How do you define "Athesim"?

[Falvlun]

That's partially the point I was trying to make. I don't think that I have to learn about all the different fairy, Santa Claus, Bigfoot, and mermaid conceptions in the world to say that I don't believe in them; I don't have to "reject" every one of them on an individual basis simply because it happens to be believed by some people.

If I thought that idea 'X' doesn't have enough evidence to warrant belief in it and I heard that there were many other similar ideas, e.g., 'Y', 'Z', 'M', etc., that are also held to be true by some people, then I don't see why I'd have to examine every one of them before I can reach the conclusion that I don't really believe any of them to be true.

In other words, if a set of ideas contains similar elements and all of those elements make a similar assumption (in this case, the existence of an entity without sufficient evidence), I don't think it'd be unreasonable to view that one element of the set as generally representative of the others without necessarily examining all of them in detail.

That's precisely my argument, so now you've got me confused as to what "side" you are on.
I don't see gods as any different.
Do you or don't you believe, like Penguin, that you'd have to research and individually reject every single god in order to say that you don't believe that gods exist?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Do you or don't you believe, like Penguin, that you'd have to research and individually reject every single god in order to say that you don't believe that gods exist?

I never said that. To simply not believe that gods exist, you don't have to do anything (except adopt a belief in a god, of course).

To reject the existence of all gods, you'd have to do that one-by-one.

 

[Falvlun]

I never said that. To simply not believe that gods exist, you don't have to do anything (except adopt a belief in a god, of course).

To reject the existence of all gods, you'd have to do that one-by-one.

To "not believe" is the same thing as to "believe not" which is the same thing as "disbelief" which is the same thing as "reject"

EDIT:
If you say "I don't believe that gods exist" or "I believe that gods don't exist" you have rejected the belief that gods exist.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

To "not believe" is the same thing as to "believe not" which is the same thing as "disbelief" which is the same thing as "reject"

EDIT:
If you say "I don't believe that gods exist" or "I believe that gods don't exist" you have rejected the belief that gods exist.

So... to go back to the analogy I was using earlier: you believe that I did not have pancakes this morning, then?

 

[Falvlun]

So... to go back to the analogy I was using earlier: you believe that I did not have pancakes this morning, then?

Are you using "not believe" as synonomous with "lack of belief"? If so, I agree, that is different, but do realize that is not the only way "not believe" can be interpreted. And I am fairly certain that when most people claim that they don't believe something, they aren't talking about a mere lack of belief (mostly because we generally don't talk about things we merely lack a belief in.)

However, the only groups of people who are able truly claim that they "lack a belief" are a) agnostics, according to the popular sense: belief that it is equiprobable that gods exist and gods don't exist and b) people, like infants, completely ignorant of the concept of gods.

I think it's equivocation to equate the "I don't believe" of "I don't believe in any of the god concepts I have ever come across but I don't know if there are god concepts out there that I may accept at some later date" with the "non-belief" associated with "lack of belief" above.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Are you using "not believe" as synonomous with "lack of belief"? If so, I agree, that is different, but do realize that is not the only way "not believe" can be interpreted.

I'm not sure how this is relevant. I've said from the start that I define atheism in terms of lack of belief.

However, the only groups of people who are able truly claim that they "lack a belief" are a) agnostics, according to the popular sense: belief that it is equiprobable that gods exist and gods don't exist and b) people, like infants, completely ignorant of the concept of gods.

I disagree.

If I reject belief in X, then I still lack belief in X. The two states are not mutually exclusive. In fact, rejection of the belief implies lack of the belief.

I think it's equivocation to equate the "I don't believe" of "I don't believe in any of the god concepts I have ever come across but I don't know if there are god concepts out there that I may accept at some later date" with the "non-belief" associated with "lack of belief" above.

No, it's not equivocation. One is a subset of the other. A person who rejects all gods still lacks belief in all gods.

More to the point, a person who rejects most gods but hasn't adopted beliefs in any gods still lacks belief in all gods... and this is precisely the sort of person who is normally called an atheist.

 

[Falvlun]

In your breakfast example, for instance, people generally won't say "I don't believe you had pancakes" precisely because that will usually be interpretated as a belief that you didn't have pancakes. What they will say is "I don't know".

 

[Falvlun]

I'm not sure how this is relevant. I've said from the start that I define atheism in terms of lack of belief.

