Just How atheist are you?

Post Reply New Topic

It's more like calling baldness a hair style, which it is in a way...

I had a debate going with jonk, but it seems to have been swamped by the all of the fighting in here.

Rather than arguing each of your points, jonk, my position is that I don't have to: you are making an elementary confusion between belief and knowledge. If I'm feeling generous, we may say we know the evidence of our observations, and we may even know the positive content of our inductions, i.e. we may know God has not presented himself, and we may know he will not. But because God's non-existence is not self-same with his not-action, concluding his non-existence is, based on whatever criteria you provide, an act of belief rather than knowledge. If you call it knowledge, you are being disingenuous. Whatever criteria of belief you provide are a priori claims rather than positive claims, and are therefore not objective. Now, this is a fine semantic point, but nonetheless agnosticism holds: you don't know, you believe. Whether or not you think your disbelief is justified is a matter of non-objective claims; the fact that science employs similar methods is really quite irrelevant, as science is just refined induction and is therefore inferior to epistemology.

Dialectical conveniences, as I called them, are by definition practical stances, and may be taken as a motive for the way you divvy your resources among tasks, but this is not equivalent to knowledge, nor are they objective criteria for belief.

While we are all being so blunt, I will offer my opinion on strong atheists: They are philosophical midgets whose primary preoccupation is politics, and who, due to their belief in the dangers of religion, have politicized the whole debate rather than approaching it as one of knowledge. Going back to a complaint I made a while back:

One day, a man went out for a walk in the field, when a tiger began chasing him. He fled as fast as he could, but the tiger chased him over the edge of a steep slope, and he barely managed to catch himself on a root growing from its side. The tiger waited patiently at the top, while a second tiger began pacing at the bottom. Two mice, one black and one white, came out of a hole, and began chewing on the root. Just then, the man spied a strawberry growing on the slope; he reached out and grabbed it. How sweet it tasted!
-Zen Koan
Sometimes Izaak, taking a side is an act of will and has nothing to do with knowledge. A philosopher has no need for such fallacies.


Humorous jonk, but a complete failure to parse the logical conditional. The antecedent is a matter of definition.

im agnostic now. hopefully it stays that way

Since I never said that God is natural,I don't see why do you insist on evidence in nature?




How do you know that?

I don't believe in dragons personally,but I don't really know if they really exist...





Its exactly what mathematics and logic do.



This is if you presume that there is indeed a independent reality outside our minds.
To know that you must be outside your own mind,which is logically impossible.

Even a Karl Marx (a materialist) call this 'naive realism'.



Logical consequence of this claim,is positive claim:"A true claim may be not proved yet,but only because there hasn't been someone sufficiently clever to find evidence that proves it."



If all factual knowledge is tentative,what's the point on using science for disproving God?
Since disproving God is also tentative...
No one knows what the future may bring...



Then whats the point of negating other's people internal belief (in God)?



If we compare your statement from above,with this,then internal beliefs are more important then scientific proves,since unlike scientific they are not tentative.

And if scientific knowledge is about tentative knowledge about world around us,what's the point of using something tentative for disproving something that is: "True Always no matter what the future brings, isn't about nature. But internal beliefs, only."



Material objects are evidence for non-material objects.Empty space is necessary for material object to exist,yet it is non-material.
Material objects can be material only towards something opposite from material.If there is not opposite from material,therefore there is no material.



Hehe...

If your aunt had wheels she could be a car,tricycle,chariot...or anything else,and this does not lead to any necessary conclusion,since it's a posteriori

But seriously...if your aunt had wheels,she would be aunt with wheels,not car.
Aunt cannot be car,since this violates definition of car(and aunt).


If wishes were horses,then wishes would not be wishes,but horses,and therefore could not be wishes.

But wishes cannot be horses since this violates definition of horse(animal) and definition of wish(subjective imperative).So your parody is self defeating.

Your parody is not disproving,but indeed an self defeating a posteriori ridiculing of a priori claim.

Nature is higher being from natural being,then relationship of God (highest being) with nature (higher being) is same as relationship between nature and natural being.



On what proof is based this claim?



On what affirming evidence is based claim "it is a matter of rationality to require some affirming evidence for claims"?



Well,I can quote Einstein too:

http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/E ... uotes.html



Sounds like hardcore Atheist to me...


