Atheism/Existence of God Debates (Please Read OP)

tommy2bad wrote: »

And so? Agnostic is what I was pointing out as the position of non belief. (Or suspended belief) Not atheist. Can you see the distinction?

Most atheists are agnostic atheists so no, not really.

http://actok.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Agnostic+v+Gnostic+v+Atheist+v+Theist.png

Geomy wrote: »

The belief or non belief in God is vulnerable to further experience. ...

Very true.

nagirrac wrote: »

Except, hold on a minute, how can you trust materialism, a philosophical worldview, and one shared by the majority of atheists, if based on evolutionary biology humans tend to be irrational? Are we to suppose those who hold to materialism are immune from the effects of evolutionary biology, somehow escaped the irrational bit?

This is true. But I think I'll hang my hat with the side that will take the approach of show me the evidence for me to believe.

Isn't this a significant intellectual challenge to atheists?

Not really. You still have to do some leg work to make such a stance work. What weakness is inherent from not believing something that is unsupported?

If religious beliefs survived because they conferred survival value, but are completely false, and yet they are the most common beliefs humans hold and have held for the history of humans, how can we trust any human beliefs?

Beliefs aren't to be trusted. That is why in conversation, if you are saying something you think rather than know, one might say, don't quote me on this, or I think, or from what I hear. Some type of qualifier to show that the position isn't necessarily that strong for some reason. It is the onus of the listener to acknowledge that the position doesn't have much weight to support it. Beliefs are interesting, but they aren't of special importance. Not if they can't be demonstrated.

tommy2bad wrote: »

Except I'm not referring to atheists, I am referring to what the term atheist means.
So again, Atheist = belief that their is no God
Agnostic = no belief in God
Theist = belief in God
See how both atheist and theist require belief?

You are just wrong. It does say a lot about how doomed conversation is when both sides can't even come to agreement on terms. I am interested in why you want to stick to this view though. I mean, do you think there is some equivalence then? Something like a/theism are both faith propositions? Is that it? Because I can tell you the reason why you are wrong... Or you can ask for instance in the A&A forum if people can be agnostic and atheist, and if that is what people who are atheist largely are. I suggest A&A as you can get answers from a lot of atheists in one place. If you happen to know a better one, try them out instead/too.

tommy2bad wrote: »

What I was trying to point out was that believing their is no God isn't that different from believing their is a god.

So both will have a positive claim, and thus something to prove. Afraid it isn't going to work out that well for you.

nagirrac wrote: »

You do realize that materialism is a human belief right, a metaphysical belief about how the universe we observe actually is? How do you know its true?

I don't over estimate my knowledge. I operate on a certain understanding which is the best I can do given the limitations that I have. Being human, firstly, which is a pretty big limitation. The not knowing that much is another limitation, though in relative terms to the first (despite the personal significance) is minor. People generally have some criteria on which they assess the world. I don't think I'd necessarily be able to put it in to words, and I don't know if many could, but we have the information we have come across in our lifetimes on a particular topic, and then we have how we interpret it.

In the religious context, there are a lot of atheists who have read a lot more of the bible than the religious themselves. That is why we see plenty of "what? That isn't in the bible.. Oh it is... Well, you are taking it out of context." If there are people who think that an all powerful being created a book and they haven't even read it themselves, then that's a strange one to me.

Personally, I can admit I haven't read it all. I read a lot of it a good many years ago, but the more I read, the more I found myself incredulous. In my case, it really did seem the best way to make someone an atheist is to read the bible.

Of course, you're coming from a deist perspective, so you aren't as interested in the specfic claims of made by religions. You just have this picture in your head of a deity just start the show and away it went. While the interventionist deities can be challenged on the basis of what they say, the deity you would suggest is less able to be challenged. Have you been a deist for a long time? And why do you give it so much more stock than say, the idea of the universe always existing? Do you give that notion any stock, a little or are you pretty much an all or nothing when it comes to deism?

How do you know it's not just another aspect of our evolution, and we have biologically evolved this materialistic belief because it's a survival adaptation.

Anything is possible, but I'm not seeing how the materialistic belief could be adaptive. Had you some means by which it could be in mind that I'm not seeing?

How do you really know that the thing behind your eyes that translates what is outside your eyes is in any way shape or form a true reflection of what is out there?

I don't *know* but I have no particular reason to really delve in to that particular question.

No point appealing to science as science is an extension of our senses, a bit broader range obviously, but still generally measuring what our senses observe.

You want to make the limitations of science, that's fine. I'll be right there with you in the context of the social sciences. I'm doing Social Science myself, and in terms of the research there, I don't think positivism is ideal as its methodology isn't really going to give a great picture. Though, that is not to say I'm happy with the rival methodologies of say, interpretivism, critical, post modernism either. They seem to all be quite limited when it comes to the social sciences, and I'd love to be able to see some means by which to resolve the weakness at least from how I currently see them.

Thing is though, the reason for the challenges in social sciences is the social part. People. People don't fit in to that many boxes as a static thing. The strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree thing... Even in such questions a person might be in between two of the choices. The next day, they might have a different answer. It's a limitation in that sense.

