No, Artie is right. I don't approve of his weak and strong atheist terminology, but it works, and what he says is true. Strong atheism is an absurd position for all reasonable persons.
No, You and Artie are wrong. It does not work. the inclusion of infants is both arbitrary and unnecessary. While there is plenty of insistence that babies are atheists, there is little reasoning for the inclusion. On the other hand there is plenty of reasons why babies should not be considered atheists or theists.
No, You and Artie are wrong. It does not work. the inclusion of infants is both arbitrary and unnecessary. While there is plenty of insistence that babies are atheists, there is little reasoning for the inclusion. On the other hand there is plenty of reasons why babies should not be considered atheists or theists.
Moreover, there is a sense in which real atheists should be slightly offended to have their position lumped together with the non-position of infants and animals- atheism
One would think so, anyway. One the one hand, we have the claim that atheism is some default epistemic stance which presumably makes easier the (true) argument that belief in god and not believing in god are not somehow equal (the argument "I believe in god, and you believe god doesn't exist, but we both just believe different things and it's all faith" is flawed). The argument is rather easily addressed without defining atheism solely and wholly by a single (constructed) category of what atheism is not, but apparently this is still too much to ask.
So, on the other hand, we eschew atheism as a systematic, intellectual, philosophical, and justified position. We kiss goodbye the critiques and skeptics who helped shape the modern world (via many different routes, from literature to the creation of the social sciences) : Voltaire, Hume, Shelley, Kant, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Freud, Marx, Feuerbach, Russell, "George Eliot", Paine, etc. We trade philosophical critiques and use in their stead appeals to the basis (empiricism) for a series of methodologies (the sciences). The "New Atheism" of Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, Hitchens, and their erstwhile supporters uses as a means of justification popular science, poorly wrought caricatures of actual theological (and anti-theological) systems & doctrines, and a vast array of findings from the sciences that are flung at straw-man religions and used to attack largely fictitious theological foes.
This is not to say that the sciences offer us to reason to doubt religion or god, nor do I deny that much discovered through the sciences as well as the ways in which justifications for theological beliefs have been undermined (especially since Darwin) present usable evidence against many religious beliefs. However, the New Atheists seem to possess so great a disdain for religious thought that it prevents them from familiarizing themselves either with their own intellectual forebears or those of their opponents. As such, the New Atheism has presented itself as something so weakly defended, defined, or structured that one could attack it with the very methods that were used by non-believers of a seemingly bygone age.
McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World does an excellent job at painting a clear but concise picture of the emergence of atheism and the reasons for its flourishing. Less time is spent on the "twilight" part, and many reasons relate to the general shifts in Western culture that came about when the economic models of Marx et al., the social science of Durkheim, and the psychological cures of the analysts failed. Instead of curing the woes of the individual and of societies, allowing the realization of a secular teleology, we found ourselves in the War to End All Wars. Then, not long after, World War II. So mjuch for curing the ills of society. And then came the attack on epistemology. Physics, the science, par excellence, came tumbling down, it's only rival (mathematics) soon to follow (at least as a science of the kind hoped for). 19th century positivism wasn't just challenged, it was systematically destroyed in virtually every conceivable way: the failure to produce what was expected, the proof that what was expected would forever be unobtainable, and were this not enough we received the direct challenges to epistemology itself posed by Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and even Popper (as the need for his defense and its nature implicitly spoke to the problems of The Scientific Method).
Less popular but more informed atheists of today have noted the importance of atheism as a positive force and with a united front (in the sense that religious advocates have). The New Atheism has constructed itself to defeat itself by denying it has structure or exists as anything other than simple rationality. It sees religious belief as so bereft of validity that it challenges religious arguments mainly by assuming its own worldview and the proceeding to demonstrate that, given an empirically-minded, materialistic skepticism religion offers less than nothing. In doing so, it not only fails to deal with its actual opponents but denies the popular development of an "institutional" atheism (or secularism) built upon an informed, justified, and reasoned epistemological foundation.
Were religious thought so rare and were without much influence, then not only would there be no need for justifying atheism, there would be no need for the word itself. This is not the world we live in, and acting as if atheism can be defined so broadly it is basically meaningless is to imagine that we live in a world where religious thought is antiquated, rare, without advocates or support, and almost entirely irrelevant to modern societies. We do not live in such a world.
I don't know which is worse: that many atheists understand their worldview as compatible with that of an infant, or that by defining a self-applied label to those incapable of reason, rationality, and argumentation this somehow makes atheism something other than ignorance.
