Yes that’s one of the reasons why superstition persists. Some say education tracks religiosity quite well, but there are outliers. Yet when a now deceased person was asked if he’d deconvert all theists to atheism i.e. there’s only 1 theist left on the planet, would he pull the trigger?, he answered, “I wouldn’t.” He was an antitheist and the notion of a perpetual, celestial dictatorship was a nightmare scenario to him. Of course he had forgotten, 'tis better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
The problem with strict atheism is that it ignores the spiritual nature of humanity. Humans gotta worship something, and atheism is a negative definition which does not capture who we are as humans.
“There is no God.”
Then, what is there?
Well, there is all of existence to revere.
Stop and think about it and it’s pretty f*cking amazing that we are here, in this vast shimmering symphony of matter and energy, and here we are, the ultimate complexity of chemistry, asking questions about our existence!
It blows my mind!
And this is what draws me to scientific pantheism, which sees all of existence and “God” (used metaphorically) as identical.
You can’t see how dreadful that argument is?
“Humans gotta worship something” - what’s the conclusion - those who don’t worship something therefore are not human? Presumably they are the Übermenschbermensch…
And sure, the universe is extraordinary. Why not still think that, but refuse to jump to an unsupported theistic conclusion?
Meh. Credulity is an amazing thing.
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An atheistic stand might better be portrayed as “A theistic god does not exist”, were a theistic god is a being seperate to the universe, usually taken as having created and continuing to sustain it.
It’s whether it exists or not that is the point at issue, not so much whether we know it exists.
So one approach is to say that those who believe it exists are theists, and those who do not believe it exists are atheists; this latter including both those who believe it does not exist - what you call hard atheists - and those who do not believe either way - agnostics.
There are those who reject his lack-of-belief approach, adopting a belief-god-does- not-exist definition. They take the definition of atheism to be the belief that god does not exist. I think they are in the minority, and so long as one keeps track, it’s not of much import.
Incidentally, amongst philosophers, there is a surprising degree of agreement.
You’ve removed a totally sound possibility here: Belief that we cannot know whether a god/God exists.
I esseentially said exactly what you’re saying with less words, and , as far as I can tell, more practicality.
Using words matters, and using them imprecisely sucks. There is very good reason to sort your terms out before engaging. You seem to agree that best use occurs somewhere - and exactly where I’ve put it (besides the tidbit i opened with).
This is good - we are far closer than you want to believe on this. But I still maintain your need to jettison good, robust terminology for a discussion of atheism seems to me to ignore the entire point of OP, and using words of this nature.
We may simply disagree, but I think it worth while at least acknowledging this.
This, for instance, is absolutely spot on as best I can tell. The only addition I would give, is that you are ignoring that agnostics can have a belief that we cannot know whether God exists, and so abstain entirely from the other two options. That seems to separate htem from “non belief” and “belief” in terms of God/gods. Some atheists actually believe in God, but accept we cannot possibly know. This is the problem with faith, as you are extremely well-spoken about.
You will notice that you can trigger a lot of reaction without intending to do that. It’s the subject matter. It pushes a lot of buttons. Philosophy of religion is fair game, but posts about atheism will often turn out this way.
What do you mean by “God”? Which God of religion are you talking about here?
Amongst “academic philosophers in philosophy departments” would be a better description. By weight of numbers, professors teaching philosophy at seminaries vastly outnumber academic philosophers, but are not represented here. So too, the lives of monastics are far closer to that of an Aquinas, but also a Proclus, Plotinus, or that of Hindu sages, etc., and yet they are also not included.
Hence, there is a sort of equivocation in play if we say “most philosophers in the past believed in God, but today most do not,” since in the later case we will be radically truncating the definition of “philosopher,” delimiting it to participation in a field that is in some ways hostile some forms of philosophy/theology (and which is vastly more athiest than the surrounding society, or natural science faculties, which speaks to selection effects and siloing). There is a problem with selection effects too, as today someone with the interests of a Proclus or Shankara is going to end up in a theology department.
