atheism is a (religious position)

[9-10ths_Penguin]

You don't need me for a useful definition. You can simply consult the many dictionaries that are online.

Can you point me to one of those dictionaries whose definition of "god" reflects actual usage?

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Is that why you're on this forum - because you were once just a speck of stardust or protoplasm floating in space, and then over eons of time became an ape, and now you consider yourself to be human.
Am I putting words in your mouth again?

Are you capable of forming, and responding to, arguments or are you just going to engage in these meaningless distractions because you can't actually defend the statements you make?

 

[Copernicus]

Can you point me to one of those dictionaries whose definition of "god" reflects actual usage?

I don't have a favorite, but a good place to start is the online Wiktionary entry for god. The first word sense given points to the most common meaning:

1. A deity or supreme being; a supernatural, typically immortal, being with superior powers, to which personhood is attributed.

However, every dictionary contains definitions that are more or less detailed. IMO, too many conflate the proper name "God" with the common noun "god", and the more professional dictionaries out there, e.g. Merriam-Webster and other companies owned by Britannica, do a much better job of enumerating different senses together with examples of usage. I myself once did some consulting work for the Random House Unabridged Dictionary and learned quite a bit about the process used to compile them.

Bear in mind, though, that definitions are not the same thing as word meanings, which they are often confused with. Definitions are succinct statements that give distinguishing clues to a body of usage based on attestations. A better way to look at the meaning of one or more word senses is to go to a thesaurus, which attempts to summarize relationships with similar and related concepts. So the Wikipedia entry for God (and also Conceptions of God) is also a useful place to start for a broader survey of the various concepts that the word denotes. I just give the opening definition here for the proper name God (monotheistic concept) here:

In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In non-monotheistic thought, a god is "a spirit or being believed to control some part of the universe or life and often worshipped for doing so, or something that represents this spirit or being".

 

[DNB]

Are you capable of forming, and responding to, arguments or are you just going to engage in these meaningless distractions because you can't actually defend the statements you make?

Let me think about it...

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Know thyself.
I'm aware of my own perspective and world-view, and the presuppositions and knee-jerk decisions they engender. That's why I rely on formal, cognitive operations to sort through facts and abstract questions like these.

I may experience the world subjectively, but I'm free to analyse and interpret it objectively.

No, it is clear from your posts that you are in effect a naïve realist. Your claim that the meaning of words are objective shows that.

The problem is this. You are in the world as a part of the world and thus for the processes in your brain, where you can't be objective, you hit a limit of what you can do with your methodology. It is clear that you don't understand that e.g. useful has no objective referent and that you in effect take for granted when you say something is useful, you believe it is objective.

 

[Augustus]

Not really. The apophatic view is that God can only be described by what [he] is not, whereas in my view God can be described in any manner you wish, as long as words such as 'imaginary', 'purely conceptual', 'only an idea', are included.

Then you wouldn’t be applying these terms to an existent god.

To me it sounds like you are arguing an existent god is improbable, not incoherent or meaningless.

 

[blü 2]

Then you wouldn’t be applying these terms to an existent god.

To me it sounds like you are arguing an existent god is improbable, not incoherent or meaningless.

It's the idea of a real God, one with objective existence, that's incoherent ─ as I said before, never appears, never says, never does, described only in imaginary terms like omnipotent, perfect, eternal ─ and not in terms appropriate to a real entity like species, genus, height, weight, mugshot.

Thus if we find a real suspect, we have no way of determining whether it's God or not; and as I also said, we have no definition of godness, the quality a real god would have and a real superscientist who can create universes, travel in time, raise the dead, would lack.

Imaginary gods, no problem. Even I have reasonably well formed concepts of dozens of them.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

It's the idea of a real God, one with objective existence, that's incoherent ─ as I said before, never appears, never says, never does, described only in imaginary terms like omnipotent, perfect, eternal ─ and not in terms appropriate to a real entity like species, genus, height, weight, mugshot.

