Heya MoonWater,
Sorry for missing your post.
Dealing with your first statement which states (to paraphrase slightly): Faith is belief that is not based on proof. Let us assume that we believe this statement to be true (that is, it is not merely a statement but also a proposition). Currently we have not presented any proof for this proposition. According to the proposition, if we hold any belief (including belief in the statement itself) without proof, then we are holding it according to faith. Currently, therefore, since the proposition is unproven, we must conclude that it is being held because of faith. Therefore, you are saying that you have faith that "faith is belief that is not based on proof.
Keeping that in mind, I will now turn to the relationship this premise has to your argument. You suggest that your premise constitutes evidence for your argument. However, as I have shown above, your premise, according to itself, is faith based and therefore, again according to itself, cannot constitute evidence.
I fully agree with both you and Scuba Pete that reason is important. However, I would also go further than this and say that it provides an alternative to faith and evidence when it comes to finding a justification for believing in something. It does this is through the field of logic which produces conclusions from premises in accordance with reason. For example, if I assert the definition "All single men are bachelors" then I am clearly not holding this to be true based on evidence or faith. In fact, I am holding it to be true because of reason (or more accurately 'principles of logic").
Now what are the implications of this for your first premise? Well, to reiterate again, this premise states that faith is belief that is not based on proof. You then go on to elaborate that you are not referring to "a proof" but evidence and facts. However, in the last paragraph I clearly indentified a third category of beliefs that are held due to reason and not due to evidence/proof or faith. Therefore, your premise is simply incorrect and the dictionary you got it from is stating a definition that is not coherent which, I might add, is a common problem for every day use dictionaries.
How then does this affect your main conclusion that "Atheism is a faith"? Well it doesn't directly. Atheism could still be faith based and your conclusion could still be true. However, it clearly shows that your argument is not valid and so you have not found a viable path to your conclusion. It also shows that whilst atheism might be a faith, an atheist may utilise evidence or reason or both in order to show that it is not. In other words an atheist does not need to provide evidence in order to demonstrate that atheism is not faith based.
Perhaps this still doesn't seem viable to you since, usually, reason is only employed in order to move from premises to conclusions not show the premises as true. If it is employed in justifying a premise then it does so by setting it as a conclusion to another argument with its own unsupported premises. However, you have already identified 1 category of proposition that is justified by reason without the need of this: definitions. Furthermore, as I state in my last post, reason can help us choose between 2 unevidenced arguments and it is this latter use of reason that allows us to conclude the nonexistence of god.
More specifically, if two arguments explain a given phenonmenon yet one raises more questions in its premises than the other then it is clearly less likely because it would require more evidence. To look at it another way, if two arguments require different amounts of evidence then it is more unlikely that evidence exists for the argument that requires more evidence by virtue of the fact that we have not found any evidence for either argument.
Hey Scuba Pete,
Sorry for not understanding this part beforehand. I think you are interpreting my phrasing other than I had intended it. My usage of the term "expect" is not meaning that which you or her believes is likely but which she has stated is reasonable. For example, I can expect my children to keep their rooms tidy even though the majority of children do not keep their rooms tidy. I am not suggesting that I think that outcome is likely but reasonable or due.
I disagree that an atheist does not need to provide any justification for his faith. If an atheist does not provide any justification for his belief then it becomes faith. Together we have all identified 2 forms of justification which are often combined. MoonWater identified one in the OP and I identified the other in post 259.
I do not understand why the fact that I desire evidence implies that if I do not provide some for some of my beliefs then this is unfair. I feel you are assuming that my desire for evidence implies that I believe that all of my beliefs should be supported by evidence when this is not the case (and I agree if it were the case then it would be both unfair and hypocritical). Evidence is great and so is reason. I desire them both. I believe that faith constitutes only those beliefs that are both unevidenced and unreasonable whereas beliefs that are either evidenced or reasonable are not faith based.
For reasons I have already stated (but I can talk about them again if you want) I consider belief in specific definitions of God which include the classic demiurge as well as any creator gods to be unreasonable. Therefore, until I encounter new evidence or reasoning, take the proposition that there is no God to be true.
Yes there is also reason as I stated in that post. However I disagree that there is seldom no "evidence". I can come up with a very long chain of propositions that have no evidence. For starters the existence of every single concept that has been disproven to exist via a priori reasoning. As I stated to you before when we debated what constituted evidence, evidence is not merely an attribute of a concept but a kind of attribute that specifies its relationship to another concept. Something cannot be evidence unless it is evidence for something else. Therefore, the status of something being evidence is given by virtue of the argument that utilises it being valid. There can be no evidence because an argument is invalid (ie the premises do not support anything and so cannot be evidence for the conclusion) or because the evidence itself simply does not cohere with reality.
I don't find the roles of opponent and friend to be mutually exclusive. In fact I find that a relationship with a person who fulfills either role is greatly improved when they fulfill both roles instead. The dominant role I generally assign anybody I debate with is "potential teacher" but in the context of my sentence, opponent seemed more clear.
A flaw is an invalid relationship between propositions. Propositions themselves cannot be flawed. Again I believe this comes down to an understanding of the word expect other than what I intended which I have already discussed above. In this case I meant that in order for atheism to not qualify as faith based, MoonWater expects atheists to conform to a specific standard which she outlined. I realise that she doesn't actually expect an atheist to be able to do this given the assertion she makes in the thread title but then I am using a different definition of the word expect as I explain above.
