When I identified as an atheist, what I meant by that at the time was that I believed that God didn’t exist. When I studied Philosophy, that also seems to be the definition that was used.
That is, if Theism hold that the proposition “God exists” is true, Atheism is the position that the same proposition is false.
However there seems to be a rising popularity with the notion that atheism is more aligned with a “lack-theist” type view. And that it’s simply the “lack of belief”, and isn’t it self a proposition or position on a proposition. I find it unnecessarily complicated as a definition that just muddies the water.
I do understand this is just a semantics thing, and so long as I understand how someone uses the word, it doesn’t really matter in the long run. I can speak to someone if we can get these definitions clarified before a discussion engages.
However, as this is a philosophy forum, I just wanted to see what the general consensus was here about the use of the word Atheism. What are your thoughts?
For me I tend to think the most useful way to categorize it is the following:
Proposition 1: “The truth value of the proposition “God Exists” Cannot be known by anyone”.
True = Hard Agnostic (global claim)
False = Theist or Atheist (both disagree with the agnostic, because they take a position on the ontological discussion and say that it can be known if it is true or false).
Proposition 2: “The truth value of the proposition “God Exists” Cannot be known by me”.
True = soft agnostic (personal claim - I’ve not looked into it enough to know whether the theist, atheist or hard agnostic is right or wrong).
Further categories:
Apathetic = Someone that just hasn’t really thought about the topic or doesn’t care about it at all.
Lacktheist = the lack of belief (psychologic description or quality: could also apply to inanimate objects like a rock)
what are your thoughts?
I find this the most useful way to categorize it. Again, I get semantics is somewhat arbitrary and if someone insists on calling themselves an atheist but defines it differently, I’m happy to continue to discuss it. My issue though is that whenever it gets to the point about what do we call someone who says the proposition that “God exists” is false? What word do we use? They often just say atheist again lol and the issue is it lumps lots of people together that believe very different things.
For some reason, a lot of self-identified “Atheists” seem to get really angry with my suggestions, and don’t seem to realise how arbitrary semantics is, and seem to confuse my suggestions as insisting that I am saying that they say that the proposition “God Exists” is False because they identify as Atheist. Although what is really happening is I would usually just use a different term to describe them.
I wish people understood that a little better as it tends to cause issues when it doesn’t need to (I’ve been banned from subreddits for posting this very same discussion and accused of, and I quote… “shit-posting and trolling”.
No, because you miss the absolute “no-no” position: I am neither a believer, nor an atheist, nor an “agnostic,” nor anything else related to this shit. I do not define myself in relation to the insanities populating the human ape mind; I have full contempt for this nonsense, and my MCogito metaphysical system fully explains the metaphysical origin of the alpha-dominant “God” idea: it is the animal conformation of the infinity of Thought by bodily appearance, by its extremely slow maturation pace, and by the fact that we remain physically small for a very long time simply to ingrain our submission to the alpha-dominant ideas that form our ethnic herds.
When in doubt about the definition of a word, use the generally accepted meaning. This from Wikipedia:
Atheism , in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism which is the belief that at least one deity exists.
If you’re worried about misunderstandings, just say ”I don’t believe God exists.”
But, how should I say this(?), you’re in this shit. Are you not?
Secondly, quite feeling bad for not being believable.
I find ChatGPT quite reliable. Grok’s initial personality meant I interacted much less with it. Gemini is at par with ChatGPT as far as quality and reliability are being measured. They would be the prototypes of AGI that would run the world simulations of the future. Social media is quite the rage; most everyone seems to be plugged in so to speak.
What is this “no-no” position you seem to be waving around in my face? My position is defined by 2 + 2 = 4. If this were not so we wouldn’t be able to tell whether we have 4, 5, \text{or } 6 fingers/toes.
