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Theism is faith in the existence of God.
Atheism is a practically zero belief in the existence of God.
An agnost is a lazy bastard that neither wants to quantify his belief or express his faith.

There's a big difference between faith and belief. Faith is absolute, the dimwitted brother of truth. Belief is always quantifiable and finite, never 100% true or false. I personally would put the existence of God at a level of around -1000 decibel (meaning 10^-1000 percent probabilitity).

You realize that you can't be an agnostic and an atheist, right?

The worst of them, again Carl Sagan comes to mind, want to be the high priests of a new religion, dictating what constitutes meaning, right and wrong and so forth--a scientific papacy out to destroy unbelieving infidels and purge the race of genetic inferiors, once known as the Darwinian "unfit," but now called "the fetus." It's no accident that the same people what want a poor black woman to "choose" abortion don't want her to be able to choose the school her child attends. If they can't kill the child, they want to dictate what goes into his head in Kansas and everywhere else.

Of course, this clash isn't a new one. Almost a century ago, prominent scientists from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the like were champions of eugenics and supporters of forced sterilization along with the NY Times. Scientists now whine that "eugenics was never a science." It's hard to see why not. The great champions were scientists and political progressives, while the only significant opposition came from religious conservatives such as G. K. Chesterton.

Never, never forget that Charles Darwin closed his The Origin of Species praising death by starvation, a statement that in historical context meant he was saying that the deaths of over a million people in the Irish Famine of a decade earlier was a good thing. That's the sort of foulness championed as progress that scientific naturalism indulges in.

Those who'd like to read about the challenge to this pseudo-science based on naturalistic dogma, can go to Evolution News and Views and ID the Future. You may have to be patient. Today those websites are getting hammered very hard.

And if you like books, Arthur Balfour, perhaps the most brilliant British prime minister of the 20th century and for a time the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, criticized science's embrance of naturalism in Theism and Humanism. His book makes it quite clear that naturalism self-refutes, and a world view that does that isn't worthy of respect. (Self-refuting is like someone saying, "I'm a very honest person who lies a lot.")

--Mike Perry, Seattle, editor: Eugenics and Other Evils

Theism is faith in the existence of God.
Atheism is faith in the non-existence of God.

That's what I mean.

What is the practical difference between being atheist and being agnostic?

First I want to assure you that we are in total agreement with respect to the nature of science.

I'm not sure how I can more clearly explain that the whole study of origins is non-scientific in nature. As such, it seems to me that it does not belong in science classes. Do we agree on that point?

You keep restating this but have not submitted any further argument for why it is so.

When 'people of faith' express convictions about what conclusions should be drawn from certain facts, many times they are belittled by scientists because there is a presumption that natural causes are the ONLY viable explanation for the facts. It's the interpretation that is troublesome, and this type of interpretation is prevalent in so-called scientific information.

As an example, I recently watched a program on TV called 'the search for the ultimate survivor' - supposedly a tale about the path that mankind followed to make it until today. Again and again, information was presented as absolute fact - even when the producers themselves admitted in the program that the data supporting those conclusions was minimal. At the head end of the program, they acknowledged that all human fossils found everywhere would not even fill the back of a pickup truck. During the program they told numerous cgi-enhanced fanciful tales about the lives and cultures of peoples - in one case I think it was something like parts of 8 skeletons were found, and they went on and on about the culture and types of creatures that evolved from this or that line of hominids. They did not let their lack of concrete data prevent them from speculating about what, how, and WHY!

I have seen this type of rampant speculation in Imax movies, on public television, in books and movies, in textbooks ad nauseum. The fact that these things are presented as fact is what is troublesome to me.

You are right when you say that science is not about absolutes. It is about unfalsified hypotheses. What is ultimately frustrating to me is that these productions and documents fail to acknowledge this fact. In our culture, science is often presented as the arbiter of truth, when in point of fact, it can only deal with the physical world. It can establish facts about material conditions, but cannot legitimately extrapolate the cause of those facts. When so-called scientists move from describing the material world to defining the meaning around the facts, they are injecting philosophy into science - and that is in my mind a corruption of science. On what basis can one say that an atheistic explanation is superior? What if theism is true?