Thus if we find a real suspect, we have no way of determining whether it's God or not; and as I also said, we have no definition of godness, the quality a real god would have and a real superscientist who can create universes, travel in time, raise the dead, would lack.

Imaginary gods, no problem. Even I have reasonably well formed concepts of dozens of them.

But real is not a fact in your philosophical system. It is an assumption. All you are doing is, is saying it doesn't make sense to you as you.
You treat your assumption as if it magically becomes a fact.

 

[blü 2]

But real is not a fact in your philosophical system. It is an assumption. All you are doing is, is saying it doesn't make sense to you as you.
You treat your assumption as if it magically becomes a fact.

You're just as hooked on my assumptions as I am. For example, that's why you're replying to me. When you can demonstrate that any of them is non-trivially wrong, get back to me.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

You're just as hooked on my assumptions as I am. For example, that's why you're replying to me. When you can demonstrate that any of them is non-trivially wrong, get back to me.

Well, they are not wrong. The problem is that there are people, who are not connect to the real world, that keep answering you. And I am one of them. I defy the real world and thus I am not in it.

 

[SkepticThinker]

You've never heard of rape, genocide, cold-blooded murder, gratuitous abuse.
Or, on a more common scale: bullying, cheating lying, adultery, pimping, pornography, et...

You believe that everybody has an innate sense of empathy and altruism towards others? Why can't two siblings or two neighbours get along, even at an extremely mature age? How do you tell a 40 yr old man that it's not right to beat your wife or abuse your child - he's not expected to know this already? Go tell Vladimir Putin to love your neighbour, see what he does to you.

Everybody needs to to be have a wise deontological system impressed upon them, throughout their life. And, fundamentally speaking, we've become so desensitized in this world that never has a moral code become so imperative.

Again, go tell a gang-banger to put down his gun, and see what you get.
You've overestimated your species, and under appreciated God's intent and wisdom..

How did such a fantastical, amazing, incredibly and infinitely wise deity end up making such a wretched, horrible, awful lot of humans such as ourselves? That doesn't seem to make much sense.

 

[Augustus]

It's the idea of a real God, one with objective existence, that's incoherent ─ as I said before, never appears, never says, never does, described only in imaginary terms like omnipotent, perfect, eternal ─ and not in terms appropriate to a real entity like species, genus, height, weight, mugshot.

Then you share something in common with the apophatics

 

[SkepticThinker]

You said it yourself - planet earth is a miracle - an aberration so diametrically opposed to all other celestial entities within the universe, that is not due to chance. That was my point.
We're not talking about a pool of water or a single biological form on one planet, and not on the other. We're talking about an overwhelming diversity of life forms, too large to count, and beyond even identifying. And the most prominent and transcendent creature on this planet is man - a spiritual entity that bases his entire life on his desires and passions, as opposed to practical survival and all that it entails.

That's called an argument from personal incredulity fallacy.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

this is all just a kind of ego-thing. The ego doesn't ever want to admit to being wrong. So when it come across someone that doesn't agree with it, it needs to subjugate that disagreement. So it can go on being right.

Except when it is you, right? Other people have this "ego-thing" problem and just can't admit that you're right and they're wrong.

I have clarified this many times in other threads, but no one ever listens, because they aren't debating to learn anything. Their ego is debating to be maintain being right.

Perhaps others don't find that your empty claims and disparagement constitute learning.

You are making the same point over and over and never getting through, so to you that means you're dealing with dense people defending their fragile egos from your amazing éclat. It's other that have the ego problem, right?

But what are you holding up as "justification"? And why is your criteria the one the rest of us should adhere to?

He's using the academic criteria for justification, which reliably generate sound (correct) conclusions. Other forms of "justification" that use rogue "logic" to attempt to connect the nearest piece of evidence like the latest messenger "revelation" or "the miracle of life" to any desired conclusion are just variations on belief by faith. These other ways of knowing are sterile. If being correct matters to you - and that's questionable give how much of your grievance is in the form of demeaning others and their egos for wanting to be correct - then you ought to be interested in the method that does that for us. If not, then any sterile method is just as defensible as any other. Feel free to invent and deploy your own rules.

when existence itself can stand as evidence for a "creator God", how can you claim it's not enough?