LOL you never look at one paragraph from Hegel My system is 6 order of magnitude easier to understand that his but it’s metaphysics, it’s somewhat abstract, if you don’t understand it stand in the void, relate on nothing, and don’t understand the multi-categorical point of vue, I agree it quite indecipherable. And above all: it works! Hegel’s dialectic don’t, Hegel is unable to precisely define the metaphysical difference between a pebble, a bird, an idea.
I’m in the strong-atheist of your category, the problem is it define me relatively to something I have full contempt. I don’t want to be touched by these insane discussions about “God”. Supernatural don’t exists, period. (not in that way).
Do you define yourself as a Raelien or an a-Raelien? Nothing because you don’t bother about Rael.
Did you know? The None category is the fastest growing religious affiliation in the world/USA. We need that little boy to yell out, “the emperor has no clothes!” The whole facade will collapse.
Lol having contempt for something isn’t something that negates the concept. Anti-facists have contempt for facists and can still define themselves in opposition to that.
I’m not sure how you think this is in any way analogous or how you even think it makes sense in the context of the above conversation. What are you saying here exactly? I’m guessing you’re accusing either me on one of the other interlocutors as being “against reality” in some way? Lol can you explain this a little better please because it just comes across non-sensical.
You can count strong atheists on your fingers. Most atheists are weak atheists; even very prominent atheists, back when New Atheism was viral, were/are weak atheists.
What about antitheism?
“Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago. They were… more trouble than they were worth.” ~ Worf
It’s complicated from the get-go. Here’s my history:
I’m the child of Roman Catholic parents, and they meant to bring me up in the spirit (and I guess in the Spirit?), but the believe never really took hold. It’s not so straightforward as a celar-cut “I never believed in God.” I’ve always known who gave out presents at Christmas, and I knew my parents I knew, yet they would always pretend the presents came from the “Christkindl” (Baby Jesus with his entourage of Angels). I played along, and that was also how I treated bible stories: as important content you should play along with. I was praying as a child, but I never really expected to be heard. It was just a calming ritual. A lot of this is really long ago, and I’m fairly sure a lot of this is re-interpetation, but what I do know is this: I’ve stopped with any and all God stuff by the time I was… 12? 13? Around that age. And there was never a singular conversion moment, nor was there a sense that any of my believe systems changed.
What this means is that, as I grew up, my God concept did not grow up with me, and now all I have is nonsense (which the Christians around me agree is nonsense), and I never managed to understand what it is that people actually do believe in when they believe in God. Which should lead to my response to the following:
It is this: I can neither say “God Exists,” nor can I say “God Doesn’t exist,” and mean what I say - because both propositions are nonsense and thus not truth apt. This ties in with me struggling with other abstracts (like “love” and “justice”). I’m something of a pan-heretic by default, I suppose.
As a late child/early teen, I called myself an atheist, because that’s the word I knew. I called myself an atheist, because I didn’t believe in God. I’m fairly certain (though I can’t say I remember specifics) that I wouldn’t have made a difference between “I don’t believe God exists,” and “I believe God doesn’t exist.” Me being an atheist was above all a practical issue. It’s a useful shorthand for why you don’t go to church, have nothing to say in confessions, etc. This sort of stuff. I underwent confirmation, for example, as an open atheist. I did it for my parents. There were preperatory courses, and even there everyone knew I didn’t believe in God. They didn’t kick me out or treat me badly. They didn’t even try to convince me. They just gave me the regular lessons. Maybe they thought it was a phase? Maybe it’s how they interpret the go-out-and-spread-word stuff? That’s generally how I experienced believers around me: they’d explain God stuff to me the way I’d explain why I like some music to a guy who doesn’t like it. What I did with that was up to me. I’ve never met a pushy Christian. Due to that, me calling myself an atheist did the job. It was a casual thing and had the desired effect.
