken with many people who are offended or who think poorly of me because I even bother dwelling on matters of the spirit, since "the spirit" is an unscientific idea, unworthy of space in a rational person's brain.