I doubt either one of us will convert the other, that's not really my plan though.

My goal is not specifically to convert you, although I do believe that my world view is true, and that you would benefit from becoming a follower of Jesus Christ.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

We agree violently about your Newton example above. Origins - specifically that of the universe is by definition untestable.

Naturalists and Creationists agree that specific data has been collected. We both theorize about origins and have differing understandings of the MEANING behind the collected data.

Since the scientific method cannot be used, let's stop calling speculation about origins science.

As I said, once naturalists take their phiolosophy out of the science curriculum, I'll cease trying to get my philosophy in. If it's fair to apply materialism and naturalism, then theism is fair game, too.

Until that happens, I think that the textbook stickers are a great idea. If nothing else, it gets people to think, and I hope we can all agree that a thinking populous is a good thing. I will also work to "call a spade a spade" with respect to philosophy in science class.

It's not those 'neutral thinking scientists' versus 'those biased religious nuts' it's
those 'biased materialistic naturalists' versus 'those biased people of theistic faith.'

Let's be fair and acknowledge our bias.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

Just a matter of politics, really. A hundred years ago they enforced creationism, and now they enforce evolutionism. It all depends who's pulling the strings and controlling the school system. They could be telling people 1+1=12 and this /. article would say "the pseudo-science of 1+1=2".

Also, everything false can be disproved. I'm just saying. To think anything can't be proven or disproved is to say reality has no basis to be figured out.

I, myself, like Darwin's ideas, but I'm thinking they'd apply better in the context of the universe and life forms preceding those of Earth, as opposed to just Earth. The painful fact - that some don't want to accept - is that we have spirits, and that they're all over the place. Does it intrigue anyone else that our essence is something capable of survival in space and extremely fast speeds? That we're based in something ideal for jumping from one celestial body to another? Not many people want to think this through all the way.

I would think the the actual birthplace of life would be near a star, perhaps, where matter goes through a million times more patterns in a second than on a slow-moving planet like Earth. I'd think the trial-and-error methods Darwin observed would meet success way faster in such an environment. It only makes sense. My overall theory on the path of intelligence is that life started as quirky and inefficient gassy form somewhere, then evolved into the fast and more efficient spirits we have today, which in turn invented (or maybe just spawned) the carbon-hydrogen bodies we're controlling right now.

Just an idea from this little gnostic. No theism or atheism involved.

Who said: "I used to be outraged, now I'm merely amused."?

I don't know which is worse, the fundamentalists who know nothing about the theory and underpinnings of evolution, or people who understand the underpinnings of neither but insist on name calling on the subject... I also suggest that you look up the term 'Ad Hominem' (as well as the names and definitions of other logical fallacies ('straw-man' comes to mind)).

I won't bother with your last point (God using evolution as a tool) because
1) I haven't really thought it through and come to a conclusion one way or another
2) My gut feel is, no. But, per point 1, I haven't thought it through to form a chain of logic through to a conclusion.

1) The 'Theory of Evolution' is an enormous subject. Some is good science, but a large portion appears to be conjecture (more sadly, conjecture piled on conjecture). Let's at least try to be a tad more exact here.

There are three things general disagreements in the two theories:
The origin of Life,
The origin of Species,
and Macro/Micro evolution.

There is NOTHING in the theory of evolution to explain the origin of LIFE. Several theories, but no way to test them (and, quite frankly, the theories don't have a lot to recommend them from the bio-chemical point of view although new stuff from the ocean floor is facinating). Most actually show a shocking lack of bio-chemical knowledge. Martin's experiments in amino-asid production from the 1970's notwithstanding (as the nature of the structure of his experiments make the results meaningless in this context).

There is not a whole lot of evidence for trans-species migration that is, migration from one species to another. Much speculation and theorizing, but not hard evidence as such. The most common example in the popular press labeled as 'evidence' currently put forward, is that species of bird change beak form with a change in environment. They also change back but they don't, as far as we can tell with current evidence, change species. This is the difference between micro and macro evolution.

