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The problem is has to do with what Thomas Kuhn wrote about in "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".

Khun's SSR is not good scholarship. The whole idea hinges on one thing: scientists are humans, and humans are intellectually territorial (have a "world view" they will defend regardless of any factor) and therefore incapable of changing their minds based on new discoveries or even of "thinking outside the box" at all. If we were talking about politicians or religious followers, that might be largely true; but we are talking about scientists, and it is largely false. Sure there are open-minded politicians and stodgy conservative scientists, but these are the exceptions. Among all demographics in society, scientists are rare in that their livelihood rewards the willingness to change one's mind, and the ability to "think outside the box".

Eventually, new paradigms are accepted and science experiences a seismic explosion of creativity.

What a conspiracy theory. Even though Khun abused and thereby expanded the meaning of "paradigm" (in usage since his book), there is no such phenomenon within science. Science itself is a paradigm. There has been only one "paradigm shift" in recorded history: that from the theistic/deistic idea of divine interference (even to the extent of occasionalism; look it up) to scientific thought. Obviously, the paradigm of science began long before the generally agreed "beginning of modern science" around the time of Bruno or Bacon, and just as obviously it has not fully supplanted theism even to this day.

Sometimes the "stubbornness" in science is human stubbornness in the face of physical reality, but most times it is compelled by fact, and facts are stubborn things indeed. I think your interpretation and thereby overzealous application of his work is exactly the kind Khun himself complained about. It's an easy mistake to make if you let that book speak to you too deeply. So no, I don't think your Khunian claim is a particularly good description even of the situation at DARPA, let alone the state of science in general.

Besides that, it's unreasonable of you to dismiss the other poster's speculation that scientists are repulsed by the idea of advancing military causes. Scientists, like most people, tend to believe in moral causes and not mere jingoism. That both why Einstein wrote his famous letter to FDR and why he later regretted doing so. Supplanting human nature with Khun's largely inaccurate portrayal of human nature in one small endeavor is just a crock.

I doubt that most intelligent people would refuse to work for DARPA because of the military issue.

That's probably a good generalization from a practical standpoint. However, though you agree in the letter here, you then:

There are other factors such as recognition, freedom to work on pet projects, etc.

disagree in spirit. It's unreasonable to believe it plays no role in original, creative thinkers' job preferences. It would be the same straw man argument to say: "I doubt that most intelligent people would refuse to work for DARPA because of the recognition issue" or any other issue.

I'm glad you're interested in the philosophy of science and in human nature; I wish more people were. But I hope you will keep reading and thinking, because Thomas Khun is far from the best or last word on the nature of the scientific endeavor.

The academics who run DARPA would not like my ideas. So I stay away from them.

I'm sure that a) they're heartbroken, and b) you would contribute revolutionary, useful ideas to their cause. Seriously, that was a really pretentious, arrogant statement.

Well, at least I am not an anonymous kook, nor a coward.

Who are or aren't has no bearing on the correctness or rigor of your ideas or of what you

Of course, critical thinking and logic are anathema to anyone who believes in god.

For that to be true, the majority of people throughout most of human history would have to have been incapable of critical thinking and logic. Perhaps you should reconsider your conclusion and consider the possibility that many of those who believe in God arrive at their belief based on evidence and logical arguments that they find convincing. An obvious, well-known apologist of this would be C.S. Lewis. Many modern scientists (especially in physics and cosmology) have also written on the topic of being led to some form of theism by the evidence they observe in their fields.

I love the strawman argument in your sig. Who is claiming atheism is a religion? Atheism, "a", the opposite of, "theism", belief in existance of deities or "gods".

Did you also know that wheels are round and the sky is blue? Any other insightful gems for us? Maybe tomorrow you can define some more words for us, or regurgitate some more beaten-dead-horse one liners without so much as a pabulum of intellectual value.

And agnosticism is the only religion that is entirely correct - we do not know for sure one way or the other. I think it's funny that you choose decisiveness over correctness. You could be absolutely sure that the sun revolves around the earth, it will not make you correct.

Would you accept the creation of an atheist organization that publicly excluded all Judeo-Christians? How about if it received tax dollars to do so? What if that organization allowed Christians, but only if they renounced God in front of their friends and family? Would you still just consider the whole affair as destroying that organization's rights?

What if their policy was no persons of Italian descent?

The simple fact of the matter is that atheism has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can pitch a tent in the rain, render first aid in an emergency, or be an effective leader. If the BSA's goal is in fact to foster theism, then they should call themselves a seminary school and be done with it.

