Atheism only has meaning in the context of someone else’s religious beliefs. If you don’t know anything about a god you really are by default an atheist. I don’t believe in other people’s fairys or pink unicorns. That’s not a position of absolute knowledge but a skepticism against any mysticism or mythology for which there is no credible evidence. I do not need to examine every set of religious beliefs that anyone has ever held and determine if they sound credible to me before I consider myself an atheist.
A denial of knowledge is agnosticism. It’s what the word means, and it is mostly in the context of your beliefs, not others.
One can completely disavow the possible existence of the god of every religion on earth and still not be an atheist because he has developed some personal, internal theology.
I’ve never heard, nor heard of a theology that is plausible, but this does not mean that in the whole of the universe there isn’t one. As I was trying to jokingly indicate, a mechanistic clockwork or quantum/clockwork universe with predictable rules does not inherently rule out the possibility of a creator god. Occams razor simply indicates that one must not “multiply entities unnecessarily”, and it’s corollary “the simplest explanation is usually the most accurate” is a heuristic, not an ironclad law.
Yeah, there probably isn’t a god, but since in my life, for the problems I am interested in, God? no God? no difference. As there is no difference to the problems I’m interested in I stopped worrying much about it, and have no ego in either outcome so I can listen and discuss things with representatives from either side without having the whole “you’re full of shit” thing get in the way.
Between being raised in a college town, and spending over 15 years in the computer industry, as well as hanging out with a sub-culture within a sub-culture that consisted mostly of people who were if not smarter, at least had better educational pedigrees than I, I’ve spent a LOT of time around really smart people. Many of whom were atheists, and many of whom were not. To be able to speak to either group, to ask questions from the perspective of one who seeks knowledge, and who doesn’t have to (internally) fight that information in order to understand it and to integrate it.
As an example, I have very good friend of mine in the south bay area who is a fundamentalist christian. He is a very bright man with multiple patents in a variety of disciplines under his belt, and one who understands his faith, has read deeply about it, questioned it and not found it wanting (much). We were talking about the paradox of humans having free will, but God still knowing How It Will All Turn Out. This, to one how must have all answers Does Not Make Sense. Hence paradox. He admits it is a paradox, but (to him) this is the mystery of God, and something one must accept in faith.
No, not a satisfying answer for me, but by accepting that I cannot understand the mind of God, should he exist, and by accepting that what I...let’s say “suspect”...may be wrong, I can listen to him and get more out of the conversation than if I just dump his answer into the bucket marked “fucking bullshit”.
How you wish to deal with these sorts of questions is your life, but I have approached the world with arrogance and a belief that I was in the Right, and I have (tried to anway) approached with world with a bit of humility (even if it’s manufactured for the purpose) to try to understand the other side. One gets you a LOT more information about what and how people think than the other. And frankly the problems and questions I find most interesting these days are more about people than not.
As others have pointed out to you in this thread and Eliezer has explained in detail, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Why on this one topic would you deny the possibility of knowledge based on all the evidence you have?
There was no evidence of black swans, until there was.
To many people there is evidence of God, it’s just that to others that evidence is (via Occam’s razor or other tools) evidence of the vastness of the universe, evolutionary adaptions, the big bang, spontaneous remission etc.
I don’t have the tools to evaluate many of their arguments, and at my age i’m fairly certain (not due to age, but due to my track record where advanced math and such is concerned as well as other interests and commitments) that will not be able to acquire the skills and knowledge to evaluate them.
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
A good bayesian will always assign a small chance that anyone is right, even the homeless guy down the street claiming that the aliens are living in the sewers and stealing our nuclear energy. That doesn’t mean it is likely. Moreover, how interesting it is to temporarily entertain a claim has nothing to do with how likely the claim is. I entertain myself by discussing minutia of halacha (Orthodox Jewish law). That doesn’t mean I need to pretend that that has any more connection to reality than the rules for Dungeons and Dragons.
Why does this bother you so?
You are posting on a website devoted to improving human rationality and you are wondering why people feel a need to respond to a set of arguments that directly advocate assigning higher chances to certain hypotheses because they make the world more interesting?