Since I was a curious kid, I eventually came across the term “agnostic” (I think I was 14 maybe?). From that point onwards, that was what I called myself, mostly because I wasn’t really motivated to say “God doesn’t exist,” (except to Jehovas Witnesses when they were being pushy at the doorstep), and I liked shifting the emphasis from existance to knowledgability. And I’d call myself an agnostic until my mid-thrities, which is when I came onto the internet…
…where I discovered the grid-based, two-dimensional model: believes in God/doesn’t believe in God, and thinks you can have definite knowledge about God/thinks you can’t have definite knowledge of God. So you have four logical slots, and I’ve met people of all kinds. I gravitated towards this, first because I like grids to make sense of things, and I’ve met people I could classify according to this. So since my mid-thirties I call myself an agnostic atheist, and I’m fine with it. But I’ll drop the terminology in a one-on-one conversation if it gets in the way it’s not important.
One of the things the grid-based model has shown me is that I have far more in common with a fideist than with people like Dawkins. The stark opposition between atheist/theist simply doesn’t tell the whole story. And since I don’t believe in God, the God division isn’t the one that’s the most useful to me.
There is a second, practical motivation that helped the shift from agnostic to agnostic atheist: Christians often have the idea that if I’m an agnostic I’m undecided. This goes away when I call myself an atheist. I’m not undecided on whether God exists or not: I dismiss the topic as meaningless and just go on with my life. I consider deciding whether God exists or not a waste of time. So, if I don’t believe in God, and if I don’t believe you can ever have postive knowledge on that, I see no reason to spend time on the topic, other than to better understand people who do believe. I like it when people explain themselves; I don’t like it when people try to convince me.
In my experience, calling myself an agnostic encourages the latter. And that in turn has lead to situations where I suddenly found myself in a situation where I had to argue “God doesn’t exist”. But that’s a rigged game: first, it’s more important to the theist than it is to me, and second of all the theist is on “home ground”. It’s impossible to win a debate you consider nonsense. And when you don’t even want to have a debate in the first place… Part of that is me conceding to much terminology: it’s a language trap, where I gradually alienate myself from what I say until I say what I don’t mean (and there no longer is anything I can mean to begin with).
So you say that “atheism” as “doesn’t believe in God” is too complicated and muddies the waters? To me it can’t be any simpler: I don’t believe in God, therefore I’m an atheist. All the God talk comes later.
I’ll summarise it like this: “God exists” (and its negation) is a meaningful proposition to most theists, and to some atheists - presumably atheists who used to be theists on the whole remember what they believed in? But it’s not a meaningful proposition to all people who don’t believe in God. And theist cultural dominance is such that the term “atheist” is useful to them, too.
I’m fine with deviating definitions for specific purposes, but in an all-purpose thread, the need to define “atheism” once and for all is not something I welcome. Within my worldview God-talk is nonsense, best ignored when you want to get on with life. But other people have other worldviews. So best thing to do is adapt your language to your conversation partner(s).
On the internet I remain an agnostic atheist under the grid-based model, because that’s the sort of place the internet is. Too many diverse people around. I can still agree to other definitions for a specific purpose, provided I can still follow the topic under these terms. But that’s as far as I’ll go.
Not sure how much sense this makes, but it’s my position. (Also, a lot of “atheists” might not be angry so much as frustrated, when you don’t accept their terms. They probably live somewhere, where people treat them one way or another depending on what they call themselves, and nothing really works for them. Such is life. Won’t speak for everyone, though. And then there are people who just like being angry (no matter what they believe).)
The OP’s concerns are valid but looks like s/he hasn’t watched/read enough videos/articles. At some point in their journey even prominent atheists clarify their stance to be provisional atheism but still open to proof/evidence of God. One was asked what he would do if the sky split apart and a great voice announced, “I am God”, to which he replied, “Yes, I worry about that a lot.” This person describes his position as God almost certainly doesn’t exist.
From the bowels of Christ, I beseech you. Think it possible that you maybe mistaken (Cromwell’s rule)
Most atheists start questioning their faith very young. I even heard one say that he was only 8 when he began to doubt religion. Others give their age to be 13-14 when religion stopped making sense. Others never make it, so to speak.
I’m wondering whether I should check them out or not.
My position is defined by