Because you are acting like "lack of belief" is the common interpreation for "not believing" when it's not. It's actually a very uncommon and clunky way to say "I don't know".

I disagree.

If I reject belief in X, then I still lack belief in X. The two states are not mutually exclusive. In fact, rejection of the belief implies lack of the belief.

The problem is that you are claiming it is "only" a lack of belief. I should have written "The only groups of people who are able to truly claim that they merely "lack a belief"....

No, it's not equivocation. One is a subset of the other. A person who rejects all gods still lacks belief in all gods.

More to the point, a person who rejects most gods but hasn't adopted beliefs in any gods still lacks belief in all gods... and this is precisely the sort of person who is normally called an atheist.

Are you trying to claim that the atheism a baby has is the same as the atheism you have? That is what happens when you claim that both you and the baby are atheists because you both merely lack a belief. That is the equivocation. I am fairly certain that your atheism, and that of any person who has given this any sort of thought, is not the same as an infants, and it is not merely a lack of belief.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

In your breakfast example, for instance, people generally won't say "I don't believe you had pancakes" precisely because that will usually be interpretated as a belief that you didn't have pancakes. What they will say is "I don't know".

Hmm. You're making it very difficult to talk about lack of belief. Would you agree that it's valid to re-phrase "he lacks belief in X" as "he does not believe in X"?

 

[Falvlun]

Hmm. You're making it very difficult to talk about lack of belief. Would you agree that it's valid to re-phrase "he lacks belief in X" as "he does not believe in X"?

Yes.
The meaning of "he does not believe in X" would have to be ascertained through the "why" he doesn't believe in X. It wouldn't automatically denote a lack of belief, and it probably, unless context made it clear, would not be the first conclusion.

 

[Willamena]

Interesting. I generally equate "opinion" with "belief". They are synonomous.

And that's popular, yes, and I've even used it that way in the post you quoted. But still I do distinguish between belief and opinion.

Belief doesn't change. It's a finger pointing at the truth*. The truth might change, and the opinion might change, but belief doesn't. It can't point at anything else.

*The apparently true proposition.

 

[Willamena]

To "not believe" is the same thing as to "believe not" which is the same thing as "disbelief" which is the same thing as "reject"

EDIT:
If you say "I don't believe that gods exist" or "I believe that gods don't exist" you have rejected the belief that gods exist.

Just so. When asked if I believe in Sasquatch, and I say, "No, I don't believe in Sasquatch," it just means one thing. Always has, always will.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Yes.
The meaning of "he does not believe in X" would have to be ascertained through the "why" he doesn't believe in X. It wouldn't automatically denote a lack of belief, and it probably, unless context made it clear, would not be the first conclusion.

I disagree. It always denotes lack of belief. It sometimes (often?) also implies more.

 

[Falvlun]

I disagree. It always denotes lack of belief. It sometimes (often?) also implies more.

I'm assuming you mean that when you don't believe something (you reject something), that also means you lack a belief in it.

The problem is that lack of belief is not the intended or salient meaning, however. Your argument is like claiming that I forgot to add "atoms" when I say what chocolate chip cookies are made out of. Well, yeah, atoms do make up chocolate chip cookies, but that's not really the point.

Perhaps you could give examples?

So far, the only one you have given that I thought worked for "lack of belief" in a normal, natural way is when you talked about the kid from another culture, who had never heard of the tooth fairy, not believing (lacking a belief) that the tooth fairy exists.

But then again, that is one of my instances where I agree that "lack of belief" is appropriate, and would be made apparent from the context.

But in general, any kid who comes up to me and tells me that he doesn't believe in the tooth fairy, I know he is not intending to tell me that he merely "lacks a belief" in the tooth fairy. He's telling me that he believes that the tooth fairy doesn't exist.

 

[Falvlun]

And that's popular, yes, and I've even used it that way in the post you quoted. But still I do distinguish between belief and opinion.

Belief doesn't change. It's a finger pointing at the truth*. The truth might change, and the opinion might change, but belief doesn't. It can't point at anything else.

*The apparently true proposition.

I have a feeling there's something more behind what "belief" means to you. For instance, I used to believe that God existed. I no longer believe that God exists. My belief changed. Not sure how that meshes with the above.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I'm assuming you mean that when you don't believe something (you reject something), that also means you lack a belief in it.

