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And the explanations are the epitome of psychological ignorance of what constitutes the cognitive state of belief. A thousand wrong ignorant explanations do not make it right. A "lack of belief" about anything is an oxymoronic reference to an "opposite or negative belief." The "cognitive state" is a belief in which you have faith (and claim it is true) or you wouldn't hold it no matter whether it is positive or negative!
This just in!! "Not collecting stamps" is now considered to be an active hobby!
Faith is belief in something without evidence. That describes yourself and what you choose to ramble about. That word does not describe atheists, especially in the general sense. An atheist is anyone who is not a theist. Period. It's not any kind of claim, and it doesn't require any faith in anything. It doesn't require anything, except not being a theist, which is defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity.
The Templeton Prize seems to cater to intellectually dishonest claims in support of the validity of religion, and this guy seems to fit, starting with his seemingly intentional misrepresentation of what an atheist is. While he claims to wish that the so-called New Atheists would demonstrate some more humility, I think it was Dawkins himself who said (in The God Delusion) that while he doesn't assert with 100% certainty that no god exists, the sheer improbability of it is enough to justify asserting that there is no god.
I stand with Matt: Sure, there may be a microscopic chance that the Tooth Fairy or Bertrand Russell's teapot exists, but it's so laughably unlikely that I'm glad to say they're not out there.
Nobody asked me for my advice, but I really don't think it's worth the effort to engage with people who will predictably misrepresent and ignore your points and then claim that they won.
This just in!! "Not collecting stamps" is now considered to be an active hobby!
Faith is belief in something without evidence. That describes yourself and what you choose to ramble about. That word does not describe atheists, especially in the general sense. An atheist is anyone who is not a theist. Period. It's not any kind of claim, and it doesn't require any faith in anything. It doesn't require anything, except not being a theist, which is defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity.
Sadly, people who do not know what they do not know about tend to make these kinds of category mistakes in bold. I guess philosophical reasoning and analogies are not your strong suit. You and this forum universally refuse to acknowledge the validity of my panENtheist view of God. That is undoubtedly because it makes atheism a negative BELIEF about what Nature IS NOT as well as a CLAIM about something that undeniably EXISTS and is our undeniably our creator. There is no question about our creator's existence, only what it IS!!! No one can definitively say what kind of creator it is NOT, the forum deference to the existing ad populum BELIEF about it notwithstanding. You can only give it a neutral name or title to avoid the existing theistic ones.
I guess philosophical reasoning and analogies are not your strong suit.
I know enough to know that that is an ad hominem attack, and I'll not stand for it! Good day, sir!
I said good day! Bah humbug!
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You and this forum universally refuse to acknowledge the validity of my panENtheist view of God.
Yeah, because it's just as equally lacking in any evidence as the most fundamentalist literalist crazy Christian's view. You'll try to dress it up in "mystical" blah blah word salad to distract from that fact, without ever refuting that to any skeptics' satisfaction. You are one of the evasion type posters around here. People make direct points against yours, and you try to dance around them, without any actual refutation. While using fancy words and claiming we just don't get it because you know more than we do.
"is the belief that the divine intersects every part of the universe and also extends beyond space and time."
Okay. You believe that. That's fine. There is no actual evidence for that, and it is a position of faith, as irrational as any other type of theism. We don't deny that you genuinely believe that, and we can't stop you from doing so. But, we don't share the belief, as well as have our various criticisms of it. I mean, you came to a discussion forum, so there you go.
All the various forms of pantheism, I've found to either be ultimately semantics, or meaningless. If God is love, then we already have a word for love- love. If all reality is God, then why not just call it reality? If all the universe is God, then why not just call it the universe? Existence definitely exists, so if you insist on calling that God, then yes, that God exists. But you could do the same trick with a pencil.
Plus, that's not much of a God worth revering, which I thought was what the point of the God concept was. If everyone ever is God, then God is a child rapist and murderer, and doesn't consistently use his blinkers.
God left a Pepsi bottle on the ground at the park the other day, is I guess what pantheists believe. Not exactly screaming for worship. "Hitler was God!" -say pantheists.
"All existence is one being" - there's no evidence for that. "All existence is one consciousness" - there's no evidence for that. And whatever other pantheism and new age mystical mumbo jumbo I'm forgetting.
You can believe what you want. You had some experience that caused you to believe whatever- okay. Nobody's denying that you experienced something or other. We're just pointing out that with the way you have chosen to interpret this subjective personal experience, you're now just as divorced from reason as any other theist is, whether you choose to be in forever denial about that, or not.
The one constant I've noticed, is that all believers believe what they want to believe, and that is no different for you as any other believer. Just like people who believe in heaven and hell always think they're going to the former and other people are going to the latter, people who believe in some mystical "agape love" version of theism- have some kind of need or desire for that to be true. Faith is a biased enterprise.
