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Can you simply be Agnostic?
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The caves aren't in their less randomized, crystalline version.
*Looks at mega sized crystals in picture* er, what?For example Na+ and Cl– ions are smallest components of a salt crystal. The salt became more randomized when it dissolved in the water. The Law of Entropy decrees that it cannot reconvert itself to the less randomized, crystalline version. The salt cannot reconstitute itself as crystals, unless we introduce external energy to evaporate the water.
You are actually kinda close to getting it. The salt crystalise without something counter acting the loss of entropy (doesn't necessarily have to be an energy source, you can crystalise materials from aqueous solvents using organic solvents and vice versa). So we apply this principle to evolution. Can we see an external energy source, belting out energy? Clue: its the big yellow ball in the sky that you shouldn't look directly at because you'll go blind.
The caves are not NaCl crystals, by the way, they are gypsum (CaSO4.2H2O), I just referenced salt as its an easy example to do at home.Just for example look at the following image
No picture is coming up for me, sorry
The Law of Entropy decrees that it can't reconvert itself to the less randomized, crystalline version.Components become randomized by changing from orderly state to a disorderly state. Entropy ensures that salt , which becomes more randomized when it is dissolved in water, will not reconstitute itself in the crystalline form -- unless we apply heat energy from outside the system and evaporate the water. This fundamental law of physics stands with other fundamental manifestations of the universe such as gravity, time and electromagnetism and evolution violates entropy what an irony?
Ok now you are just being dishonest. Well I gave up posting with JC because of his dishonesty (well, because i also suspect that he is some kind of creationist vote bot) so I'm dropping this here. You are too close minded, not interested in an honest discussion so dont waste my time again.0 -
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It's not really a worthless speculation, it's merely speaking in pragmatic terms. I can say with 100% certainty that I will never observe a decrease in entropy in my life.
You shouldn't change your position in the middle of an argument. Your original statement said that "the entropy of a system is very unlikely to decrease spontaneously" is equal to "it won't". Now you are talking about what you can perceive and not what is an objective fact. Yes, you can say that you will never observe a decrease in entropy. If, hopefully, you live to 80, then you will have had 2,522,880,000 seconds of existence. If, in that time, you had managed to observe one event per second, then you still woudln't be able to rule out the possibility of the occurrence of an event which has a probability of let's say 1 in 3,000,000,000. The second law of thermodynamics does not prohibit a decrease in entropy. It merely states that there is an exponential relationship between the decrease in entropy and the probability of its occurrence. So while entropy changes in macroscopic closed systems are extremely unlikely, that is different on smaller scales of change. The point is, though, that a subjective perception does not an objective fact make.Words do not drift etymologically, etymology concerns their origins.
OK, so I hate having to keep doing this, but perhaps you would be so kind as to follow the link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtymologyWikipedia wrote:Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.
Words can and do drift etymologically. A word through habit or custom can take on a different meaning. Take the word bead, for example. The earliest use of the word bead in the English language meant prayer. As time progressed people had the custom of counting their prayers using strings of beads. Over time the word bead became associated then with the round object on the string and not the action. The word then became more ambiguous and began to describe any round object resembling a prayer bead. In the Old West in America, the word came to have the meaning of the small knob forming the sight on a gun. This is where we get the expression "to draw a bead on" comes from. There is no conscious decision here to change the meaning of the word. It is merely representative of the inherent associations that come with language formation.I do not ignore the evolution of language, and I gave many examples.
Where?The word is used in a positive sense (that is, it's used as an assertion of certain ideologies today, rather than simply the lack of certain other oens). There is plenty of evidence that the meaning of the word has not changed "because of our increased understanding of the world". There is a reason that people so often say "I'm an atheist", without prompt. They don't simply mean "I'm not a theist" , they generally mean "I'm a new atheist". That's how the word is used today.
You should try to steer clear of logical fallacies, you know, they don't help your case. As I have said before, it is disingenuous and dishonest to make hasty generalisations. You are still implying that everyone uses the word atheist in the sense you propose. That is simply untrue. I don't make any assertion that there is no god. To do so would be a statement of belief and belief, in this context, is something that I have no interest in.
By the way, the term "new atheist" also has a specified meaning and so you should be careful before using it out of context. The term "new atheist" refers to people like Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett who suggest that the time has come to be more intolerant toward religion. Again there are people here who subscribe to that idea and those who don't and it is improper to make assumptions about every atheist on that basis.n fact, you just contradicted yourself above there when you tried to say "describing atheists in such a way that they have an advantage in arguments against agnostics is descriptively advantageous".
