... unless you're trying to reject what you're ignorant of.
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"Lack of belief"
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Augustus
…
That's like saying being a conservative or a liberal isn't a position, it is a label that applies to a wide variety of positions.
Every atheist who is aware of the concept of god has taken such a position.
It's only the babies, rocks and people who are unaware of gods who haven't rejected gods.
Even if we accept the babies and rocks definition that results from a misunderstanding that the word in question is a-theism, rather than athe-ism, almost everybody who is an atheist holds a position regarding the key point about god(s)'s existence.
It is simply a semantic trick that uses those ignorant of god as a smokescreen to pretend it is a non-position, non-belief, when it is almost always the opposite.
Why would you try to reject something you are totally unaware of? You are missing the point by resorting to different meanings of the word ignorant that don't fit the context.
Anyway, what were your objections to Gilbert's article? Why do you agree with Descartes?
No, it's like saying "not communist" isn't a position.
There is no single "concept of god". There are many concepts of god, and even the typical theist rejects most of them.
And there are many atheists who simply take the position of Laplace when it comes to gods ("I had no need for that hypothesis").
What position is that? Spell it out explicitly and we'll see if it makes sense.
Atheism itself is a non-position, but individual atheists can take all sorts of positions. If you want an atheist to defend one of them, ask them about it.
You, me, Falvlun, and every other atheist are as ignorant as a baby about most gods. By insisting on a rejection-based definition, you're insisting that to be atheists, we have to reject god-concepts that we haven't even heard of.
For instance, without googling them, tell us why you reject Setesuyara? Why do you reject Kuk? Please be specific.
That PDF reads more like a manifesto than a normal scientific paper. Other problems:
- It infers way too much from the actual experimental results
- The description of the experiments suggests plenty of methodological problems and leaves room for many more
- It makes no mention of basic information like sample sizes
Overall, I'm a bit annoyed that you'd ask me to waste my time reading it. I don't give its results - or its overreaching inferences from the actual results - any weight at all.
You think we choose our beliefs? Why?
Because none of this makes sense otherwise.
Believing in god vs not believing in god becomes functionally the same thing. Heck, heliocentrism vs geocentrism, creationism vs evolution, no belief would matter. Reason and rationality would no longer matter. You wouldn't accept things because of evidence or arguments. Evidence and arguments wouldn't matter.
You shouldn't care if you are a strong atheist or a theist or a Leprauchanist. Because you would have nothing to do with it if it were pre-ordained. There would be no reason to prefer one or the other. Everything would be equal.
There wouldn't be any point in forums or discussion or debates. Because everyone is already preordained for any particular state.
If we don't decide what we believe, then all beliefs are the default state.
I think you took my question a different way than I intended.
My position is that we're convinced of our beliefs. Choice doesn't come into it because we can't choose to believe an idea we aren't convinced of and we can't choose to not believe an idea we find convincing.
This isn't about anything being "pre-ordained"; it's about belief being an involuntary thing.
I think that the idea that belief is a voluntary choice is (at least in this part of the world) a bleedover from Christianity, where it's taken on faith that belief is a matter of choice so that disbelief can be a culpable "sin".
You don't base any beliefs on things you've never heard of, so why would this be any different?
My favorite icecream flavor is Moose Tracks. According to you, I can't make that claim since I haven't tried every icecream flavor out there. I don't even know which icecream flavors I haven't tried, so how can I possibly have a favorite?
If tomorrow, I try an icecream flavor that far surpasses Moose Tracks, guess what? I can make it my new favorite.
I reject all god concepts I've ever encountered. If I find one tomorrow that blows my socks off, I can reconsider my belief. If tomorrow, Jehovah comes down from the sky in a blaze of glory and says "Hey Falv, what do you think now?" I will probably respond "I'm really sorry about before, sir, and I totally believe you exist now."
I dont know why you insist that beliefs be immutable.
Or why you insist that beliefs must cover things we don't know about. (How is that even possible?)
You're the one insisting that babies aren't atheists. If your definition for "atheist" is someone who rejects all the gods he's ever heard of, then babies would be atheists (since they reject all the gods they've ever heard of).
Sorry - I'm not going to discuss another analogy with you. It always ends up so confused that it's just a waste of time.