The problem is that lack of belief is not the intended or salient meaning, however. Your argument is like claiming that I forgot to add "atoms" when I say what chocolate chip cookies are made out of. Well, yeah, atoms do make up chocolate chip cookies, but that's not really the point.

Perhaps you could give examples?

So far, the only one you have given that I thought worked for "lack of belief" in a normal, natural way is when you talked about the kid from another culture, who had never heard of the tooth fairy, not believing (lacking a belief) that the tooth fairy exists.

But then again, that is one of my instances where I agree that "lack of belief" is appropriate, and would be made apparent from the context.

But in general, any kid who comes up to me and tells me that he doesn't believe in the tooth fairy, I know he is not intending to tell me that he merely "lacks a belief" in the tooth fairy. He's telling me that he believes that the tooth fairy doesn't exist.

If I said "the kids in Whereverland don't believe in the Tooth Fairy because they've never heard of the idea" you would understand what I mean, right?

And I already gave another example: if I ask you "do you believe I had pancakes for breakfast this morning?", if you answer "no", I will only take this to mean "I have not reached the conclusion that you had pancakes", not necessarily "I have reached a conclusion about what you had for breakfast, and 'pancakes' wasn't that conclusion."

 

[Falvlun]

Maybe I should explain better why I think saying "babies aren't atheists" implies the need for a rigorous, objective definition for God.

If you define "atheist" as "someone who rejects all things that they consider a god", then this can be expressed in terms of sets: I consider the set "things I consider gods" and the set "things I reject". If all members of the set "things I consider gods" also appear in "things I reject", then I'm an atheist.

But consider what happens when both sets are empty: the test is satisfied. The two empty sets are exactly equal so that criterion is satisfied. A person who has never rejected anything is an atheist as long as the person doesn't consider anything to be a god.

So, someone who never rejected anything can be considered someone who has rejected things they consider to be gods? :areyoucra

Math and language don't mix. I think this needs a healthy dose of common sense. Quit pysching yourself out!

To get around this problem, you need some way for the sets not to match. IOW, you need to base your test not on what the person himself believes "god" to be, but on some external definition.

Two reasons why this is not a problem:
1) See above. Simply don't consider people who have never rejected stuff as people who have rejected stuff.

2) Yes, what we consider to be gods is informed by our own personal opinions. But we do not exist in a vacuum. Our concept of gods is also influenced, and has been shaped, by what other people have been calling gods for millennia. Your problem only exists if god is an unintelligible word that each person has made up a definition for, but it's manifestly not.

... and that's where you run into all sorts of issues, because IMO, it's impossible to come up with a definition of "god" that includes every god and excludes every non-god. And while a big part of this is because of vagueness in the definitions, a lot of it is because different conceptions of "god" contradict each other. *We* don't consider Superman or the Archangel Gabriel to be gods, but plenty of people would. Since we're forced to use an objective definition for "god", we have to resolve the conflict somehow and effectively say "sorry, group of cultures 'X', your ideas of what 'god' means are wrong."

I'm curious what your definition of a "troll" is, and what your belief status about them is.

And if you don't feel like playing along, my point is basically that nearly every definition regarding things that we can't scientifically study and describe is going to be ambiguous, but there is still enough of a general understanding of what is meant that it doesn't matter in any other case. You have to show why you think gods should be an exception to this rule.

 

[Falvlun]

If I said "the kids in Whereverland don't believe in the Tooth Fairy because they've never heard of the idea" you would understand what I mean, right?

Yes, I already said that was a good example. But the context makes it abundantly clear.

If you simply said "The kids in Whereverland don't believe in the tooth fairy", would you naturally assume it was a lack of belief? I don't think I would; in general, I don't think people naturally think in those terms.

And I already gave another example: if I ask you "do you believe I had pancakes for breakfast this morning?", if you answer "no", I will only take this to mean "I have not reached the conclusion that you had pancakes", not necessarily "I have reached a conclusion about what you had for breakfast, and 'pancakes' wasn't that conclusion."

That's not a good example. Nobody talks like that, for one. The question would be "Did I have pancakes for breakfast?" If someone answered "No" to that question, then that would certainly be taken that they believe you did not have pancakes. If they truly had no belief, then they would answer "I don't know".

As for the way you phrased it, I still think most people would take the "No" as a belief that you didn't eat pancakes.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

So, someone who never rejected anything can be considered someone who has rejected things they consider to be gods? :areyoucra

Math and language don't mix. I think this needs a healthy dose of common sense. Quit pysching yourself out!