Only strong atheists believe that gods don't exist. Weak atheists have no beliefs in that regard. Besides certain theists such as Christians also believe that every other god except the one they believe in don't exist.
No more absurd than certain kinds of theism, Christianity for example, since Christians believe no other gods exist but their own and the only difference between a strong atheist and a Christian is that the Christian disbelieves in the existence of every god except one and the strong Atheist disbelieves in the existence of every god.
You can't call weak atheism agnosticism that would be like calling apples oranges. Please learn the difference between atheism and agnosticism. There is a reason we have two different words for them.
No, Artie is right. I don't approve of his weak and strong atheist terminology, but it works, and what he says is true. Strong atheism is an absurd position for all reasonable persons.
Then it is also an absurd position for all Christians since they also disbelieve in the existence of nearly all gods, they have just made one exception.
One would think so, anyway. One the one hand, we have the claim that atheism is some default epistemic stance which presumably makes easier the (true) argument that belief in god and not believing in god are not somehow equal (the argument "I believe in god, and you believe god doesn't exist, but we both just believe different things and it's all faith" is flawed). The argument is rather easily addressed without defining atheism solely and wholly by a single (constructed) category of what atheism is not, but apparently this is still too much to ask.
So, on the other hand, we eschew atheism as a systematic, intellectual, philosophical, and justified position. We kiss goodbye the critiques and skeptics who helped shape the modern world (via many different routes, from literature to the creation of the social sciences) : Voltaire, Hume, Shelley, Kant, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Freud, Marx, Feuerbach, Russell, "George Eliot", Paine, etc. We trade philosophical critiques and use in their stead appeals to the basis (empiricism) for a series of methodologies (the sciences). The "New Atheism" of Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, Hitchens, and their erstwhile supporters uses as a means of justification popular science, poorly wrought caricatures of actual theological (and anti-theological) systems & doctrines, and a vast array of findings from the sciences that are flung at straw-man religions and used to attack largely fictitious theological foes.
This is not to say that the sciences offer us to reason to doubt religion or god, nor do I deny that much discovered through the sciences as well as the ways in which justifications for theological beliefs have been undermined (especially since Darwin) present usable evidence against many religious beliefs. However, the New Atheists seem to possess so great a disdain for religious thought that it prevents them from familiarizing themselves either with their own intellectual forebears or those of their opponents. As such, the New Atheism has presented itself as something so weakly defended, defined, or structured that one could attack it with the very methods that were used by non-believers of a seemingly bygone age.
McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World does an excellent job at painting a clear but concise picture of the emergence of atheism and the reasons for its flourishing. Less time is spent on the "twilight" part, and many reasons relate to the general shifts in Western culture that came about when the economic models of Marx et al., the social science of Durkheim, and the psychological cures of the analysts failed. Instead of curing the woes of the individual and of societies, allowing the realization of a secular teleology, we found ourselves in the War to End All Wars. Then, not long after, World War II. So mjuch for curing the ills of society. And then came the attack on epistemology. Physics, the science, par excellence, came tumbling down, it's only rival (mathematics) soon to follow (at least as a science of the kind hoped for). 19th century positivism wasn't just challenged, it was systematically destroyed in virtually every conceivable way: the failure to produce what was expected, the proof that what was expected would forever be unobtainable, and were this not enough we received the direct challenges to epistemology itself posed by Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and even Popper (as the need for his defense and its nature implicitly spoke to the problems of The Scientific Method).
Less popular but more informed atheists of today have noted the importance of atheism as a positive force and with a united front (in the sense that religious advocates have). The New Atheism has constructed itself to defeat itself by denying it has structure or exists as anything other than simple rationality. It sees religious belief as so bereft of validity that it challenges religious arguments mainly by assuming its own worldview and the proceeding to demonstrate that, given an empirically-minded, materialistic skepticism religion offers less than nothing. In doing so, it not only fails to deal with its actual opponents but denies the popular development of an "institutional" atheism (or secularism) built upon an informed, justified, and reasoned epistemological foundation.
Were religious thought so rare and were without much influence, then not only would there be no need for justifying atheism, there would be no need for the word itself. This is not the world we live in, and acting as if atheism can be defined so broadly it is basically meaningless is to imagine that we live in a world where religious thought is antiquated, rare, without advocates or support, and almost entirely irrelevant to modern societies. We do not live in such a world.