This is a pretty common difficulty though. I have seen it said in several places that “philosophers” lost all interest in asceticism after Nietzche’s attack, up until Foucault’s retrieval. This trades on the same narrow redefinition though. Over that same period, Buddhist and Christian monastics/religious orders alone outnumbered all the world’s academic philosophers by an order of magnitude.
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sounds like atheism with extra steps, not gonna lie.
Where I see this come up the most is burden of proof shifting. If athiesm or agnosticism are simply the absence of a belief, then, so the theory goes, they do not require the same burden of proof.
That might hold in some respects, but it is often used illicitly when it comes to policy discussions. For instance, if I never studied molecular biology, I could hardly demand that it be barred from the public schools on account of the fact that I have no beliefs about it. That would be absurd. Likewise, when people complain about religion in schools, it is not really that they have absolutely no beliefs about the issues at hand (since then, why would they even care?), but rather, presumably, that they think the beliefs in question are at least unlikely to be true or good to hold.
But holding something to be unlikely is not lacking a belief about it. It is not equivalent with ignorance.
I think you may have taken me the wrong way.
You don’t believe all humans have an innate sense of wonder and awe? Even if it is for our own intellectualism
I did not mean to imply awe for anything supernatural
Having said that, evidence does suggest humans have a natural, cognitive, and neurological predisposition toward spirituality
They are not nonsense. The question is whether there is a God, and by that what it typically meant is that there is a personal being at the base of reality that has certain attributes and has a certain relationship with contingent reality.
With regards to God, the minimum type of attributes it is said to have are:
- Necessary existence (that is that it is a real being, and it’s non-existence is impossible, (it is eternal).
- Has a will and performs actions such as creating.
- Is The Most Powerful or the source of all power.
- Is All-knowing.
- Is The Most Wise.
- Is self-sufficient/independent
There are others, but at minimum it’s usually argued for that in particular. Now that’s not nonsensical. We can understand what each of these things are communicating. And this either exists or it does not. That is exactly what is truth apt. So if someone states “God exists”, that statement is either true or it isn’t. I don’t even understand why you would suggest that it isn’t something that can either be evaluated for its truth, or at least be evaluated in terms of being able to discover the truth of it. It’s not identical to “love” or “justice” because the whole idea is that its a real being. It’s not an “abstract” concept in the same sense at all.
In the same way, we can say that “Big-Foot Exists”, it’s a being that is said to be real by a group of people, and they list out the characteristics of said being, and we determine if it’s a true or false statement, or if it’s even possible to determine if its true or false.
Yeah I tend to think of it in the types of conversation that can be had.
You have the ontological discussion about “Does God Exist?”
On this level of engagement, both need to have a clear definition or what “God” is exactly, usually listed out as the bare minimum of attributes (exists, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-wise, has a will, independent etc). If they agree about the type of being they are discussing, then they can agree and disagree with the statement “God exists” or its negation “God doesn’t exist” respectively.
So they both agree on the ontological level of discussion that it can be known whether X exists or not.
“GOD EXISTS”
- Theist says that statement is true.
- (hard/strong) Atheist says that statement is false.
“GOD DOES NOT EXIST”
- Theist says that statement is false
- (hard/strong) Atheist says that statement is true.
So they take up opposite posts, on that statement, but they agree on the epistemological level of the discussion that it is a statement that can be known to be true or false.
The (hard/strong) agnostic here comes in to opposition with both the Theist AND the (hard/strong) Atheist. As the agnostic says they are both wrong in even evaluating that statement with a truth value and having certainty or confidence in their evaluation. So there is an epistemological question now, that contains the onotological statement, and so it shifts to a different level of discussion. It moves up a notch and asks: “Is it possible to know the truth value of the statement “God exists”?”