If you want to talk about the limitations of science, you came to your deism by another methodology. What methodology was this?

There's a lot of evidence from science that strongly suggest what is out there is not what we may think it is and that materialism is as much jabberwocky as beliefs in a spiritual realm appears to materialists.

I'd doubt it's as bad as you are letting on there. I'm getting the smell of a false equivalency going on here.

So again, why would you trust your brain if 95% of human brains are apparently not to be trusted?

I've got enough wherewithal to know that looking at how many things on which I've been wrong in the past, I am certainly possessing incorrect beliefs/assumptions right now. We all are. It'd be great if we could all come to some means of assessing which was correct and which were not so. You propose science isn't up to the task in certain areas. You cited metaphysics as an illustration. Are there others? And what means might such issues be resolved?

nagirrac wrote: »

So, we are in agreement then, human beliefs are not to be trusted.

You do realize that materialism is a human belief right, a metaphysical belief about how the universe we observe actually is? How do you know its true? How do you know it's not just another aspect of our evolution, and we have biologically evolved this materialistic belief because it's a survival adaptation. How do you really know that the thing behind your eyes that translates what is outside your eyes is in any way shape or form a true reflection of what is out there? No point appealing to science as science is an extension of our senses, a bit broader range obviously, but still generally measuring what our senses observe. There's a lot of evidence from science that strongly suggest what is out there is not what we may think it is and that materialism is as much jabberwocky as beliefs in a spiritual realm appears to materialists.

So again, why would you trust your brain if 95% of human brains are apparently not to be trusted?

Very simplistic version this:

Let's assume the following:
The truth is valuable.
Beliefs requires reasoned substantiation or evidence of some kind.
How best to establish the truth?

Again, keeping things simple. Let's assume one objective truth, there may be several, but I think it's a fair assumption to make that the general number of true statements about an object will be vastly outnumbered by false statements. For e.g
1+1 =2
There are infinite ways you could say something equals 2 (1+6 = 2) and be wrong. However, that's a mathematical statement. So, let's make an inquiry about a property in this universe: the colour of green grass. Where all the colours are objectively defined, red, orange, green, blue, violet. I hope you agree that we can't say green grass is red because it makes someone feel comfortable. Likewise, we cannot say it is purple because people have told us that to be the case for generations. So when somebody makes a claim. The default position should be to doubt it. Credulity the opposite of this position, leads a person to be more likely to accept a shed load of crap e.g green grass is orange because millions have believed this. For any given claim the number of false statements will likely outnumber the number of true ones. It would appear that adopting a questioning attitude towards all claims is the best approach.

So to answer your question, reasoned doubt is what makes it more likely we wouldn't believe in false ideas or false things. Now, I'm not claiming such thinking is true, It more than likely is wrong. I am however claiming that it's the best way, currently, for establishing what's true. The best way that we know of currently to exhibit this doubt and test claims is through materialistic processes. Such processes have led us to realise the brain doesn't function intuitively. Does that mean we should throw out every bit of info the brain provides? Not at all. I like to think of this in terms of proxy measurements. You know that by themselves they're not reliable. But you also have methods of improving their reliability. Comparing different proxy results from different spatial regions to eliminate local variations. Comparing data obtain from different proxies to build a broader picture. Comparing data obtained from various instruments to check validity of proxies. Using these you can build up of picture of what's likely the most correct picture of a distant past in the earth. Again it's no guarantee that you're correct, but why shouldn't you at least try? Our brain may very well be feeding us a pile of crap but it's up to us to figure out if it is and how to combat it shovelling this crap into us. If truth is one's goal in life then the best approach is keeping everything in balance. No point in being credulous to the point of believing everything and no point in being, I forget the term, to the point of not believing anything because you can never know for sure. Especially, for the latter, if you can never know for sure, how can you be sure that you can never know for sure that you can never know for sure?

Finally in a different post you mentioned religion being a survival mechanism. Just because something may have conferred a survival advantage doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing. You only need to try telling CF or sickle cell anaemia suffers otherwise. In another thread you mentioned depression. Human brains have basically evolved to allow a part of brain to paralyse the entire system. Again, possibly as a result of survival mechanisms that many people are now unfortunate to inherit a higher susceptibility to. If the brain was a programmable computer designed by humans we'd have implemented a timeout-like function that wouldn't let the entire system become paralysed by stress hormones being released. We'd simply have pressed reboot.

There is a lot more I'd like to say here but I think I'll wait to see which way the responses go first.