As long as they get some of my tax dollars, they'd better damn well allow people like me to participate.

So if atheism is a choice, then isn't religion (theism) in general a choice as well?

PS: Isn't your Christian porn and sex toys site (as cited in your sig) in bad and immoral taste? Studies show at least 50% of born-again Christians (in the US) have porn and sex addictions. Should you really be trying to make that worse?

In the traditional sense of the word, Atheism is an explicit position that either affirms the nonexistence of gods or rejects theism. Agnosticism is the view that the truth of certain claims â" particularly metaphysical claims regarding theology, afterlife or the existence of God, gods, deities is unknown or, inherently unknowable.

The more interesting question is "Does the cultural anthropology question that theism progresses from animism to semi-anthropic polytheism to monotheism in a process of theological-cultural refinement have historical evidence?" Then again, higher criticism sometimes takes a post hoc ergo propter hoc approach to historical evidence.

Correct, what makes someone an atheist is NOT believing in a higher power of any kind. If they may later believe, then they have gone from atheism to theism.

Someone who is "unsure" is best called an "agnostic" (although that itself can have various connotations ranging from "unsure" to "don't care enough to even think about it")

I, for reference, am most definitely an atheist. (AND I am a good person, with a sense of morals and ethics that are quite close to that of society at large).

I don't really disagree with the way you've phrased that... but... my view of religion is as a delusion - as such, it's a kind of mental illness. If someone has a more commonly accepted mental illness and it causes them to do something "bad", we generally say it wasn't their choice - their mental illness is to blame (simple example: A very mentally challenged person deciding to crap on your living room floor)

In the same way, I have to say that it's the "illness" of religion that is causing people to do these things. It's a LOT more complex and subtle, and so a lot of it can be mistaken for free choice, however I think witnessing those with the strongest form of the illness (many of the "lower order" of the extremists) it's quite clear they're not rational.

In fact, in the sentence above the one I just quoted, you said:

This is actually my point - they didn't make a choice. They were brainwashed from an early age and now suffer from the mental illness caused by the brainwashing.

I do agree with that - but think it mostly applies to the "smart" ones... I don't actually think these people are all THAT religious in reality. They're using religion to control those below them. They MIGHT believe some of it, or maybe even all of it, but almost certainly not as "fervently" as those who follow them.

Nah, I only default to it on the Internet to enrage the religious.

However, a Christian Skeptic is someone who has not yet confronted his religion with reason.

if he can act on our world he is bound to the laws of physics (or else we should detect forces that are unexplainable to physics)

>A theist can give a rational accounting for unchanging laws of physics. An atheist cannot.

Yeah, saying that some un-apparent entity without any explanation itself created the laws of physics is much more rational than saying that we just don't know why they are that way. Your accounting adds no real information at all, it just makes you feel a little better because you can wrap your brain around it.

>Every cause needs and effect. But there is no reason there can't be an uncaused Beginner.

And there is no reason to believe that the universe itself is an effect. The laws that apply within the universe are not known to apply to things 'outside' it. Personalizing this cause only creates more questions.

Or you can know that she does not love you.

Not if there is no evidence of the woman's existence, you can't. You can't have any knowledge at all. All you can have (or not have) is belief; and that's the fulcrum upon which the weights of theism and atheism turn.

This is such a nuanced discussion that one can't throw around words without rigorously defining them first. We may both answer "No", but exactly what we mean is very different. That IS semantics. Agnosticisim vs. positive atheism vs. negative atheism are not the same, and they shouldn't be used as such.

Agreed - your comment should be directed at the person I replied to, who did not define his terms, or use the term strong/positive atheism, or say anything that implied he was talking specifically about them.

A positive claim of agnosticism is more rational than a claim of atheism ... Atheism and theism are both faith

Be careful to stick to your own definitions - you mean strong/positive atheism.

Also I would point out that agnosticism can also mean the belief that we can never know, not that we simply don't know, which is just as much a statement of faith.

And note that just because two things are both statements without evidence does not mean they are equal in any sense. "I believe there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter" is far more of a claim than "I believe there is no teapot orbiting Jupiter" (especially when it's people in the former group that often rule their lives by this belief). To pick on the latter group seems rather petty to me.

And that's the pointless argument I was trying to avoid when I said this is a semantics issue. There are numerous other meanings of those words (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism for references). I reject believe in God, therefore I'm an atheist, end of story. If you want to have a big discussion over semantics, that's up to you, but the point is that when someone identifies as an atheist (or agnostic), they do not necessarily mean what you think it means.

