"Humans are born as atheists"

[Jumi]

Got it and it works beautifully. Thank you so much. .

Glad to help.

 

[Willamena]

If they lack belief in god, yes they are. Atheist is usually used for people, though. Given a rock cant be indoctrinated into theism. Guess it remains an atheist.

They cannot "lack doing" what they cannot do. That's a degree of complication that would have Occam rolling in his grave.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Gotta disagree. Atheist have knowledge of what they are denying, babies do not. They are no more atheists than they're a-atheists, which would amount to being theists.


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Atheism doesn't require denial. If it did, there would be no such thing as atheists.

Think about it: have you even heard about every god-concept? For the ones you have heard of, were all of them expressed so coherently that you could evaluate them at all?

We can't reject what we can't evaluate, and we definitely can't reject what we haven't even heard of.

Theism and atheism are a MECE set. Everyons belongs to exactly one of these two categories... and being a theist requires belief in at least one god.

 

[Augustus]

check

check

check

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

However, science does show that the human brain seems hard-wired for belief.

Sort of. Young kids have a tendency to over-infer agency and design. It could be described as a rudimentary version of animism.

They may not be born skeptics or freethinkers, but the tendencies they're born with don't qualify as belief in a god or gods, so they're atheists.

 

[Valjean]

That spotted rock in the lower right corner looks Presbyterian, to me...

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Is atheism a lack of belief? Or is it the belief that deities are non-existent?

Atheism is a lack of belief.

"The belief that deities are non-existent" isn't coherent when we break it down a bit. The category "deities" is so poorly defined that it can't be rejected as a category without rejecting each individual member of the category... and no human being knows about every claimed deity, let alone considered each of them carefully enough to actually form a belief about all of them.

 

[Revoltingest]

Yes they are born and then condtioned by the parents and society, but even calling yourself an atheist is part of condtioning, we are what we are, once we label what we are we then lose who we are and again we become a label.

Conditioning is only part of the picture.
Some people reject it to become something else.
I suspect some inherent (genetic?) component which gives a tendency to either faith or disbelief.
So those predisposed to non-belief could very well be atheist babies because of this destiny,

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Seems the authorities don't agree with your special definition.

Except they do. Let's look at your defintions:

- 2 explicitly include "lack of belief". Points for the reasonable side.
- 4 include "disbelief". Look that up - the dictionaries I'm familiar with include lack of belief in their definition of disbelief. More points for the reasonable side.
- 2 assume monotheism ("supreme being" or "God") and can be safely rejected by anyone who realizes that polytheists aren't atheists.

Overall, every definition you gave either supports the side you're arguing against or can be discarded.

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[Augustus]

No-one's arguing that the appellation need be meaningful,

That would be a somewhat atypical approach to language though would it not?

 

[sojourner]

Sort of. Young kids have a tendency to over-infer agency and design. It could be described as a rudimentary version of animism.

They may not be born skeptics or freethinkers, but the tendencies they're born with don't qualify as belief in a god or gods, so they're atheists.

What qualifies as "a god or gods?"

 

[Valjean]

That would be a somewhat atypical approach to language though would it not?

Atypical enough that it would never be applied to rocks except by theists in anti-atheist threads.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

What qualifies as "a god or gods?"

That's the thing: there is no - and can be no - single coherent definition. There's no real reason why, say, the divine messenger Mercury is considered a god but the divine messenger Gabriel is not. There's no reasonable criteria to say that Hades is a god but Satan isn't. What we always do is go by the believer's own beliefs about what they consider a god and not a god:

- we consider Muslims to be monotheists without having to ask whether the angels and djinn that they believe in (that look a LOT like gods of polytheistic religions) qualify as gods or not.
- likewise, we can acknowledge Pagan polytheists as polytheists even though their gods look a lot like things that are considered absolutely NOT gods in the Abrahamic religions.
- same goes for pantheists, sun-worshippers, Rastafarians, and anyone else who agrees with atheists about what exists but has different opinions than atheists about what should be considered a god. It's what the individual thinks that matters.

The approach we always use is we compare the list "things I believe exist" to the list "things I consider gods":

- if more than one thing is on both lists, I'm a polytheist.
- if only one thing is on both lists, I'm a monotheist.
- if nothing is on both lists, I'm an atheist.

A newborn baby who has nothing on either list is obviously not going to have any items on both lists, so by the method I gave, the baby would qualify as an atheist. This isn't particularly meaningful or valuable in and of itself, but when someone rejects the idea that babies are atheists, they're implicitly rejecting this approach to belief.

