Atheism doesn't mean much.

[LegionOnomaMoi]

LOL. I'd like to know if the sun has risen. I think I'll stick my head out the window and check. Now your method of verification is what?

That as the sun doesn't rise, the question itself cannot yield a correct answer. In your example, the failure to formulate an adequately logical premise is trivial, but for those of us in research this kind of seemingly simplistic faulty reasoning can be far more serious.

I've read literally 1000s of primary research papers.

What is a "primary research" paper? You mean actual research papers as opposed to junk reported in newspapers? Those of us in research just call such studies "research".

I'd like it if you could show me a single one that has any sort of a formal logical argument?

You are aware that "formal logical argument" and "logic" are not the same thing, correct? For example, it is impossible to use quantum mechanics without relying on quantum logic. It is impossible to justify any statistical method without understanding the underlying logic. It is impossible to design an experiment without logical structure. It is absolutely possible to do research without some first-order logic derivation. Every inference, every use of mathematics, every assertion that some finding entails some conclusion (or doesn't), etc. is using logic. Have you been equating "logic" with formal derivations in classical symbolic logic this whole time?

Can you do that?

I don't know of any research study that didn't depend fundamentally on logic, but I'm not sure that you are using the term "logic" outside of an extremely narrow sense (formal arguments/derivations).

Observation! Statistics!

Are you arguing that researchers don't use statistics or that statistical methods don't have a logical structure and their use an understanding of their underlying logic? If your understanding of both logic and statistics is that limited, I can refer you to some literature.

I don't discount logic

At this point it doesn't seem you are aware of what it is, what research entails, or elementary notions such as "premises" or "inference".

Without observation logic is nothing but a IF/THEN GAME!

What did I say that indicated one could develop theories without empirical methods? I'm just amazed at your assertion that logic is useless without premises (which are logical in and of themselves) and so complete a failure to understand reasoning itself that the relationship between valid inferences required for any and all verification and sound interpretations of any and all empirical data don't just require logic- such reasoning is logic.

Any conclusion verified by logic, rests on the truth of the premises, which must be verified by observation.

Wrong. Demonstrably wrong. First, premises are (again) part of logic. Second, this is the argument typical of religious fanaticism: interpret all evidence according to conclusions you've already made. Your arguing against your own point. Vast numbers of religious beliefs are based on observations to which are applied invalid logical inferences.

If you require some elementary literature on critical thinking and reasoning, I've had students use some textbooks with great success. See e.g.:

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational:The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions. HarperCollins.

Brandom, R. B. (2009). Articulating reasons: An introduction to inferentialism. Harvard University Press.

Gilovich, T. (1993). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (1994). Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds. Wiley & Sons.

Shermer, M. (2002). Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. Henry Holt & Co.

I've used several more (including various intro logic books) if you require additional help.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I've read literally 1000s of primary research papers. I'd like it if you could show me a single one that has any sort of a formal logical argument? Can you do that?

I was going to wait until you defined either your conception of what logic is, but as it doesn't seem you are really aware of what it is and given that you'd be very familiar with the essential role logic plays in research had you really read "1000s of primary research papers", I decided to help clarify the issue by giving your sources such that you can indicate how you distinguish these from the use of logic I claimed is essential to all research. I've gathered a tiny but somewhat diverse sources that rely very explicitly on logic in particular ways:

Das, M., Mondal, D., & Ray, D. S. (2012). Logic gates for entropic transport. Physical Review E, 86(4), 041112

Lehtonen, E., Tissari, J., Poikonen, J., Laiho, M., & Koskinen, L. (2014). A cellular computing architecture for parallel memristive stateful logic. Microelectronics Journal.

Lara, J. A., Lizcano, D., Martínez, M. A., & Pazos, J. (2014). Data preparation for KDD through automatic reasoning based on description logic. Information Systems, 44, 54-72.

Liu, T., & Vignale, G. (2011). Electric Control of Spin Currents and Spin-Wave Logic. Physical review letters, 106(24), 247203.

Louie, A. H. (2007). A living system must have noncomputable models. Artificial Life, 13(3), 293-297.