Like I said, already, logical fallacies such as this straw man don't help your argument. I never said that nor attempted to but feel free to argue against it.There is plenty of evidence that the meaning of the word has not changed "because of our increased understanding of the world".
Maybe you can actually provide this evidence rather than just referring to it. In fact, the evidence you are talking about points the other way. Karen Armstrong in her book, The History of God, shows that (as I and other posters have mentioned) the word atheism from its roots in the 16th century was used as an insult. It was widely held until the middle of the 17th century that it was impossible not to believe in God. The works of philosophers like Thomas Aquinas were taken as conclusive evidence for the existence of God. The word atheist was used to denote someone who "irrationally" rejected such evidence. Over the last 300 years our scientific knowledge has increased to the point that the existence of god is not a solid fact nor even a tenuous one. The arguments of Aquinas such as the argument from design have been torn asunder. The use of the word atheist in the sense of god-denier is thus no longer appropriate and it is due to our increased understanding of the world.
Look, raah!, I see where you're coming from. I see what you mean by politically motivated. It's just that the change you see as deliberate I see as an evolutionary response. It would take a more detailed discussion on cultural morphology to discuss this better but I think that that is best left to another thread. If we get back to the OP, the question was whether someone can simply be agnostic. I agree with you about the definition of agnosticism as laid down by TH Huxley but I think that that only answers the question about whether you can know God exists. You can decide to be an agnostic and decide that you don't know that God exists and still make a further (IMO illogical) step and say that in spite of not knowing that you believe that god exists.
I think, to explain more accurately where I stand (as an ignostic atheist) on the matter, I will leave it to someone else:
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Raah, (If you'll excuse me I'd like to leave out the exclamation mark because it might make the tone of this post sound impolite.:))
Atheism originally meant denial of the Gods, but at a guess (I don't know) it was probably defined by people who opposed atheism. I don't agree with your comparison of the redefining of atheism as a lack of belief to the reluctance of the Catholic Church to allow people to leave. In my opinion it's more a case of the majority theists and atheists speaking different languages. From the typical theists point of view a deity exists and it requires faith to believe in him. Taking the stance that he doesn't exist also requires a kind of faith. From the typical atheist's point of view the deity is non existent and is nothing more than the fairy in the well or the fabled unicorn swimming around the moon at the night. So, no level of disbelief or belief is actually necessary. Of course the issue isn't as black and white as that but that's the way most people appear to view it (wrongly in my opinion.) When people approach the concept of atheism from those different perspectives they're obviously going to define it differently.
Also would you please use your physics brain and destroy Dead One's butchery of thermodynamics.
Thanks,0 -
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It does not presuppose that. It presupposes only that people believe in the existence of god. Now, unless you have some strange understanding of the word deny, then you really are demonstrating some awful logic there.
Awful logic that you seem to be the only person who doesn't understand? I think its obvious who is lacking in the logic department.You thanked the posts you did because it was a person writing forcefully who you perceived to be on "your side".
Dont presume to tell me whats in my own head and what my motivations are. The fact that you still dont understand why I thanked that post just shows how lost you are in this discussion.If you recall the last time we were having a discussion on here you were telling me how determinism did not rule out free will. Didn't I see you a few weeks later thanking a post by Dades where he says free will is an illusion?
You would to link to what you are talking about, because I dont know what post you are refering to.The word atheist never having meant "belief in non-existence" is utterly ludicrous, look it up in any dictionary, modern or old, and that will be amongst the meanings. As I've said, you appear to have some deep rooted misunderstandings of language.
We weren't talking about "believe in non existence", we are talking about it supposedly meaning "denial of the existence of god". Poor strawman there. Even in the case of "believe in non existence of", that is simply a clarification of the strength of someones atheism, while it may be that most atheists fall under that umbrella, the general meaning for atheist is still "lack of belief" as that covers everyone, not just the majority. Most irish people might live in dublin, but that doesn't mean that the term "irish" means someone that lives in dublin.The word "massive" these days means big. It also means what it meant to mean originally, but when people use it they mean "big". Massive means big.
And? I never said words dont change meaning, I'm just disrupting the meaning you are trying to attach to a word.
You seem to have completely missed the point. I only said "in contrast to atheism" because we were discussing the differences between the word atheism and agnosticism. That's what this thread is about. The word being in opposition to both those positions would support the lines, it would support the "atheism is assertion of non-existence". The lines that are crossed out in favour of the crosses. This really is a ridiculous last passage. Even if I had said "and theism" it would not have made a jot of a difference to the point I have made.
