Just How atheist are you?

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Nothing is confirmed except the size of your ego.

Anyway, I don't have any problems with atheists in general. Just the hard-line ones who claim absolute dominion over the truth. I am a sceptic about everything, because I believe nothing can be known with absolute certainty. And on matters of metaphysics and religion there is more room for doubt than in most things.

I was "mostly" atheist myself for a long time. I didn't look too deeply into things, and it just seemed the most logical explanation for reality. It's only recently that I started looking deeper into certain philosophical topics and realised that some things don't add up. So I became more sceptical, and although I still lean towards the atheist side of the religion spectrum, I now think of myself as an agnostic.

That's not to say I couldn't change my mind again. But before I could, someone would have to:
- Explain what happened before the big bang.
- Solve the mind-body problem without ignoring the subjective aspect of consciousness or resorting to dualism.

While it is possible that both of those problems might one day be solved to my satisfaction, I have my doubts. Just as ants can't invent space travel because they have no concept of space, I think there are some things that can't be solved by puny human brains.

Concept of nature is itself a priori,and can never be tested by experience,since nature is a priori concept that makes natural laws and object natural in the first place.

You can never have empirical evidence of 'nature as such' but only to its attributed parts.Since nature as such can be never empirically experienced,therefore we can never know nature(according to your implications)...
In order to empirically research something ,you must first have a priori framework into which you fit empirical evidences,because without it empirical evidences have no meaning.
If you want to have claim existence of natural objects you must first a priori presume existence of nature.
Nature is a priori explanation of natural things,but it cannot explain nature itself.
In order to explain nature,you must have meta-nature (cosmos)...and meta-nature must be explained by meta-meta nature etc....to the point of infinity.
This point of infinity is totality,or everything that exists (that people call God).
God is a priori necessary for existence of everything,in the same manner as nature is a priori necessary for existence of natural things.

Monotheists worship God,as symbolic expression of their feelings towards God,same as Animists worship nature as symbolic expression of their feelings towards nature.
But worshiping nature does not mean that idea of nature is stupid,same as idea of God.

Pure a priori deduction is also part of reality.
A priori truths are necessary truths (like 1+2=3),unlike empirical(a posteriori) truths that can be negated with set of skeptical alternatives.

But no skeptic can deny that 1+2=3



Entire mathematics and logic are based not on empirical evidence,but by a priori demonstration.
According to this 1+2=3 is not knowledge,but conjecture.


Besides that,even if your claim is correct,someone still have right to believe in something that is not proved,he only have no right to claim knowledge.




Does universe(as such) or nature(as such) have physical effect on anything?What universe or nature do?
Does physicality as such have physical effect on anything?What physicality as such do?

Does whole influence its parts?



If God is highest being,then his interaction with all beings is like interaction between nature and natural objects.
Empty space is not material,yet interacts with material world,and as a matter of fact empty space is necessary for material object to exist in the first place.

I'm a skeptical theist. I'm both too logical and too religious in the true sense to blindly follow anybody.

"religious in the true sense"...

what exactly do you mean?

If I'm understanding the implications correctly, I'd suggest using the term "spiritual" over "religious". If I'm off base, disregard the semantics.

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Last edited by SilverProteus on 05 Feb 2008, 9:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

The "giant octopus munching on a snickers bar in the center of the universe" made me laugh and think of PZ Myers. You should check him out.

Anyway, I am somewhat of a theist (I want to convert to Judaism), but I admit that sometimes I doubt the existence of a god. Then again, in Judaism you can pretty much debate theological points for hours.

The point remains, Witt, that claims without evidence in nature are quite alike each other and there is little (no discernable) difference between them. The idea of an invisible dragon or god are exactly alike in their complete lack of affirming evidence. You appear to suggest that claims about teapots or spaghetti monsters is that they are about material things. And dragons, I suppose, too. But in thinking so, you have completely missed the point. First off, dragons don't exist... never have. They are just as imaginative as gods are, except that perhaps they have not captured as much human attention. They are not real, nor are they about real material things. They do not have certain material traits. Nada. It's entirely made up and I can pose a completely non-material situation regarding the idea, if that would help you move from your incorrect frame of mind to one that gathers the real point, better.

