Please tell me where if anywhere the following statement is true or false AND why it is so:
Lack of belief in “X” is NOT the same as belief in “not-X.”
ex: Lack of belief in the existence of something is NOT the same thing as believing that that something does not exist.
This issue came about in an argument I had with someone over the definition of the word atheism/ist just to give an idea about where I am coming from. Save the discussion of the definition of the word atheism for later. For now just talk about the claim I made at the beginning of the post.
Heck, I can pretty much prove it. I was convinced that the route I was driving to work was slow. That statement stands fine on its own. So, I then began experimenting with alternate routes to work and found several that were faster.
Now, these experiments affirmed my disbelief in my initial position (that the route I was taking was suboptimal), however, my belief that I have now found the optimal route (routes, actually. It is traffic/time-of-day dependent insofar as I can tell) is independent of my belief that the initial route was slow.
Umm…if we are talking about God here for example…lack of belief in X in the sense of not fully believing in X may mean u are agnostic which is not the same as belief in notX ie God does not exist, an atheist view.
Well thats how I analyse it!
I guess it depends what u mean by ‘lack of belief’
Is this a refutation of what I said? Because that’s exactly my point.
Saying “I don’t believe in the existence of X” does NOT mean “I believe in the non existence of X”
Believing in the non existence of X could very well occur, HOWEVER this would be a coincidence not a consequence of “not believing”. Ergo because of it being a coincidence, it should not be discussed in correlation with my original statement in the first post.
John: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, no noise is made by the fall.
Greg: I don’t believe that.
John: So you believe that noise IS made?
Greg: I never said that. I said that I do not place belief in the notion that no noise is made. However I do believe that it is MUCH more likely for noise to be made that not. It would be foolish to say that noise is DEFINITELY made because it can not be proven. But this does not change the fact that it is more likely that trees will make a noise because there is nothing that indicates that they won’t.
In this scenario John lacks the belief that trees are silent when they fall. He does not believe that they definitely will make noise. He does believe that the likelihood for noise is much higher because there is nothing that justifies belief in the contrary.
This is how atheism works.
Theists say +God.
Atheists do NOT say -God.
Atheists say that -God is more likely than +God.
Agnostics say that -God is just as likely as +God.
If an atheist says +God, then that person is a “gnostic atheist.”
I don’t believe that marshmallows are good.
Therefore, I do believe that marshmallows are not good.
I don’t believe in unicorns.
Therefore, I do believe unicorns do not exist.
Put in terms of formal logic, it looks to me a lot like:
If not X
Then not X.
I think that is a sound argument. The issue, I think, is that you are taking an inductive argument and trying to put it in terms of a deductive one - the argument only poses two possibilities, and you seem to want there to be a third. It’s the word “belief” that confuses things; when you look at real-world examples of belief, there is always the possibility of uncertainty or ignorance. If you can’t rule out those possibilities, you can’t prove the conclusion.
Try this:
If I don’t believe in +unicorns, I may believe in +/-unicorns or -unicorns.
I don’t believe in +unicorns, therefore, I believe in +/-unicorns or -unicorns.
I think that makes some logical sense, but I fail to see any way for it to make any real-world sense, assuming that I am aware of the issue and have given it the slightest bit of critical thought. All I can say is: I believe, I don’t believe, or I am uncertain.
Believing that unicorns do not exist is a coincidence. It it not required if you lack the belief in them.
The two claims do not HAVE to go hand in hand.
It all has to do with being able to prove that unicorns do not exist. If you say that you cannot prove unicorns are non existent, you would be making a logical error in saying you know for a fact that they do not exist.
I have on my desk a 12 inch pianist, who plays his little piano whenever I ask him to. You don’t believe in 12 inch pianists right? Your line of thinking would even go so far as to make you say you believe that 12 inch pianists do not exist, right? Well I’m listening to one play on my desk right now. You could ask for proof, sure. But until I provide it to you, you must maintain a lack of belief in my 12 inch pianist, and you cannot say that you know it does not exist.
