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I completely agree with you. To argue for theism on Slashdot is definitely not going with the popular crowd, wouldn't you agree?

I don't believe that you think I'm arguing for the case that the popularity of an argument makes it right.

I think we (atheists and believers) can agree that we both hate agnostics.

Dictionaries are all over the place on this issue. I'm not saying language is so elastic that we should nod knowingly when someone uses the word dandelion to refer to a tricycle, but the word atheism is so fraught with controversy that we should really be trying to figure out what a particular person is saying, rather than trying to force them into using the definitions we're most comfortable with. Being a medic and using the word apnea to mean "not breathing," and knowing that theism refers to a belief in God, I figure that atheism is a lack of theism, as apnea is a lack of breathing. I'm not calling myself agnostic, because to me it's just a word meant to make people feel better.

Another way of looking at it is that there is a set of all people. Some of those people believe in God--they are theists. Everyone else is an atheist. Some of those atheists posit that there is no God, some consider the idea unknowable and call themselves agnostics, and some have never enountered the idea, but they all lack theism, and so are atheistic.

I don't like the word agnostic, because I think it's silly. Are you agnostic about The Flying Spaghetti Monster? Agnostic about Thor? The invisible magical elf under my bed? No, you just don't believe, because there's no reason to believe. I'm as agnostic about God as I am about the Easter Bunny.

I agree with you that theism is not necessarily incompatible with a Darwinian view of life. I think there's a lot to Galileo's old line about "how to get to heaven not how the heavens go."

However I must disagree with your statement about Creationism saying nothing specific. Many creationists make specific claims that are in direct opposition to scientific theory. For example: the Earth is six thousand years old, dinosaurs and humans lived together, and the Flood created the grand canyon and caused the extinction of many species. Furthermore, intelligent design is often presented as a scientific theory. It clearly is not, because it has no testable hypotheses. Attempts to put both Creationism and Intelligent Design in classrooms upset many scientific people including myself. The former because it makes so many incorrect claims of fact and the latter because it confuses religion or philosophy with the scientific method.

So my question is: Even if there is no God, and you are an atheist, is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists? The Earth's people evolved into a world of mixed beliefs (some religious, some not), which could be argued to be the survival of the fittest idea or world. The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world, as opposed to such less-fit worlds of all atheists or all Christians, as examples.

If we evolved to be a mixed world of beliefs, as the "fittest", perhaps we should accept that, and quit trying to convert people with arguments for our favorite religious/non-religious belief.

It could also be argued that we are evolving to a world populated by atheists, and that theism is merely a stepping stone. How many people with religious beliefs do you think would accept that?

> 2. The claim is not "some people who happened to be theists also did bad things", but rather that "people did bad things in the name of their religious belief". If you want to counter that, you need to show how someone's lack of belief caused them to do bad things.

I think that the Stalinist purges and repression in China both qualify. They both see theism in general as something to be wiped out and it's not hard to find out that religious folks were a significant contingent of those "undesirables" they purged.

If you need more documentation, there's plenty available on who all was getting purged under Stalin and why. There's also plenty of information about what's going on right now in China. I believe the US State Department has reports on it which should be available via a bit of Googling.

Someone else pointed out that Stalin once studied to become a priest, but he sure as hell abandoned that later on. Hitler I wouldn't use as an example of an atheist, sorting out his real beliefs from his politics is a mess, but in at least one citation I'm aware of, he claimed to be using religious prejudices to advance his cause and hoped that Christianity would later die off naturally, even though he didn't want to kill it actively (he was too busy playing people off against one another). More than anything, Hitler was into eugenics and the alleged supremacy of his 'race'.

Nah, that's completely fallacious. It's exactly the same argument as saying that for someone without a background in engineering, gaining understanding how the car is built by the factory disproves the pre-existing experience of the car. It expands the individual's conceptual content around "car", but does not alter the questions relevant to theism, such as origination of the car. The only thing "moving" here is your focus from one complex entity (e.g. man), to another complex process, while you choose to deny that either is notable.

I don't think that simply taking the existence of God as axiomatic is enough to produce a definitive moral code.

Sorry for the late reply, and I certainly agree there. My post was quite long enough without going into even more detail. =) However, while I do think that the axiom of God's existence is not sufficient, it does appear necessary (and the argument I made requires only necessity, not sufficiency).

There are a good number of ways to develop this further. It seems to me that your suggestion,

I think that one also has to accept the axiom that whatever God says is moral is actually moral.

is only one possibility. And I agree that this axiom is, to some extent, vulnerable to the charge of degenerating into "might makes right." Objective morality cannot be grounded in arbitrary statements backed up by power.

In this vein, contemporary theology and philosophy has richly explored the view that the basis of objective morality is not merely in God's decrees, but in God's nature. In other words, the necessary and sufficient axioms are: "God exists, and God is perfect." Given these premises, it is impossible for any authentic statement from God to be anything but good. This is a very tidy result; the legitimacy and correctness of the moral instruction is rooted in God's perfection, while the obligation of the moral instruction is still rooted in power. Both of these aspects are needed. Without correctness, we simply arrive at "might makes right" again. Without obligation, we have empty statements with no authority -- supposing a superintelligent cockroach were to communicate perfectly correct moral instruction, that would be scant reason to actually carry out those instructions if I didn't feel like it.

