If Atheism is a psychological position we don't need to seriously consider it

[Sunstone]

I have read several,

If you've read "several" scholarly articles on burden of proof, yet still display a remedial grasp of the concept, then may I suggest you spend some time reflecting on what you've read.

 

[Trailblazer]

They have their opinion.

Anyone can have an opinion, but that does not mean they know anything about God.

 

[lukethethird]

Anyone can have an opinion, but that does not mean they know anything about God.

If anybody knew anything about God we wouldn't have forums like this.

 

[Trailblazer]

Now there is also the fact there are people around who believe in God. That's not disputed, but the established fact, that there is in fact no God still firmly stands.

It is not an established fact unless you can prove it.
Nor is it an established fact that God exists because that cannot be proven either.

 

[ChristineM]

That pretty well covers it.

What I’ve seen sometimes is people calling themselves atheists, continually denouncing and trying to discredit everything that anyone calls “belief in God,” parading and celebrating the inability of believers to satisfy their evidence tests, and claiming that they don’t have to satisfy any evidence tests themselves because atheism is not a belief system. That is all intertwined with insinuations and sometimes explicit claims that belief in God is proof of some kind of character defect and/or moral deficiency. The whole system is customized for people to excuse and camouflage defaming the character and mental capacities of people who believe in God, and to use lack of evidence as an argument without having to produce any evidence themselves.

What evidence do you want?

I find the most compelling evidence for lack of gods is the fact that in over ten thousand years of god worship literally billions of people have failed to provide any evidence for gods making god worship the most failed concept in the history of mankind.

We also have E=MC2 showing the god of revelation 19:6 kjv cannot exist in a finite universe containing matter.

Or how about designing childhood leukemia? What compassionate god would be so sick minded.

Marmots or mosquitoes?... What designer god would create a race to worship him then design a horrid, tortuous way to kill his creation.

The futility of prayer is yet another evidence.

Yes there is evidence gods dont exist, the trick is recognising it


P.s. i think you will find that most atheists dont go around "denouncing" gods, it would of course mean they would first need to believe in mythology to denounce it. On the contrary, other than a very few evangelical atheists, most dont care whether you believe in god, donald duck or harry potter. But they will retaliate when people throw belief in their faces or misrepresent atheism in order to make them feel all warm and sanctimonious.

 

[ChristineM]

If anybody knew anything about God we wouldn't have forums like this.

There would also be no faith

 

[Valjean]

In re the OP: Schizophrenia is a psychological position. Joy, panic and bliss are psychological positions. Psychological positions show up on an fMRI.

Ideas, principles and beliefs don't seem to me to be psychological positions.

Well, still, we extraordinary atheists make claims of belief, not knowledge.

So you're a strong atheist, making a positive claim, which carries a burden of proof in debates.

 

[Valjean]

Marmots or mosquitoes?... What designer god would create a race to worship him then design a horrid, tortuous way to kill his creation.

But I like marmots! They're cute.
Seriously, though, from an ecological standpoint, both marmots and mosquitoes are useful cogs in the ecological machine, particularly mosquitoes.

 

[Trailblazer]

If anybody knew anything about God we wouldn't have forums like this.

If nobody knew anything about God, we would not have forums like this...
If nobody wanted to know about God, we would not have forums like this...
Some of us religious folks know something about God, but that knowledge is very limited.

God dwells in His inaccessible habitation of holiness and glory, and will unto everlasting continue to be enthroned upon the heights of His independent sovereignty and grandeur...
We are only allowed to know what God wants us to know, which is revealed through God's Messengers...
What God wants us to know are some of God's Attributes and God's Will for every age of history.

 

[ChristineM]

But I like marmots! They're cute.
Seriously, though, from an ecological standpoint, both marmots and mosquitoes are useful cogs in the ecological machine, particularly mosquitoes.

Marmots are cute for sure but believed to be the initial carrier of the fleas that spread black death.

Mosquitoes are one of the deadliest animals in the world.

 

[PureX]

What I’ve seen sometimes is people calling themselves atheists, continually denouncing and trying to discredit everything that anyone calls “belief in God,” parading and celebrating the inability of believers to satisfy their evidence tests, and claiming that they don’t have to satisfy any evidence tests themselves because atheism is not a belief system. That is all intertwined with insinuations and sometimes explicit claims that belief in God is proof of some kind of character defect and/or moral deficiency. The whole system is customized for people to excuse and camouflage defaming the character and mental capacities of people who believe in God, and to use lack of evidence as an argument without having to produce any evidence themselves.

That pretty much hits the nail right on the head. And is one of the reasons that I give little credence to atheism as a philosophical position.

But there is another reason, and that is that atheism is a groundless and pointless rejection of a number of positive possibilities. Not the least of which is the power of faith to heal us psychologically, and to help us change our relationship to ourselves, each other, and our world for the better. And the fact that some expressions of religion have abused the human need for, and power of faith to their own ends does not mitigate the fact that BILLIONS of people currently and throughout history have used their faith in a god-ideal to help them be and become better human beings then they would otherwise have been, living in fear, confusion, and without any positive ideals. And yet the atheists among would us choose to throw all this away, based literally on nothing, and hope to see everyone else do the same.