It’s not often mentioned here, but the (hard/strong) agnostic is in direct opposition to both the Theist AND the (hard/ strong) Atheist. It’s strange that no one picks up on this, and I think it’s my main issue with conflating agnostics with atheists and why I lean towards the categorization I give above. Because in this you can see clearly how the Theist & the (hard/strong) Atheist actually become allies on the epistemological discussion. They both agree that the truth of falseness of statement X can be known, where as the (hard strong) agnostic says no, it’s not possible for us to know, atleast at the moment.
I like looking at it in terms of these levels:
----------------------------------
LEVEL 1
ONTOLOGICAL LEVEL “DOES GOD EXIST? (X)”
[THEIST (YES)] V|S [ATHEIST (NO)]
----------------------------------
LEVEL 2
EPISTEMOLOGICAL LEVEL “IS X KNOWABLE”
[THEIST & ATHEIST (YES)] V|S [AGNOSTIC (NO)]
----------------------------------
Bad assumption. I have a degree in philosophy with a main focus on philosophy of religion. And also been heavily involved in the religion debate circles online for years now, having read and watched a lot on the subject.
I am aware of this. But there are also those who say they would still doubt even if they went to heaven - they would first assume they were hallucinating. (Richard Dawkins for example). And those who just outright refer to God as an impossible existence and have claimed without any doubt they know that God only doesn’t exist but he can’t exist (Aron Ra - he literally wears it on his t-shirt).
But in any case, how has anything I’ve said made you assume that I’ve not read much or watched enough on the subject? Lol I’m having a semantics conversation, and discussing the usefulness or pragmatic reasons behind inclining towards certain definitions over others. Whether or not self-described atheists are open to the evidence is irrelevant because under my definitions they would just be between the Hard and Soft agnostic. Those who say WE don’t know right now, but it may be possible to know in the future if the evidence was to be presented.
wow there has been a lot of engagement on the thread! Will try to respond to the rest when I get time. Thanks for taking part in the discussion everyone.
Though degrees are not guarantees, I respect them. I’ve actually seen degrees transform people.
This doesn’t contradict what I said.
Because if you’d studied the topic, which might involve watching debates/lectures and reading articles, you wouldn’t have asked the question. Popular atheists go out of their way to explain they don’t know God exists but they only disbelieve God exists and that if they are atheists, they are only so in a provisional sense and would switch to theism the moment there’s good evidence for God.
I hope you’re not too offended; reading people isn’t easy and I’m really bad at it. Apologies.
From what I can see, they don’t, and they are. The focus group is philosophy staff at academic institutions able to award an undergrad degree in philosophy. IF we follow the usual parochial approach and restrict ourselves to the USA, that’s ten or twelve thousand folk. There are a few hundred seminaries, with one or two staff who may have an expertise in philosophy but who may also be historians or theologians. That gives a few hundred. And if their institution can award a BA they are eligible or inclusion in the PhilPapers result.
So Seminarians don’t outnumber, but are included, in the focus group for the PhilPapers study. It’s true that the respondents are overwhelmingly of the analytic tradition, as one would expect; and it is also true that those whose AOS is phil of religion overwhelmingly think there is a god. Neither is of much interest.
What’s interesting is that this result is one of the very few that comes out with such a strong result - fifth highest consensus. Most of those who study such things have chosen atheism.
Again, the correct response to feelings of awe is not to immediately conclude that there is a being who is seperate from, but created and sustains, the world.
Awe is not an argument for theism.
I think, I need to clarify. They are not nonsense in the sense of nonsense syllables. And I do not think they’re nonsense to everyone. My default assumption would be that they’re not nonsense to people who believe in God, to people who used to believe in God, or to people who hold that God doesn’t exist.
But they’re all “meaningless” to me. So what does it mean for “God” to be meaningless to me? What follows is a good jumping off point:
It starts with me not being able to grasp what it means for God to have attributes. For example, pretty much everyone agrees that God is not an old man with a white beard who lives in the sky. This is something I could understand and not believe in, but if I attack this conception I would obviously attack a strawman.