I don't know which is worse: that many atheists understand their worldview as compatible with that of an infant, or that by defining a self-applied label to those incapable of reason, rationality, and argumentation this somehow makes atheism something other than ignorance.
I don't know which is worse: that many atheists understand their worldview as compatible with that of an infant, or that by defining a self-applied label to those incapable of reason, rationality, and argumentation this somehow makes atheism something other than ignorance.
One would think so, anyway. One the one hand, we have the claim that atheism is some default epistemic stance which presumably makes easier the (true) argument that belief in god and not believing in god are not somehow equal (the argument "I believe in god, and you believe god doesn't exist, but we both just believe different things and it's all faith" is flawed). The argument is rather easily addressed without defining atheism solely and wholly by a single (constructed) category of what atheism is not, but apparently this is still too much to ask.
So, on the other hand, we eschew atheism as a systematic, intellectual, philosophical, and justified position. We kiss goodbye the critiques and skeptics who helped shape the modern world (via many different routes, from literature to the creation of the social sciences) : Voltaire, Hume, Shelley, Kant, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Freud, Marx, Feuerbach, Russell, "George Eliot", Paine, etc. We trade philosophical critiques and use in their stead appeals to the basis (empiricism) for a series of methodologies (the sciences). The "New Atheism" of Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, Hitchens, and their erstwhile supporters uses as a means of justification popular science, poorly wrought caricatures of actual theological (and anti-theological) systems & doctrines, and a vast array of findings from the sciences that are flung at straw-man religions and used to attack largely fictitious theological foes.
This is not to say that the sciences offer us to reason to doubt religion or god, nor do I deny that much discovered through the sciences as well as the ways in which justifications for theological beliefs have been undermined (especially since Darwin) present usable evidence against many religious beliefs. However, the New Atheists seem to possess so great a disdain for religious thought that it prevents them from familiarizing themselves either with their own intellectual forebears or those of their opponents. As such, the New Atheism has presented itself as something so weakly defended, defined, or structured that one could attack it with the very methods that were used by non-believers of a seemingly bygone age.
McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World does an excellent job at painting a clear but concise picture of the emergence of atheism and the reasons for its flourishing. Less time is spent on the "twilight" part, and many reasons relate to the general shifts in Western culture that came about when the economic models of Marx et al., the social science of Durkheim, and the psychological cures of the analysts failed. Instead of curing the woes of the individual and of societies, allowing the realization of a secular teleology, we found ourselves in the War to End All Wars. Then, not long after, World War II. So mjuch for curing the ills of society. And then came the attack on epistemology. Physics, the science, par excellence, came tumbling down, it's only rival (mathematics) soon to follow (at least as a science of the kind hoped for). 19th century positivism wasn't just challenged, it was systematically destroyed in virtually every conceivable way: the failure to produce what was expected, the proof that what was expected would forever be unobtainable, and were this not enough we received the direct challenges to epistemology itself posed by Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and even Popper (as the need for his defense and its nature implicitly spoke to the problems of The Scientific Method).
Less popular but more informed atheists of today have noted the importance of atheism as a positive force and with a united front (in the sense that religious advocates have). The New Atheism has constructed itself to defeat itself by denying it has structure or exists as anything other than simple rationality. It sees religious belief as so bereft of validity that it challenges religious arguments mainly by assuming its own worldview and the proceeding to demonstrate that, given an empirically-minded, materialistic skepticism religion offers less than nothing. In doing so, it not only fails to deal with its actual opponents but denies the popular development of an "institutional" atheism (or secularism) built upon an informed, justified, and reasoned epistemological foundation.
Were religious thought so rare and were without much influence, then not only would there be no need for justifying atheism, there would be no need for the word itself. This is not the world we live in, and acting as if atheism can be defined so broadly it is basically meaningless is to imagine that we live in a world where religious thought is antiquated, rare, without advocates or support, and almost entirely irrelevant to modern societies. We do not live in such a world.
I don't know which is worse: that many atheists understand their worldview as compatible with that of an infant, or that by defining a self-applied label to those incapable of reason, rationality, and argumentation this somehow makes atheism something other than ignorance.
This is a great post Legion, I can certainly appreciate you alls contention.
A couple things.
I dont think that religious thought is obsolete but I do feel that with the advancements we have seen that "god" existing is no longer a given. Without someone thinking of a god concept first, there wouldnt ever be anything to reject. The rise of naturalism makes even a pantheist concept look more like atheism.
