BWE wrote:What you write almost makes sense to me but not quite. At this point I've lost the thread of the discussion. I was responding to fallible's suggestion that it was possible to merely have a lack of belief. My position on that is that it requires ignorance or stupor to simply lack a belief. That not believing in god requires rejecting the premise of god because you can't claim ignorance. That's my reasoning. Hers is different. My way makes sense to me and I, being as you so astutely pointed out, a genius of uncommon quality, feel strongly that my argument should convince everyone. However, it doesn't seem to have convinced fallible. That's ok. She probably feels the same way although I don't know about the genius part with her. But my point of the separated truths was minor and connected to whatever she had said to me. Now I don't know what we are talking about so ah well. But I'm sure it's deep.

To be fair, you've been reasonably consistent about treating god-beliefs as internal states rather than as references to external entities, and I'd then propose it also means that professing belief (or professing lack of belief) is taken to be nothing more than a social strategy. This isn't really made clear by anyone's profession of belief or lack of belief, so a lot of them are going to insist that it's putting words in their mouths or attempting mind-reading, or some other such dalliance. The thread title, and all the other attempts to address the same question then are just blinkered, mistaken efforts to treat deities as external entities. That means all the hogwash about garden sprites, unicorns and orbiting teapots, not to mention black swans, are just weird attempts at misdirection toward external entities. All I've ever said about deities is that there haven't been any new or original deities for a very long time. "Internal truth" doesn't denote deities to me; it denotes rapture.

I'm so profoundly sorry to everybody for my psychotic posts last night/this morning. Truly batshit crazy I was - again. AIP. I do it to myself time and time again and never seem to learn. Misery.

I dont have a lack of belief. I dont reject anything that can be proven. The existence of deity has not. This thread is the biggest load of dribble. It is an attempt as so many do to give a complicated answer to a simple question: Is there actual proof of a deity's existence? The simple answer: NO. What you believe is personal to yourself.

Scot Dutchy wrote:I dont have a lack of belief. I dont reject anything that can be proven. The existence of deity has not. This thread is the biggest load of dribble. It is an attempt as so many do to give a complicated answer to a simple question: Is there actual proof of a deity's existence? The simple answer: NO. What you believe is personal to yourself.

That's vacuous (to me) or dangerous (to you) or both. You're limiting yourself from the start to proofs you can demonstrate that you understand or else are committed to arguments from authority. That includes scientific arguments that hinge on an analysis of evidence that you may not understand. If you claim you understand the proof (including analysis of evidence) of the Higgs boson, I'll be skeptical that you know what you're talking about. That doesn't mean you can't accept the Higgs boson, but it means that your statement that you don't reject anything that can be proven is rash or naive. Some theist is going to tell you that you just don't understand his proof of the existence of God. Fine pickle you're in, precisely according to your own principles.

We don't accept creator gods because they were proposed by prescientific people simply to explain the brute fact of existence and who didn't know anything about just how much would have to have been created and set going after the rocks and the waters and the firmament were made. They called it 'firmament' because they thought it was eternal and unchanging. As soon as people knew some modern cosmology they started talking about a trigger god who was thereafter uninvolved, but that's a rehash that someone dreamed up ex post facto and pretty much ex recto.

BOLLOCKS JUST UNBELIEVABLE BOLLOCKS.

JFCOAPS?

Yep. I am afraid so. Some people. It is not surprising when top universities still have departments of theology.

To whom is the bollocks unbelievable?

Fallible wrote:JFCOAPS?

Jeremy Fucking Corbyn Old Age Pensioners?

Just For Coming Out Against Penguins, Seriously?

The last one.

Scot Dutchy wrote:BOLLOCKS JUST UNBELIEVABLE BOLLOCKS.

Aww, Scot, you post bollocks in these forums at least 1.5 times more often than I do, on average.

Fallible wrote:The last one.

Called it! Swish.

Thommo wrote:

Fallible wrote:The last one.

Called it! Swish.

If you go for basketball metaphors, you'll love this one:

https://twitter.com/Trevor_Luznak/statu ... 79/video/1

Thommo wrote:

Fallible wrote:JFCOAPS?