Atheism only has meaning in the context of someone else’s religious beliefs. If you don’t know anything about a god you really are by default an atheist. I don’t believe in other people’s fairys or pink unicorns. That’s not a position of absolute knowledge but a skepticism against any mysticism or mythology for which there is no credible evidence. I do not need to examine every set of religious beliefs that anyone has ever held and determine if they sound credible to me before I consider myself an atheist.
A denial of knowledge is agnosticism. It’s what the word means, and it is mostly in the context of your beliefs, not others.
One can completely disavow the possible existence of the god of every religion on earth and still not be an atheist because he has developed some personal, internal theology.
I’ve never heard, nor heard of a theology that is plausible, but this does not mean that in the whole of the universe there isn’t one. As I was trying to jokingly indicate, a mechanistic clockwork or quantum/clockwork universe with predictable rules does not inherently rule out the possibility of a creator god. Occams razor simply indicates that one must not “multiply entities unnecessarily”, and it’s corollary “the simplest explanation is usually the most accurate” is a heuristic, not an ironclad law.
Yeah, there probably isn’t a god, but since in my life, for the problems I am interested in, God? no God? no difference. As there is no difference to the problems I’m interested in I stopped worrying much about it, and have no ego in either outcome so I can listen and discuss things with representatives from either side without having the whole “you’re full of shit” thing get in the way.
Between being raised in a college town, and spending over 15 years in the computer industry, as well as hanging out with a sub-culture within a sub-culture that consisted mostly of people who were if not smarter, at least had better educational pedigrees than I, I’ve spent a LOT of time around really smart people. Many of whom were atheists, and many of whom were not. To be able to speak to either group, to ask questions from the perspective of one who seeks knowledge, and who doesn’t have to (internally) fight that information in order to understand it and to integrate it.
As an example, I have very good friend of mine in the south bay area who is a fundamentalist christian. He is a very bright man with multiple patents in a variety of disciplines under his belt, and one who understands his faith, has read deeply about it, questioned it and not found it wanting (much). We were talking about the paradox of humans having free will, but God still knowing How It Will All Turn Out. This, to one how must have all answers Does Not Make Sense. Hence paradox. He admits it is a paradox, but (to him) this is the mystery of God, and something one must accept in faith.
No, not a satisfying answer for me, but by accepting that I cannot understand the mind of God, should he exist, and by accepting that what I...let’s say “suspect”...may be wrong, I can listen to him and get more out of the conversation than if I just dump his answer into the bucket marked “fucking bullshit”.
How you wish to deal with these sorts of questions is your life, but I have approached the world with arrogance and a belief that I was in the Right, and I have (tried to anway) approached with world with a bit of humility (even if it’s manufactured for the purpose) to try to understand the other side. One gets you a LOT more information about what and how people think than the other. And frankly the problems and questions I find most interesting these days are more about people than not.
As others have pointed out to you in this thread and Eliezer has explained in detail, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Why on this one topic would you deny the possibility of knowledge based on all the evidence you have?
There was no evidence of black swans, until there was.
To many people there is evidence of God, it’s just that to others that evidence is (via Occam’s razor or other tools) evidence of the vastness of the universe, evolutionary adaptions, the big bang, spontaneous remission etc.
I don’t have the tools to evaluate many of their arguments, and at my age i’m fairly certain (not due to age, but due to my track record where advanced math and such is concerned as well as other interests and commitments) that will not be able to acquire the skills and knowledge to evaluate them.
In many of my social and professional activities I have to rub elbows with folks who are of varying degrees of religious, and it makes my life more interesting if I can listen to them with the possibility, however faint that they are right.
Why does this bother you so?
A good bayesian will always assign a small chance that anyone is right, even the homeless guy down the street claiming that the aliens are living in the sewers and stealing our nuclear energy. That doesn’t mean it is likely. Moreover, how interesting it is to temporarily entertain a claim has nothing to do with how likely the claim is. I entertain myself by discussing minutia of halacha (Orthodox Jewish law). That doesn’t mean I need to pretend that that has any more connection to reality than the rules for Dungeons and Dragons.
You are posting on a website devoted to improving human rationality and you are wondering why people feel a need to respond to a set of arguments that directly advocate assigning higher chances to certain hypotheses because they make the world more interesting?