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Are people born inherently atheist?
- Thread starter eggyolk
- Start date
Defined in terms of a persons belief which is an individual thing.
What I said.
If that's what you meant, then sure, but if only defined in terms of belief, then it's objective.
I appreciate your long and thorough post but there are so many points I would have to address and correct and comment on it's impossible. I do feel however I should clarify the Scientology view. From their own page:
"DOES SCIENTOLOGY HAVE A CONCEPT OF GOD? Most definitely. In Scientology, the concept of God is expressed as the Eighth Dynamic—the urge toward existence as infinity. This is also identified as the Supreme Being. As the Eighth Dynamic, the Scientology concept of God rests at the very apex of universal survival."
Does Scientology have a concept of God?
Your comment on my statement "We define weak atheism as an absence of belief and an absence of disbelief in gods." is so confused I have no idea how to untangle it. You write and I quote: "To say one neither believes god exists nor disbelieves is to make an assertion and, as noted above, necessarily a belief." Not asserting god exists and not asserting god doesn't exist is an assertion and a belief? How can one write that and how does one respond to that? I give up.
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Not at all, actually. The word encompasses both apathy and lack of participation. You claimed that it didn't include apathy.
Curious George
Veteran Member
If the pope gets into a car accident and becomes brain dead is he now an atheist?
AmbiguousGuy
Well-Known Member
He was probably already an atheist before it happened... so, yeah.
Are you suggesting that apathy (in regards to politics) is a political belief?
That's true. We do have it in that case. However, it is still meaningless to attribute to infants.
I'm not jumping to conclusions. I've seen the effects on neural activity and concept representation of those undecided, and specifically with respect to spirituality. And even if I hadn't worked on that study, the idea that one can use the word "god" as English speakers do and have no beliefs is contrary to the entirety of cognitive neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and basically the cognitive sciences in general. I've studied how beliefs and non-beliefs are physically represented in the brain not to mention my focus on modality and the linguistic representation of mental states. However, I don't need you to take my word for your being wrong you can read the neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophical literature yourself:
"atheists are simply one end of a continuum of belief. On the face of it, this is unsurprising, even an anti-climax. Like numerous other traits in nature, beliefs vary. so what?"
Johnson, D. (2012). What are atheists for? Hypotheses on the functions of non-belief in the evolution of religion. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2(1), 48-70.
Of course, this does not mean that terms like "non-belief" aren't useful. Although I prefer likert scales or some equivalent, there is merit in categorical answers, and despite very similar correlates for epistemic expression in general, differences in e.g., the caudate between belief and disbelief or in the ACC between both and uncertainty make a difference. The problem is not the term (well, it is but I can't do much about it and I've had to use it), it's the term applied to children when it can't be:
"Even if a proposition is not believed, it may be more or less close to being believed. We shall distinguishnon-beliefs in a narrow sense from disbeliefs. A sentence A is disbelieved by a person if she believes the negation of A, and the person is in a state of non-belief with respect to A if she is agnostic about it, i.e., believes neither A nor the negation of A."
Rott, H. (2009). Degrees all the way down: Beliefs, non-beliefs and disbeliefs. In Degrees of belief (pp. 301-339). Springer Netherlands.
Although I would prefer a more apt word, "non-belief" is used fairly often in pretty particular contexts. However, it doesn't then apply to infants. Because when the term is used it is still used to relate one's mental state to the position of some proposition on the epistemic scale. In other words, it is technically belief. Otherwise non-belief would be synonymous with being unable to comprehend at all.
If you ask a participant a question that s/he does not understand, you will find activation in places the you would not with uncertainty, belief, or disbelief. Whatever other reasons there may be for this, one certainty is that when we are able to represent concepts we can only do so by relating them to other concepts and properties. It's not only basic to neuroimaging, it's so basic we use it to as a control. If one is interested in, for example, how participants' classify and process propositions on some epistemic scale, it is vital to weed out confounding effects/artifacts produced by e.g., generic rather than specific cognitive processes and/or unrelated memory recall. So we'd show nonsense words. And not just any, there are databases of particular nonsense words because the word has to at least look like it could be a word otherwise this too affects processing and fails to successfully control for artifacts.