And one final quote from Einstein(relevant to this discussion) :

I've deleted the rest as it really doesn't deal with what I was saying and dealing with what you went on about there would only take all of us further away or else just be useless rancor of some kind. No point in that. But I see that you went off on tangents far too easily. Too bad.

On the above, which is on-topic, I can only say that I don't insist on such evidence. If you have some internal state of mind you like to have then by all means have it and you don't need to meet any of my standards to have and keep it. It's none of my business.

Of course, if you try and publicly suggest that your internal state of mind is fact about reality, then that is quite another thing.

But if all you want to say is that you believe in some god that has nothing to do with reality and isn't about nature, then have at it. That kind of thing is cool with me.

Jon

Actually my argument WAS about knowledge.

If you wish to go into it more fully I will present it as such:

Atheism:
Metaphysics - Objective Reality
Epistemology - Reason

Theism:
Metaphysics - Subjective Reality
Epistemology - Faith

Agnosticism:
Metaphysics - Subjective Reality
Epistemology - varies

If you consider it that way my objection to Agnosticism is Metaphysical, not political. Of course, it is very rare the I'll see eye to eye with an agnostic on an epistemological level either, so you can include that as well. Ethics is beyond the scope of discourse so we'll leave that well alone.

And I ignored the Zen Koan quote because it was completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. If you still wish to assert that my stance as an atheist is ill considered or politically motivated... I would enjoy the show. Further, I wouldn't mind an explanation of the following sentence:

"Sometimes Izaak, taking a side is an act of will and has nothing to do with knowledge. A philosopher has no need for such fallacies."

Which fallacies are you talking about? I am uninterested in an explanation for the first sentence (it is included for context only) because it appears to be based on an apparently erroneous assumption because I did not fully enunciate my reasons for regarding agnostics as sniveling fence sitters. I concede that I probably should have used less emotive words to describe my distaste for avowed agnostics.

I'm agnostic.

Moderate atheist or Necronomicon thumper, depending on my misanthropy.

Praise be to Bill Hicks. :]

-Kir

I don't know what to believe. I feel like every day my belief system is shattered.

I've gone from atheirst to agnostic to atheist to agnostic again to I-don't-know-what...

I'm not writing about the above, just wanted to say something about what your avatar reminded me of. I used to make mercury fulminate and it simply has to be the very best 'mad scientist' reaction there is. Mercury fulminate is used to make blasting caps and is much more dangerous in handling than nitroglycerin, but the chemical reaction is amazingly fun when making it. Just mercury dissolved in nitric acid (green solution) and added regular drinking alcohol (pure, though.) The whole reaction is exothermic (heats up and boils on its own) and it blows out various colors of and large quantities of smoke as it boils. Just hold the erlenmeyer flask out in your hand and run around the room with an evil smirk on your face. It works!! People figure you are a mad scientist. (Nice thing, though, is that the resulting crystals are safe-ish as long as they remain under liquid. So you don't have to worry about tripping, except for the nasty stains all over.)

Jon

LOL! Ok, when I get my hands on some mercury, nitric acid and alcohol, I'll try that

Actually, I think you are wrong about my comments, but I can't find purchase to say for sure. It took me this long to realize I can't understand you, at all. I find we are too far apart in viewpoint and failing to communicate for whatever reason (yes, I tried to follow you and felt unable to find anything I felt I understood well enough to respond to) to be worth the effort right now to pull things closer. These do not exactly reflect my thoughts, but they are close enough and thorough enough that perhaps you would find them allowing you to communicate with me better:

• Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper
• Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper
• The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination by Jacob Bronowski (more recent)
• Critical Rationalism: a Restatement and Defence, which is a compact and modern version of where I am coming from, by David Miller and published by Open Court Books in 1994.

Or perhaps if you could provide me with a reading list that might help me understand your thinking better so that I might read what you wrote with enough understanding to go somewhere with it.

Either way, we cannot go further. I can't follow you, at all.

Jon

I don't necessarily believe in a god, or THE one god, but I don't deny that there may be other forces out there. Dudes, we humans just know too little to make that assumption and we credit ourselves way too much for being "able" to answer such questions. Do you know anything for fact, or is the objective also subject to subjectivity? All I can say is that humans aren't the ultimate power...we just have the ultimate ego and our words and conscious minds disguise a deeper reality we refuse to see. I guess that makes me a positive atheist, wow that's a first positive in a while ha.