I’ve seen arguments about “necessary existance”, but I can’t square them with the real world. This precedes arguments about God. For me this only makes sense in a limited and closed logical space. I don’t know what to do with it.
The problem is exacerbated when applied to “God”. The word existance loses its meaning, when decontextualised like that. Existance is context bound: James Bond never existed as a real person, but he exists in books and movies, and that leads to questions of abstraction: to what degree is the James Bond of the books and the James Bond of the movies the same entity, etc. It’s complicated, but I have something to lean on.
God? What’s even the context here? If the context is something like “necessary existance” it’s a non-starter for me. A nebulous word such as “everything” seems to get rid of the need of an additional concept. And so on. “God exists,” and “God doesn’t exist,” seem to lead to very same world for me.
“If you find a clock in a field, you wouldn’t think it came about by accident, would you?” And lines like that. Yeah, I can visit a clock factory. We have a word, we extend its meaning beyond dubious borders, and then we find a way to paste the language together. What does it mean for God to create a world? It’s certainly not a process I would recognise, is it? Folks just extrapolate in some way… and I can’t follow.
I’m also not sure what having a will would mean for a creature like God. It’s so far out of my experiental radius that even speculating seems… silly. What it amounts to is people telling me what God wants to do. But that’s people.
I don’t have anything to say to that, really. I realise, for example, that “Most Powerful” here has been written in capital letters, so questions like “Is God stronger than wooly mammoth,” don’t seem to hit the mark. Some time after the beginning, man created God and in the image of man they created him. But he wasn’t divine enough. So they added “but more powerful” and nodded sagely and went home. I know this is unfair, but it’s all I have. The source of all power? Isn’t power just a concept woven around wanting to do stuff and sometimes not being able to? What gap does God fill here?
[quote]4. Is All-knowing.
5. Is The Most Wise.
6. Is self-sufficient/independent
[/quote]
[ETA: Anyone know why this doesn’t show up as a quote? I can’t find a difference to all the other instances, and I created it the same way…]
And so on. The post’s going to be long enough already, and none of the content above is meant in any way to be an argument. It’s just an attempt to illustrated how all this God talk is slippery and I can’t get a hold of it. And if I’m at all motivated to try, it’s because there are theists. It’s not because I think the result would change anything about my world.
I mean, I know about conversions, and I won’t rule out I’ll have a sudden epiphany at some point. But I can’t make heads nor tails of the concept, so I can’t say something like “God doesn’t exist,” and feel like I said something of substance. I can say it to get missionaries off my doorstep (around here mostly Jehova’s Witnesses) - except I shouldn’t, because generally it doesn’t get them off the doorstep.
There are a lot of other things philosophers care about that are meaningless in the same way for me. “Free Will” comes to mind.
It’s not “in the same way” at all. Big Foot doesn’t transcend the world I know, so there are ways to look for Big Foot. There are problems with reference here: if I find something that fits some aspects but not others, how much can I put down to faulty memory, embellishments, etc. before I can say “I found something unexpected that’s vaguely Big-Foot-like, but it isn’t really Big Foot.” But this are minor hiccups. I can do none of that for God. There’s nowhere I can look. I just have to re-arrange my mind, and suddenly he’s everywhere? How does that work?
So to your second post I, then, say this: The ontological level isn’t accessible if the conceptual level is unclear. And I believe that knowledge of God is impossible, because the conceptual level is unclear by design.
So for example:
That wouldn’t be me. My immediate response is “What would the sky splitting apart” involve? I’d rightly be criticised for being evasive, but that’s where my mind goes first. As for the voice claiming to be God, since my default reaction to invoking God is “a form of social control”, I’d imagine that’s what happens here, too, in some way. I might also question my sanity. I’ll know when it happens, I suppose. I’d probably just be very confused.
According to pantheism, some choose to use the word “God” metaphorically - but pantheistic beliefs do not rely on that.
God is not seen as separate from existence.
All of existence is divine.
Everything is “God” so “God” loses any distinct meaning
Scientific pantheism is not theism in the classical sense.