Nor (as I have already gone over) is this merely a matter of neural network activations. It's an issue in fields from philosophy to linguistics, but the result is the same. One can formulate the proposition "It is true that there are god or gods" and even if does not know, one can still assert that one does not know. And as one can assert:
"It is impossible to assert something without expressing a belief."
Davis, W. A. (2003). Meaning, expression and thought. Cambridge University Press.
You do not have to consider the claim to have beliefs. People make evaluations on beliefs they don't know they have all the time. The study of cognitive errors is a big areas of research in the cognitive sciences. I mentioned in an earlier post atheists whose actual responses questions about god did not match the biological indicators they displayed. To learn words, we place them in a conceptual network that has some mapping onto neural networks. A Christian, for example, might represent the Greek pantheon in the same way an atheist would. However, the similar representation is not true for the Christian god. A Christian classifies as distinct from "mythical" gods their god because they believe it belongs in a different category. The atheist believes it belongs in the same.
It also doesn't matter. As I've repeated over and over again, the only way not to have beliefs is to not understand the word. Otherwise, your beliefs are literally shaping the way concepts are structured and related in your brain. Even without the physical realization, concepts are classes to which particular things, properties, things with particular properties, etc., are believed to belong in. When you see some model of a car you've never seen before, you do not need to consciously determine that it has the necessary properties to be classified as an instance of the concept "car". When you read, hear, or talk about god or gods, the beliefs you have even if unknown to you will "prime" other concepts you believe to be similar or related. The priming effects, the representation, the categorization and classification, and everything else necessary to use the word "god" they way you do entails beliefs.
I've been relying on the cognitive linguistic framework because formal languages would have us believe that when I say "if you're hungry, there's food on the table" I mean "if there's not food on the table, you're not hungry". But I have no problems using a formal approach.
"Formal" refers to syntax. That's why everything get's reduced to symbols. It's so we can evaluate the structure, and avoid meanings to the extent possible. Nor is there an agreed upon "best way" to represent beliefs. That said, the most uncontroversial is probably that a belief is mental state, cognitive state, or cognitive act in which a proposition is taken to be true. Notice that the proposition itself does not include the mental state predicate. In other words, the predicate would be "god or gods exist" ad the belief would be the cognitive state/act in which the proposition is held to be false. Disbelief, not believe, not believing, lacking belief, etc., are all ways in which the truth value of the proposition is false. Logically, they are equivalent. There are more complicated systems, but alas the great work done for many decades now is designed for operators to act on propositions, and is no more suited for dealing with mental state predicates than classical predicate calculus.
This is simply your word games again. First, I'm making a person claim about my knowledge, not ability. The term didn't come from the Greek "gnosis" but to define Huxley in opposition to those who did know. That just means he didn't know, and neither do I, and if you are uncertain than neither do you.
Talk about straw man. I said you can't use the term if you don't have beliefs about it. The reason this is so is because using the term means you have a concept. It is the concept that entails belief. I have a concept of Spielberg, and this means I can consider it possible he is wearing a blue shirt. I can process the question and the concepts therein such that I can situate it on the epistemic scale. Likewise, had you said "do you believe that Spielberg is 400 feet tall?" I could do the same, only this time I would situate it on the certain disbelief side of that scale. However, I didn't say that because you use the word in sentences that means you necessarily have specific beliefs about any sentence in which the word appears. Just because it is true that if I claimed I am a god your concept of "god" is sufficient to reject this claim does not mean for any question or statement with the word "god" in it you have beliefs you didn't before. I already knew that Spielberg, as a human, can wear shirts.
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Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
The only reason the Apathetic Party candidate didn't get any votes is because he didn't bother to run for office. Well, and those would have voted for him stayed home.
Well, is he still a theist? Can you be a theist when you're brain dead and can't believe in anything?
Curious George
Veteran Member
If we define atheist as not theist, then it is dependent on the definition of theist. Theists obviously do not believe that when their physical body is incapable of thought they all become atheistic. It seems to me your definition is question begging. I suppose this does not mean that it is wrong, it just means you are using poor logic.