Then also, there is species of blue-green algae. From one variant to another there is as much as a 30% variance in the cytosine count. Goodness, a 30% variance in genetic material and still be the same species?

Fossil bones show a pretty big variance within a species over time. OK. So what. Ask any biologist whether bone structure or soft tissue tells you more about species identity. Since we have no soft tissue to study, some major assumptions must be made in order to make the theory of evolution work. Consider that there is a larger variation (as a percentage) in genetic material between my wife and myself then between myself and the great apes. You may put your own jokes here. My point, however, is that similarity does not necessarily denote congruity.

The current theory and evidence for macro-evolution still has quite a bit of circular logic in it. Certainly too much to be so all-fired bigoted about it. Also, you might want to study the history of seeking the mass of the electron to see how subtly false assumptions and prejudice seeps into even the 'hard' sciences.

Personally I find it fascinating that, currently the most successful method to find oil and gas is to use an 'ancient earth' model in your exploration and research. However, the 'ancient earth' model doesn't explain why it's still there and still under tremendous pressure. It's a fascinating universe to live in, ain't it?

2) Abraham/Isaac. Perhaps studying the WHOLE story with an open mind might be beneficial. God spent a significant amount of time trying to teach Abraham. Try taking anyone from a poly-theistic fetishististic society and teach them mono-theism. The depth's into which fetishism infiltrates your life and society is amazing. Note the number of 'Christians' with good luck charms or who read horoscopes. (For those of you without a dictionary, fetishism isn't (necessarily) about sex. It is t

>It is rare to see such ignorance on /. Oh wait, it isn't. :)

It is not ignorance, but experience through many years. You judged me badly. It seems you are a bad judge of people.

>You are misinformed. ID is not held by "dumb religionists"
>but some pretty smart people.

That is what you all say, but you people never substantiate that claim, and when you try, you fail.

>Had you been following
>current events you would know the former atheist
> (probably the best well-known critic of Theism in
> general) Anthony Flew jumped ship and is now a Deist.

Never heard of him, so he is not that well known.

Lets see.... He is 81 years old, and one of his arguments for a non christian god is:"It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism,"

At 81 years it is usual to find it inordinatly difficult to think. Personally, at 39, I do not find it difficult to think about constructing that stuff.

As for Gerald Schroeder:
The first thing I noted on the URL you supplied, is that Gerald pretends to know Quantum Physics. As a quantum physicist, I was not duped.

Kim0

As for those people preaching intelligent design:

They are all religious, and do not know what theories or evolution are. They
just pretend and believe they know. Remembering this, they are easily exposed,
as long as you yourself really know what theories and evoution are.

It is rare to see such ignorance on /. Oh wait, it isn't. :)

You are misinformed. ID is not held by "dumb religionists" but some pretty smart people. Had you been following current events you would know the former atheist (probably the best well-known critic of Theism in general) Anthony Flew jumped ship and is now a Deist. Not a fundamentalist as the slashdot groupthink would believe.

Why did he jump ship? Many reasons, but the primary one is a book written by Gerald Schroeder, who is an MIT-trained physicist with over 60 published articles in scientific journals. And he's a Jew, too. Not the rabid fundamentalist you painted in your post.

See The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder for more information.

Are you kidding me? Please tell me that this is a troll.

No? Okay, so here goes:

1. Atheism is not a religion because it has no religious doctrines---it is the denial, in fact, of any religious doctrine.

2. Atheism is not a religion because it has no institutions, no worship, no articles of faith, etc.

3. Finally, atheism is, as I understand it, the view that there are no good reasons for believing in a god, a goddess, many gods, or many goddesses. The arguments in favor of theism fail, and, given the success of the naturalistic worldview embodied in the sciences, it is only rational to deny the veracity of supernatural or theistic explanations. They need not be false so much as utterly irrelevant. (After all, my folks think that there's magic going on in their computer, and have a tough time grasping the whole computer programs just being 1s and 0s represented as electrical current. Their explanation is false, but it is utterly unnecessary, since we know that computers are electrical, and not magical, devices.)

