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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote:
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: You can't demand seriousness while being flip. -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: Who says there's a question being asked? -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: For any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory. Some extrapolation required. -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: This is silly. Do you have any evidence of the number 3? Not the existence of, say, three basketballs or three m&m's, but of the actual platonic number. Do you then not believe in the number 3? Are you an athree-ist? Or are you actually not in the business of contemplating the existence of 3 at all? You're an atheist if you actively believe God doesn't exist. You're an agnostic if you actively believe it's not possible to come up with a coherent position on the matter. You cannot be both an atheist and an agnostic. -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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What are you talking about? God is a concept.
If you don't have a position on the matter, you're not anything. Just because I don't know if I believe in the Democratic planks doesn't make me a Republican. EDIT: Didn't see your response, john. Got to go to work. Will be back. -------------------- ![]() Edited by sonamdrukpa (02/11/13 05:29 PM)
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: No one disagrees that the concept of God exists. God her/him/itself, if she/he/it exists, is a concept though (as well as possibly a being, a supernatural entity, a force, etc.) - in the same way that 3 itself is a concept. To define the number 3 is enough to describe the qualities of the number 3. If one defines the concept of God, one can make inferences based on that definition as to some other qualities that "God" has. The concept God is different from the concept 3 in that it is at least theoretically possibly (ignoring for a moment if you disbelieve in God or not) to locate the being of God and say, "Yes, this being right here - this is the one that corresponds with my concept of God. They are the same thing." This is not possible with the number 3, because the number 3 has no physical incarnation, even in some theoretical sense. But this is not a salient difference for the point I'm trying to make - I'm not making a category error. The claim was made that evidence was necessary for belief in a God and that, therefore, lack of evidence constituted disbelief. Hence the claim was that a lack of evidence constituted atheism, regardless of whether or not there was a positive belief or not. However:
There are no athreeists, despite the fact that half the globe is mathematically illiterate and doesn't know of evidence of the existence of 3. It would take positive disbelief to become an athreeist. It is the same for being an atheist - it is not the default position for people who have never thought about God. Similarly, agnosticism i not simply the default position for people who haven't made up their mind yet - a child who is being taught for the first time that God exists isn't an agnostic for as long as it takes for his preacher to get to his conclusion, and yes, that is what you would be claiming if agnosticism doesn't require positive disbelief in a satisfactory level of evidence for belief or disbelief in God. **And I would like to argue that simply defining a number is not actually evidence of its existence - I can define Lamarkianism, but this is not evidence of its existence. HOWEVER, whether or not you disagree with me on what constitutes evidence is beside the point - while you, john, may have thought about the definition of the concept 3 before, most atheists have not, including clam_dude (at least not until now I'm guessing), and so my analogy would still hold - he believes in the number 3 even without having evidence of it. Quote: I think God is the exception to this general rule that things are not their concepts - God is both being and concept, at least as he/she/it is commonly defined. "God is Love" is a common saying, is it not? Also, this is one of the most important passages in the new testament, and therefore fundamental to many people's definition of God: Quote: Sounds like God is being defined as both a concept (the Word), an incorporeal being (that did things like make the world) and a coporeal being (Jesus). Quote: We choose to become atheists, agnostics, or deists - and it requires an active choice. Being apolitical does not correspond to atheism. Babies are apolitical, but they are not atheists - there is no word that corresponds to atheism with regards to the existence of God since people so often just end up following whatever religion their parents were or what is most dominant in their culture. "A-deists", or whatever you want to call them, are practically non-existent in adulthood. I don't think I've ever met one. As a small aside, I might be willing to budge to some degree on whether agnosticism requires active beliefs about the evidence for/against God, since there are so many varieties of people claiming to be agnostics. But I think you have to had at least thought about the concept once or twice and not just let it wash over you. Quote: I definitely agree with you that Dawkins is sloppy about this - he's a gigantic dick and throws flip remarks implying his critics were attacking straw men when they were not. When he says he's an agnostic, he's simply playing games and I'm under no