Wow, this is just poor. You are admitting to quotemining on a par with what creationists do. Regardless of the implication that you want to make, Huxley coined agnosticism in contrast to both strong atheism and strong theism. He didn't qualify one over the other when coining the term, and he specifically meant agnosticism as a philosophical position to take in relation to any proposition without evidence, as the quote I already gave reported. Agnosticism cannot be on the same scale as atheism/theism as its not a position of belief (its a position on whether you can arrive at any belief) and, etymologically, it comes from the word "gnosis", meaning knowledge. Your implication is either incredibly dishonest or completely inane, given all the evidence clearly available, your choice.0 -
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Thank you very much, I've always regretted that damned exclamation mark.Raah, (If you'll excuse me I'd like to leave out the exclamation mark because it might make the tone of this post sound impolite.:))Atheism originally meant denial of the Gods, but at a guess (I don't know) it was probably defined by people who opposed atheism. I don't agree with your comparison of the redefining of atheism as a lack of belief to the reluctance of the Catholic Church to allow people to leave. In my opinion it's more a case of the majority theists and atheists speaking different languages. From the typical theists point of view a deity exists and it requires faith to believe in him. Taking the stance that he doesn't exist also requires a kind of faith. From the typical atheist's point of view the deity is non existent and is nothing more than the fairy in the well or the fabled unicorn swimming around the moon at the night. So, no level of disbelief or belief is actually necessary. Of course the issue isn't as black and white as that but that's the way most people appear to view it (wrongly in my opinion.) When people approach the concept of atheism from those different perspectives they're obviously going to define it differently.
Well first I think people should not be so offended by the word 'belief'. It would be silly to think that one doesn't believe anything even with respect to science. I would say that belief does come into whether or not unicorns swim around the moon. (Invisible ones that is, it might be somewhat inappropriate to use the falsifiable notion of a material horse with a horn)
As another aside, there is quite a large difference between "faith" and "belief". It is easy to say that everyone everyday believes lots of things. But to say that they have faith in alot of things is a different matter.
I would not go as far as saying atheists have faith in the non-existence of a deity. Some people would, that is not my argument here at all. In fact, everything I've said here does not even require the word belief , if that offends people. "Assertion of non-existence" is enough to draw a distinction between the "lacking belief" and "asserting non-existence of an entity of which we claim to have no knowledge", which you can call just an assertion or a belief, but either way this creates a distinction between agnostics and atheists.
Now in terms of 'lack of belief' and 'belief in non-existence', we can look at examples to see which is more appropriate, though obviously there is not a large difference between them.
If I simply lacked belief in a unicorn, and someone came along to me and said "I like that unicorn", my position would not imply any judgement on my part about that persons liking of unicorns. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people who self describe as atheists (as opposed to those who would like to self describe as only agnostics, but apparently are not allowed to) think that religious belief is unfounded.
Now, the modern atheist would say that religious people are wrong. This requires something more than a "lack". Thinking that religion is similar to unicorns does not mean make it lack. Now with the unicorn example, or any other manner of invisible things it is the case that we must simply believe that they don't exist.
I think it is very intuitively clear, that you cannot go from simply "lacking" some belief to stating that it is a stupid belief. If you say "I lack this belief, because it's stupid" by which the person means "it's wrong, or improbable" then this is really no less than saying "I believe in the opposite to this view".
While it's often the case that theists and atheists are speaking different languages, I don't believe my argument has depended on a theistic view of what an atheist is in anyway. To this end I have relied extensively on atheist self descriptions, and cited posts from people in this thread. I have tried to show that: even though there is a large insistence of the word meaning "lack of belief", the people here who use it to describe themselves all fall under the "assertion of non-existence" category. This is often avoided through probabilistic language and things like that, but it all boils down to the same thing.
I do agree with you though, that each of the groups will want the word to mean different things. But as Peregrinus' post said, there is no language pope, and I can no more impose "assertion of non-existence" on the word atheist than the word can be imposed on people who would prefer to self describe as agnostics.
I'm afraid I was so wrapped up in bickering with people that I haven't read much of his posts past the first ones, though it does not seem that the other posters are having any trouble with him. Anyway, I'm in the process of studying just that for an exam, and I'd better not spend to much time posting here.Also would you please use your physics brain and destroy Dead One's butchery of thermodynamics.
Thanks,0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkAGExZCII
. People get to start taking predefined words and redefining them to suit their agenda will just end up with crap like homeopathy and all the damage that has done. 
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