 

[Valjean]

The utility of a proposition doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its truth.

 

[Apologes]

I salute the OP for refering to actual contemporary scholarship on the issue and basing their argument on that rather than quoting laymen and "public intellectuals" to argue about what is fundamentally a philosophical term.

I remember doing the same in an older thread and getting accused of making an appeal to authority fallacy (because quoting scholars is so not a sound practice) and of having some hidden agenda against atheists.

I'm willing to let people be vague with their agnosticism/atheism identities but to see them use that as a primary meaning of the term is cringey to say the least.

 

[lukethethird]

The utility of a proposition doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its truth.

Not to mention the futility.

 

[Valjean]

Marmots are cute for sure but believed to be the initial carrier of the fleas that spread black death.

Mosquitoes are one of the deadliest animals in the world.

So human impact is your yardstick?
I could argue that humans are a planetary infection and that these flea bitten marmots were part of the planet's immune cascade.
Plus they're cute and fun to watch!

Mosquitoes are annoying, for sure, but what would happen to the planetary ecology if all the boreal forests and tundra died?
These regions receive very little energy input. Mosquitoes are part of the mechanism for moving solar energy and nutrients from mid-oceanic phytoplankton to northern regions and spreading it around.

One simplistic example: Sun feeds phytoplankton, feeds tiny fish, feed bigger fish, feed salmon which migrate thousands of KM into the nearly sterile boreal forests to directly fertilize streams and streamsides, as well as animals, large and small, which wander far afield fertilizing the whole area, large eating small, everyone pooping and the mosquitoes taking tiny amounts of energy/fertilizer from everyone as a final step in spreading it around evenly.

Even the annoying have their place.
especially if they're cute...

 

[Jumi]

My first post in this thread was in reply to the original post.

Its Its not that i wont consider it but i have considered it and rejected the concept on experience and research.

You've considered what was accessible to you and rejected it. You agree with me that it's your right and I applaud you for researching some alternative. We also both agree that the alternative you looked into isn't right.

 

[Jim]

The author in the quotation in the OP is making the case against "babies and rocks" being atheists. It's something I've argued, at least since I came on these forums, and I understand the argument well. Atheism is "not believing" in the same sense that theism is "believing;" but there are still those who will move the goalposts and tie atheism to a "state of believing" rather than to belief in gods.

I think it all depends on what we’re trying to do in a discussion, whether we’re trying to communicate with people we disagree with, or trying to do something else, for example like scoring points in our own eyes or in the eyes of people we want to impress. If we want to communicate with people who disagree with us, then I think we need to use their definitions of words to understand what they’re saying, and to try to explain to them what we think. I think that for purposes of understanding and being understood, it’s worse than useless to argue with people about their definitions of words. All that does is stir up a lot of smoke and dust that make it impossible for anyone to see what anyone else is trying to say. There are some complications involved in that. One of them is that for all of us, the way we actually use some words is never exactly in accordance how we say we’re defining them. Another complication is that the way we actually use some words varies from one context to another, and sometimes even from one part of a sentence to another. Those divergences can be very wide sometimes. I’ve learned to work around those complications sometimes by finding other ways of saying what I want to say.

I think that in some possibly rare cases, when a person identifies as an atheist, it really is only because there’s nothing in their beliefs that they call “belief in God.” That’s what the identity faction they were attracted to told them that it means, so they looked at their beliefs, didn’t see anything in them that they call “belief in God,” and thought “Yay! I’m one of them, I’m an atheist. I’ve found where I belong.” They really aren’t telling us anything at all about what they do believe.

I think that possibly more often, when people identify as atheists, however much they recite the faction definition, in practice they actually equate “atheism” with blaming some religions and their followers for part of what’s wrong with the world and/or what some people have done to them.

In any case, as I said, for purposes of understanding and being understood by people who call themselves atheists, I think it’s worse than useless to argue with them about the definition of “atheism,” or to insist on applying our own definition to what we say to each other.

 

[Twilight Hue]

It is not an established fact unless you can prove it.
Nor is it an established fact that God exists because that cannot be proven either.

It's already proven fact that theists cannot substantiate anything along the lines of they're being a God.

God just isn't there, and there's nothing existing that would credit much less suggest that any of the claims made thus far have any merit by which can be pursued in a convincing fashion as to even suggest a possibility.

There is actually nothing there whatsoever to properly establish there is any proactive deity at work.

That's the proof, and it's a strong and concrete enough to say it's factually accurate and reliable as things stand.

 

[Kenny]

If you start in life with no God, there is no God. Atheism is not a position. It's a fact.

An unprovable position

 

[Jim]

I debate principles, whether some religion has attached to it or not.

At this point I’m not aware of any reason to think otherwise.

I think there's far more active opposition from religion towards atheism than vice versa. Atheist arguments are usually defensive.

Maybe so. I don’t remember saying or thinking otherwise.