I am pointing out that these two claims
do NOT have to go together. IF THEY ARE TOGETHER it is by coincidence, not consequence.
Ok. So I think that if you know what an idea is, and you know you don’t believe it is right, you should put on your big-girl pants and decide whether you believe it is wrong.
How long does one sit on the fence before one decides?
Ever hear of an agnostic? A true agnostic does not assert the existence of god, nor the nonexistence.
Try this.
Joe tells you he has $1000 in his pocket. You don’t know for sure if he does. Until he proves it you lack the belief that he has it. You don’t believe that he does NOT have it, do you? What happens if he shows you that he does? You could say that it is highly unlikely that he does not have it, because he probably doesn’t. But asserting full on that he DOES NOT have $1000 in his pocket would be slightly arrogant.
This one still applies:
I have on my desk a 12 inch pianist, who plays his little piano whenever I ask him to. Prior to me telling you this you lack the belief in it? Now that I have said this you still lack the belief? Your line of thinking would even go so far as to make you say you believe that 12 inch pianists do not exist, right? Well I’m listening to one play on my desk right now. Are you willing to stake your life on the notion that the 12 inch pianist does not exist? I would hope not, because if I really do have one you’d look pretty silly then wouldn’t you?
Its called withholding judgment until all the facts are in.
I’d be more willing to duke it out with you if you suggested staking yours on there being a 12 inch pianist on your desk and showing it to me. THAT would be a little more compelling rather than flicking the carpet from underneath me. Then we both have an equal chance of looking silly. (well to the objective observer who has no idea who is right, anyway…)
Yeah, lack of belief in X could mean there is no knowledge of a thing at all. The circumstances in order to hold a belief about ‘not-x’ have not arisen. Maybe like Xunzian’s post.
eg
I’ve never talked about “a 12 inch pianist on Airex’s desk before” (now summarised as X). Therefore there were no circumstances available to me in order to hold a belief or non belief in X, thus lacking this belief because of its prior unavailability to the conscious mind.
However, once we proved that there wasn’t X, THEN we can say we hold a belief about ‘not-x’.
“Smith coined the terms implicit atheism and explicit atheism to avoid confusing these two varieties of atheism, defining Implicit Atheism as “the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it”.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism#Im … efinitions
I think WillNZ has seen the light. Really and truly though it inst about whether the person’s claim is true or not. The real truth comes in after evidence is analyzed. What’s more important is your ability to employ acts of skepticism to a claim,
My first claim is that there is a 12 inch pianist on my desk. I make the claim, then you judge how likely that it is true. If I have a history of lying, or maybe you have never witnessed similar occurrences to be true, then it would stand to reason that you will hold my claim to be on the unlikely side. If you ask for proof and I can not provide it then sure call me silly. The whole point is that you are able to recognize proof and how you treat the situation prior to its presentation. If I say that the 12 inch pianist will vanish from sight if another set of eyes looks at it, then you need to recognize that my logic for justifying MY claim is irrationally circular. HOWEVER, despite my own irrationality, you need to still be able to recognize that you cannot provide logical reasoning AGAINST my claim. You would only be able to support the improbability of my claim. There is a huge difference.
The same thing applies to a religion. You grow up having no knowledge or understanding of a god until someone tells you about it. Theres no possible way to even know the word until someone tells you, or you read it somewhere. At the point where you for the first time try to contemplate God is where skepticism need to be employed. No “proof” (yet) can be justified by any sort of “evidence” in favor of the hypothesis. The God hypothesis is an untestable claim. “God” is a subjective feeling, and as such you have the ability to make it as good sounding to yourself as you like it. Because of the subjective nature of the god hypothesis, it is unable to be proven. Something is only proven when there is no chance for a person to logically come up with an “I disagree” counter.