You do? Why? Do you actually reject the concepts themselves or for the arguments for the concepts?
I don't know about you, but there have been plenty of times when I've been confronted with, say, an unfalsifiable god - i.e. a god that can't be rationally rejected. I've never seen a good argument to accept one of these gods, and I've rejected lots of arguments for one of them, but I have no justification to actually reject an unfalsifiable god itself. Do you think you do? If so, please share - I'd like to find out how you do the impossible.
I don't... and I have no idea why you think I do.
It isn't possible. That's the problem with defining "atheism" in terms of rejection of gods. This is why your definition fails.
As I pointed out earlier, you (and I, and everyone else) are as ignorant as a baby when it comes to most gods. If failing to reject these gods disqualifies a baby from being an atheist, then it disqualifies you, too.
If you do not believe that we have an active role in the acquisition and development of our beliefs, then I think my objections stand.
If you do believe that we play an active role, and are just objecting to my use of the word "choice", then I think we are fine.
My main point is that the lack of belief demonstrated by atheists debating online is an active position, and not a passive default state.
Augustus
…
A manifesto?
Did you actually read it?
What would it need to do to make itself into a 'normal' scientific paper?
It actually makes very limited inferences. Can you give an example of something that infers 'way too much'?
Explanation? Examples?
Or just an out of hand dismissal based on it not meeting your preconceived opinions. You haven't actually mentioned anything in the article, just a few generic problems that might exist in a generic scientific paper.
You didn't really read it properly did you? You couldn't possibly have missed all of these if you had:
"Seventy-one female students at the University of Texas at Austin participated to fulfill a requirement in their introductory psychology course. Only native speakers of English were eligible to participate. "
"Eighty-six female students at the University of Texas at Austin participated to fulfill a requirement in their introductory psychology course. Only native speakers of English were eligible to participate."
"One hundred sixty-one female students at the University of Texas at Austin participated to fulfill a requirement in their introductory psychology course. Only native speakers of English were eligible to participate."
"Six subjects were omitted from all analyses because of either suspicion about the procedures or excessive difficulty reading the moving text. Of the remaining 80 subjects, 40 were required to perform the concurrent digit-search task and 40 were not. "
"Three subjects were omitted from all analyses due to either suspicion about the procedure or excessive difficulty reading the moving text. Of the remaining 68 subjects, 34 were required to perform the concurrent digit-search task."
"These omissions resulted in 132 subjects approximately evenly distributed among the conditions for the RT analyses and 148 subjects for all other analyses."
Sorry for annoying you by referring to interesting and well respected scientific research on a topic that has significant real world implications. Can you recommend something more worthwhile on the topic?
Not everyone thinks it is a worthless pop psychology manifesto though. Daniel Kahneman, widely considered to be the (one of the) most important and influential contemporary psychologists, found it such a waste of time that he bothered to discuss (Harvard professor) Gilbert's work on this issue and link it to his own work on heuristics and biases in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman's is very rigorous, very empirical, very well respected with countless practical applications in society. The results of Gilbert's research are consistent with a broader field of study, which is why people such as Kahneman give it a bit more weight than you.
If you found reading that a 'waste of time' (not that you appear to have 'wasted' much time by actually reading it), then it probably explains why you keep making the same mistakes in your discussions. You have already decided that you are right, and damn the evidence against it.
Many 'rationalists' do have a very 'anti-scientific' tendency when it doesn't support their preconceived opinion.
What are your view on religious people who dismiss respected scientific research out of hand without even bothering to read about the topic btw?
I'm not sure what point you're getting at. We can choose to, say, research or reflect in order to challenge our beliefs, but the actual act of changing our beliefs happens without our choice.
I think you're conflating a few things:
- what's being demonstrated by atheists in online debates are their beliefs.
- their beliefs fall within , but are not required by, the umbrella definition of atheism as lack of belief in gods.
I think you're getting hung up on the common traits among atheists and inferring that they're part of the definition. Individual atheists will have beliefs and characteristics that go well-beyond the bare requirements of the word "atheist". Every atheist I've ever encountered has had a pancreas; this doesn't mean that "having a pancreas" is required to be an atheist. Many atheists I've encountered have rejected various gods; this doesn't mean that "rejecting gods" is required to be an atheist.
