Atheism Examined

I don't know what there is to examine. Atheists have no defining creed, no tradition of core literature or scripture, no churches, no catechism, no shared ethos - nothing that ties us together beyond our rejection of the statement "Gods exist."Beyond that you're looking at what self-described atheists tend to do, or believe, or what have you, but it's not going to be possible to talk about the characteristics of atheism as a coherent whole, because, aside from the position on gods (which, even for that, atheists may not agree on precisely how that position is stated), there really aren't any. There's nothing that I believe that I think should be insulated from scrutiny, but it's important to remember that most of what you've listed in your post actually has nothing to do with atheism per se; it's mostly just independent philosophical positions that are associated, to a greater or lesser degree, with people who are atheists.

It's no surprise to see so many myths about atheism in your post; atheists are a very maligned group. Anybody who has "secret knowledge" - that is, they know (or think they know) something that most people don't - is going to consider themselves part of an "elite". It's true in every field, even religion. Why does that surprise you?Or is this just more of a pattern you've established where the same behaviors for which you give a pass to the religious are used to impeach atheists? It never has been easy, because it always comes down to drawing a nonsense distinction between "not believing that something exists" and "believing that something doesn't exist." It's the same thing said two different ways; atheism and agnosticism are the same position with two different names. Well, that's absolute nonsense. The burden of proof is always on he who makes the positive claim of existence, not he who points out that no evidence for the positive claim has been provided.Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The lack of evidence (for instance) for a teapot in orbit of Alpha Centuri is good reason to conclude that there is no such teapot. But God is not a monkey. And as you've said, the only thing that would be everywhere at once, eternally, would be God.Thus it's sufficient to find only one place where there is no God to prove that there's no God, anywhere. As you've defined him, he can't both exist and not be somewhere.Well, there's no God right here where I am, and I've never been to a place where there is a God, so that's a considerable weight of evidence that there is no God, anywhere - not as you've defined him.That's the position of a lot of atheists, like me - we don't know that all possible conceptions of God have been falsified, but it's certainly safe to say that the popular concepts of God have been. Concepts like "God is an all-powerful creator and father-figure" or "God is an energy force that grants wishes". Gods like "God is a merry prankster whose every action is taken in such a way to conceal his existence" disprove themselves by Occam's Razor.All the popular conceptions of God either run contrary to physical fact or run contrary to internal consistency. That is why the "stronger-than-weak" atheist (a "6" on the "Dawkins scale", if you will, which is just about as strong as atheists ever go in practice) asserts that "there is no God." Because that's not how people arrive at conclusions. If absolute certainty is necessary for you to arrive at conclusions, then yes, that's the best that you can say.But nobody lives like that. We arrive at conclusions based on relatively uncertain information all the time - it would be paralyzing to operate in any other way. The realities of biology introduce doubt into all data - you could be hallucinating, or dreaming, or misremembering.But on the same basis that I conclude (though I can't be sure) that Scarlett Johansson is not present in my kitchen, I conclude that God is not present in my universe. With the same certainty. Which God? The common tactic of theists is to leave this term purposefully undefined, so that when the atheist does disprove a certain God, the goalposts are moved.Honestly if the best theists can muster to defend their beliefs are disingenuousness, that doesn't speak well for the veracity of their beliefs. Except that this isn't true. Theists are no less likely to engage in moral backbending to excuse specific situations than anybody else. There's a million such examples. "God says 'thou shall not murder', but execution and war don't count."In practice, morality for theists isn't any more absolute, or less nuanced, than morality for atheists. Combined with the propensity of religion to rationalize and promote otherwise-needless immoral acts (i.e. the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the abuses of the Soviet Union), and we see why atheists, as a whole, tend to be slightly better-behaved than theists.

I wouldn't say "all." For instance, people who believe in The Force are nominally atheist, but clearly not motivated by scientific rationalism or evidence-based inquiry. Arguably, Buddhism is a completely atheistic religion. And, indeed, we're all born atheists; but clearly a 2-year old infant is not motivated by evidence-based inquiry via the scientific method.Atheism is a very broad category.

Lack of belief in God is atheism. To lack the belief in something's existence is the same as believing that the something doesn't exist.

There's no such thing as "active disbelief." You don't take an action to disbelieve; you just don't believe. We all disbelieve in what we're ignorant of. The result is the same.