Obviously there are competing views in the world. Every person involved with a particular belief believes that belief just as much as any other group (i.e. Christians and Muslims both hold their beliefs as factual). If you want to cop out of the argument and say that everyone is entitled to their beliefs, fine. I prefer to look for what is true. Not “True”, but true.
Umm, wait… they arn’t in already? This is going somewhere? Oh I know where this is going. Sweet, I love going to this place.
I’ve heard of an agnostic, sure – they dress up everything I read after after 'A true Agnostic… [Does not assert the existence of god, nor the nonexistence] appropriately to deal with the crowd at hand.
I’ve heard of an agnostic – but not a true agnostic. Is the implicit claim here that you are a -true- agnostic? I have never met a -true- agnostic since the time I found a mime on a secluded cliff side forest-plateau in what appeared like it could or possibly couldn’t be a country of some sorts – as per the possibily psychic directions of some… natives maybe? Hard to tell if they even existed or if they were just part of the acid trip. Anyways I accidentally smashed my watch and the acid made temporal relations impossible, so in an indeterminable amount of time of (continuous) mime lecture I was unable to discern his message, if he or she had one or ever existed.
Agnostics --the good ones-- are weird; they’re like that lanky kid in gym class. You know? You could never get them in dodgeball cause they were surprisngly lithe, and in basketball their goofy shit just seemed to work…? They’re the ones with the patience. I think half the time it’s more or less just for the sake of the ‘sport’. Like a mercenary sniper whose already pissed his pants 3.5 times waiting for the perfect shot of either side’s captain. He cannot be certain if he can ascertain the answer to that question.
One way some of the proponents of Agnosticism choose to view themselves is under the definition of simply being inadequate – that the human mind doesn’t have the faculties to process ‘that’ question.
Why does the Sniper hone his craft and wait? shrug He he unable to know if he can actually ascertain the answer to that question, making it irrelevant.
Try this:
Gobbo tells you his first thought upon reading this thread is to point out that the item in question actually matters. You can’t hop between money, God, unicorns, X’s and -my- 12 inch piano man (Cedric you get your ass back here!). Wanna know why? Cause money exists definitively and guessing on an amount is entirely different; unlike the other two: you don’t have a shot with Cedric, and we don’t know if God exists.
You can use X, but define the domain’s parameters definitively. So in this case we would separate money, something we’ve almost all seen and touched in real life (A different kind of ghost in this circumstance, like the ‘Casper be my friend ghost’ instead of the lurking philosophical monsters in the night: The origins of Cedric and that weird yellow sock he carries around, and of course the ‘God’ concept) from the rest of the pile, and could even organize that pile differently to place Unicorns, and cute little piano men, and even money in a group of (in some cases assembled,) conceivable objects (in the semantic sense) and ‘God’ as inconceivability or the logical negation in this setup as anything non-conceivable is then standardized (unless you’ve got some acid?)
So, just to lay it out : I can attach a level of belief to things I can conceive of, starting with the things that have the most empirical evidence (to me) so I’ve seen money, and I’ve seen larger denominations of said substance gathered before in my life, firsthand, at different stages some of which include the 1000 dollar conceptualization. Now, while I haven’t seen a horse with an apparently mythical horn on it’s forehead, but I’ve seen a very realistic looking plastic ‘unicorn’ and rubbed it’s horn. This may not prove they exist physically but I can place a belief value to that conception, according to it’s empirical precedence, however small or subtle, compared to concepts which appear to make more logical sense, concepts like: There simply are not living breathing godly white horses who developed Horns through some anomalous means. I personally don’t care to make a causal logical stream which could cause a catalystic reaction somewhere along the lines which doesmanifest divinity and a cool horn on a pristine white horse of a particular penchant – but I hold a small level of belief in the fact that it could be possible physically and thus non-absurd, because I have no doubt I could think up something creative if I tried – and thus I can believe it to be true in some small way because the combination of a horse with a horn is possible.
Asking to prove non-existence is… not new. That is to say – it’s a non-possibility which has stayed non-possible. I seriously hope you write back with stage 2 or at least down that acid or you’re gonna go insane, man.
