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Ambiguity of Atheism
- Thread starter Acim
- Start date
You can through the ones you've erected, though.
This sound bite logic is the label that manifests the ambiguity.
If I ask what is on other side of the brick wall, it exposes the ambiguity in this hypothetical. Say you give an answer. I say, you can get to that in some fashion, therefore your awareness of brick wall preventing you to get to where you say you want to go, is ambiguous.
Not to mention the ambiguity that amounts to 'you' and 'brick wall' being impenetrable, when surely both are, but perceived for time being, that both are in relative way.
I agree that what you are presenting is relatively knowable, but also what you are presenting is ambiguous as follow up questions would demonstrate.
I said before: If any type of theist says something along lines of, "I equate God / deity / divinity with this concept,"
> then that is how rejection will enter in. Let's try it. I equate God with existence of Universe. Do you understand that Universe exists? Yes, okay, do you understand this is God? No. Okay, now let's here you reject the claim.
If something can't be created or destroyed, then it would be plausible to say that is (in part) God. And actually, to a certain degree, I actually do believe this. That energy in a non specific instance, especially if specific instance is limited to something that 'won't last' - the energy is Divine. It is closer in my understanding to say the energy is Will of God's Son 'playing out.' At any rate, you ain't going along for that ride, and point is you're prone to reject the concept as Divine / God / Deity oriented, not because it doesn't exist (the energy), but because for you, it is or means something else (entirely). From my perspective, yes that equation to something else seems nonsensical.
As I said before, Once evidence is allowed into the picture via strong atheistic position attempting to dictate how the discussion must look, it exposes the atheist position to a plausible string of definitions that will first be placed on theists.
Such that if I am atheist with regards to FSM, but say, you know I'd believe in FSM if She was sitting next to me and looked exactly like I've been told She looks, or how I imagine her, then I could see me believing in Her existence. Now, that might not be another atheist's criteria, as in that is too little to conclude existence on. Another may say, that is going too far, as appearance of it could just be in sky for say 10 seconds, while we take detailed photos and it disappears after that.
Point being, the existence aspect is based on evidence terms that are ambiguous and vary not only from denier to denier, but arguably from believer to believer. This occurs with things that are known. I say it occurs with Science. There is not a strongly consistent understanding of what makes for Science. This isn't to say it is as ambiguous as say something else that has ambiguity (say FSM), but it is to say, Science carries with it ambiguity for what makes for Science.
Same goes with Justice. With Love. With Life. Now, all these are concepts. And FWIW, all these concepts in my understanding are correlated with Divinity (including Science), but for an atheist, these concepts are rejected to have any correlation with God / Divinity. For some theists, everything physical is correlated with Divinity, either as creation of God or as part of God. Or even plausibly as aspects of polytheistic version of divinity. All rejected by atheist. Not rejected that the item exists, but rejected that a correlation to Divine makes any rational sense. All of this does get discussed, but here in this post I'm not delving into those side discussions and am just saying theists aren't only having theistic beliefs correlate with things that are invisible and made up (nowhere to be found in our world), but are very much correlating lots, arguably everything, in our world and our minds (mental constructs) with some variation of theism. Atheists (who are extremely strong atheists) reject each and all claims of divinity.
Eh, my atheistic side was hoping for something better. The bias in this clip was too shallow for my tastes.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Acim, I appreciate what you are trying to do here, and I hope that the debate already started in this thread remains closer to the realm of friendly discussion than contentious debate. It strikes me that it is impossible to discuss the ambiguity of "atheism" without getting into these debates over what it means. We have already seen some of the same material on whether it can be defined as mere "lack of belief" alone.
One point I'll put to you is that there is a difference between ambiguity and vagueness, although people often use "ambiguity" to mean "vagueness". Ambiguity refers to different distinct meanings or senses for the same word. For example, the noun "wave" is ambiguous between its senses as the name of a moving configuration of liquid and a static configuration of hair on someone's head. Vagueness refers to the fuzziness of usage in a single meaning. So, although waves in the ocean are countable objects, you cannot actually count them accurately because it is so difficult to tell when you have one wave or two distinct waves that are merged with each other. Similarly, mountains cannot be counted accurately, because you find it necessary to arbitrarily distinguish between "saddle mountains" and two distinct mountains that overlap. Virtually all words in a natural language exhibit both ambiguity and vagueness. We tend not to notice that in practice, because we tend to use words in contexts that focus on one word sense (unless making a pun) with fairly clear boundaries of meaning.