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That is undoubtedly because it makes atheism a negative BELIEF about what Nature IS NOT as well as a CLAIM about something that undeniably EXISTS and is our undeniably our creator. There is no question about our creator's existence, only what it IS!!! No one can definitively say what kind of creator it is NOT, the forum deference to the existing ad populum BELIEF about it notwithstanding. You can only give it a neutral name or title to avoid the existing theistic ones.
"Undeniably"- "no question"- using words like that in a forum section like this, well, that explains your post count to reputation ratio...
Atheism is not a belief, it doesn't require evidence, and it doesn't require faith. It's the lack of theism. K.
And there is no evidence that there is any creator. The concept itself doesn't even make sense. Okay, some guy created the universe... so then who created him? The creator's creator?
I have no big problem with deism, and a lot of the atheists around here feel the same way. If you think there's a god, and god's in some kind of different realm from physical space and time, and he looks over the universe- okay, cool. You go ahead and believe that, if that's what you really think. That's 1000% better than the dogma and Bible people (they're the worst.)
There are three Barnes & Noble locations in the Buffalo area. Pre-pandemic, I frequented a location near the University at Buffalo, going there on a near-daily basis. The near-UB location has easily the most extensive philosophy section of the three. Since 2021, I've been a regular at a different location, and have had to make do with an inferior philosophy selection. So I've mostly read material from other sections. Today, however, I'm back to my original B&N stomping grounds. Because of the change of venue, I was able to pick up a book I've never before seen or heard of, 'Respectful Atheism' by Thomas Sheridan. Published in 2021, the book was apparently partially inspired by a continuing education course of the same title that Sheridan taught at Tufts sometime (or sometimes, rather--he apparently led the course for multiple sessions) during the 2015-2020 timespan. I found the following passage from the introduction worth sharing:
'Consider a report by Lee Billings in Scientific American in March 2019, quoting a Dartmouth physicist named Marcelo Gleiser, who just won the Templeton Prize. This prize is an annual award of the John Templeton Foundation, which promotes the idea that religion and science are fully compatible (I will have more to say on that controversial issue later).
[Gleiser]: "To me, science is one way of connecting with the mystery of existence. And if you think of it that way, the mystery of existence is something that we have wondered about ever since people began asking questions about who we are and where we came from. So while those questions are now part of scientific research, they are much, much older than science....As a theoretical physicist and also someone who spends time out in the mountains, this sort of questioning offers a deeply spiritual connection with the world, through my mind and through my body. Einstein would have said the same thing, I think, with his cosmic religious feeling....I believe we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge, in the sense that if you look carefully at how science works, you'll see that, yes, it is wonderful--magnificent!--but it has limits. And we have to understand and respect those limits. And by doing that, by understanding how science advances, science really becomes a deeply spiritual connection with the mysterious, about all the things we don't know. So that's one answer to your question. And that has nothing to do with organized religion, obviously, but it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic....
I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It's a statement, a categorical statement, that expresses belief in nonbelief: Namely, 'I don't believe, even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don't believe.' Period. It's a declaration. But in science we don't really do declarations. We say, 'Okay. You can have a hypothesis; you have to have some evidence against or for that.' And so an agnostic would say, 'Look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god. What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?' But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn't know about. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, and all that. This positions me very much against all the 'new atheist' guys--even though I want my message to be respectful of people's beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on."
Gleiser makes a beautiful statement; however, I would take issue with his use of the word "atheist" and whether atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. He is quite correct that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In other words, one cannot logically prove that there is no God, even though no evidence, credible in a scientific sense (more on that later), has ever shown up. And, as Dawkins has maintained, if any such evidence were to appear, it would turn all of science upside down. In the same manner, one cannot prove that there is no pink unicorn or tooth fairy somewhere. So if one wants to argue that being an atheist means 100 percent certainty that no evidence could ever possibly exist, then no one could legitimately use the term. In that extremist sense, I would have to go along with him and claim to be an agnostic.
But it seems to me that if one is 99.9 percent certain that there is no God (of the type cited here, namely the traditional all-powerful, all-knowing, loving being who observes and cares for each individual person), then use of the term "atheist" seems to be entirely appropriate. After all, that is precisely the way that science claims to work: It employs inferential statistics, a null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is a statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena or conditions (e.g. Nature exists and God exists), in which lack of relationship is assumed to be true until statistical evidence indicates otherwise. The physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva examined millions of particle collisions and finally had to reject the null hypothesis to "prove" that the Higgs boson existed. No such data have even been sufficient to reject the null hypothesis that God does not exist; therefore, I regard the term "atheist" to be appropriate for all commonsense uses where one is quite confident in one's disbelief and in keeping with the methods of science.'