But of course you do, because there's no evidence for them.If somebody puts forth a proposition for which there is no evidence, what is your reaction?Imagine you have two guys in front of you. One says "there's a teapot in orbit around Alpha Centarui." Another says "there's no teapot there." In the absence of any evidence that there's such a teapot there, is it really reasonable to say that both of those positions are equally supported, and that there's no way to come to a conclusion? Of course not.Propositions for which there is no evidence are best regarded as false. Whether or not you've even heard the proposition doesn't change anything.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Sure. People like you lying about atheists. There are no such inferences, and the reason that God's existence cannot be proven is because God does not exist.The fact that you can't provide a proof of God's existence doesn't eliminate the burden on you to prove your assertions. It's no one's obligation to prove or disprove your assertions until you've presented evidence for them.I mean, you can go around and assert all the unsupportable stuff you want, but intellectually honest people are under no obligation to respond until you present your evidence. The simple fact that you've made an assertion doesn't obligate anyone to disprove it. To say that there is no God is a negative affirmation, not a positive one, obviously. Chemical changes in the brain and body associated with people who claim to be feeling love.Honestly, though, whether or not love exists is hardly material. Nobody's trying to tell me how to live my life because of what love wants me to do, or not do. The reason that people are so commonly atheists about God is because the theists are always in our faces about God. If they wouldn't ever bother anybody, the rest of us wouldn't have anything to disbelieve in.I don't go around telling people I'm an atheist. It's not relevant. But when somebody asks about my belief in God, I tell them that I'm an atheist. When somebody tells me how I have to act because that's what their God demands, I tell them about atheism.Do you see the difference? What is he made of, then? Here's several pictures of the human heart. Can you point out the God in these pictures? I do. Not so amazingly, God makes perfect sense and becomes completely understandable when you realize there's no such thing, and it's just an ill-defined but angrily defended fiction.The barrier to your understanding of God is your misconception about what God actually is. Isn't that proven by the fact that atheists have no trouble understanding God, but theists always complain that they can't understand God? Isn't that evidence that they're proceeding from false premises? Why, are you blind? I just dropped a spoon in the kitchen, and I assure you, I was able to see gravity perfectly well. Well, here, among other places. Let me ask you this. Is it generally a feature of things that exist that you can make up whatever features you want, as necessary, to respond to counterarguments?Isn't that a feature we more commonly associate with falsehood? Isn't multiple, contradictory accounts something we also most commonly associate with falsehood? You don't see any backbending in the fact that you had to develop an entire paragraph's-worth of imaginary moral situations to explain how to apply a single sentence's-worth of moral precept?You've proven my point, NJ. It's a universal feature of morality - atheist and theist - that it isn't simple, and that it can't be reduced to simple absolutes. Your own examples proved that.

Shit, NJ, how long do you think this stuff takes? I rebutted nearly every one of your arguments on the gryphon ride from Ironforge to Stormwind City.You act like it's a titanic struggle to deal with the arguments of theism, but honestly the intellectual efforts of theists to defend theism couldn't be more pathetic. In a hundred thousand years of belief in gods, what's the best your side has ever developed? Ridiculous sophistry like the ontological argument. And, of course, "believe in my God or I'll fucking kill you." (Historically that's been a big winner for you guys.)

And I think the whole issue is a red herring, which serves only to cause atheists/agnostics to squabble amongst themselves rather than dealing with the intellectual vapidity put forward by theists in defense of theism.Honestly I can't see any merit in arguing about different kinds of disbelief. Either you believe, or you don't.

Fair enough.

That's what I mean. If you're a person who requires absolute certainty to arrive at conclusions, then, indeed, you won't be able to arrive at a conclusion about the existence or nonexistence of God.But nobody lives like that. In the real world, reasonable people arrive at tentative conclusions because there's no such thing as certainty.I've arrived at the tentative conclusion that there's no such thing as God. I'm a "6" on the Dawkins scale. You might be a 5 - or you might be a 6 who doesn't feel comfortable admitting it. I don't think any human being is a 7 - conclusive, absolute certainty in the fundamental nonexistence of any such thing as "God". (That doesn't stop theists from arguing as though every atheist they encounter is a 7, but that's the straw-atheist they're arguing with. The 7 is the atheist that it takes too much faith to be, if you will.)I'll post an excerpt from Dawkins book if there's interest in using his scale as a continuum of theism/atheism. I find it much more informative than the standard "weak/strong atheist" dichotomy. Two guys come to you. One says "there's a teapot in orbit around Alpha Centauri." The other guy says "there's no such teapot."Now, of course, no human has ever been to Alpha Centauri, so there's no evidence that such a teapot exists. Are you really telling me that there's no basis for deciding between these two propositions? That we should conclude both of these positions are equally supported?No, of course not. There's no reason to assume the truth of statements that have no evidence. And that which is not true is false. Reasonable people come to the tentative conclusion that the second guy is probably right, every single time. Does anybody come to the conclusion that he's absolutely certainly right? I don't know anybody who comes to absolute conclusions, except for religious believers. We aren't certain, yes. I've never claimed certainty.But to say we don't know? I think that's incorrect. I think there's more than enough evidence - or lack of it, if you will - to merit coming to a conclusion. I'm a scientist (for purposes of example.) I maintain that nerves conduct information not in the form of electrical potentials, but in the form of sound waves.I advance no evidence to support my view. You're a surgeon, about to perform surgery. Your patient has been anesthetized with chemicals that assume that interrupting electrochemical pathways is sufficient to prevent transmission of pain information to the brain, but as far as you know, they do nothing to prevent the transmission of sound waves.Do you proceed? This is crucial life-saving surgery, but if you proceed on an unanesthetized subject, she'll die just from the pain. You have access neither to my data on the subject (if I even have any) nor any medical text on neurophysiology - only your experience as a surgeon, which, as you know, is all anecdotal and therefore can't be said to refute a scientific study.What do you do? I'm comfortable cutting away because assertions for which no data can be produced are probably wrong. If I were to wait for certainty before coming to a conclusion, as you suggest, my patient would die waiting.

