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Is Atheism a form of Faith?
I've wondered when reading posts if for some atheists their stance is a fait...

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Is Atheism a form of Faith?

Cheshire
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Posted 10/30/09 - 10:36 AM:	#361
sheps wrote: It is astonishing how well trained some of the more experienced members of these forums are in being overly aggressive towards those who don't share their atheistic positions. And how these threads always end up with the theists having to defend their position AGAIN, when the original point of this thread, I imagine, was to actually get the atheists to defend their position. It is very unfortunate that we don't have that many experienced contributors who follow a religion. To be honest, its probably because people who are not atheists on these threads widely get treated with contempt and hostility by those that are. Well, the context of this particular argument is rather insulting to atheist. If I started a thread "Are theist engaged in magical thinking?", I would have a lot of angry theist on my hands. Personally, I reluctantly arrived at atheism after a lot of thought and reflection. So, when a theist asserts I have taken a position based on faith(in a religious sense) it is offensive. Next, theist take a lot of liberty by inserting God whenever there might be an unknown. Do you know the origin of all existence? No. Then it must be God. Well, that comes across as a cheap shot, because the theist doesn't know either; he has simply selected to insert God where there is an unknown. Also, dishonest. No one believes or disbelieves based on the non-existent evidence for god. I simply look at theism from a historical perspective and I have all the evidence I need. God seems to exist to people who believe in God. When no one believes in a god, then the god no longer seems to exist to anyone. So, the existence of a god is the result of a belief in god. So, god can not exist independently of believers. Once you stop believing in god for a little while the nature of the delusion seems overwhelmingly apparent. And to say some one is deluded is such an insult generally that it makes the argument loaded from the start. Atheism feels like intellectual liberation and it is always painted with this brush of arrogant rejection. We aren't trying to take something away; just letting you know it was never there. Edited by Cheshire on 10/30/09 - 10:58 AM
Or not.

Kelby
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Posted 10/30/09 - 10:49 AM:	#362
Kant Chocula wrote: I may simply be parsing words By no means. If I take you at face value then I am committed to empiricism as my epistemology and some form of naturalism as my metaphysics. You need not be commited to empircism (which by the way I am not quite sure how you are using the term). The fact that I try making my eggs in the morning taste a little bit better each day does not make me an empiricist, but it does lend my actions to empirical experimentation. If you are making an empirical claim you are obligated to give us the empirical means of how you came to the conclusion if you wish to convince. However, it is unreasonable for you to expect me to accept a correspondence theory of truth in order to satisfy your curiosity about my claim. [/devil's advocate] Again, the act of empirically verifying something does not necessarily connote a pure correspondence theory of truth. What entitles you to have the right to determine my means of verification? I technically don't have the right to determine your means of verification, but I wasn't talking about your means of verification. You can do what you like, but don't expect any thinking person to be convinced by your discovery. If they can't discover it themselves then no one is convinced. Making something publicly demonstrable is what it means to make something verifiable. It pushes the truth claim at hand into the public sphere for critcism and testing. If however I grant you a "non-empirical" way of verifying God, and you claim to discover his(her) existence, then the question still stands....what do you mean by existence? A literal existence prone to discovery? ...or a deeper, more metaporical, i.e. watery sense of existence? I see science generally as a means of reliability. There is always room for doubt...but the beauty of science is that it has a strict mode of questioning (not too alienated from common sense). In other words, it can act as a form of persuasion. If we make propositions amenable to scientific inquiry then they have the potential of becoming reliable. If a theist is going to persuade "everyone," publicly, that God exists, and he/she wishes everyone to accept this fact as a fact in the world which all of us can see, then it is completely reasonable for the skeptic to ask the method used to see. We are not convinced otherwise. Edited by Kelby on 10/30/09 - 11:18 AM