Hitchens was brilliant. While I'm not anti-Dawkins or Harris like a lot of atheists are, I don't like them as much as I did Hitch. He was a brilliant debater, could be very funny and was very well spoken. There are none alive who speak as well to the subject in my eyes as him. I can think of someone who is close to his talent, but he has been dead quite a while. Robert Green Ingersoll.

https://librivox.org/lectures-of-col-r-g-ingersoll-vol-1-by-robert-green-ingersoll/
https://librivox.org/lectures-of-col-r-g-ingersoll-volume-2/

These are audio books of his lectures, and the guy who narrates them does a fantastic job of it. Really puts across the content very well. I've started some other things on Librivox, but the quality of the people who do them hasn't seemed to be as high as the metric of the person who did the Ingersoll ones. They are long, generally half an hour to an hour long, but they are of a very high quality in content. Stick 'em on an mp3 player or something and listen to them on the go.

nagirrac wrote: »

In reality I am closer to what Dawkins' calls a "sexed up atheist" or a pantheist.

I'm familiar with it on a pretty basic level.

I find the concept of a God who pushed the start button and then went back to sleep as uninteresting as you likely do and in actuality find that position indistinguishable from agnostic atheism.

Yeah, I mean the sciences can't really rule out the possibility of such an entity, but even if such a being existed, what of it? It wouldn't mean anything in the greater scheme of things. It'd probably be the sorta thing that most people wouldn't even think about, and others would see as some kind of cosmic horror.

So my concept of God comes from the lineage of Spinoza through Einstein, the universe we observe as part of a manifestation of God.

I've read a bit of this. Do you think it fairly represents the perspective?

but I don't hold to a view that the universe is purposeless and blind, in fact the opposite, I think it is an ongoing creation.

Well, I'd agree in the sense the big bang is still banging.

I actually also tend to believe the universe is eternal, so there's no need for a God to start it, and that the big bang was just the start of the space-time we observe.

I don't really have a firm position on the subject but I find the idea of the big bang - big crunch - big bang an interesting one. I can't say I have looked in to it too recently though.

I haven't really looked in to the multiple universes thing either, so it is by intuition alone that it seems hard to accept. Except intuition is no basis in knowledge, so yeah...

However, living as I do in the US, where in all reality church and state are completely separate, the ongoing battle between a small minority of fundamentalist religious and a small minority of (sorry robin) militant atheists is so loud and so unproductive.

Ever hear that quote about the future? It's already here, it's just unequally divided. Well, I'm not living in the States, never have, but from what I can see in an outside looking in, it seems this church state separation is there, just unequally divided.

Science is absolutely wonderful, but should not be constrained by ideology.

How might science expand in such a way to deliver answers that we can be confident in the answers? I'd need to have more than a sounds nice to see a justification for believing something. You know, it reminds me a bit of this thing that I see people talk about - this we are all connected stuff. I've only come across this line fairly recently, and from now on I'll be sure to clue them in a little on the sociological thought that would argue the complete opposite of that. I'd recommend they become acquainted with the ideas of Durkheim in A Division of Labour in Society. I think it does a better job of looking at how society is than an idea that sounds nice and all, but does nothing to persuade.

At the end of the day reductionist materialism is an ideology and should have no more standing in scientific inquiry than any other philosophical ideology. We can't demand that nature conform to the way we think it should be

No, and we can't change our thinking without sufficient justification for doing so. It goes back to the point I mentioned previously - we all form our beliefs/opinions/attitudes based on the knowledge we have, and our interpretations of it. I like engaging in the religious discussion, but I don't expect people to change their mind on the basis of the discussion. I set it to the more achievable goal of both sides getting an idea where the other side is coming from. We all bring our biases in to anything. Have a group of people see some event, and it is interesting how differently the one thing might be explained by different people. If we are all so different in terms of an event we all are witness to, how much harder then for the more intangible questions/topics.

The latter leads to a lot of pseudoskepticism, where evidence is not even considered or ridiculed because it conflicts with established theory. Consciousness is just an accidental byproduct of our brain activity as an example, we're just "lumps of meat" or a "bunch of neurons". Well, perhaps we are a bit more than that if we start looking at the evidence a little less dogmatically.

I ain't touching that one. I'll leave that to those better able. Though, honestly, I think that while there are certainly people here who'll be much better able to speak on such matters, I think the best will just be time. Kinda sucks that so much new stuff will continue to be understood and we'll be too dead to find out.[/morbid]

:pac:

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

Wrong. Here are the proper definitions:
Gnostic Atheist: "Knows" there's no god.
Atheist: Has no belief in god, willing to accept contrary evidence.
Agnostic: Don't know, don't care.
Deist: Believes there is some sort of being with power commensurate to popular definition of god, but thinks same being is not interested in what the inhabitants of an insignificant speck in his/her/its creation get up to. Is willing to listen to contrary evidence
Theist: Believes there is some sort of being with power commensurate to popular definition of god, who is very nosy and expects everyone to follow his/her/its rules on the minutest little things and actively causes stuff to happen. Can be willing to listen to contrary evidence.
Gnostic Theist: "Knows" that what a theist believes is true.

Please note I'm using god in the generic sense, because we see the whole spectrum regarding every god invented by man.

And also please note, there are far fewer gnostic atheists than there are gnostic theists.

Brian, we've moved on; http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=87860906&postcount=7840
BTW you forgot ignostic, turns out it is a word, but just to add it in here, it's someone who believes God is unknowable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism