As a spin off from “atheism is as invalid as theism” lets play with the absence of god.
The only difference between atheism and agnosticism is attitude, not the status of their beliefs.
Assuming ‘p’ is defined as “god exists”, ie. the core theistic belief.
Folk can’t believe a negative. Unlike the good Wittgenstinian i previously assumed I was, holding ‘~p’ does not capture the nature of a lack of a belief which atheism/agnosticism conveys. There is more to it.
When I state ‘~p’ or ‘“god exists” is not the case’ that is not to say ~p now figures in the list of my beliefs. I do not go about my life consciously stripping ‘p’ from all my dealings. Psychologically speaking, i can think of no better way to ensure that ‘p’ has a hold upon me (try not thinking about that pink elephant!). Instead, I simply reject the question. ‘~p’ is simply stating ’ ’ (which is to say, ‘bugger off’ or ‘i hold no such belief “p”’)
Atheists and Agnostics both say ‘~p’, but one is more certain about that statement than the other.
If you wanna state that ‘~p’ means “disbelief in p” in any significantly different way to the “absence of belief p” then I think you mistake what belief is, and you are probably trying to give ‘disbelief’ the same epistemic status as ‘belief’. Ie. that you require support for it.
Most obviously, there are infinite of these ‘disbeliefs’ that you hold, yet you require support for none of those. This is because, in actually, you do not hold a ‘disbelief’, you simply dont hold a belief. Dividing the two is nonsense, ‘disbelief’ is simply a stronger (as in rhetorically stronger) way of expressing a lack of belief.
Can you explain this moreso? On the face of it, saying that people can’t believe a negative, but that they can be more or less certain about a negative statement seems a dubious seperation.
the main purpose of “atheism is as invalid as theism” was to prove that its literally impossible to have logical proof of gods non existence.
the second purpose was to figure out what kind of subjective, irrational, non-solid pieces of evidence would lead a person to describe themselves as atheist instead of agnostic.
as i expected, i got a little bit of occams razor, which i feel i rendered irrelevant, and thats about it. this leads me to believe that the reasons you guys are using for saying atheist instead of agnostic are emotional. the thought of god creating all this pain makes you angry. and you dont want to say thats the reason why, because you know that its entirely plausible that god could create this pain. you just dont want to believe it, and the agnostic kind of does want to believe in god more than you do. thats the difference, whether or not you want to.
i dont think your post here has changed my opinion of the discussion. i am still going to say that theism means believing in a conscious creator, atheism means believing in a mechanical creator, and agnosticism means believing in neither.
you cant say that the mechanical creator requires less proof than the conscious creator. you CAN however say that believing in NEITHER is a lot easier than believing in any. that would make you an agnostic. none of us has proof or rational suggestion of the existence of a mechanical creator any more than the existence of a conscious one. therefore, we all believe in neither and are agnostic.
i define atheism as belief that the physical machinery of the universe (or of some other one that doesnt contain time) is repsonsible for the creation of this one. i define agnosticism as the lack of any decision on the matter. i define your “pro-atheistic agnosticism” as not being able to prove that there is a mechanical creator, but wishing that there was one.
the effect of creation by machine is exactly the same as creation by consciousness as defined in my thread. i still dont understand. did you respond to my last post?
~theism either means agnosticism or mechanicology (aka atheism). i just still dont see how you can be atheist without saying that mechanicology is more likely than theism. and i cant see how mechanicology is more likely. didnt i already resolve this?
Um. People can believe a negative statement, or rather what they mean by that is, the status of their belief can be negative (they dont have the belief).
The atheist is fairly certain about their position, the agnostic less so. What’s unclear?
I’m not really concerned with this line of argument myself. You can do some good stuff with the interrelation with god’s various properties making him fundamentally inconsistant, but i havent looked too much into it myself.
Eh? This isnt the point of this thread, but i cant let something like that drop obviously. I outlined myself pretty clearly: default state is always non-belief (atheist). Only substantial evidence would make me uncertain (agnostic). Only compelling evidence would make me believe (theist).
There is no substantial evidence. Your examples were all phenomena which have simpler explanations which do not appeal to God. Anything more than the simplest explanation is worthless speculation.
Two points:
For myself, I dont believe in any kind creator. As i detailed previously, i dont reckon the concept of an original cause is reasonable. Most likely, time began, as such there could be no cause before it.
Second point, a mechanical creator is indeed a simpler prospect than one with consciousness. I would have thought this is quite obvious, but if you need it spelt out:
A conscious creator would need to be mechanical too (as in, he would need to have mechanical component to affect the world). The mechanical creator does not need consciousness.
Another way of looking at it: building something that can emit a force is simpler than building something that can emit a force and think about it too.
So you are claiming that agnostics believe in less than atheists? Thats a strange position.
In anycase, i have no belief in any type of creator. What’s more, I am not uncertain in this. Why am I not an atheist then?
This is simply ad hoc, and makes all atheists deists. Atheism, by every definition without a specific agenda, has no doctrine. You are proposing that a negative statement entails some fairly significant positive ones. Why so? Why, just because i dont believe in god, must I believe in X, Y, Z?
I make no wishes, I only go by what is rational to believe given the evidence I am aware of. No evidence = no belief.
Agnosticism might not be a lack of decision as people can decide to be agnostic. I think being unsure of that decision is the crucial thing. I dont mind if agnostics define themselves in much the same terms of my atheism and are sure about it (making them true blood atheists as far as i am concerned), i just think it would be a more useful definition if it had that element of uncertainty, or there really is no difference between atheism and agnosticism as far as i can see.
I got kinda bored. If the stuff above doesnt answer and you cant find a damn good reason why not, then nothing will: Mechanical is simpler than conscious and mechanical. If the simpler explanation is indeed exactly the same in its effects, then we must go by it, to add anything else on top of that is just speculation with no grounding in the evidence.
Might as well go for a summary:
Atheism entails no doctrine. I see no reason for a mechanical cause while maintaining the lack of conscious one (you are basically saying atheism doesnt exist, only deism, wtf?).
A mechanical force, even if i did go for it, is more likely than a conscious force because it is simpler. Analogy: You get knocked over by a car you didnt see at all. You can say it was a car, or you can say it was a particular make of car in a particular colour being driven by person X. You have no reason to believe this more complicated answer, since you dont have additional evidence for each point. So dont speculate.
As I previously expressed in your thread, I don’t think you understand that some people are just not interested in believing in God. You may not quite ‘believe’ (whatever that means) but you are very interested in believing and searching. I felt that way once too, but no longer. Now my only interest in God is learning how to play nice with religious people, and hopefully how to persuade them that their belief might be mere dead weight on their lives rather than the panacea or ‘salvation’ they often think it is.
You could call this explanation for lack of belief ‘emotional’ perhaps, but not all emotional states are equally adaptive. I think atheism is more adaptive than theism – you have the flexibility to ‘pretend’ you’re a theist even, but your mind is fundamentally unbound by the authority of a god. So I like atheism for that.
Oreso,
As I mentioned in FM’s thread some time ago, I think there is more to the difference between atheism and agnosticism than the rhetorical strength of their assertions of disbelief. In addition, I would expect that one is less interested in searching for/submitting to a god than the other. The agnostic considers the god hypothesis a more ‘live’ hypothesis, a higher priority hypothesis, than the atheist. Both consider it a mere hypothesis rather than a ‘law’ in scientific terms, but the agnostic is more likely to hypothesize it and be more zealous in testing it than the atheist, who will devote his attention to other things.
Actually I’m not sure that the distinction above is really the distinction between the words ‘agnostic’ and ‘atheist’, but nevertheless I think this distinction in terms of ‘degrees of interest’ or ‘liveness of hypothesis’ is the chief one that distinguishes nonbelievers from each other – not just how emphatically they assert ~p. But perhaps the ‘certainty’ in ~p to which you refer could be considered isomorphic to the ‘degrees of interest’ I speak of. You’ll find my position more or less in William James’ “The Will to Believe”.
Thats fine. You still seem to be describing a difference in attitude. Im flexible on what exactly that difference in attitude is, but i still wanna maintain that there is no difference in the core belief: neither believe that god exists.
nope. you can do that with organized religion, but i fixed all of those problems. i want to make sure you know that its not possible for anybody to describe the omnisoul as fundamentally inconsistent except in regards to the problems with time, cause, effect and their existence before time as we know it.
yes the default state is non-belief. atheism is not non belief! it is belief in a mechanical creator or an infinite past with no creator. it is a belief in those things exactly like theism is a blief in a conscious creator. agnosticism is a belief in nothing but uncertainty.
agnosticism is non-belief. when you say substantial evidence would make you agnostic, you mean that youd need substantial evidence suggesting that a conscious creator is responsible, and evidence suggesting that a mechanical creator is not responsible for creation? that would mean that right now you beleive in a mechanical creator and are atheist as i have defined it. yes?
the universe exists. i say its because god. what is the simple phenomena that explains this in lieu of god? some kind of physical machinery you cant describe? that makes you a mechanicologist. and you have no proof for your claims of mechanicology any more than i do for theism. mechanicology is not default, ‘i know nothing’ is default.
time created itself? well, it wasnt there when the creation started happening. time is a product of the larger physical structure, which was created by something that doesnt have the same physical poroperties that lead to time in the same way. its simple. believing time created itself is not simple. occam?
the creator does not need to be subject to laws like everything in our universe is subject to because he doesnt live in the universe. assuming that the metaworld is subject to laws exactly like our universe is is a big assumption.
are you saying god was built? because i say that in order to avoid an illogically infinite regress of creators, we must say that he lives in a world without time and without the neccesity for a creator.
youre not an atheist because you cant answer the question “how and by whom were we created?” with “i dont believe we were created” which i feel is the same as “i believe there was no creator”
i dont buy the idea of an infinite regress of causes. infinite has never been observed, there is no reason to believe it is real other than math anomalies describing things which havent been observed. theres no reason to think black holes arent small balls or that the big bang didnt start as a small ball. there is no such thing as infinite.
and besides, i put this in the same category as a mechanical creator. if its not a conscious creator, then the thing that came before all that we know must have been a physical process. whether there were infinite processes or just one weird one that exists outside of time, its a physical process. thats the only option other than a conscious process.
you have no reason to believe that a mechanical process created this any more than i have the opposite belief. agnosticism is the lack of belief in mechanicology in all its forms (one of which you believe in) as well as theism, for the same reason: no evidence supporting either.
you DO believe that we were created, dont you? i mean, i know that at least i exist. maybe you dont.
you believe that things currently exist and that a valid question is “where did they come from?”. there are two valid answers only: conscious did it, or machinery did it. you dont know which.
=agnosticism, not mechanicology
yes that is clear, but as i see it, atheists believe that it was not a conscious creator who created. the only other option is a mechanical one or the “lack of creation” which makes no sense unless described as mechanical creation. something created, it either was or wasnt conscious. those are the only options. lack of creation doesnt make sense.
you mean mechanicology is simpler than believing in a conscious creator? i thought i proved you have no reason to say that. occams razor doesnt apply to things living in a universe we can never see or understand. occams razor was made to define things that exist in this machine. you cant say either is more or less simple if they both have the same alleged observed effects.
its not simpler. neither is. therefore we must leave it at that. to say mechanicology is simpler is speculatively adding things on top.
i think the word deism better describes my theory of a conscious creator. i didnt know it was used to describe mechanicology. i think if you dont know what created this, you are agnostic. if you think it wasnt conscious, but you are slightly more sure of what created this than the agnostic is, what are you more sure created this? or do you think that we were not created? do you think that we currently exist?
when you look back into the past, down the chain of cause and effect, the first one was either conscious or it wasnt. if you say it goes back forever, then i think that makes no sense and is impossible, but if you insist, i think that belief falls into the category of believing in a mechanical “first cause or infinitely long, purely mechanical prelude”.
no way. the question you ask upon being hit by the car is “what created this car? what brough it to hit me? why is it here?”: did it evolve and move towards you naturally due to the forces of nature, or did a conscious creator construct and direct it for some purpose? which is the simpler explanation? they both are possible because we know nothing of how cars are created, and we didnt even see the car at all before it sped away.
they are both equally plausible because they are the only two options, and it must have been one of them. you cant say that the car was not created. and saying that the car existed for an infinite period of time before mechanically following the laws that led it to you falls under the category of non conscious creation.
the speculation you describe would be like me saying that the universe was created to reharmonize the omnisoul components by teaching them to be selfless. it would be crazy for me to say that this is as believable as mechanicology. its different if all i say is that it was conscious instead of unconscious. they are both equally plausible because we know nothing about it, and we have no reason to think, in this particular instance, that a conscious creator is an unusual thing.
the only authority i obey is that of happiness. i think people should do good things because they will create a chemical in peoples brains that makes them feel “good”. no further explanation is required. i think we can all agree that people should do things that cause happiness. i think we all either obey this same authority or we are fucking assholes who literally should die, i mean that i literally hope that you die soon if you dont think the happiness of the world is important.
the reasons why we think this authority was created differ. i think it was created because its like the power outlet for the machine that sets all of the important parts in motion. the parts are souls and they are pushed because of this divine, unexplainable force that they are able to create by doing certain actions. those actions are the ones that the creator consciously wants us to do, and thats why he made the universe this way.
you atheists (if you arent agnostic as i have defined it) BELIEVE that this authority was created by something other than a conscious creator, namely, the laws of physics caused random mutations that somehow created brain chemicals that are “good” and “bad”.
if you dont believe either way, that means you dont know. that means you are agnostic.
i describe your use of the word atheism as opposed to agnosticism as “emotional”, as in it is not founded upon facts that disclaim the idea of a conscious creator more than any other option (all one of them: mechanicology).
if your mind isnt bound by the authority of creating, or at least not hampering happiness, i literally hope that you die soon. if you are bound by the obligation to create happiness, then you are bound by the same authority that i am. this statement suggests your hatred of organized religion, which i wholeheartedly share. organized religion has nothing to do with this discussion or my theory of god.
i think i may have solved our semantic problem: you should call yourselves atheistically inclined agnostics, not agnostically inclined atheists (or ‘weak atheists’). because your atheism is an emotional, irrational, unproven, baseless inclination and your final statement as to the consciousness or unconsciousness of the creator remains solidly uncertain.
the second purpose of my thread (which i suppose we can continue here?), was to ask why you think atheism ought to be inclined towards as opposed to theism? theism is warm and fluffy, atheism is cold. i bet you feel like a hardcore intellectual by embracing the cold and scoffing at organized religion, but just bear in mind that those two things dont neccesarily happen together.
i would say that the most important (or only) influence god has on the world is that he designed our actions to be motivated by the power cord we call happiness. all actions are focused solely on this, and the purpose of the universe is to create humans who follow their happiness to its ultimate end, which is communist utopia.
so you would say that atheism is better because of its ambiguous intellectual flexibility? what is better about saying that happiness was created by random mutation and was not inserted into the universe by a force that consciously wanted us to pursue happiness? how does that free your mind? what slight difference would it ever make? wouldnt you behave the exact same way, except perhaps slightly more inclined towards creating happiness?
im not saying you should try hard to believe this now that you can see it doesnt make a negative difference, im saying you shouldnt have the negative, atheistic inclination. the basis of your inclination is your distrust in the positive effects of religion. the fact remains that most people who are religious actually DO benefit from it. they usually also lose in the long run because of the distractive power of mainstream religion, but believing what i just said about happiness cannot possibly cause the negative side effects of mainstream religion because it is too simple and straightforward, and doesnt require the use of magical men who get their authority from an invisible, quasi-infallible asshole.
if religion had NO possible negative side effects, would your atheistic inclination go away?
Like i said, not really interested, but… by making God not omnipotent or good, etc, arent you making him less desirable as a deity?
sigh No, i believe in no creating force whatsoever. If, however I did, then that would be correct, though that belief would not be necessary from my atheism.
The simplest answer is to say there was no cause, and this happens to be my belief. If however, I did belief in a mechanical cause, this would still be a simpler explanation than a conscious cause.
Uncertainty is not a belief, it is an attitude you have to beliefs.
You’re still hitting wide. Time did not cause itself, there simply was no cause. Spacetime simply is, it did not begin as you seem to understand it (which would require a larger framework, and thus be question begging).
As a side note, time cannot be the product of anything, as there would be no time within which to produce it.
I dont care what laws, if any, the creator is subject to, the fact remains that any effect he has on the universe is a force of some kind. This is all i mean by a mechanical component; the ability to make a force.
God as a cause = Force + Personality
Mechanical cause = Force
Of course i am not saying he was built. It was just an analogy to demonstrate that by every measure (except that of a narrative, which is no good measure ), a force is simpler than a consciousness.