I'm aware that it's considered a logical fallacy, but all scientific reasoning is fallacious.

You're not aware that induction is a fallacy?I hate philosophy, and it's not my intent to turn this into a discussion of philosophy, but believe me when I tell you that one of the major problems facing philosophers of science is how scientific knowledge can be trusted when none of the steps in the scientific method can be logically verified. The "problem of induction" is part of this.Personally I answer the question simply - "because philosophy is bullshit." If philosophy can't figure out how to reconcile scientific knowledge with the logical fallacies, the failing is in philosophy.The problem of induction, according to Wikipedia, is basically that the only way to establish the effecacy of induction as a tool is inductively - it's always worked before. A little circular, don't you think? Nonetheless I conclude that if science and logic are in conflict, then it's logic that's wrong, somehow. I don't know what that makes me (aside from a really shitty Vulcan.)

Oh no, I'm not disagreeing. The success of science is not in question, and quite frankly, I find philosophical concerns about its logical underpinnings kind of a waste of time.In my experience scientists doing work in science spare not a thought for the philosophy of science, except in the occasional, jocular "isn't it funny what they think over in the Humanities division?" kind of sentiment. (My wife, on the other hand, finds a lot of the arguments of philosophers of science maddening, and an insulting devaluation of her years of labor in her field.)Anyway I didn't mean to turn this into a thing about philosophy of science. As I said I'm aware that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" is the precise opposite of what is considered to be logical. To my mind, that has absolutely nothing to do with its utility in the real world.

You polled them and asked?No? I'm not prepared to accept your made-up assertions about "atheists by and large." I don't see where I used the term "absolute." Oddly enough, like myself, my wife is capable of both understanding the chemical basis of human attraction and appreciating the human experience of love.I guess it's funny how we wind up with people who share our outlooks on life. Actually, that's not so funny, is it? Like Sam Harris I think it's well past time to retire facile and false oppositions between feelings and rationality, etc. ...what?How can you not see the difference? Are you even reading my posts, NJ? I often get the sense that you aren't. He's the what in the right ventricle? I just told you. A comforting fiction.See? Simple to understand. That is gravity, and that is the wind.By your logic we never see anything at all; since it's only the reflected photons exciting cells in our retinas that we can perceive. If seeing the effects of something is not the same as seeing that thing, then truly, we never see anything at all.I'm of the opinion, largely, that most people's eyes do work, and they are able to see; not the least of which because so many people are able to perform tasks that are obviously sight-based. Clearly, in your blindness, you've come to the conclusion that everyone else is just as blind as you. In the way I just told you. Weren't you paying attention? You even quoted it.To repeat - the fact that you had to develop a whole paragraph of hypothetical situations to explain a single sentence offered as a clear and universal "moral absolute" refutes your own assertion that the morality of the theist is always clear and absolute.There's no such thing as a morality that is clear and absolute, because no moral code can encapsulate all possible situations. There's even a situation where we would conclude that a person has every moral right to kill another person, even though the killer is standing in the killee's own kitchen. A policeman, for instance, might be very justified indeed in killing a suspect in the suspect's own home, out of self-defense.I find your response disappointing in many ways. You've largely missed most of my points, probably when you cut up my post as though to reply to it line by line. I suggest you make an effort to understand my points as a whole rather than trying to interpret every sentence absent the context in which they were written.