I disambiguated what I meant by complex in this thread:
In other words “complex” signifies composition. @Kevin_Levites has got my meaning right I think:
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Actually, this is the distinction I tried to have @CyberLN make explicitly, and I’m glad you brought it up:
So now here is what I think is the correct taxonomy of views (please offer corrections or alternate taxonomies that you think better reflect usage):
- Atheism, properly speaking, is the negation of the existence of God. “God doesn’t exist.”
- Agnosticism is the belief that there isn’t (two versions: to date, or could never be,) any evidence for God’s existence.
- Both of these can be lumped as atheism, now broadly construed as not having of any god. Etymologically judicious.
Despite this being, I think, a reasonably good taxonomy, I’m fully aware that it does not exhaust all possible subdivisions.
And so when I speak of atheists as those who hold the view “No god exists” (as opposed to “I do not hold the existence of any god”) I am speaking of atheists in the narrow sense (which might not be anyone’s view here, don’t know yet).
Anyway, it is worth noting that all I was doing in this passage is outlining the provocative and somewhat unexpected nature of the claim “Atheists think of god as complex.” Here is what I said:
I wish you had read it for what it was, instead of using the words to throw what looks like a prepackaged argument at me.
And I wish you would state things as you mean them rather than attempting to define for others how they define themselves or their beliefs.
I understand that you are rather familiar with “prepackaged arguments”, that is obvious.
You are of course welcome to define things in narrow enough terms to support whatever conclusion you wish to promote. You are not welcome to assume anyone will accept such terms.
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100%. One must prove the existence of something before making relevant claims about it.
There’s one caveat though, which I think you won’t find difficult to grant, and that’s that we typically have to be able to give some kind of initial, putative definition, if only to know what we are talking about. (This is at least the case on the order of demonstration — not necessarily of induction broadly construed. I can come upon something I’d never conceived of in any way before!) Otherwise any statement of existence would just be “X exist” and there would be no way to think about whether the evidence for X is any good since we have no idea what we are talking about.
Sheldon suggest a fun example: mermaids.
Do mermaids exist? If the question is to have any meaning at all I have to have some notion of mermaid. Say “a rational being with a human-like torso and a fish tail that is reputed for its song.” Then I can judge whether a demonstration of existence might be possible, and what sort of evidence might be sufficient.
We would be surprised if a mountaineer climbed in search of evidence for “mermaids”… we would think he must have a strange notion of mermaids indeed. But if a sailor looked for evidence of mermaids at sea, this would be a little less surprising.
There is actual evidence for triangles, I’m asking the same for a god. Give it your best shot. That’s all many atheists would need to believe.
You are going too fast… and I think missed my point entirely. Please read more carefully and ask about things you don’t understand and I’ll try to clarify.
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You seem reluctant to give your evidence. Nothing else matters to me if you can’t evidence your claim that god exists. Everything else is a moot point.
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Well that pretty much sums it up…
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This is another way of getting to one of the main things I’ve been trying to address in the thread as it has unfolded: basically what’s the concept of god that’s been put forth here?
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“Meat is murder” after all. The Smiths said it best.
Does it really matter? Gods tend to fall into two categories, completely useless and completely unevidenced. If, for example, you call ‘energy’ god. Well. that is useless. We already have a word for energy, it’s energy. You have to distinguish your god from that which we have already explored and know. Call your god a being beyond time, and space, then it exists for no time and no space. We agree with you, it does not exist. At least not in that form. So what kind of a god do you have? I’ve not been swayed by any of your inane, unevidenced, assertions thus far.
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@Sheldon, in your first long post, I see fallacy names repeatedly thrown at me (burden of proof, straw man), a lot of mocking, but not a lot of intelligent engagement. Instead you’ve quoted me repeatedly without showing understanding of the context or intent. You’re going to give the other smart folks here a bad rep…
An example? Here you go:
What? In that post I’ve neither (mis)represented anybody’s view, nor actually asked for anything to be proven. So “straw man” and “burden of proof” don’t begin to apply.
The point of the remark was to say that before attempting any a posteriori demonstration for God’s existence, there’s lots of prerequisite knowledge and background discussion, especially when talking to folks who might believe thinking rationally and thinking according to the scientific method are one and the same, and that the world can be fully understood mechanistically. The case of God is then similar, in a way, to a discussion of instantons. You need to know a lot of quantum mechanics and even QFT before really making sense of them (e.g. I’d have to explain path integrals first).
I hope you’ll try a different, more careful, approach in the future. That said, your second post is more engaging so thank you.
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Although I can speak only for myself, I suspect many here would agree. You may think your taxonomy is correct. (Although I’m not sure why you used that word as it’s primarily used in the field of biology.) However, I do not define those words as you do. To be specific:
- No. Properly speaking, atheism is to be without theism. It carries no burden of proof. You, a theist, propose god(s) exist. I do not believe you. The burden of proof falls on you.
- No. Agnosticism is not about belief. It is about knowledge.
- No. There are agnostic theists. That is someone who believes in the existence of god(s) but admits they cannot obtain knowledge if any actually exist.
I identify as an agnostic atheist. I do not believe any of the proposed gods exist and have no way to know if most do or not.
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Are you not aware that a scientific theory is a body of knowledge that has withstood rigorous scrutiny and has undergone numerous tests of its validity? It is not “a hunch” or “a guess” as it’s commonly thought of by laypeople with no knowledge of the scientific method.
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Thank you @CyberLN for this helpful reply.
Let me just initially make a few conversational comments on your reply.
In the kind of technical sense of “properly” as opposed to “commonly,” it is typically the more restricted sense which is understood to be proper or primary. For example “taxonomy” is primarily and properly used to refer to biological classification, but it is extended to commonly signify all types of systematic classification. But “atheism” may be an interesting exception… I’d have to think that through.
In any case, I agree that the more genetic meaning of atheism is the one you are calling most proper.
Now this is definitely true, and recognizably an implication of my claim that proposition 4 is also held by theists.
————
Because there are obvious issues with even the basic taxonomy I proposed in response to an objection, this might be a nice topic to revisit in detail, perhaps in a future thread.
Yes, I’m a published scientist and early career philosopher of science. I have a decent idea of how scientific methods work. In fact it’s my job to make sure other scientists do too.
Good. Since you’re a scientist, how know how important evidence is, so why don’t you answer this question:
What objectively verifiable evidence do you have for the existence of any god, or that one is even possible?
Take as many posts as you need to answer this. I’m still waiting for your response…
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I’d like to revisit an interesting but unfinished portion of this thread. Here are the pieces:
First, I asked @CyberLN to tell me what they meant by “god.”
I got a nice answer:
One thing I wanted to discuss was what @CyberLN meant by ‘supernatural.’ So I asked them:
I got the following answer:
This is where things get tricky… there are issues here and I would like to address them. Why not start with the one I brought up but which wasn’t responded to?
I guess the concern here is that tying the notion of “supernatural” to knowledge makes it a claim about what we know, and not about the world. So, in that definition, in ancient times, thunder really was supernatural. But it doesn’t seem we’d want to say that. Instead, we might want to say that some people thought thunder to be supernatural because they were ignorant.
@CyberLN Any thoughts about this first concern? Do you think you want to restate what you mean by “supernatural” ?
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If this is the case, then why on earth did you say, “mere theory”?
Can theories be proven true?
If, as you say, you are responsible for ensuring other scientists understand scientific methods, do you accept sloppy wording from them?
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A theoretical prediction about a new phenomenon, in physics, as well reasoned at it might be, is still pure theory. And for an experimentalist, mere theory. That’s common parlance.
Do you know the difference between theory and hypothesis?
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