I really like the framing of the matter in terms of the null hypothesis. It would be quite the trickster deity that made all components of the universe theoretically discoverable except for its own presence. But this logic is predicated on the idea that a god would in some sense be a part of this universe rather than completely removed from it. Drawing from science as Sheridan does, though, I think the issue of the potential existence of a god or gods is more analogous to the idea that a multiverse could exist. If our perceptual and intellectual tools are limited to making deductions and inductions within the confines of this universe, then strictly speaking, we must remain agnostic about the possibility of the existence of any extra-universal phenomena, gods or a multiversal universe-plex included. The logic of quantum physics may be such that universes should be theoretically birthable an infinite number of times...but we're still extrapolating from a [known, or knowable] sample size of one in that case. I remain open to being convinced otherwise on logical matters pertaining to our ability to 'rationally speculate' about the possible existence of extra-universal phenomena. Cheers.
PS: I obviously don't think Sheridan should have used 'God exists' as one of his two examples of 'measured phenomena or conditions', as that would fall into the alternative category of 'mere assertion'. The book seems to have suffered a bit from shoddy editing (in one paragraph not quoted here, he spells the surname of an anti-atheist author no less than three different ways), but the overall point made in the quoted passage is good enough to not be marred by such a minor error
As a theist, I couldn't agree more. I do like your take on atheism. Perhaps it will help both the theist and atheist search for truth together.
I've said before a theist views truth as Who, the atheist views truth as a " What".
But truth is truth, regardless it come from a saint or a scientist.
Just because some theists feel threatened and attacked by simple disagreement cannot be my problem as an atheist.
It’s not for their benefit; rather, it’s for ours i.e. who wants to spend time puffing, blowing and arguing re: a god that does not exist, unless it’s in the courts relative to our rights as atheists. There are battles that matter and those which do not; when one is emotionally/angrily invested in the latter, it is they who feel threatened.
It’s not for their benefit; rather, it’s for ours i.e. who wants to spend time puffing, blowing and arguing re: a god that does not exist, unless it’s in the courts relative to our rights as atheists. There are battles that matter and those which do not; when one is emotionally/angrily invested in the latter, it is they who feel threatened.
Each person gets to decide for themselves what to engage over and how to engage. It's not important to you? Great. Just don't assume who feels threatened or who is angry just because it is of interest or relevance to them or because they speak with any conviction on those matters. I feel neither threat nor anger for example, not even a little.
You assume way too much about other people, and then make snap judgments that you then become married to. Don't be so needy to prove your rightness. If for the sake of argument some of us are misguided or wrong, we'll figure that out on our own in time and in our own way. Whatever light we come upon will not be magnanimously bestowed by someone such as yourself. You can, of course argue your points, as do we all. Just don't project or assume in the process. In short, have a little epistemological humility.
Each person gets to decide for themselves what to engage over and how to engage. It's not important to you? Great. Just don't assume who feels threatened or who is angry just because it is of interest or relevance to them or because they speak with any conviction on those matters. I feel neither threat nor anger for example, not even a little.
You assume way too much about other people, and then make snap judgments that you then become married to. Don't be so needy to prove your rightness. If for the sake of argument some of us are misguided or wrong, we'll figure that out on our own in time and in our own way. Whatever light we come upon will not be magnanimously bestowed by someone such as yourself. You can, of course argue your points, as do we all. Just don't project or assume in the process. In short, have a little epistemological humility.
Each person gets to decide for themselves what to engage over and how to engage. It's not important to you? Great. Just don't assume who feels threatened or who is angry just because it is of interest or relevance to them or because they speak with any conviction on those matters. I feel neither threat nor anger for example, not even a little.
You assume way too much about other people, and then make snap judgments that you then become married to. Don't be so needy to prove your rightness. If for the sake of argument some of us are misguided or wrong, we'll figure that out on our own in time and in our own way. Whatever light we come upon will not be magnanimously bestowed by someone such as yourself. You can, of course argue your points, as do we all. Just don't project or assume in the process. In short, have a little epistemological humility.
My point is, relative to the bigger picture, each person does not get to decide (for others); hence it’s a waste of time and hot air i.e. how many legitimate theists are going to read the same angry diatribes posted daily in this forum anyway (lol). It’s simply a few folks patting each other on the back for being atheists and spewing anger; hence, you’re right, that is not important to me. However, bottom line, I will defend anyone’s right to believe what they want as it simultaneously defends my rights as an atheist as well.
That said, I find it hilarious you’re telling me not to assume one feels threatened when it was your previous statement re: threatened theists that I responded to; obviously, I didn’t assume anything. In other words, your posts speak for you re: anger, self-righteousness and an inflated sense of self sans empathy for others as opposed to listening to reason/logic or a desire to advance atheism (for all of us) rather than your ego.
His previous post said threatened 'by simple disagreement.' Key oversight on your part. If someone is threatened by disagreement, then I dare say that they lack psychological health, to use your preferred parlance
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