Language needs logic. Logic is math.

Two reasons why this is not a problem:
1) See above. Simply don't consider people who have never rejected stuff as people who have rejected stuff.

Someone who has never encountered anything can be validly described as having rejected everything he's encountered.

2) Yes, what we consider to be gods is informed by our own personal opinions. But we do not exist in a vacuum. Our concept of gods is also influenced, and has been shaped, by what other people have been calling gods for the century. Your problem only exists if god is an unintelligible word that each person has made up a definition for, but it's manifestly not.

I disagree.

The only common criterion I've been able to come up with all gods is that a god is an object of worship by humans. But I've had theists dispute even that, claiming that God would still be a god even if nobody was around to worship him.

And even that criterion is shared by things I don't reject, because there have been plenty of real people, for instance, who have been worshiped.

I really do think that the only coherent way to define "god" is to simply list off all the gods, point to the list and say "a god is any of these."

This is why I made the point I did about this "reject" definition of atheism being rooted in monotheism: it strikes me that it's based on a notion that there is one "main" concept of God, which everyone hears about and either accepts or rejects, and the question of other gods only comes into play if you happen to accept one of those other "secondary" gods, which then disqualifies you from being an atheist. That's the only way that a definition of atheism based on rejection could ever allow for actual atheists to ever exist.

I think I see some of that in your argument here: that there's some core set of ideas that everyone is supposed to know are part of "god" (with or without a capital 'G') without considering the wide, full, varied and often strange spectrum of god-beliefs out there.

... though to look at monotheism from a different perspective, there's something else to consider: if we get to impose our ideas of "god" on babies when deciding whether they're atheists, do we also get to impose widely-held ideas about "god" on Christians? Can we say that they're polytheists because they believe in the Trinity, angels and Satan? So far, even though *I* would consider such things to be gods and I think many, many people would agree with me, I haven't done this. Is it proper to do so?

IMO, if there is an intelligible concept of what it means to be a god, then Christians (and Muslims, and any other so-called "monotheists" who believe in things like angels and Satan along with God) are polytheists. If you're going to argue that they're monotheists, then I'll respond by saying that we do not have an intelligible concept of "god".

I'm curious what your definition of a "troll" is, and what your belief status about them is.

And if you don't feel like playing along, my point is basically that nearly every definition regarding things that we can't scientifically study and describe is going to be ambiguous, but there is still enough of a general understanding of what is meant that it doesn't matter in any other case. You have to show why you think gods should be an exception to this rule.

In broad strokes, a troll is a fantastical character from fairy tales that lives under bridges. (Edit: and I don't believe they actually exist)

And I'm not saying that gods are an exception to any rule; I'm saying that we don't go around using expressions like "atrollist", let alone define it as "a person who rejects the existence of all trolls", so the question of defining exactly what a troll is doesn't really matter in any normal context. It matters because you've made it matter with the definition for "atheist" that you've chosen. If you go with a different definition for atheist, then it ceases to matter.

 

[Debater Slayer]

That's precisely my argument, so now you've got me confused as to what "side" you are on.
I don't see gods as any different.
Do you or don't you believe, like Penguin, that you'd have to research and individually reject every single god in order to say that you don't believe that gods exist?

I don't think that I'd have to research every single god concept and reject it in order to be able to define myself as an atheist, mainly because I wouldn't presume to make a positive claim about the existence of any of them in the first place. There is nothing to "reject" if I don't know about every single one of them on an individual basis. The lack of positive claim would itself be a qualifier for me to be an atheist according to the definition I use ("atheism is the lack of belief in any gods," that is).

If I had a slate and nothing was written on it, I wouldn't define it in terms of all the words that can potentially be written on it but aren't; I'd simply define it in terms of what it is: a clean, white slate.

So instead of saying "this is a slate that doesn't have the word 'gods' carved on it" or "the word 'stars' isn't written on this slate," I'd say, "this is a blank slate that has no words carved on it." I don't think there would be a need to individually mention all of the words that can be carved on it but aren't for whatever reason.

To further clarify my point, I don't think one even has to attempt to reject that which has no perceived supporting evidence. I don't actively try to accept that 1+1=2 or that the Sun shines from the east; I just can't help but view them as facts without even attempting to convince myself of them. Conversely, I don't see how an atheist would have to 'reject' all god concepts if they thought that no god concept has enough evidence to support it.