compulsion to respect that self-designation. The man is a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, and he knows it. I don't know about all of the others, but I know that for instance Hitchens branded himself as an atheist more as a label so that people understood where he was coming from more than anything else. If he was going to be specific about it, he was an antitheist agnostic, and that is probably what most of those others (I'm guessing) would say if you pushed them to be specific. That does not make them both atheists and agnostics - it's like if I married a woman with a young child who came to see me as her father: I would brand myself as her father, and I would share many characteristics of fathers, but if you wanted me to be precise about it I couldn't in all honesty say I was her father. I would simply be a man involved in the child's life. It wouldn't ever be correct to say I was both her father and "simply a man involved in the child's life". The strict definition of atheism requires active disbelief, the common conception of atheism requires active disbelief, and it is only the messy realities of identity politics that create the illusion of wiggle room. -------------------- ![]() Edited by sonamdrukpa (02/11/13 07:57 PM)
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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whew
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: Jesus Christ, that's some nerve, saying I didn't address your points when I specifically did and then you go and ignore key bits of evidence for mine such as the gospel of john. Quote: It is a grammatically correct sentence - please tell me what rules of grammar I've supposedly broken. Quote: Absolutely not. I'll address this shortly. Quote: Do you understand what the word "necessary" means? If you lack something necessary for belief, then it's impossible by the definition of necessary to believe. Quote: What type of crazy grammar do you subscribe to? "X is a concept" is a syntactically well-formed sentence. Here's another metaphor, because you seem really confused in these posts: "America" is a concept. I can also have a concept of America, but the America itself is a still concept - it is an abstraction, in the same way that peace is an abstraction, or numbers. Here is the wiki on "concept" if you need some reference. God is an abstract idea as well. There are also conceptions of God, but they are not what I was referring to, and I made it perfectly clear that I was avoiding such confusion. Quote: No - only if you also think that god is love would you then believe in god. But you don't - you're an atheist. Saying "God is love" for you is on the level of saying "Ghosts are love" or "The tooth fairy is love". You're under no rational obligation to believe logical consequences from statements you specifically deny or hold as nonsensical. Quote: Most deists do. Quote: Did you at all read the passage from the Gospel of John? I'm not conflating ideas here - I'm specifically arguing that God as concept and God as being are the same thing - a property which almost all deists hold as fundamental to the idea of God. As Christians put it, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." I'm not conflating the "concept of God" with God at all, because "the concept of God" is not God, while "God as concept" is. In the same way, my concept of America is not the same thing as the buildings, people, land, etc. that compose America - my concept of America is not America. However, the nation of America - which is only a concept - is the same thing as the physical incarnation of America - the people, the land, etc. Quote:Quote: We're obviously at a dead end here, but I would like to point out that no one I know has ever described a baby as an atheist - it is not the common language usage of the word. -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: I went to bed and when I came back there were 200 new posts. Also, why did your quote make me into SeaShrooms? Quote:Quote: I spoke wrongly, but that actually makes my point more clear: disbelief in God is required to be an atheist; lack of belief is not. A lack of evidence for the existence of 3 is, to fix the analogy, similarly not sufficient to be an athree-ist, since that would require disbelief. Quote:Quote: That X was meant to be a stand-in for any appropriate noun you could throw in. The same way people go, "Imagine that person A does blah blah to person B, does person B have the right to blahdiblah" Quote: America is an abstract idea - that is all it takes to be a concept. How am I wrong? Quote: This is true. It does not make "America" not a concept. Quote:Quote: Ah, that makes sense. I guess the traditional deist response would be to say that you do believe in god - just that you have a stubborn refusal to either accept it or recognize it as such. As the early Christian church leader Paul said, "What may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse." As the pantheists would say, since you believe in the universe, you do believe in God - but again, you just refuse to accept this. I don't mean to argue either of these points, only to use them to explain. Quote:Quote: The nation of America is a concept - it is not merely the physical thing. It's the same way you are not merely your body - you are an abstraction, a collection of consciousness (an emergent property resulting from the configuration of your atoms but not simply those atoms) and prior actions and relationships with people and the world. Quote: Why not? In many cases the thing isn't the concept, but in many