That ain't religion, which has at its core reliance on faith (belief without grounds), revealed truth (i.e. magical texts), and supernatural explanations.

As you imply ID != Literal [Christian|7-day] Creationism.

Also, many Christians believe evolution is the tool used by God. Similarly with the big bang and the creation of our universe.

I haven't seen sufficient evidence to weigh in with any one [particular] theory as yet, for either situation. But I do /believe/ in ID. I'd probably lean towards evolution from a running start.

My conviction comes partly from faith and _partly_ from analysis of things like arguments for irreducible complexity of bacterial flagella. Counter-arguments haven't yet convinced me as they tend to have statements such as "careful analysis shows that there are no major obstacles to gradual evolution of the flagellum" [http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html ]. The implication being: just because an intelligent being can find a possible route then it must have been followed by evolution.

And then, as we both agree, evolution may be Gods mechanism.

Simply to discount intelligent design is not scientific as theism transcends scientific reasoning. You can show an extremely high probabilty that evolution will not be falsified, but however much you protest that doesn't deny the possibility of an intelligent creator.

Flame away!

Atheism is not a religion.

The word "atheism" itself tells you that.

"A" means "without," and "theism" means a belief in a higher power.

I would direct you once again to the article you linked to. "God" is capitalized over and over again, and not just in reference to the God conceived of by Christianity.

I strongly suspect this is because it's the grammatically sensible thing to do, because in a sentence like this:

"I believe in God."

The word functions as a proper noun. This is clearer when you look at this sentence:

"I believe in a god."

But I'm really just guessing about all of that. I really have no idea why a source as antagonistic toward theism as infidels.org would capitalize the word God.

Anyway, with respect to my sig, it's the title of the article. The normal convention is to capitalize "uncommon" words in titles, that is, words besides the, an, a, of, and so on. I admitted that it's a hair misleading, but it is not a "wilful deception." Particularly if one bothers to read the article, which makes Flew's views about the Gods of Christianity and Islam pretty clear. I really don't feel responsible for people going off half-cocked when presented with this information.

I know, letting go of Iron-age theology, bronze-age philosophy, and stone-age prejudices is painful, but you'll be much better off in the end.

What an arrogant thing to say.

At any rate, your belief that any model for evolution (or abiogenesis, for that matter) disproves the existence of God is absurd. Well before there were amino acids there was matter, and consistent laws of physics. Can you, in your God-like wisdom, explain that?

I know what the canned answer here is. It might be tempting to tell me that we should approach such questions objectively, and that creating our own hypothesis that we accept dogmatically without evidence runs contrary to reason. And you would be correct, but I have all the evidence I need.

The truth is, despite your best efforts to convince yourself that your views are scientific, have made a glaring leap of logic.

I have no inclination to try and reason my beliefs because if reason could bring you to accept the truth, reason could also lead you away. I'm just trying to establish that the belief in God (theism) is not hanging on whether or not evolution by natural selection is true.

Your other assumption is that Christianity is the product cultural diffusion is incorrect; if you study how it was formed, it introduced radically new thology* and philosophy in a very short period of time, in a place where there was really no competing ideas that resembled it.

* If you study this further, you'll see that I'm actually lying here, and both the context and the ideas based in Christianity had their root in pre-Christian Judaism. However, the extent to which the old concepts were fulfilled and expounded upon was simply much more than a small group of men could come up with. The Jews in power around the time of Christ for many reasons would not have come up with the ideas that formed Christianity.

Scientists have proven all too human in their stubbornness. In his Theism and Humanism Arthur Balfour, a former President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, pointed out how scientists have held to a point of view in spite of repeated experiments demonstrating the contrary.

If Galileo came back today, it's easy to suspect his persecutors would be scientists. "Nevertheless, there is a designer." he might be heard to murmur as they led him away.

--Mike Perry, Seattle, editor, Theism and Humanism by Arthur Balfour

P.S. For those who like debate, there's a blog on the evolution v. intelligent design debate in the media at Evolution News

Firstly, I was a Christian, so I am well aware of Christian thought. I grew up with this.

