"Lack of belief"

[McBell]

If a person identifies as an atheist, then obviously that person is familiar with the concept of a god or gods.

Is there a point you're trying to make here?

The only point I can see from him is that it contradicts with his arbitrary conditional modifier.

 

[ArtieE]

So basically you disagree with ArtiE's statement earlier, "All atheists who say they lack belief in the existence of gods have a conception of what gods are."

That's not me. I just responded to that post and agree. Then you and ArtiE suddenly tell me it's wrong...

Why wasn't he wrong when he said it?

There's nothing wrong with that statement.

 

[PackJason]

The only point I can see from him is that it contradicts with his arbitrary conditional modifier.

Apparently.

 

[Ouroboros]

There's nothing wrong with that statement.

I didn't say it was wrong. I agree with that statement. But because I agreed with that statement, I was told I was wrong.

The only difference is that I don't see how babies identify themselves as atheists. I agree with that atheists have concepts of God/gods. But I don't think babies have concept of God/gods neither do they identify themselves as atheists.

 

[Valjean]

So, having a lack of belief is like having a concept of god to believe in: vague and relative to each person who uses the phrase.

We're really gutting the English language.

No. A lack of belief is not like having a belief. Having a lack of belief is not having a belief. Nothing vague or subjective about that.

Scientifically.
Belief can ultimately be reduced to some kind of 'brain activity' after all. Agree?

No. We're talking semantics, not neurology. There is always brain activity, no matter what's being contemplated. Asking any question generates a cascade of neural activity.

 

[McBell]

I didn't say it was wrong. I agree with that statement. But because I agreed with that statement, I was told I was wrong.

The only difference is that I don't see how babies identify themselves as atheists. I agree with that atheists have concepts of God/gods. But I don't think babies have concept of God/gods neither do they identify themselves as atheists.

Identifying yourself as an atheist is not a requirement of being an atheist

 

[ArtieE]

I didn't say it was wrong. I agree with that statement. But because I agreed with that statement, I was told I was wrong.

The only difference is that I don't see how babies identify themselves as atheists.

They don't identify themselves as atheists any more than they identify themselves as babies. That doesn't mean that they're not babies just because they don't have a concept of what babies are and can't identify themselves as such.

 

[Ouroboros]

They don't identify themselves as atheists any more than they identify themselves as babies. That doesn't mean that they're not babies just because they don't have a concept of what babies are and can't identify themselves as such.

True.

 

[Willamena]

@Willamena, most of the times i find most of your post to be illogical, you also tends to write in over complicated and nonsensical. Is english your native language?
Not only you, there're also other posters here whose writing style is similar to you.

English is not my native language, is it my inability to comprehend those posts and they really does make sense?
Nonetheless the writing style is weird and many times it doesn't make sense to me...

I'm sorry about that, Pudding. I write how I write, and though I sometimes despair that English is becoming a dead language, everything I say makes sense to at least one person, which is all I can hope for.

 

[Valjean]

But you have to know what it means with "gods" to not have belief in them.

No you don't. You don't need a concept of the Ravenous, Bug-Bladder Beast of Traal in order not to believe in it. "Not having belief is how you start out, it's your default position..
True, you have to have a concept of God to reject or dismiss that concept, but basic atheism doesn't reject or dismiss anything. It's just lacking a belief.
You're bring up an issue that's already been explained a dozen times in this thread. Not having a belief in God is how we start out, it's our epistemic default position.

It was the term they used in the research if I recall correctly. I will try to find it again and link to the paper, then you can look at what they said. (I think Harris was one of the researchers.)

Found links:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0007272
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/where-religious-belief-and-non-102421
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18072236

This is not about neurology. It's about semantics. There is always brain activity, no matter what is asked or what subject is contemplated..

 

[Willamena]

You don't have knowledge of subjects that you haven't been exposed to
is same as saying
you lack the knowledge of subjects that you haven't been exposed to.

Don't have is the same meaning of lack, which also means without.

Lack
Noun
1. the state of being without or not having enough of something.
Verb
1. be without or deficient in.

You say you don't lack any knowledge, then go on saying you don't have knowledge of subjects that you haven't been exposed to, that is contradiction in itself.
Saying you don't have is same as saying you lack.
It is contradiction you say you don't lack but then go on saying you lack(don't have).

Are you still going to claim you don't lack any knowledge?

I am not lacking knowledge of subjects that I haven't been exposed to--in English we have another word for that: ignorance. I am ignorant of subjects that I haven't been exposed to.

The word lacking carries the connotation of "being without" in the sense of something you had but no longer do, or should have but don't. There is nothing I really want or need to learn, so I'm not lacking for any knowledge at the moment. I have just enough.

 

[Augustus]

There was some research done a while ago (by atheist scientists, if I remember correctly, doing fMRI and such), that showed that unbelief also have a brain activity. To "unbelieve" something isn't just a dead neural activity, but activated other areas than belief. So really, "lack of belief" does have a mental state in the brain, according to that study.

My point was that disbelief/unbelief is substantially different to ignorance of.

I consider the only time someone can be said to 'lack belief' is when they are totally ignorant of something.