Shouldn't we ask what atheists believe (or don't believe), rather than you telling them what they supposedly believe?

In my experience many athiests hold the position in part as an emotional pushback against the constant pressure they get from theists.

No - I don't believe in God because there is absolutely no evidence.

It's these agnostics (in your sense of the word) that are suffering under the pressure of theism, because they are so scared of admitting they don't believe. If I asked if you believed in unicorns, you'd simply say "No" - none of this "Well I don't believe, and I do not not believe, therefore I'm in a more rational position than those people who don't believe, but believe that unicorns don't exist".

No Christian (that's what I'm defending, ultimately) person I've ever met has claimed any of the beliefs you describe. And these are, by and large, run-of-the-mill lay people, including quite a number in po-dunk towns, where we might expect such anti-intellectualism to run rampant. I'm sure they exist, but I think they are largely a figment of the overactive atheist imagination. That's putting it a little poetically. The more common term is "straw man." I realize this is just my experience, but honestly, are these really beliefs that you commonly encounter, or are they just a composite of what you imagine religious people must be like?

Hopefully it's clear that, yes, I think radical fideism and mysticism are broken ways of trying to understand the world. There are strains of those things in church history, but I say in no uncertain terms that they were mistakes.

The "thoughtful and well-informed" individuals I'm thinking of are not just experts in the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, although some knowledge of theology is relevant in these kinds of discussions. They are Christians who, notwithstanding the obvious intellectual deficiencies of theism, have mysteriously managed to get tenure in top philosophy departments. Or they are ordinary but studious lay people, like the guy who writes thinkingchristian.net

I will say in parting (I have to go to a conference tomorrow) that Christianity is not simply a myth in the same sense as the gods of the Greeks or Norse, and it isn't a philosophy or set of statements about the nature of a higher reality, as are some other modern religions. Its central doctrine is based on an historical event, and this event is subject to verification or falsification in all of the ordinary ways. It is therefore at least possible to have evidence for or against it.

"Er... all of us were born atheist. Many of us were later taught theism, and then some of us still later rejected that. Nobody is born believing in God, any more than they are born believing in Father Christmas."

And, we were all born crapping our pants. Most of us later learned to use a toilet. The rest of us still crap our pants.

Its kind of sad that you can be well-read in philosophy and reference Spinoza and Schopenhauer and still want to force every idea into a choice between theism and atheism. These two categories have more to do with cultural and political battles than they do with philosophy, and I would hope that reading philosophy, people would come to realize that there is a vast range of positions between theism and atheism, and between any two positions that are set against each other in the culture, and that our interest in philosophy would be driven by genuine curiosity, not a desire to bash the other side with what famous philosophers or "Einstein, King of Science" said.

Do you believe in God? If you answer "No", we both share the same position, but just use different labels.

But labels ARE important; semantics are important. This is such a nuanced discussion that one can't throw around words without rigorously defining them first. We may both answer "No", but exactly what we mean is very different. That IS semantics. Agnosticisim vs. positive atheism vs. negative atheism are not the same, and they shouldn't be used as such.

As you stated, the true meaning of agnosticism is not "I don't know", but that "The answer is unknowable in this world, so the question itself doesn't make sense."

A positive claim of agnosticism is more rational than a claim of atheism, because in the absence of evidence the former says that the answer is "With no evidence, it is impossible tell one way or the other", while the latter says "With no evidence of existence, I will assume non-existence." To me, the former is more rational that the latter.

Atheism and theism are both faith, in that they are positive statements of belief in the face of no evidence and unprovable facts. They are both less rational than saying "how can we ever know" with a shrug of the shoulders.

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For more fun, spend some time of Wikipedia in this area: "positive" atheism = "I believe there is no god"; "negative" atheism = "I do not believe there is a god". Gnostics and their repudiators, the Agnostics. Theism & Deism. Many hours of fun!

A theist can give a rational accounting for unchanging laws of physics. An atheist cannot. We both assume they don't change. A theist can give a rational accounting of why they don't change. That was the general point. "We observe they haven't yet changed" is not a basis for future events since you still have laws hanging in mid-air, so to speak.

In terms of Big Bang cosmology, I didn't say there must be a beginner. Just that Big Bang cosmology strongly lends support to the theistic worldview.

Also, your arguments that there must be infinite regress with that logic doesn't work. Every cause needs and effect. But there is no reason there can't be an uncaused Beginner.