With that understanding, I think that someone made a good point earlier about atheism. It's vagueness tends to follow the same vagueness associated with theism. That is, one meaning of "atheism" is that it is the opposite of "theism". It has a semantic dependency on "theism".
Orias
Left Hand Path
A-theos simply means "No God", like a few people here have said. It is the simple etymology of the word, anything else is personal belief and unreflective spew.
People can accredit themselves all they want by saying that even more accredited people agree with them, but most of us here know thats just silly, since there are a lot of accredited people that are extremely misleading.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
To subdivide things further, I think there are two types of strong atheists:
- strong atheists with certainty: "no gods exist, period."
- "probabilistic" strong atheists (and I'm sure someone can come up with a better term): "the hypothesis 'God exists' is less reasonable than the hypothesis 'God does not exist."
For the second type, I think there may be some overlap with weak atheism, but I think the position makes more sense as part of strong atheism than weak atheism, because it is an explicit rejection of the god hypothesis... it just happens to be a tentative rejection that might be subject to change on further evidence.
I'd put myself in this category: based on the evidence before me, I reject the idea of God as unreasonable, however, I realize that I'm not privy to all evidence, so I reserve the right to change my mind.
Atheism is an exception. As soon as theists can actually agree on what believing in god means then I will rethink my position of (not)theist. We aren't talking about people that are (a)geocentrists or something that can be shown in any real way other than just pointing at reality and saying goddidit..
That's kinda interesting I think you could prove that method to a jury of your peers using reasonable doubt. That is if they weren't all theists.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Only arguments can be fallacies, and atheism is not an argument. It is a rejection of a type of belief. So it makes no sense to call atheism an exception to etymological fallacies. If someone claims that the meaning of a word is based simply on its etymology, then that is purely and simply an etymological fallacy. The only reliable argument for word meaning is usage.
Orias
Left Hand Path
Forgive me for not adding that translations are lost over time, making words lose meaning and interpretation.
I prefer to view things from such stances simply because it does not tie all sorts of unnecessary and complicated positions and meanings into a word meant to simply describe one thing. Doctrines and practices tend to make labels and interpretations opposite of being univocal.
It still describes what it was originally intended to, its just that now days people use it as a shield and strengthen it with personal metaphor.
When someone doesn't believe it doesn't really require one to define the belief. There isn't anything to not believe so I don't think the definition should be very hard to grasp. Theism is a unique word dealing with hard to grasp concepts that mean very little to "atheists".
E. Nato Difficile
Active Member
I agree with this. Religion is so pervasive in our society that people who don't believe are looked at with wonder and suspicion. A term to define all people according to their lack of belief in gods or the supernatural should be as superfluous as a term to define people who don't knit, or who don't speak Farsi.
-Nato
But they, the ones who look with wonder and suspicion, aren't the ones who made up the word. It was the ones who wanted to segregate themselves, and it's for them the word exists.
E. Nato Difficile
Active Member
Source?
Citation?
E. Nato Difficile
Active Member
Atheism in Pagan Antiquity by A.B. Drachmann:
In Greek they said atheos and atheotēs; to these the English words ungodly and ungodliness correspond rather closely. In exactly the same way as ungodly, atheos was used as an expression of severe censure and moral condemnation; this use is an old one, and the oldest that can be traced. Not till later do we find it employed to denote a certain philosophical creed. (p. 5)
The History of God by Karen Armstrong:
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word 'atheist' was still reserved exclusively for polemic. Indeed, it was possible to call any of your enemies an 'atheist' in much the same way as people were dubbed 'anarchists' or 'communists' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (p. 126)
-Nato
Doesn't mean the word theist means anything to someone who is not theist as far as the label is concerned. What kind of thinking was common when both parties think they are using common sense?