(think the paper is the one I refer to below)

I do in fact lack a belief in the existence of god.
Is your "argument" the false dichotomy that one lacking belief either rejects or does not understand?
If so, you are just plain flat out wrong.

My argument is about the impossibility of lacking belief in the existence of god if you understand the statement "god exists"

The peer reviewed scientific journal I quoted suggests you are 'plain flat out wrong'. Perhaps you have an "argument" about why you consider that article to be flawed?

This is from a paper written by Sam Harris (not an eminent scholar admittedly, but someone that many atheists tend to put stock in): "Several psychological studies9 –11 appear to support Spinoza’s conjecture12 that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection... Our behavioral data support this hypothesis, in so far as subjects judged statements to be “true” more quickly than they judged them to be “false” or “undecidable”"

On what grounds do you contend that you have a lack/ absence of belief regarding the existence of god?





Can you explain to me why you think these studies are wrong?

 

[Ouroboros]

No you don't. You don't need a concept of the Ravenous, Bug-Bladder Beast of Traal in order not to believe in it. "Not having belief is how you start out, it's your default position..

But they're not gods. You don't believe in them because you know they're not gods. So you do have a conceptual understanding to what gods are.

True, you have to have a concept of God to reject or dismiss that concept, but basic atheism doesn't reject or dismiss anything. It's just lacking a belief.

The ignorant person's lack of belief, yes, but the educated atheist who identify himself as an atheist do so because he/she knows what they don't believe in. The difference here is ignorant vs educated.

You're bring up an issue that's already been explained a dozen times in this thread. Not having a belief in God is how we start out, it's our epistemic default position.

And I disagree, but I'm not going to hammer any more on it. I was supposed to stay away from this thread, but when I say ArtiE's post, I thought "yay!" one atheists finally gets it, and had to chime in. My mistake.

This is not about neurology. It's about semantics. There is always brain activity, no matter what is asked or what subject is contemplated..

I answered to a question in another post. That's it.

 

[Ouroboros]

My point was that disbelief/unbelief is substantially different to ignorance of.

I consider the only time someone can be said to 'lack belief' is when they are totally ignorant of something.

(think the paper is the one I refer to below)

And I'm in agreement.

Belief, disbelief, and ignorance (lack of belief) all have different brain patterns.

 

[LuisDantas]

Atheists, is this right or wrong?

I guess it is right, even if only because it would be difficult to find someone who can say anything about a belief without having some conception of what that belief refers to.

Whether that means that inanimate or mute entities can't be atheists is a separate issue.

 

[Augustus]

No. We're talking semantics, not neurology. There is always brain activity, no matter what's being contemplated. Asking any question generates a cascade of neural activity.

I'm not discussing semantics or the definition of the word atheist. Language is use of language after all.

I'm discussing whether or not there is a substantial difference between total ignorance of the concept 'god exists' and coming to a conscious decision that you do not wish to make a judgement on whether or not god exists.

I believe you cannot have a lack/absence of belief in the existence of god if you can understand the concept "god exists".

 

[LuisDantas]

I didn't say it was wrong. I agree with that statement. But because I agreed with that statement, I was told I was wrong.

The only difference is that I don't see how babies identify themselves as atheists. I agree with that atheists have concepts of God/gods. But I don't think babies have concept of God/gods neither do they identify themselves as atheists.

Babies probably do not identify themselves as anything, depending on how young they are.

To the best of my learning, they identify themselves with the whole of existence early on before learning to perceive themselves as separate beings.

However, they are for all intents and purposes (besides express self-identification, I guess) atheists until and unless they have enough cognition and abstract reasoning to learn of some conception of deity and manifest some form of inclination to either believe or disbelieve in its applicability to reality.

 

[ArtieE]

My argument is about the impossibility of lacking belief in the existence of god if you understand the statement "god exists"

Do you understand what you have written here? You have written that everybody who understand the statement "god exists" must believe god exists.

 

[Valjean]

Of course you don't believe in those things, but those things aren't the definition of atheism

Atheism is lack of belief in ... specifically something you call God or gods. Not unbelief in paper cuts or unbelief in pink unicorns. It's specifically lack of belief in "god" or "gods" which have meanings and concepts, and not just out of the blue and arbitrary whatever.

But it's analagous to a-unicornism. Atheism can be a dismissal of theism, but it need not be, that's not the essential concept.

So ArtiE was wrong about "All atheists who say they lack belief in the existence of gods have a conception of what gods are."
Beat him up instead of me. I only agreed with him. Then he disagree with me for some reason.

Yes, ArtieE's statement is wrong. If anyone's beating up on you it's because you keep pushing a definition of strong atheism when what we're talking about is weak atheism. You're argument is a straw man.

This has been explained a dozen times in this thread. You can find many definitions of atheism is an ordinary dictionary, but only one is being used here. Why do you keep ignoring it?

 

[Ouroboros]

I guess it is right, even if only because it would be difficult to find someone who can say anything about a belief without having some conception of what that belief refers to.

Thank you.

Whether that means that inanimate or mute entities can't be atheists is a separate issue.

It is, in a sense.

My view is that atheism is something you identify with, and as such, it's something you know something about. Being atheist is not just being ignorant, but being educated, in my opinion. But I do know that many atheists have a different view on this (as apparent from the discussions here).