Mur-Petit, J., García-Ripoll, J. J., Pérez-Ríos, J., Campos-Martínez, J., Hernández, M. I., & Willitsch, S. (2012). Temperature-independent quantum logic for molecular spectroscopy. Physical Review A, 85(2), 022308.

Petrović, D. V., Tanasijević, M., Milić, V., Lilić, N., Stojadinović, S., & Svrkota, I. (2014). Risk assessment model of mining equipment failure based on fuzzy logic. Expert Systems with Applications, 41(18), 8157-8164.

Pires, G. D., Dean, A., & Rehman, M. (2014). Using service logic to redefine exchange in terms of customer and supplier participation. Journal of Business Research.

Schneebeli, L., Feldtmann, T., Kira, M., Koch, S. W., & Peyghambarian, N. (2010). Zeno-logic applications of semiconductor quantum dots. Physical Review A, 81(5), 053852.

I could go on forever, but given your basic inability to have thus far expressed much if any familiarity with logic (or perhaps you've been defining it in such constrained terms all along), I offer the above mainly to determine what you are looking for in the first place.

 

[paarsurrey]

Doesn't this imply that they are able to be reasoned with, as opposed to, say, digging in their heels on a certain topic and refusing to budge from certain preconceived notions even when faced with logical fallacies and historical evidence to contradict such notions?

You get it wrong.

Regards

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I've read literally 1000s of primary research papers. I'd like it if you could show me a single one that has any sort of a formal logical argument?

"Scientific knowledge is best expressed in formal logical languages (3). Only formal languages provide sufficient semantic clarity to ensure reproducibility and the free exchange of scientific knowledge. Despite the advantages of logic, most scientific knowledge is expressed only in natural languages. This is now changing through developments such as the Semantic Web (4) and ontologies (5)."
King, R. D., Rowland, J., Oliver, S. G., Young, M., Aubrey, W., Byrne, E., ... & Clare, A. (2009). The automation of science. Science, 324(5923), 85-89.

You've "read literally 1000s of primary research papers" and somehow missed an increasing trend within sciences to not just use logic, or even rely on mathematical/formal presentations & representations of scientific research, but quite literally the development of technologies and frameworks to express scientific knowledge in symbolic logics? The references (4) and (5) are from 2001 & 2000 (respectively). That's 14 years during which you missed the development of tools in order to extend the use of logic in scientific research to the use of formal (symbolic) logic to express & communicate this research and express the results. In case you don't have access to Science, here's the abstract:
"The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist “Adam,” which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge."

And in case you don't have access to academic databases in general, here's an example of such a research paper (pre-print as the published version would require you to have access to the journal Artificial life)
Louie, A. H. (2007). A living system must have noncomputable models. Artificial life, 13(3), 293-297.

If you can't access the instances I provided in a previous post, you still have your counter-example. If you want more, I am not going to continue to derail this thread by providing evidence for a claim (research papers contain formal logic) that I never made. However, I will give you some search terms you can use to discover some freely available research paper: "quantum information", "quantum logic", "efficient causation", 'lambda calculus" (or "λ-calculus"), "computable", "ontologies", "Formal Darwinism Projecy" (see "The simplest formal argument for fitness optimization"), "game theory", or "Bell's inequality" (in fact read EPR & Bell's paper).

 

[Desert Snake]

@LegionOnomaMoi

I don't think you're off topic, fascinating stuff.

 

[Thief]

Must be over my head.......hehehehehehe

And science is a proving that atheism has it right?

 

[paarsurrey]

Ignorance and stupidity are different things, too.

The person who has no notion of "god" is ignorant of god. That person is not an atheist for being ignorant of god.

I agree with you.

Regards

 

[McBell]

When someone says, 'I'm an atheist', my reaction is pretty much, "so what"? I mean, it's not telling me anything, it's basically a statement in the negative. It doesn't tell me that the person is excercising some 'rationale' to reach that conclusion. It could just as easily be assumed that atheism is the default position for that individual when not thinking about the ideas at all.

to me it shows they are logical and have done some serious thinking for themselves unlike many who are not atheists.

That seems like some wild assumptions you'd be making there. But hey, whatever floats your boat.

Hypocrite much?

 

[steeltoes]

Ignorance and stupidity are different things, too.