What if I say “If the validity of the existence of God is inconceivable?” (something whose non-existence cannot be proven as something to (not) exist – your point right? I mean I just can’t conceptualize proving that something which isn’t in existence to prove, isn’t in existence, I can just write out a sentence that says that and sort of wonder what it means.) Then belief value on G is a null set as it’s not functional – remember this is different than 0 in math.
Or, if G=I(nconceivable, Null Set), What if Null Set??
You’re essentially boasting as to how you cannot put a belief value on something which cannot be conceived of beyond semantically absurd collections of words, much like a 5 sided sphere can’t be. In the end the Platonic solids are just non-mixing like the words in the literal phrase ‘5 vertex sphere’ in so fundamental of a way it seems KeWl as part of the perspective you must take to look at it: The only belief value we can attach to ‘5 vertex sphere’ is that it’s a phrase in the English language consisting of (3) parts which couldn’t appear outside of the null set in physical reality together without direct contradiction in meaning and thus existence in question – nor as a conception beyond picturing the ‘word’ (in english) in your head. So, in relevance to the latter, while you can conceptualize non-physical concepts like ‘jealousy’ on their own through physical manifestations, you cannot meld absurd concepts together like ‘the jealous legislative drawf of gravity’ without it being an implicit comparison of multiple distinct concepts (metaphor), or inconceivable in the manner discussed.
The conception of ‘proving something doesn’t exist’, unlike that of ‘sphere’ is absurd. Triangle pegs and square holes. I can type out the phrase ‘proving something is non-existent’ but the concept itself is not conceivable. It’s not a possibility within the constructs of a universe/dimension of matter.
But I mean… so what? You can’t think about what you can’t think about?
I do not assert the existence of a ‘True Agnostic’ as an absurd conception (that is someone who doesn’t try to hide or change the phrase " A true agnostic does not assert (the existence of God), nor the nonexistence" from a phrase to a non-absurd conception (like an assertion) – but I do not assert the non-existence of a ‘True Agnostic’ as an absurd conception because I cannot prove that non-existence of an absurdity and neither can you.
It’s an absurdity in my mind – perhaps a defunct in my thought process as a human, but I do not see a claim here, I don’t see how your phrase can exist in conceivable manner. It’s the same wall I hit when I try to imagine God beyond the word ‘God’. I see some English words in my head but I can’t complete them into a workable logical concept.
Maybe I should too eh? I mean why type? Am I sure you are there? I cannot prove your non-existence… any more than I can prove my existence, nor my non-existence (maybe this is the negation) so should I assert something: Thoughts pertaining to self; or just slip into the null coma? Sleep till we can a better, more fundamentally monastically fucked, opposing, and thus negated truth-value comparison.
The bolded ones do not follow. And some would even go as far as to say that the non-bolded ones don’t follow either, but my focus is on the bolded ones.
Non-democracy does not mean Anarchy. Non-democracy engulfs any number of things, not just governing systems. Non-democracy could mean something non-related to the group denoted by democracy at all; such as a chocolate bar.
It is the same problem with Windows and Macintosh. If you don’t have windows, then you could have:
any other number of operating systems other than Windows.
no operating system
This is a problem concerning the existence of belief to start with, I think.
If one is conscious of the idea of God(X), (1)then that is a belief, (2)that belief is either X or not-X. In other words that idea is either believed as being true, or believed as being false. One cannot be neutral in belief when conscious of an idea.
But if one is not conscious of the idea of God (X), and lives as if there is no God, then that person cannot be said to hold a belief on the falsity of an idea he is not even aware of. If one is not conscious of the Idea of God (X), then there is no belief involved, so nothing can be said about X or not-X. A person not exposed to the idea of God, who lives as if God does not exist is not an atheist, nor an agnostic. That person is neither, because each of them involve an exposure to the idea to begin with.
(well to the objective observer who has no idea who is right, anyway…)