There's a nice example of this rogue logic connecting any physical finding to any preferred conclusion.

Rogue thinker: "See that over thing over there? It's complex and has a pattern. It makes my case. God lives!"
Critical thinker: "Not in this universe it doesn't."

Especially compared to how often we see atheists admonishing everyone else to adopt THEIR position?

I think most of them are still busy trying to get you to understand it. It is YOU having the emotional reaction to having your ways rejected and admonishing others to drop their "BS" try to see a little further with you. You just don't approve, do you?

And you couldn't be more wrong about critical thinkers caring about what you believe. They care about the quality of their own beliefs, not yours. They're telling you that your beliefs are inadequate for them, not you. No experienced critical thinker is trying to convert theists. That would be a waste of time not only because it would be impossible to make any headway against a faith-based confirmation bias, but because it really doesn't matter. If my neighbor wants to dance around a tree in his back yard at midnight baying at the full moon while shaking a stick with a bloody chicken claw nailed to it in order to center himself and give his like meaning, that's fine, as long as he isn’t violently insane, sacrificing animals to his god, and he keeps the noise down.

This BS about atheism being "unbelief" is exactly that: BS. And I'm going to call it what it is.

Bad atheists! You go ahead and give them a piece of your mind for admonishing others and falsely claiming unbelief. It's BS, right?

 

[blü 2]

Then you share something in common with the apophatics

In not knowing what a real god is? Hmm, maybe you're right.

 

[DNB]

How did such a fantastical, amazing, incredibly and infinitely wise deity end up making such a wretched, horrible, awful lot of humans such as ourselves? That doesn't seem to make much sense.

You should ask yourself that - I see all my mistakes stemming from my arrogant, perverted, depraved and selfish moments, and any good that I may have done credited to when my heart was in the right place, however momentarily that occurs.

In other words, you tell me where to attribute this self-inflicted spiritual warfare.
All that God has ever asked from us was to love one another - who seems to care?

 

[DNB]

That's called an argument from personal incredulity fallacy.

Countless educated men on the subject have said the same thing - planet earth is a miracle, and to allege that something as unfathomable in design and abundance as our world, came from nothing, is absurd.

 

[Willamena]

Atheism is a position on a religious subject. It's a position against.

 

[blü 2]

Countless educated men on the subject have said the same thing - planet earth is a miracle, and to allege that something as unfathomable in design and abundance as our world, came from nothing, is absurd.

It's true that, at least in Europe, for many centuries the argument from design (or, Argument from Design) was regarded as one of the strongest arguments for God. It's also true that Darwin was troubled by the manner in which his theory of evolution contradicted the bible, and that this delayed the publication of his theory. But since then (1859), the theory of evolution has been developed into what's been called the overarching theory of biology, supported by abundant evidence from the field and in the lab, and giving rise to related studies such as genetics (cf Darwin's 'gemmules').

The number of authenticated miracles remains at 0. There is no theory of miracles, such that we too can alter reality independently of the rules of reality to please ourselves. No government has a department of supernatural warfare studying how to repel invading gods or demons ─ the enquirer has to be informed via DC and Marvel comics. God does not appear, say or do. There is not even a description of a real God such that if we found a real suspect (one with objective existence) we could determine whether it was God or not. Gods and other supernatural beings are known to exist only as ideas, concepts, things imagined in individual brains.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

Countless educated men on the subject have said the same thing - planet earth is a miracle, and to allege that something as unfathomable in design and abundance as our world, came from nothing, is absurd.

Ah...educated men. They say all sorts of things about all sorts of topics. When you choose to believe 'educated men' speaks more to how you confirm your existing beliefs and biases than any proof.
(I don't mean to aim that at you...it's true of most of us)