The person who has no notion of "god" is ignorant of god. That person is not an atheist for being ignorant of god.

And yet that person is without a belief in God. Why does an atheist have to be conscience or aware of his/her atheism to be considered an atheist? Atheism comes with prerequisites?

 

[paarsurrey]

And yet that person is without a belief in God. Why does an atheist have to be conscience or aware of his/her atheism to be considered an atheist? Atheism comes with prerequisites?

"Atheism comes with prerequisites?"

What prerequisites?
Regards

 

[angellous_evangellous]

When someone says, 'I'm an atheist', my reaction is pretty much, "so what"? I mean, it's not telling me anything, it's basically a statement in the negative. It doesn't tell me that the person is excercising some 'rationale' to reach that conclusion. It could just as easily be assumed that atheism is the default position for that individual when not thinking about the ideas at all.

This simply demonstrates your artless attitude toward intellectual thought and misanthropy.

 

[Willamena]

And yet that person is without a belief in God. Why does an atheist have to be conscience or aware of his/her atheism to be considered an atheist? Atheism comes with prerequisites?

What does it mean to be conscious or aware of one's atheism? Atheism isn't a condition like disease.

Atheism is being without belief in god/gods. Ignorance is something else.

 

[paarsurrey]

When someone says, 'I'm an atheist', my reaction is pretty much, "so what"? I mean, it's not telling me anything, it's basically a statement in the negative. It doesn't tell me that the person is exercising some 'rationale' to reach that conclusion. It could just as easily be assumed that atheism is the default position for that individual when not thinking about the ideas at all.

I agree with you.
An Atheist cannot sit simply pretty. There is nothing in Atheism/Agnosticism/Skepticism as such; unless one tells and proves one's rationale positively.

Regards

 

[Desert Snake]

This simply demonstrates your artless attitude toward intellectual thought and misanthropy.

Intellectuals aren't necessarily misanthropes.

 

[LuisDantas]

What does it mean to be conscious or aware of one's atheism? Atheism isn't a condition like disease.

Atheism is being without belief in god/gods. Ignorance is something else.

Atheism, however, is part of some ignorance situations. One has to learn of the concept of deity to even consider whether it can be believed in.

 

[LuisDantas]

I agree with you.
An Atheist cannot sit simply pretty. There is nothing in Atheism/Agnosticism/Skepticism as such; unless one tells and proves one's rationale positively.

Regards

Not seeing the problem, myself. Atheism needs no justification.

 

[Willamena]

Atheism, however, is part of some ignorance situations.

Which only demonstrates that they are not the same thing.

One has to learn of the concept of deity to even consider whether it can be believed in.

If belief takes consideration, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to consider.

 

[Dirty Penguin]

When someone says, 'I'm an atheist', my reaction is pretty much, "so what"? I mean, it's not telling me anything, it's basically a statement in the negative. It doesn't tell me that the person is excercising some 'rationale' to reach that conclusion. It could just as easily be assumed that atheism is the default position for that individual when not thinking about the ideas at all.

Should we qualify our position or does it matter?

I mean...I'm an atheist...and pretty much none of my co-workers know that I am because it doesn't seem like a big deal to advertise.

I casually passed by one of my co-workers just the other day and said (Good morning. How are you) and she said to me "I'm blessed how about you"....I said (I'm doing well)....See, no need to wear my atheism on my sleeve like some theist do. For some of us...it is who we are...for some of us our atheism is just as unimportant to us as your theism is to us.......

 

[Desert Snake]

Should we qualify our position or does it matter?

I mean...I'm an atheist...and pretty much none of my co-workers know that I am because it doesn't seem like a big deal to advertise.

I casually passed by one of my co-workers just the other day and said (Good morning. How are you) and she said to me "I'm blessed how about you"....I said (I'm doing well)....See, no need to wear my atheism on my sleeve like some theist do. For some of us...it is who we are...for some of us our atheism is just as unimportant to us as your theism is to us.......

Great. I wouldn't know how to respond to that, so apparently theism varies.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Intellectuals aren't necessarily misanthropes.

Ah, I see how you're reading me... I mean...

This simply demonstrates your artless attitude toward intellectual thought and [your] misanthropy.