cases it is - love is a concept, peace is a concept, happiness is a concept, nations are concepts, people are concepts, sports teams are concepts, money is a concept. They are abstractions. They are descriptions of things which are sometimes physical but which are more than just physical things - when I talk about Real Madrid, the team is physically composed of the players, but the team is more than that - it is a particular relationship those players share as well. Money is a physical object, but it is also an abstraction - it is a store of value. And a dollar is both. There is no confusing of concepts and things there. Quote: Well, normally, but if we're talking about the beliefs of people whose ideas are profoundly shaped by bronze-age writings, I'd say it's relevant. Quote: I think you have confused me for SeaShrooms, though I'm unsure what sort of server error caused his username to replace mine. I haven't used the word dogma once. This is only barely on topic, but the philosopher Bertrand Russell, when asked what he would do if he died and ended up facing God, being asked why he didn't believe, said that he would say, "Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!" -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: There are also emergent phenomenon. For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epi Quote: No, peace itself is a concept even in the strictest sense of the word - what kind of odd definition of "concept" do you have where abstractions like peace aren't concepts? Would you really cop to a proposition like "3 isn't a concept - only my concept of 3 is!"? Quote: No, what the word "peace" refers to is peace. The definition is the "concept of peace", true, but propositions involving the word "peace" are judged on the qualities of peace itself, not on the concept of peace. Otherwise, if I said, "I wish there were peace in the world" I would be wishing for something that's already happened - the concept of peace already exists. One of the qualities of peace is that it is an abstraction. It is a concept. Concepts are abstractions. Concepts don't have to be actively conceived in order to still be conceptions. The number 3 would still be a concept even if people had never evolved to think it. Quote: No, it's not, any more than saying money is a concept is an admission that there is no physical incarnations of the concept - dollar bills, coins, etc. A quarter is money, even if money is an abstraction. Quote: If you're gay, you can be prevented from seeing your dying spouse in the hospital because they're not legally your spouse because gay people can't get married in most of this country...because in Leviticus 18:22 it says "One should not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable." and voters care about that. I can come up with a thousand similar examples. You may think that the Bible is irrelevant to today's world, but it clearly is. I think you're confusing "should be relevant" with "is relevant". -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: Regardless of your personal definition of what a concept is, the analogy still holds. I don't believe in [some primitive culture's boogeyman that I've never heard of], but that doesn't make me an a-[some primitive culture's boogeyman that I've never heard of]-ist. And I've never believed in the existence of [some number I've never thought about], but that doesn't make me an a-[some number I've never thought about]-ist. I am an a-toothfairy-ist, and that is because I actively deny the existence of the tooth fairy. People in Finland that have never heard of the tooth fairy are not a-toothfairy-ists. Active disbelief is required to be an atheist, regardless of whether or not you think God is a concept or a physical being or both. -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: I've gone too far; we've lost the point of the metaphor since no one actually ever uses the word a-toothfairy-ist. I'm simply going along with my argument, and you with yours. Quote: I know "you can't prove a negative" is a popular slogan in these sorts of discussions, but it's merely a handy gloss - in reality, there are many cases in people have proven what could be considered a "negative." For instance, it's been proven that there are no sets of positive integers a, b, and c such that a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value greater than two. I'd say that it's conclusively proven that there were no people living in North America at the time of the Dinosaurs, as another example. It's not possible to come up with evidence of nonexistence, but it is possible to come up with evidence that implies the nonexistence of something else. Now, it is true that there is no such thing as certain proof in the strictest sense of the word. But to claim that all or most atheists are also agnostics because they know it's possible they're wrong or misinformed is a level of technicality far too precise to apply to a word so rarely used in such a way. Vigorously proselytizing for positive atheism while at the same time claiming to be nothing but a passive atheist as well as agnostic based on strict definitions of these word that you know your opponents aren't using and don't believe are the proper definitions...I can admit that there is an extremely small possibility that, say, the Earth is flat, but if I visited the nearest geology department proclaiming "I don't deny that the Earth is flat", well, that would be nothing more than philosophical wanking. -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Like I said, nothing but philosophical wanking.