This then raises the question of how someone qualifies as an atheist in *their* system, but every alternative approach I've ever seen runs into fundamental problems when you try to use it for adults.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

That would be a somewhat atypical approach to language though would it not?

It's meaningful to the extent that people care about theism, but there's no real reason why people ought to care about theism.

 

[Yerda]

This then raises the question of how someone qualifies as an atheist in *their* system, but every alternative approach I've ever seen runs into fundamental problems when you try to use it for adults.

Was exposed to theism, did not find it meaningful/compelling. Rejected idea.

Something like that.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

You think theism is one idea? That's going to take some justification.

Please describe this idea of yours that, apparently:
- can be rejected
- applies to theism as a whole.

 

[Skwim]

Atheism doesn't require denial. If it did, there would be no such thing as atheists.

Think about it: have you even heard about every god-concept? For the ones you have heard of, were all of them expressed so coherently that you could evaluate them at all?

We can't reject what we can't evaluate, and we definitely can't reject what we haven't even heard of.

Sure we can. It's done all the time. One doesn't need absolute proof or even a smattering of evidence of every possible form of god. Just as I don't need need absolute proof or even a smattering of evidence of every conceivable type of flying unicorn in order to deny their existence. And although you may feel that all that's necessary to be an atheist is to lack a belief in god, I side with the dictionaries, which look at atheism as a chosen position of either outright denial, or disbelief.

Except they do. Let's look at your defintions:

- 2 explicitly include "lack of belief". Points for the reasonable side.
- 4 include "disbelief". Look that up - the dictionaries I'm familiar with include lack of belief in their definition of disbelief. More points for the reasonable side.
- 2 assume monotheism ("supreme being" or "God") and can be safely rejected by anyone who realizes that polytheists aren't atheists.

Overall, every definition you gave either supports the side you're arguing against or can be discarded.

.
- 2 1 explicitly include "lack of belief". Points for the reasonable side. I'll grant you the 1 out of 6. The 1 that also mentions "disbelieves."
- 4 include "disbelief". Look that up - the dictionaries I'm familiar with include lack of belief in their definition of disbelief. More points for the reasonable side. Irrelevant. See above
- 2 assume monotheism ("supreme being" or "God") and can be safely rejected by anyone who realizes that polytheists aren't atheists. Irrelevant.

Overall, every definition you gave either supports the side you're arguing against or can be discarded. FALSE


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[paarsurrey]

"Humans are born as atheists"

No. It is a wrong assertion.
When was the first Atheist born? The Atheists cannot tell. They have to provide evidence as they would require of the Believers of G-d.
If their assertion is on the basis of science then they have to please quote from a text book of science and or from a peer reviewed article in a reputed journal of science in support of their opinion.
And we know religion is not on their side.
Regards

 

[Milton Platt]

No, I'm sorry, but they aren't. I have no idea where this idea could have come from other then poor reasoning or ignorance of psychology. The entire concept of there being or not being a god is abstract, and requires abstract reasoning. An object that cannot think about such questions, such as plants, would never be considered atheists with intellectual honesty. Yet babies are the same way, entirely mechanistic and bound to conditioning et al, unable to even understand that their parents can be wrong about things. They can only even understand the concept of right and wrong, on their own, once abstract reasoning begins to develop (7-12). I'd go as far as to say a first grader rambling about Jesus is not even Christian, they're simply running on a program. If I make a program that always responds to questions from an atheistic perspective, the program and computer are still not atheists.

Beside the simple fact that kids have no idea what we're even really discussing, the fact is that atheism requires making a judgement call. I'm not saying anything more than atheists consciously weight evidence and arguments to decided there probably is no god, so please save the straw men. A baby cannot make a judgement call, as we said they can't even really grapple with morality and values anyway. If you explain the cosmological argument to a baby, and explain why it's invalid/valid, they won't understand. They're incapable. They're going to **** their pants then wander the room aimlessly. While I'd love to make a joke right now, this is not what the atheist does.

Yeah, well......I have been an arheist for pretty much my whole life and I don't buy that arguement either. Maybe you could argue they are agnostic, since technically, they don't know if a god exists, but then they are agnostic about the entire world, so what does that really get you.

 

[Yerda]

You think theism is one idea? That's going to take some justification.

Please describe this idea of yours that, apparently:
- can be rejected
- applies to theism as a whole.

There is a god?