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In Posner's response to the comments, he says "I think that whether or not God is dead for one depends on upbringing and temperament, but not on arguments." I agree whole-heartedly.
Seems to me there is a qualitative difference in being able to approach such concepts, and then rejecting them on the merits. Although it may not be a rational difference.
I don't know, just about everybody I know is an atheist, but I'm pretty sure that very few of them were raised that way. Which means most of them changed their minds at some point, presumably for some set of reasons. Of course, another question is whether it's the result of argument; I do suspect that most people will either figure it out on their own, without the need to be debated into it, so to speak, or they won't, and the latter group won't be as likely to be swayed by debates.
I think that some people want to call agnosticism a weak atheism.
A person that feels she has equal reason to believe in the existence of God and the non-existence of God can be said to not believe in God, in some sense. But this type of belief definitely seems relevantly different from the strong atheist's. The strong atheist, like me, thinks that he has more reason to believe that God does not exist than to believe that He does.
Don't you think that distinction is relevant?
Note: I'm not saying that many many people don't believe in God. They do. I'm just saying that not everybody who bvelieve they do really do.
On the question of definition, I accept the distinction between negative and positive atheism. Negative atheism (or 'weak atheism') is lack of belief in god's existence. Positive atheism (or 'strong atheism') is a positive belief that god doesn't exist. I think it makes sense to make this distinction, insofar as I've found these two views to be actually quite distinct in practice.
Sorry Will, but I don't find the counterexample of the no-bear-in-my-office-ist convincing. A proposition about whether or not there is a bear in your office at some moment is pretty different from a general belief about whether a god exists. Distinguishing weak and strong atheism is helpful, I think, because it clarifies views that many people hold on a difficult and complex topic. If your no-bear-in-my-office philosophical theory reached widespread contention and it become helpful to distinguish between weak and strong forms, then, yes, you went from weak to strong.
If my neighbor believes in god, it doesn't effect me. If he comes to my door every day armed with religious pamphlets and tries to convert me, it does.
I think Posner has it right.
You and Posner forget that millions of people change their premises all the time. If that didn't occur so rampantly, evangelism wouldn't be so lucrative and successful.
Bob-
I read recently about a scientific study that discovered that feelings of spirituality and transcendence are caused by a stimulation of a happy-juice part of your brain and a shutting down of the time/space identification part (sorry i can't remember the specifics). Some people have a more active mechanism than others. Sounds like yours is virtually non-existent. This is not to say spirituality is a mere chemical reaction; just recognize that it's a very real, tangible experience for gazillions of religious/spiritual people and the biology is one explanation of your bafflement.
But more importantly for the moment - What if there really is a bear in your office?
Take the secular theories of The Big Bang and Evolution. You can take them for what they are, theories, the best stories so far about the data that has been discovered about the origin of, well, life, the universe, etc. But they are just that, stories, as unprovable as the existance of god.
Scientific people believe the theories, but accept and consider arguments against them. Secular zealots, on the other hand, mistakenly take them as facts and fight any school from teaching anything different.
God and Evolution can easily be accepted as theories. To believe them as facts, though, takes something beyond reason...I think that is what Posner is saying.
The problem with this whole line is that we are not dealing with a rational or logical or empirical question. We are dealing with a spiritual or emotional question. Was it possible for Jesus to turn water into wine? No tricks here, no semantics or explanations, just a wave of the hand and Perrier becomes Boones Farm. Can a rationalist or empiricist even begin to discuss this? The transcendant is by definition a discontinuity, a rupture, an absolute and qualitative break with rational systems. Its logical possibility is zero. Yet millions of smart people say it exists.
When you say the word "atheism" (or "agnosticism") has a meaning, you have entered a metaphysical discourse.
never reasoned into."
I'm not sure that there isn't an interesting point in here somewhere that has to do with people's attitudes towards propositions. Insofar as we're talking about whether there are different kinds of atheism (in some sense) I think we should be talking about the different probabilities that people assign to the proposition that God exists. (Assigning a probablity to a proposition is an example of having an attitude towards one, right?)
The case that I'm imagining does not necessarily include a person who has never considered whether not there is a God. I'm thinking of two people. One who assigns a .9 probability to the proposition that God exists (p) and another who assigns a .5 to p. The first person is clearly an atheist b/c he is very confident in p. It's not quite so clear what to call the second. He thinks, after considering all of the major philosophical arguments, that it's just as likely that p as it is that not p.
I want to call this guy an atheist. He does not have a positive belief in God. He is without a belief in God. Yet we cannot say of him that he believes that God does not exist.
It seems fairly clear to me that if he's an atheist, he's a different kind of atheist than the guy who believes that God does not exist.
Now, I'm not sure I understand how or if your point about quantifying god-making properties is relevantly related to this point. But I stand firm in my position that there is an interesting distinction to be made here.
I agree that many people who call themselves 'agnostic' merely think that it's logically possible that God exists and that since they can't prove that He doesn't exist they can't say that they believe that he doesn't. And that IS ridiculous.
But I think there are some people who say they are agnostic and truly think that it's just as likely that God exists as it is that He doesn't. And these people belong in a different (sub)category than the people mentioned above.
The point is that there are tons of things that we say we don't believe in even though it's logically possible that they exist. We (and probably most agnostics about God) say that we son't believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, elves, goblins, or purple dragons. But it's logically possible that all of these exist.