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: You're right - it does matter what labels we choose for ourselves. "Atheist" and "agnostic" are terms of social identity, and that's the reason that I think you're wrong to define the terms in such a way that a person can be both an atheist and an agnostic. At the level of precision you're using, anyone who's halfway cognitively honest would have to say that they're agnostic - and since your definition of atheism doesn't require positive belief, they'd also be atheists. A person could be a Muslim, an agnostic, and an atheist all at the same time. You've defined all the piss out of the words. It's not incorrect to identify as an atheist while still admitting the possibility you could be wrong. If you went up to Billy Graham and told him, "You're not a Christian because you can't be absolutely certain that God exists - you're agnostic" he would spit in your face (or turn the other cheek, if he's got his Christian shit down), or if you went to Al Sharpton and told him, "You're not an African American because you can't prove with certainty that your ancestors came from Africa - you should be agnostic about your race" he would smack you. In the same way, you can be an atheist even if your belief isn't certain...and to conflate that identity with agnosticism based on technical definitions seems to me to be nothing but an excuse to make hay. And it's not only that you're misusing these word - if we're going to be this level of precise, it seems to me that your definition of agnostic fails you. Can you prove that you don't know with certainty that God exists? Maybe you're just fooling yourself, and you really do know, in your heart of hearts, with absolute certainty that God does not exist - in which case you're not an agnostic. In fact, you should be agnostic about your agnosticism, and agnostic about your agnosticism with regards to your agnosticism, and agnostic about your agnosticism about your agnosticism with regards to your agnosticism...you don't see the absurdity with this level of technicality? -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Bertrand Russell:
Quote: If you want to only say you ought to be called an agnostic, that would be fine... -------------------- ![]()
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: I don't see how this is a response to that paragraph... Quote:Quote: Yes, there are some cultural muslims. But please go to your nearest imam and tell him that his being a Muslim and his being an atheist are not mutually exclusive and see how far it gets you. Quote:Quote: This is what the paragraph you first quoted, at the top of this post, was talking about...claiming no belief in anything is an absurdity - you couldn't even hold that you don't believe anything - and an impossibility as a human being...it would take the mind of a Buddha to really, truly, not believe in anything. While it may be accurate to say that it's impossible to be sure about something, to then label yourself as an agnostic is to make a claim...and you can't claim things and then at the same level of technicality go around saying that nothing is certain. Quote: I agree with this. If you want to make a technical distinction, you can, but - and this is the thing - you can't then also say that being an atheist technically means only a lack of belief, passive or active. Then you run into the problem of defining the distinctive meanings out of words. Quote: I believe I was the one who first mentioned the tooth fairy in this thread, though I could be wrong - and as I said then, I am an a-toothfairy-ist. I am not agnostic about the tooth fairy in any sense. I would not feel comfortable saying I was an agnostic about the tooth fairy to a man on the street, nor would I feel comfortable saying I was agnostic about the tooth fairy to a philosophy professor. Agnosticism, even in its technical sense, requires active belief that an issue is either undecided or undecidable. Admitting you could be wrong about something doesn't make you an agnostic - it only makes you intellectually honest. -------------------- ![]() Edited by sonamdrukpa (02/14/13 02:45 PM)
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Quote: I think most people would be alright if you said - "I'm an atheist, but I'm a reasonable one - tell me why you think God exists and I'll consider it." I think you'll also find that there are a fair amount of reasonable deists out there who believe in God but are open to being shown that they are wrong. But they don't go around claiming to be agnostics. -------------------- ![]() Edited by sonamdrukpa (02/14/13 02:45 PM)
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Wayfarer Registered: 10/18/11 Posts: 2,777 Last seen: 2 months, 7 days |
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Look at this another way, it's normal usage to say something like, "We have to be agnostic about the existence of Big Foot" but it's not normal usage to say "we have to be agnostics about Big Foot". Check out the respective amount of google search results for each:
"We have to be agnostics about" "We have to be agnostic about" It's possible to be atheist or deist but to label some of your beliefs as agnostic - that's simply a description of them. But to claim to actually be an agnostic is to make a claim of identity, and that identity requires that your beliefs are only agnostic. -------------------- ![]()
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