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Your typical broke, uneducated, single, unemployed, non-taxpaying citizen:
Curious George
Veteran Member
Your typical broke, uneducated, single, unemployed, non-taxpaying citizen:
you forgot disabled, and if that baby is a girl-impotent too.
Theist just means believer in god(s) it says nothing about belief in the ability to believe anything if the brain is incapable of thought. Are you saying that a person is still a theist if his brain is incapable of thought?
Curious George
Veteran Member
No, I am saying the definition is only applicable to a subset of all things. Otherwise you are assuming all people become atheists in death. Your definition fails to correspond with what theists believe. If atheist is contingent on the definition of theist and the definition of theists is contingent on that which theists believe, your definition is self refuting. on top of that, you have have assumed that the default position is the atheism. Atheism is a position by the fact that it can be a default position, so saying that it is not a position but rather the lack of position is just wordplay.
Curious George
Veteran Member
Try it this way, if atheism is contingent on theism and theism is contingent on the ability to believe then atheism is contingent on the ability to believe.
I am not going to bother to look at the page as I would prefer to be ignorant here, so I will simply accept your claim. It doesn't change much, as the main point defining. There are still those who believe humans to be gods. Likewise, although I've only encountered one, there are Satanists (I know enough to know that there are a lot of terms people collapse into that one, and I do not know which one this individual claimed to be) who believe they can channel otherworldly entities and in particular demons, understood (sort of) in the Greek sense of a kind of vague god but not called a god. There will never be a truly adequate definition of theism any more than there will religion. But so far as I can gather, you aren't defending your definition because others (such as the belief that there are no gods) don't make sense but because you don't think them to be true.
The basic sense of "assert" is to declare or state something (by basic, I mean the word is also a noun and can mean "grant liberty" but we clearly aren't talking about that use).
I can assert "I neither believe god exists nor disbelieve god exists". I just did in that sentence. As for why this is a belief, those were not my words: I quoted. Here is the quote again and (once more) the source I used:
"It is impossible to assert something without expressing a belief."
Davis, W. A. (2003). Meaning, expression and thought. Cambridge University Press.
A belief is the subjective assignment of truth value to a proposition. If the proposition is "God exist" then (by virtue of your not believing in god) you don't assign to that proposition the value "true". The reason you don't is not because some one is forcing you, or because the statement is not a truth-bearer, but becaue you do not believe the statement to be true.
Notice how you rewrote it this time:
If I say "I don't believe in gods" I am asserting what I believe to be true, and the same for "I don't disbelieve in the gods". The opposite of an assertion isn't the inclusion of negation or negative particles like not. It's generally when the statement is the negation. For example, I state "I am not an atheist" that's an assertion. If, instead, you had told me "you're an atheist" and I responded "No I am not an atheist" it would be a denial. This gets complicated because one of the definitions of "denial" is the assertion that something is not true or does not exist.
Although the ways we manipulate syntax in logic vs. language differ, both allow the same statement to be rephrased (although logic is far more flexible here). Language, after all, has synonyms and even if a word has none we can define it using multiple different ones. If you tell someone that you don't believe in unicorns, they are not going to ask "well, do you believe they don't exist?"
In logic we find even more of this. The following statements are all logically equivalent:
For any number n, there exists a number n + 1
There exists no n such that if n is a number, it is not the case that n + 1 is a number
For all n, if n is a number, then it is not the case that for some number y, y cannot equal n + 1
If n is a number, then n + 1 is a number.
If n + 1 is not a number, the n is not a number
There is no difference (at least in standard logic) between "there exists an x" and "there exists some x" and no difference between "for all x, y is false" and "there exists no x for which y is true" and so on. Language can't be manipulated in the same ways much of the time, but it isn't stagnant. The indirect object and double accusative show this:
I taught him Greek.
I taught Greek to him
I gave her the book.
I gave the book to her.
You seem to have skipped my last post. The definition of a theist is a person who believes in the existence of god(s). It says nothing about what the theist believes happens after physical death.
Weak atheism is the absence of a position and is the default until the person decides to become a theist or a strong atheist. Please learn the difference between weak and strong atheism.