So if you're willing to say that you don't believe in them even though they are logically possible, then you should be willing to say that you don't believe in God even though it's logically possible that He exists. (That is, you shouldn't say that you're agnostic if the only positive thing you can say about God existing is that it's logically possible.
The life on other planets example isn't exactly analogous to the God one , I don't think. B/c I don't think that we have much reason to believe one way or the other that there is other life in the universe. We're not agnostic about it just because it's logically possible. We also don't have lots of reasons to think that it isn't the case. (Whereas with Santa Claus, goblins, etc. we do.)
Duh. Unlike aliens on Triton, the existence(?)of God is not even theoretically a falsifiable proposition. Which, as Posner and Will say, makes it nonsense under most modern ontologies.
I think that to accept a theory is to think that it accounts for the facts in some important way.
Your comment upstream about the "spiritual experience" being a biochemical function is a diversion. Very few religious believers ever get a buzz off of worship - it's not what most devotees are in it for. Whether someone adopts a religious ontology or not has little to do with their biological predisposition toward "happy juice" or the lack thereof.
I'll grant that some devotional environments are explicitly designed to induce a sort of temporary euphoria, but those are the exceptions, and they don't account for the prevalence of religious identification.
A billion FTL scoutships, with unlimited fuel and wormhole capability etc etc would discover no aliens or artifacts in a million years of survey and allow us to assign a probability etc etc. The Vienna rule is about whether a test can be imagined, not about whether a test is practical possible.
There is no acceptable test even conceivable that would provide evidence of God's existence, by definition. Tho that has not prevented people from pretending.
I considered her comment to be something of an analogy to autism.
The distinction clarifies two different types of atheism. Weak vs. strong, the way I'm stating it, is about whether someone lacks belief in god or positively believes in god's nonexistence; the distinction deals with belief about existence simpliciter, not belief about the possibility of existence.
I think it's a useful distinction for a couple of reasons. First, someone who has never thought about the supernatural in any capacity is, I would claim, an atheist because they lack belief in god's existence. Someone who has given the issue deep thought and intellectually decided that god doesn't exist has gone a step further. They have a belief that the "weak" atheist doesn't, namely: "God doesn't exist." The second very similar reason is that I find it helpful to distinguish between agnostics (who lack the belief "god exists") and atheists who outright reject god.
I think that the distinction really does capture two different worldviews, even though I don't often make it in practice. Usually, I just say 'atheist' to mean anyone who lacks belief in god.
The idea of exploring every nook and cranny of the universe should be fine, even if it would be really difficult to marshal the resources. The billions of explorer spaceships need not have infinite fuel or take infinite time (unless the universe is infinite, in which case Bob is in trouble).
As for a "god detection" machine, there's no reason to believe that such a machine can be built.
I don't necessarily like the verification criterion of meaning, but I think that's how one of its adherents might reply.
If you're brought up believing in "Santa-God," you might lose that belief after enough talk (and thought.) (And growing up.)
And you might go on to think and talk about what the Real Reasons are for all that stuff you used to believe "Santa-God" did.
At that point, you'd be calling yourself an atheist or agnostic. (You'd also probably be in your teens-through-twenties, and into 'progressive/edgy' music, politics, and clothes.)
Later on, after even more talk and thought, you might, surprisingly enough, find yourself believing in God, just not "Santa-God."
(Yeah, you might have guessed, this is all from personal experience.)
So: belief is neither innate nor immutable.
Talking about such things is far from futile.
Also, what's more fruitless:
A - debating God's existence,
or
B - debating whether it's fruitless to debate God's existence?
If 'B' then shouldn't we keep going and debate whether the debate of the debate...ah, you know the rest.
I agree with you Will that 'atheist' does not have two distinct meanings. Posner is wrong about that. It's just that I think that there are two kinds of atheists.
"I'll grant that some devotional environments are explicitly designed to induce a sort of temporary euphoria, but those are the exceptions, and they don't account for the prevalence of religious identification"
Many do convert due to some kind of 'spiritual experience', though. John C. Wright a notable recent example http://mostlyfiction.com/authorqa/wright.htm
McClain:
Identifying atheism/agnosticism with teen rebellion is breathtakingly patronising. As it happens, I was raised atheist, and never identified as anything else, though it took a little longer for my worldview to become fully naturalistic. YMMV
I don't see atheism as merely a juvenile affectation.
It makes sense enough, as far as it goes, and suits some personality types better than any other belief would.
There are folks who would serve God better if they didn't believe in Him. (Her. It. Whatev....)
A hidden message in pi or e (a la Carl Sagan's Contact) would do it, at least to a very high probability. On the other hand, there is no conceivable test to prove the *non*existence of God, since if God does exist he could always spoil the results of any test in order to hide himself.
Well, that would prove something had existed in the past, its nature depending on the content of the message, but even it had said "I exist always" we wouldn't have to believe it.
But you know if we let imaginations run wild, the Big Dude could just open the sky like drapes and shout "Here I am!". Now such an event is not in my ontology, but there are millions of people who expect that exact event to happen... "Left Behind" club. I, as a secular modernist, have spent part of my life trying to view that group as something other than superstitious savages.
Nonsense. Here's your test:
"Hey God, if you're there, show yourself to me."
If he does, there's your proof. (Of course, accounting for fraud, and so forth.)
Proof of God's nonexistence is of course a different matter, but that's the old "prove a negative" problem. Unfortunately, given the sparseness of evidence like the above, that's about all we have to work with.