I do not need to answer such a question, i can be ignorant of the cause of the universe and still feel sure that god had nothing to do with it. This is a blatant appeal to ignorance.
“How can you say you dont believe in dragons? You’ve seen bushfires and you dont know the cause of them!”
Forgive me if i dont find this compelling.
Or no process at all. Processes require a timeline, so you havent solved the problem of how time could begin.
Besides, I have no problem with folk taking a mechanical approach, it is still simpler and thus more reasonable than a theistic one for the reasons above.
Except, belief in god is not entailed by your ignorance of the origin of the universe. By appealing to an atheists ignorance there, you arent going to doubt their lack of belief in god, as there is nothing substantial to your claims. They can remain certain that god is not a reasonable possibility because non-conscious causes (or no causes) are more likely.
Me personally, sure. I have my parents solemn vow on the matter, but as for the universe itself. No, i dont think it was caused.
Or nothing did it. And besides, a purely mechanical force is far more likely, consciousness is adding needless complexity so no reasonable person would consider it. I do not hold a belief in god, nor do i have a reason to doubt this, so im an atheist.
Saying “God is a possible explanation for X” is not a reasonable doubt, just as saying “Space Ninja are a possible explanation for X” is not that substantial either.
If that is the case, then any explanation is impossible, and i still win.
If we cant apply our rationality to the origin of the universe, then we must simply stop discussing it. There is no cause by default (not simply that we dont know, but knowing it is impossible).
As it stands, i see no reason to believe extra-universal events are necessarily incomprehensible. Since i have no other option, i will assume that everything which gives rise to comprehensibility must itself be comprehensible.
Of course, i also believe that extra universal events are impossible, so im not that worried.
Not true. If you dont know what created this, you could think that God is reasonable answer and thus are agnostic, or you could think that God is not a reasonable answer thus are atheist.
Doesnt matter. Only that a force is a more likely option than a force with a personality.
Sorry, though ive read the rest, i was getting a tad repetitive. Reproduce or point to whatever ive missed which is important.
I reckons we should continue with subheadings or something.
Cheers!
I think you may be right that people do benefit from religion in some way. At the least, we naturally incline to looking at the world from a mythical, romantic, personal, big-story perspective. We like to bond and share through the telling of such stories. Perhaps they are even a source of happiness and strength. They are certainly a source of great power. No one can ignore that power, not even an atheist. So if you are proposing a sort of countermyth as the basis of a new, un-organized religion, I think that could be good. I have a feeling that stories are a more effective way of conveying a worldview or philosophy than philosophical prose is.
But I think we can tell those stories, enjoy them, and learn from them while still holding them at arm’s length. If we believe them too much, they could become a way for the storytellers to control us. But the same could be said for many things besides religion, like movies and TV shows.
Ultimately, even the most apparently dispassionate of us have a romantic story of the world that keeps them going, a hope beyond all limits of ‘reason’. We all have our own fantasy, our own insanity. The point is to get other people to join with our insanity so we have people to play with!
i agree. though im actually not so much concerned with the story of the omnisoul itself as anything more than an intellectual exercise. i think it would be fun if someone could describe some other story that avoids all of the usual problems of mainstream mythology, but im not sure its actually possible.
the main point of creating it was to make sure that we all know that the possibility of a myth like this is exactly as likely as all of the other logical stories of creation, except much warmer and considerably more fluffy. the big bang sparking from machinery in a meta-universe, or the equally strange concept of an infinitely old universe are cold, and offer none of the psychological effects of a religious story of a god who cares and allows us to exist after physical death.
it seems to me as though the atheist is purely dedicated to the unproven myths that are cold and uncomfortable, as opposed to my unproven myth that is great and happy. they are all unproven myths, and there is no reason to hold them at varying arms’ lengths.
“in my experience, the simplest explanation has been true” is not a reason to believe in the infinite age of the universe any more than “in my experience, everything ive ever seen did not exist in its current form at some point in the past” is a reason to believe that there must have been creation. these ideas are equally plausible, and should be held at equal arms’ lengths.
2 cold ideas and one warm idea held at arms length will heat you up better than just the two cold ones, even if not as much as one warm one held closely would.
I outlined myself pretty clearly: default state is always non-belief (atheist). Only substantial evidence would make me uncertain (agnostic). Only compelling evidence would make me believe (theist).