Showing posts with label "What is atheism". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "What is atheism". Show all posts

The Ten Well-Founded "Presuppositions" of Atheism

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Robert Conner wrote something recently that prompted me to write this.

The Ten Well-Founded "Presuppositions" of Atheism:

1. We require sufficient objective empirical evidence before we will accept any claims of divine revelation.

2. We accept the general principle that any specific miraculous claim must overcome the strong presumption that it didn't occur based on the overwhelming cumulative evidence that miracles have not occurred.

3. We accept the view that believers must shoulder the burden of proof as outsiders to show their faith is objectively true, given that learning a religion as an uncritical child from one's parents in a religious culture is a notoriously unreliable way to know which religion is true, if there is one.

4. We accept the results of scientific clinical studies that have shown petitionary prayers work no better than chance, and reject personal antecdotal unconfirmed stories told by believers.

5. We accept that the laws of nature in the ancient pre-scientific world were the same as they are now, so we have a very strong presumption against accepting miraculous claims in the ancient superstitious world prior to the rise of modern science and the modern world.

6. We accept that which is objectively probable, and reject that which is merely possible.

7. We reject any and all double standards and special pleadings from religionists when they argue for their faith over the faiths of others.

8. We accept the overwhelming consensus of scientists as the surest guarantee of what is true, over any and all claims by religious leaders, scholars and their holy books.

9. We proportion what we conclude based on the strength of the objective evidence.

10. We accept the approach of methodological naturalism in assessing miraculous claims, whereby we seek out natural explanations for any and all events in question, given that doing so is the best and only way to know the truth in the midst of so many religious frauds, fakes, liars and hucksters.

Atheism Explained: What is an Atheist?

Words mean what I use them to mean. Dictionary definitions merely report how most people use words. They may not always report how I use them or how small groups of people use them. So any word can mean anything I use it to mean. The problem is that using words in some private sense that is unfamiliar to others will result in miscommunication. There is a shared understanding of how English people use words so we must use them in the standard ways if we want to be understood.

Words are not static in their definitions either, but dynamic and forever changing. The word “nice” previously meant “stupid” and the word “gay” previously meant “happy,” but now they mean something different. That’s because how we use words evolve down through the centuries. There is Old- Middle- and Modern English, which was derived in part from German and even Greek forbearers. There is American, Britain, and Australian English.

Now let’s think about the word “atheism” in this light. I am an atheist. What do I mean when I use this word? I mean that I do not think there are any supernatural beings or supernatural forces. It’s not that I have no beliefs about them. I do. I believe they do not exist. People who do not have any beliefs about such beings are people who have never considered them in the first place.

By using this word in that way the ONLY question left unresolved is whether I am effectively communicating to others. The problem is that there is no agreed upon definition of this word by atheists themselves. One of the problems is that atheism is a negative word. Etymologically speaking an atheist is a non-theist (a=non theist). Christians themselves were called atheists in the Roman days because they did not believe in the Roman pantheon. But if I were to say that some object is not a door I have not told you what that object is, only what it is not. The problem is further compounded by Christians themselves who wish to define the word for us as meaning “metaphysical naturalists,” which may not adequately describe all of us.

Skeptics have proposed other words to positively describe themselves as “Brights” or “Secular Humanists.” There are agnostic atheists, spiritual atheists, and Christian atheists. There is both a positive and negative atheism. Buddhism may be described as an atheistic philosophy.

For Christians listening in on these discussions let me say for the record that I consider them to be little more than Wittgensteinian language games, which will probably be solved in the future as more and more atheists adopt the same language to describe the same thing, which, when the dust settles will indeed communicate who we are and what we share (if there is a "we" to be found). [Keep in mind that Christians have the same problem with the word “Christian.” Is everyone a Christian who describes himself as one? I repeatedly hear that some group or person is/was not a “true Christian.”] I suspect that if most everyone in the world became atheists there wouldn't even be a word to describe us. We would probably be described as human beings, or members of the same golf club, or of another type grouping.

In any case, Dr. John Shook recently attempted to define it. See what you think.

Atheism, Agnosticism and the Default Position

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On a forum someone said this: "Atheism is not a belief, rather it is the absence of a belief, and it is beliefs which need to be justified." I responded as follows:

Atheism simply describes a "non-theist." Since the word “atheism” is a negative one, meaning “not a theist,” it doesn’t specify much of anything else except that a person who is an atheist is a non-believer. A non-believer in what? When the question is whether a person believes in any God, an atheist is someone who does not believe in any of them. However, I want to add that when the question is whether a person believes in, say Christianity, an atheist is someone who does not believe in the Christian God. Christians themselves were called atheists in the first century C.E. because they did not believe in the gods and goddesses of the Roman Empire, even though they clearly believed in a God. So when I say Christians are atheists with regard to all other gods but their own, I am being accurate by calling them atheists with regard to those other gods, even if they are not atheists with regard to whether any God exists. It depends on the question and the context what the words atheism/atheist mean.

An agnostic will agree with the atheist against all religious accounts, but she will go on to argue against atheism, claiming it can give no sufficiently justifiable account of the natural world either.

I cannot make too much sense of the idea that atheism, in the context of our debates, means a lack of a belief in God. My position is that agnosticism is the default position, the position that merely says, "I don't know" (which can probably best be described as soft-agnosticism). ANYONE WHO LEAVES THE DEFAULT POSITION HAS THE BURDEN OF PROOF, whether it's a theist or an atheist. When faced with the theist claims an atheist denies them. She doesn't merely say, "I don't believe you," for then she would be an agnostic, the default position. An atheist says "there is no god" (again, depending on the question being asked). And the strong atheist claims she knows this with a great deal of assurance while the weak atheist claims she knows this weakly.

So when an atheist says, "there is no God," or "this God does not exist," those are indeed stated beliefs. If it isn't a stated belief then what is it? And all beliefs must be justified sufficiently to the person making the claim. Non-beliefs must be those things we have never heard about or taken a position on.