Another thing is looking at the concept through the eyes of theists since they are the reason for the concept. Unless atheists want to argue that theists are presenting an actual existing concept. Theists believe a concept of deity to exist but, by virtue of that belief, also have faith that all other concepts of god are not real and are fabrications even. However when atheists do not believe in a concept they are really saying that the concept of god, no matter which theist presents it, is pure fabrication or wishful thinking. Perhaps it is me as a theist getting offended because I dont see how a person can have belief in a concept of deity the same way as having a belief in a concept that shouldnt exist in the first place. Is it really ignorance not hearing every possible type of god that is possible when the idea is that the deity only exist in the mind of the theist?
I find it problematic that the theist concept has to exist and it be rejected to qualify atheism. If we are truly in a world without god(s) then there is not and never was anything to reject. Atheists are not ignorant just cause gods dont exist unless they are wrong and thats the contention, that we are looking at it through our blinders. I dont normally see atheists rejecting evidence so much that they dont see it qualifies as evidence and unfortunately it isnt resolvable as theists can forever hide in the gaps that science is still figuring out. As we uncover more and more atheism becomes more validated as theists continue to fail to provide anything objective for something that supposedly exists that atheists are supposedly ignorant of.
I find it problematic that the theist concept has to exist and it be rejected to qualify atheism. If we are truly in a world without god(s) then there is not and never was anything to reject.
I see the world differently. Unlike morality, our beliefs are not something we have a choice about. We can choose to behave morally or immorally, hence we have a useful word to distinguish not choosing to behave either way, or not having a choice. But if we believe in a thing, it's not by choice; and if we reject a stated belief, it's not by choice, it's because we believe differently. No third option is necessary to this picture.
Yeah I have been of the mind that atheists dont really exist. Though I might be fine with saying atheists are those people that say universe came from nothing, or that the universe comes from purely natural causes, but that still leaves room for pantheism to be true. Is that what atheists are saying when they believe no gods exist, that instead of coming from god we come from nothing? If the universe came about by purly natural causes then the only argument is whether nature deserves the god label. Theists attempt to put a spin on reality that atheists dont see or dont agree with. I dont normally see people argue that the the universe doesnt exist. Sure atheists may believe the universe exists but they dont believe god exists and that fact doesnt change all of a sudden just cause somebody introduces yet another god concept to ignore.
Yeah I have been of the mind that atheists dont really exist. Though I might be fine with saying atheists are those people that say universe came from nothing, or that the universe comes from purely natural causes, but that still leaves room for pantheism to be true. Is that what atheists are saying when they believe no gods exist, that instead of coming from god we come from nothing? If the universe came about by purly natural causes then the only argument is whether nature deserves the god label. Theists attempt to put a spin on reality that atheists dont see or dont agree with. I dont normally see people argue that the the universe doesnt exist. Sure atheists may believe the universe exists but they dont believe god exists and that fact doesnt change all of a sudden just cause somebody introduces yet another god concept to ignore.
I see the world differently. Unlike morality, our beliefs are not something we have a choice about. We can choose to behave morally or immorally, hence we have a useful word to distinguish not choosing to behave either way. But if we believe in a thing, it's not by choice; and if we reject a stated belief, it's not by choice, it's because we believe differently. No third option is necessary to this picture.
Thing is faith is a choice because it is holding a conviction of unseen things being factual. If it were knowledge it wouldnt be a choice, if it were knowledge faith would not be necessary.
I see the world differently. Unlike morality, our beliefs are not something we have a choice about. We can choose to behave morally or immorally, hence we have a useful word to distinguish not choosing to behave either way, or not having a choice. But if we believe in a thing, it's not by choice; and if we reject a stated belief, it's not by choice, it's because we believe differently. No third option is necessary to this picture.
Of course we choose to believe or disbelieve, become a theist or a strong atheist. That is why we have the words "weak atheist" to describe people who for some reason can't or won't or don't choose any of the two options.
The kicker is knowledge will always be much smaller than ignorance and hope.
Certain things require faith and belief in our lives be absolutely necessary even if the thing is not the most likely possibility. Vantage point and state of mind will decide if that is perceived as justified.
As a theist, I can justify my beliefs all day long but at the end of the day it takes faith to believe in a god that isnt objective and that faith is a choice. I could just as easily assume nature is not god but that doesnt take faith especially if I am not putting any conviction in the idea. Things unseen require us to do a bit of special pleading in order to justify it.