Jeremy Fucking Corbyn Old Age Pensioners?

Just For Coming Out Against Penguins, Seriously?

Jane Fonda can't open a packet of sweets.

Jenerally, fools cannot often avoid piss-poor spelling.

BWE wrote:

Hermit wrote:

BWE wrote:We can empirically examine beliefs as generated from something. Any attributes pinned to a god were put there by a human and presumably were attempts to explain empirical experience.

This is true. However, the question asked in this thread is: "Lack of belief in gods =/= believing there are no gods?"

Historically, theists have this tendency to redefine god when challenged about his existence. Wisdom's parable is quite a fitting description of that. Every time an atheist makes an empirically based objection, theists will reply with something that diminishes what their god is. They become invisible, inscrutable, wise beyond mere human comprehension, and so forth. In the end their god(s) are impervious to empirical examination. Every . fucking . time. And it does not matter if you argue with some namby pamby Catholic who does not object to contraception, abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism and whatnot, or some died in the wool brimstone and hellfire fundamentalist.

Once transmogrified from a real, personally meddlesome god to an incomprehensible, vague creator of everything and uncaused cause not a million miles distant from the Divine Watchmaker, I tend to let their new what god is not type definition stand and simply comment that I recognise gods by what they do an until I see evidence of their agency I lack a belief in their existence. Such evidence would of course entail proof that the garden would definitely look different were it not for the work of the invisible gardener.

This approach places the onus of proof for the existence of god(s) on theists, and they have no escape to non-empirical "explanations". It also relieves me of having to disprove the existence of a do-nothing Divine Watchmaker, should they be tempted to shift the onus on to me.

This makes the whole question weird to me. The onus of proof is not particularly urgent in this case afaict outside the individual weighing it to personally evaluate the claim. Paradigms change when people die. This one is changing. If we survive another 400 years as a species, and maintain a scientific economy, I bet a million dollars religion as it's practiced today will be an anachronism. I will be waiting in 2418 to collect my money.

Of course it's weird to you. You keep loading the issue - Lack of belief in gods =/= believing there are no gods? - up with one unnecessary complication after another.

Try to keep it simple. Like this: Some people believe some god-thingie exists. Others do not believe some god-thingie exists. Do those who do not believe some god-thingie exists actually possess a belief that there is no god? Must they? Can they?

I argue that it is unproblematic to believe, at least with the limited certainty inductivism can provide, that a god exists if evidence can be found on empirical grounds. It's simply a matter of testing assertions made about such a god and testing them. At RDF and again at Rationalia I have proposed one such scenario. This looks like a suitable occasion to drag it out again.

Elsewhere in this forum this question was asked: What would it take for you to believe in God? I thought of a scenario that might work, at least for an interventionist, personal one. A lot of Christians (and not only Christians, come to think of it) believe in the power and efficacy of prayer. Well, it should be possible to empirically test for the existence of their God. Gather, say, 40,000 people suffering from trachoma and divide them into four groups. One will be treated by doctors, one will be prayed for, one will be prayed for and treated by doctors and one will be utterly ignored. The result will be pretty convincing if the prayed for groups fare best. If it doesn't, of course, it proves nothing. Perhaps God was busy having a shit at the time, or maybe he just hates some sinners and gave them trachoma as punishment. Or he might have played his favourite trick: he was testing his followers' faith.

Still, if experiments of the kind I just sketched can be repeated with similarly favourable results for the prayed for groups, it could be said that evidence for a personal, interventionist God has been provided.

Would you be surprised if such a test came out negative? Me neither. Nor would most Christians. Hence apologetics, the continual reinterpretation of the Bible turning it from literal to figurative truth and the god-thingie from a supernatural force who has wrought particular interventions since creation into the invisible gardener John Wisdom described.

The Christian god is becoming increasingly removed from empirical examination through all manner of apologetics and ad hoc addenda. Try it out on 100 Christians who say god is an all-loving being by showing them this picture:



Yes, that's a tiny detail of an "Act of God". It killed a quarter million people indiscriminately inside a few hours for no other discernible reason than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those 100 Christians will give you various explanations why their god is an all-loving god still. The explanations will take many forms, but they will all share one property: They are not empirically testable.