In short, it seems that "God exists" is therefore necessary for any moral obligations to exist, and "God is perfect" is necessary for moral obligations to be true. They are both necessary, and together they are sufficient.

Tangentially, I like to complement this with a teleological view: the simple idea that "God is the architect of the Universe," which is highly likely to be true if God exists at all. On this view, nothing in the universe is arbitrary, but rather serves some specific purpose. Therefore, the optimal condition for any entity, whether asteroid or human, is to be operating according to its purpose. There is an important nuance here. Modern culture tends to cast "morality" as an imposition of rules (such as "Go to bed at 10") upon an a priori lawless personal liberty. I think this is a false dichotomy. A teleological understanding of morality reveals that morality is more like a manual than a rulebook: "If you drink benzene, next year you will get cancer." If this view is true, then morality doesn't oppose freedom, it coincides with freedom.

I find the argument that atheists lack an objective basis for morality uncompelling because the religious basis for morality often appears so thin. The idea that one can "solve" the problem of morality by introducing a set of rules by fiat doesn't strike me as a stunning philosophical achievement

Even if theism lacks a compelling basis, this has no bearing on whether or not atheism lacks a compelling basis. Perhaps you're saying that atheism's lack of a basis seems unproblematic if theism lacks a basis as well? This would be correct if the former were merely a negative argument -- i.e., that an atheistic basis has yet to be formulated. The negative argument is true (and has been for two centuries), but I'd say that a positive argument can be made that an atheistic basis cannot be formulated.

It has been suggested that objective moral propositions might simply exist as "brute facts," with no need to reference any divinity. But there are problems with working this out in practice. I can conceive of two types of "brute fact

You're missing the larger point so badly you're wandering into a more grevious error.

The rights were declared "unalienable".

From the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...

Note "self-evident" and "unalienable"!

Don't get hung up on reference to a Creator or a Diety. The idea here is that we didn't have to fight for these rights. We didn't have to steal them from the British or any other ruling power. We simply have always had them. To a theist, this is "given" or "endowed" by a Creator. But the principle that these rights are completely innate is not dependent on theism.

The real world is fuzzy, too.

I mean, seriously, our brains exist in the real world. Animal brains also tend to not be driven by strict linear logic, either.

Microsoft is a living organism, of sorts. Very much a parasite.

Yeah, evolution can be a self-correcting process, when individuals choose to correct themselves before they get faced with the natural consequences of their actions.

But you know, it makes no difference whether there was an intelligent God creating the universe or whether it was just that a non-supernatural creation of the universe managed to mimic intelligence, in somehow allowing and selecting processes that could avoid going straight downhill every time. If we use our atheism or our theism to excuse ourselves in believing that our own way is better than everyone else's we are making the same mistake.

The discovery that the mechanics of thought and belief are not entirely shrouded in mystery is neutral to the question of the existence of God, as many have pointed out, even if it might reveal the means that some have used to induce fake religious experiences in others. The existence of fakirs does not prove or disprove the existence of a "real" thing, either.

Yes, it does consume too much time. I don't have the time to read your sources or dig out mine, and I'd certainly enjoy doing this the whole nine yards, but I simply can't afford it - time-wise. Sorry for that.

And on the other hand, I don't think you're a bad person. I do think you caught something, like people catch a cold sometimes. But we both know there are people out there with much more aggressive views on theism.

Agnosticism is like doubting Thomas, really. Understandable. Atheism is potentially as blind as belief in God may possible be blind; atheism is a belief that is made no matter the evidence. Science is agnostic. Atheism and theism are the ones that rest on a certain amount of faith.

Read the parent of my post. That is exactly what I'm objecting to -- his amalgamation of religion and theism. Christianity actually has little to do with it, apart from the fact that many religious people also practice christianity. The point is this: science and religion are not orthogonal. Science and THEISM are orthogonal, in the case of a theist who believes that god's existence cannot be falsified.

you're amalgamating Theism, christianity and religion. They are not the same thing. Yes there are lots of morons out there, why do you feel the need to point that out? We already know. There is no point to be made there.

One usage will be dead in 20 years, the other won't--along with the notation "Believe" in my one-out-of-a-billion Burger-King soda cups. Seriously, if I were serriptitiously -trying- to create a viral marketing campaign for theism, I doubt I could have done better.

Mankind works in mysterious ways. (Nightwish)

...Dude, have you forgotten what the original point was? Whether or not there is a god. I say there is no proof. You, apparently, argue otherwise. My point is this: I, as an Atheist, do not need to prove a thing. I, as an Atheist (asserting that god is a myth), argue from the default position that there is no supernatural being call God. I draw your attention to the following:...

If the former, then isn't the absurdity enough to conclude the falsity of theism? If one can believe in God in the absence of any evidence at all, how is that different from believing in a Giant Budgie creating the universe? Or an infinite stack of turtles? Or any of a literal infinitude of absurdities? Given that an infinite number of such unfounded beliefs must contradict an infinite number of others, only a vanishingly small proportion of them could even theoretically be true (at once). Hence any particular such belief must be infinitely unlikely.