Babies don't reject anything. Rejection is an active response.
So respond to the point, then.
Your position implies that we cannot make claims about a group of things unless we are familiar with each individual member within that group.
My examples demonstrate that, in fact, we make claims about groups all the time, despite not knowing every individual member.
My accusation is that you are putting an extra-ordinary requirement on this one particular belief that is not necessary, or usual, in any other circumstance.
No. I am taking the claims of these atheists and demonstrating why they are misleading and inaccurate.
These atheists claim that they do not have a position. They claim that they are the default state.
The reason they do this is because they are conflating the lack of belief demonstrated by a baby and the lack of belief they have.
The "lack of belief" definition perpetuates this conflation.
Not to mention, there's absolutely no need for the atheist label to cover babies. It shouldn't include passive non-belief at all. All that does is encourage misleading claims about the active position you all have taken.
I scanned it for red flags before reading the whole thing. Finding several, I decided that it wasn't worth my time to read the whole thing.
Frankly, my patience with "check out this long PDF or video that I assure you is wonderful and give me detailed objections"-type requests is pretty low. It takes virtually no effort at all to post a link, but demands a disproportionate amount of effort to respond.
I scanned the PDF and did a quick search for terms like "sample". I didn't find them. As I said, though, I did find enough red flags for me to decide not to bother with it further.
I'm satisfied that I gave your precious article a fair review that was more than proportional to the effort it took for your to copy-and-paste a URL. From here on out, I'm not going to talk about this unless I get some quid-pro-quo from you: your PDF is not an argument. If you want to cite it to support your arguments, fine, but I'm only going to respond to the arguments that you make from here on out. Otherwise, we get into Gish Gallop territory, and I'm not going to play that game.
I was speaking of the concepts themselves.
I see no reason to withhold belief on things that are exceedingly unlikely to be true. An Invisible Pink Unicorn is unfalsifiable, and yet I reject it's existence.
Your concern regarding gods I don't know about implies that if I knew about those gods, my position might be different. This is not a concern if you acknowledge that positions can be changed when new knowledge is gained.
No, it demonstrates why your criticism fails. Name any belief. None of them are based on absolute knowledge of a subject. None of them require the believer to know about the things that are not known. (
) The conditional nature (that this belief is based on the person's current knowledge) is always implied.
The set "gods a baby knows but doesn't reject" is empty. It meets the definition.
... or unless we can categorize the group somehow. If you can do this, you're welcome to do it, but you still haven't defined the category "gods" in a way that works.
... when the group has an established definition to let us tell what is and isn't in a group. When it doesn't have this, we have to resort to a list of group members.
No, that's what you're doing. I'm just pointing out the implications of your definition.
Do you agree that monotheists aren't atheists?
That is not what rejection means and you know it.
Why do so many of the lack-of-beliefer arguments seem to need to be misleading?
I have a concept of what a god is. I believe that most people do, since the word conveys a distinct meaning, as is not merely gibberish.
However, it doesn't really matter if you approve of my understanding of the word "god" or not. I have one and that's all that's necessary.
But I am willing to discuss it more fully in a separate thread, as it is a worthy of its own discussion and this one has enough going on as it is.
Not having complete knowledge isn't an implication. It's a normal expectation.
Monotheists are not atheists, obviously.
The decision to go one way and not the other.
If you object to "choice" as well, the distinction I'm really going for is active vs passive.
You have chosen not to believe either proposition.
There are obviously at least 3 choices otherwise you would have had to choose one or the other. Since you were able to choose "neither", that means there was a third option called "neither".
Choosing neither is not a default any more than choosing "God exists" or "God doesn't exist" is a default.
There's nothing misleading about the fact that "rejecting all the things" and "rejecting nothing" are equivalent when you have zero things to reject.
Great! What is it?
It's also necessary that the definition describes how you actually use the term. Even without hearing it, I'm going to say that this isn't the case.
Okay. If you start a thread, I'll participate.
That's not the implication I'm talking about.
Okay - so you agree that there are people who reject every god but one, and they haven't rejected enough gods to be an atheist, right? Merely rejecting most gods isn't enough. Do you agree?
How do you make sure that theists aren't counted as atheists?