In any case, claims about non-material things simply removes them from scientific examination. That doesn't improve them in any way, at all, though. It just means they aren't about a nature we can examine. The point here is that if nothing conceivable could ever disprove the claim, and in this sense most folks ideas of god and my idea of this invisible dragon are exactly alike here, then any adduced evidence that does exist simply doesn't matter -- it would be totally pointless to even examine any evidence, because the con­clusion is already known to be _True_ and the claim is quite simply invulnerable to any possible evidence. So why bother looking? This does not improve the claim, however. And it certainly doesn't make the claim True, the idea that it isn't about evidence we can discover. Instead, in so far as a shared reality is concerned, it would instead mean that the claim is meaningless. This is so because it is logically impossible for any claim to be true no matter what evidence shows us unless the claim is NOT about our shared reality. Such claims simply do not make a __factual__ assertion and hence are neither true nor false, but instead are merely proposi­tionally vacuous.

That's the point of the invisible dragon story. It is propositionally vacuous, just as most every claim I've listened to regard gods of various kinds. They are instead about internal states of mind, not about the reality around us.

We use the idea of 'true' in science as a tentative matter. No one can know what the future may bring, so all factual knowledge is tentative. In science, for any claim to be true it must be falsifiable. This rule guarantees that if a claim is indeed false, then evidence exists and may eventually be discovered to disprove the claim; and if the claim is true, then no such evidence exists. (Which only means that we can say things are tentatively true.) But in short, this rule says that evidence must matter and it is probably the most fundamental rule of evidential reasoning.

As I just hinted already, a false claim may not be disproved yet, but only because there hasn't been someone sufficiently clever to find the evidence that disproves it. But a true claim can never be proven; it can only be said that no evidence has yet been uncovered to disprove it. And in this sense, both false claims and true claims can appear very much alike at a given point in time. But the requirement for falsafiability is an important one so that if such evidence does exist, we have a chance to find it in the case of false claims.

This is the only useful meaning for true and false, regarding reality. Tentative and factual. The capital-T varieties of True, in the sense that we might know something to be True Always no matter what the future brings, isn't about nature. But internal beliefs, only. All things about our shared reality are of the small-t, tentative and factual variety of true. Things that are true in that sense are about reality, are affected by adduced evidence we may yet find, and aren't meaningless because they are about our universe around us.

Of course, you write, The only thing I can say to you on that score is that there is no such thing as "evidence for non-material objects." If you seriously imagine otherwise, then we aren't using the term 'evidence' in the same way.

I think Einstein wrote very, very well about the idea of god and most particularly about a personal god.



This puts the whole thing into a rational and factual perspective that should make clear sense to most people.

Jon

Last edited by jonk on 03 Feb 2008, 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In English, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." The Spanish version is better, though. It's "If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a bicycle."

That's about all one needs to say to your "if" above.

Jon

That about puts the concept in its place. Well said.

Jon

I've become more agnostic recently as I realized that atheism itself is just another religion (I believed in my view, and had certain ideas that supported my beliefs, but in the end there's no definite proof).

I try to keep a spiritual side and embrace what I see as the positive aspects of various faiths, while not conforming to any particular religious views (at least not presently).

Einstein wasn't exactly an atheist in the strictest sense, though. More of a pantheist. That is, he believed that the universe itself is something akin to the embodiment of God. Just not a personal God. Which doesn't really conflict with what Witt was arguing, at least from what I could decipher with my layman understanding of philosophy.

There cannot ever be proof of non-existence. To insist on it is to insist on perfection, which is impossible.

What you can rationally do is insist that claimants provide some affirming evidence of their claims. And there is no real need to waffle about sitting on the fence for things when the claimants themselves cannot be bothered to make their own cases. It's not a matter of strict logic -- one requires axioms for that and I don't think there are any agreeable ones around for this purpose, anyway. But it is a matter of rationality to require some affirming evidence for claims -- and the amount of that affirming evidence should probably grow in proportion to the uncommonness of the claim. Claiming it rained may be very common, in certain circumstances, and the amount of affirming evidence may be modest in those cases. Claiming the sun is the fiery charriot of a god, on the other hand, might reasonably require a little more in terms of affirming evidence before others start wasting time on the idea.

I think I do that, too.

Jon

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling baldness a hair color.

Although I don't want to over-emphasize the opinion of just one man (we don't study the greater minds for what they believed to be true, but instead we read them for how they think about the world) and I frankly have no right to speak for his beliefs or the lack of them so let me quote Einstein on this very subject and let his own words say what needs to be said:


Best I leave it without comment and let readers find what they may in it.

I have my take from reading not just these tidbits, but from reading almost everything I could find published under his name including a number of German language pieces (I read German fluently), the religious-discussing parts of which differs markedly from what you just wrote, in my opinion. But to make that case stick well, I'd need to cite a lot more here and make reasoned arguments that I have actually made before (a few years back, elsewhere) but which now span many, many thousands of words and would probably bore everyone to pieces.

Jon

Last edited by jonk on 04 Feb 2008, 1:27 am, edited 2 times in total.