Second, I don't agree with your idea of Buddhism. Certainly there are metaphysical elements, but I can practice the 8-Fold Path and know the Four Noble Truths without any reference to said metaphysics. I am pragmatic, ethical and philisophical, not religious. I came to Buddhism after abandoning Christianity (and Theism in general) and being a full-blown atheist for many years. I used my observations of the world, of my own interactions with my fellow humans and logic. Then many years later, lo and behold, I discovered that those things I had come to know to be practical and true were the basic tenets of Buddhism. I have read scientific studies on the benefits of meditation. I have read papers on Game Theory and the book "The Evolution of Cooperation" and other studies which have provide evidence that these tenets are true and real. I don't accept them because I want to or because I like the idea of Nirvana or find it comfortable. I wieghed the evidence.

Like your description of Buddhism, I don't concieve of a "ghost in the machine" because I see no need for one. Things are the way they are. If they were different, they'd be different. All of this mystery and wonder can exist without a creator, with out a God.

I don't know if there is Nirvanna, rebirth or Heaven. I see no evidence for it because it is simply not possible for any living person to know or even have an inkling. On those who are dead "know" for sure. So, some people imply this existence - they want there to be an afterlife, they need there to be an afterlife. Or a greater power.

All of your eloquent words are premised on the belief in the existance of a God. They only make even the semblence of sense in that context. Without that belief, they mean nothing and don't make sense. All of your arguments simply miss the point - I don't care if part of the message is God became man to make us more like God, since in my view, there is no God. Your meaning of God is clearly the God of the Bible. Have you actually read the Bible, especially the Old Testament? God arbitrarily kills people left and right. He allows women and children to be killed and for soldiers of Isreal to keep virigns. He commands that babies be dashed on the rocks. He wipes out the world. He tortures Job. And as for free will, how free are we to choose when there is no real choice. "Worship me or I will condemn you to an eternity in fire" is hardly a choice. That's like holding a gun to someones head and demanding you give them the pin to your bank card or they'll shoot you. Is that a real choice? If you say no and are shot, is it your fault for saying no? An eternity of damantion is the ultimate duress and blackmail. Hardly just and loving God in my eyes. Saddam Hussien did many of the same things to his people that God did in the Bible. Were they right? Were they good? Or is it that whatever God does is good because God does it? Anyone else doing the same things would be immediatly labelled as evil, yet God is still good? Talk about circular logic and moral relativism.

I see Chritianity (or Islam or Hinduism or Pagansim any other theistic religionetc) as simply the latest version of age old superstitions and stories used by humans to explain the world around them. Why don't you worship Zeus? Or Thor? or Osiris? Dionysis? When you answer that question, you will know why I don't worship or accept the existance of your God or Jesus.

My biggest issue with Chritianity (since that has been my experience - if this was Iran I'd be writing about Islam) is the need to judge other and proselytise. It's not good enough that I have the same morals and ethics, the same values. I am not the same as a Christian. According to Christians, I cannot enter "heaven" because, despite my good deeds or works, I do not believe. And since I do not believe, I will burn in hell because, if I do not believe, I am evil. If I am a lesser human, and evil, and doomed to an eternit

"It's a scary time when the few people with extreme religious views can change the life of everyone to suit their needs."
That is because extremists can claim they are more holy than moderates, and religious moderates are invertebrates who cannot criticise their own Usama Bin Crackahs.
If you, personally, don't make an effort to carefully and thoroughly attack religion and work against it, don't be surprised if you wake up to a Talibaptist theocracy.
You are either superstitious, or you think freely and are free of theism.
Choose, and fight.

Very clever 2short. A new kind of 'theism. Mind if I use that? Theism, atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, and now apatheism. Next time the subject of the gods comes up I will refer to myself as an apatheist. Do I believe in a God of some kind? "Well it's not so much that I don't believe but that I don't care." I wonder if this version would have saved us from burning at the stake for being an unbeliever/blasphemer back in the day.