Only when we expect evidence is this correct, as another poster illustrated with the lack of expected evidence of a global flood (a global watermark of sorts and genetic bottlenecking of all terrestrial species at the same time). On the other hand, many other things occur that do not leave evidence, absence of which doesn't help us decide on whether they occurred or not. If you want a statement you can consider correct, try, "The absence of expected evidence is evidence of absence."
No. It's a lack of faith in the existence of gods. To be clear what I mean by the word in this context, faith is unjustified belief - the literal definition, other definitions such as justified belief being or a system of beliefs like the Jewish faith derived from that meaning not being relevant here.
(Since I've removed this from it's context, I should point that this was snark, not his opinion)
Definitions are neither right nor wrong. They're the ideas we want to name. And if in the future, we find it helpful to organize our thinking differently, we can redefine the words accordingly. I do it frequently. One day I noticed that I had two words, unbelief and disbelief, and two meanings, agnosticism and gnosticism (not believing versus believing not), so rather than continue treating the words as synonyms and each ambiguous, why not just call lack of belief unbelief and believing that something was untrue disbelief. It made thinking more clear, but if I want to use these words this way when communicating, I have to specify my private definition.
And it doesn't matter if they object. If they want to converse and understand what I mean, all they need do is listen, and when they hear either of those words, assign it the definition I specified. People unwilling or unable to do that just aren't part of the discussion. They aren't engaging in dialectic, but rather, semantic inanities.
As I just posted, a definition can't be false. It can only be more or less useful than other definitions. Usefulness is determined by what type of thing one wants to consider. If it pleases you to call pre-linguistic children something other than atheists, fine. Let's call them zorks. Then the MECE formulation, which is now tripartite, that is, that everybody is either a zork, a theist, or an atheist. Nothing changes. Notice that agnostic doesn't appear in this formulation, either, although we probably wouldn't consider zorks to be agnostic until they were old enough to say that they were.
Things that actually exist are concrete in the sense that they manifest physically. If they don't, they can't be said to exist. Abstractions drawn from concrete objects and processes exist only in minds, as do abstractions drawn from nothing but imagination. Of the two, only the former has an objectively real referent.
No you weren't. That's your straw man. What you were told is that there are no experts on simple concepts readily accessible to any adolescent or older linguistic mind. You've been asked to support your claims and respond to their rebuttal, but you've done neither yet. Good faith disputation and dialectic require that when somebody tells you that your claim that there are experts on faith is unsupported, you support it.
When your collocutor says that faith is a simple concept and illustrates as much with what he calls a comprehensive overview of what faith is, and what it can do for and to one, that you either say that you agree or if you disagree, explain why, in this case, by producing some of these so-called experts and demonstrating what they add to the discussion that is useful, and that mans to anybody that understands it, not just believers, whose judgments about such things are typically subjected to a confirmation bias that finds value in all things religious even if they can't demonstrate why they think so. Instead, you ignored the invitation and come here misrepresenting what transpired.
That formulation doesn't work for the typical atheist, which might be why so many reject it. It doesn't work for me, because I answer neither yes or no to that question. I say that I do not know, which is what makes me agnostic.
Also, it doesn't include agnostic atheists, which are most of the people who self-identify as atheists. I don't believe in gods and don't practice any religion. If that isn't enough to be called an atheist, then the definition is useless to people like me, and we reject it for something that does represent how we organize these categories in our heads. I need a schema that allows for agnostic atheists, gnostic atheists, agnostic theists, and gnostic theists, so I envision a 2x2 Punnett square with a belief axis and a claim to knowledge axis.
If you'd like to participate in fruitful discussions with such people, you'll want to learn what they mean when they use these words.
Or, you can just argue with them about how you think (a euphemism for insist in this context) they ought to define words instead, which is what threads like this one generally degenerate into for that lack of effort to try to understand others
That's a more useful definition of the word than the one we inherited from theist lexicographers like Webster, who like the atheist or agnostic or theist formulation. As I explained, that just doesn't work for the majority of self-identifying atheists, who would be excluded from the atheist category if they don't also add, "And I know that there are no gods"
Yeah, I'm that, too - atheist and agnostic. To those who want impose their procrustean definitions onto unbelievers, the answer is no, that doesn't work for agnostic atheists.
Nope. Atheism isn't a claim about the world at all more than a statement of individual belief. Nothing need be proven by the atheist. If one doubts the theist's only claim - that he doesn't believe in gods - that's fine, but I assume that most atheists would feel no need to try to disabuse another of such a belief.
How much faith does it take to say that one doesn't believe in gods, vampires, or leprechauns? I'll be you say the same about two of these. Are you operating out of faith when you do, or do you have sound reasons for your opinion?