In the end we are left with a god thingie that looks near enough like the invisible gardener or the divine watchmaker to lack any features by which we can tell one from the other.

We cannot attempt to do the impossible by saying I believe that such a god-thingie exists, nor need we bother, because by definition we can know nothing about what the invisible gardener or the divine watchmaker wants us to do, or even if he wants us to do anything in particular. Arguing about the (non)existence of either is about as pointless as arguments can become.

Hermit wrote:
Yes, that's a tiny detail of an "Act of God". It killed a quarter million people indiscriminately inside a few hours for no other discernible reason than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those 100 Christians will give you various explanations why their god is an all-loving god still. The explanations will take many forms, but they will all share one property: They are not empirically testable.

In the end we are left with a god thingie that looks near enough like the invisible gardener or the divine watchmaker to lack any features by which we can tell one from the other.

We cannot attempt to do the impossible by saying I believe that such a god-thingie exists, nor need we bother, because by definition we can know nothing about what the invisible gardener or the divine watchmaker wants us to do, or even if he wants us to do anything in particular. Arguing about the (non)existence of either is about as pointless as arguments can become.

I (and perhaps BWE, for that matter) wlll continue to reject philosophical ("black swan") approaches to countering theology, and stick to regarding professed god-beliefs as problems in individual and social human behavior, in politics. Armed with an appreciation of anthropology and the history of deities in human literature, I'm not fooled by any suggestion that the Divine Watchmaker is not a modern modification of some old god achieved by the trivial stunt of taking away the all-loving or all-powerful bits. I conclude the Divine Watchmaker is absent by recognizing the shell game represented by tweaking the character of deities that were invented by ignorant goat-roasters and ruined by searches for evidence. One just proceeds inductively from there, but if induction isn't your thing, then perhaps "lacking belief" is your ticket out.

Manipulations of old gods look just like reactions of people exposing infantile tendencies to preserve the god talk that used to be called 'sensus divinatus', and that helps them feel special, and I have little sympathy for their plight. It's the 'sensus divinatus', the higher sensibility, that such people are trying to show off by pushing gods at you these days. It's actually not at all about the existence of anything more than their own special sauce, and still no spoons are bent. You already know how to deal in your own way with the fire-and-brimstone crowd by asking them for evidence. Tim Peake's handlers are going to try to keep him away from anyone who'd ask him any embarrassing public questions about his "spiritual experiences".

Cito di Pense wrote:I (and perhaps BWE, for that matter) wlll continue to reject philosophical approaches to countering theology, and stick to regarding professed god-beliefs as problems in individual and social human behavior, in politics.

That's fine with me.

Meanwhile I focus on the question posed in the thread title and its opening post. Destroying the notion that a lack in belief in gods is just another belief - by implication in no way better than having a belief in gods - seems worth doing. It is an accusation levelled at de facto atheists like me often enough. It's also a false dichotomy, something else worth drawing attention to. It's another way of countering theology. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Hermit wrote:the notion that a lack in belief in gods is just another belief

I'm sorely tempted to treat a lack more as just another deficiency, especially when dealing with the folks at the Department of Tautology Department, but you go right ahead and do what you think is best. In fact, don't many believers treat a lack of belief as a deficiency? Those guys are skinning cats and leaving nothing but the bones. I, on the other hand, don't recognize a lack of something I never had; calling it a 'lack' is just to recognize something that other people have and you don't, which stops making sense when we are talking about anything more ethereal than a bank balance. It's the having that should strike you as weird.

Hermit wrote:It is an accusation levelled at de facto atheists like me often enough.

Our focus then is permitted to broaden to include lack of belief in all sorts of dumb-ass shit including the spiritual experiences of non-denominational and non-theistic woo-heads who might suggest that our lack of spiritual experience is a deficiency as well. Don't tell me you've never seen them do it, but I guess that's gonna stray too far from the thread title for ya. I'm saying that anecdotes about non-theistic spiritual experiences are not referring to different shit. It has the same stink. This is what BWE is up to in trying to get someone to stop thinking of gods as entities, an approach I understand quite well, although from what he says, I guess it all smells different to him.