sheps
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Posted 10/30/09 - 11:45 AM:	#363
Wosret wrote: I don't really see your vague finger waving in my general direction to be all that constructive either. If you take issue with what I, or others have said, then shouldn't you address those specific things? I'd rather not be tarnished in this fashion by association, with claims vague enough to be immune to reproach. Reasonable, sorry. It wasn't even especially directed at anyone on this thread, especially not you Wosret, but I did one similar to this a while back and got some pretty insulting responses, told I was talking shit, being an asshole etc. It just has occured to me that there are a lot of very eloquent and well-versed members who make some of us a bit wary of posting a pro-theist opinion, for fear of severe reproach and being told that they're an idiot.
"Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" - Hegel "An ounce of practice is worth a ton of preaching. " - Mohandas Gandhi "Natural poets, so-called, are fresh and newly arraigned talents, rejects of an over-cultivated, over-mannered and halting artistic epoch. They cannot avoid the commonplace, so one can view them as retrograde; they are, however, agents of regeneration and they give rise to new progress." - Goethe

Cheshire
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Posted 10/30/09 - 12:02 PM:	#364
sheps wrote: Reasonable, sorry. It wasn't even especially directed at anyone on this thread, especially not you Wosret, but I did one similar to this a while back and got some pretty insulting responses, told I was talking shit, being an asshole etc. It just has occured to me that there are a lot of very eloquent and well-versed members who make some of us a bit wary of posting a pro-theist opinion, for fear of severe reproach and being told that they're an idiot. Interesting. I'm in the southern US where being a theist is almost a social requirement. Here the theists seem to own and run everything. There are no less than 10 churches within walking distance from my home. So, the idea of a theist being alienated or timid is foreign to me.
Or not.

sheps
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Posted 10/30/09 - 12:08 PM:	#365
Cheshire wrote: Interesting. I'm in the southern US where being a theist is almost a social requirement. Here the theists seem to own and run everything. There are no less than 10 churches within walking distance from my home. So, the idea of a theist being alienated or timid is foreign to me. Well, I know that the UK still has its religious elements, but amongst people I know (all people under 30) being a theist is very rare. The resurgence of creationism (perhaps as a knee jerk reaction to the growth of political Islam in the Middle East?) in the US does seem to have brought about a big atheist reaction. Us Brits don't tend to get too into creationism, yet ironically some of the best known atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens) are British.
"Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" - Hegel "An ounce of practice is worth a ton of preaching. " - Mohandas Gandhi "Natural poets, so-called, are fresh and newly arraigned talents, rejects of an over-cultivated, over-mannered and halting artistic epoch. They cannot avoid the commonplace, so one can view them as retrograde; they are, however, agents of regeneration and they give rise to new progress." - Goethe

atightropewalker
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Posted 10/30/09 - 12:08 PM:	#366
Cheshire wrote: Well, the context of this particular argument is rather insulting to atheist. If I started a thread "Are theist engaged in magical thinking?", I would have a lot of angry theist on my hands. Personally, I reluctantly arrived at atheism after a lot of thought and reflection. So, when a theist asserts I have taken a position based on faith(in a religious sense) it is offensive. Next, theist take a lot of liberty by inserting God whenever there might be an unknown. Do you know the origin of all existence? No. Then it must be God. Well, that comes across as a cheap shot, because the theist doesn't know either; he has simply selected to insert God where there is an unknown. Also, dishonest. No the title of the thread is not 'atheists engaged in magical thinking' it is 'Is Atheism a form of Faith'. If the idea of faith is insulting then I suggest these people not only stay away from Kierkergaard and Wittgenstein but Hume and Locke, and Descartes and pretty much any epistomologist. So much is human life is based on unfounded assumptions that it seems special to me. We are not animals who simply react to impulses but we have the opportunity to reflect and back the 'faithful' or less probabilistic answer in the 'belief' we will be proved right. I personally have never believed in global warming and whereas before when we had 'evidence' I was committing faith, but, personally, I now appear to have been proven right. We are humans and we have the choice to back the idea we think right provided there ia possibility it is right. Cheshire wrote: No one believes or disbelieves based on the non-existent evidence for god. I simply look at theism from a historical perspective and I have all the evidence I need. God seems to exist to people who believe in God. When no one believes in a god, then the god no longer seems to exist to anyone. So, the existence of a god is the result of a belief in god. So, god can not exist independently of believers. But gravity didn't exist before Newton. It took a 'Eureka' moment and while we know from experience that gravity seems to have always existed so the same can surely be true of a God. Unless you disprove gravity or God they can exist independent of peoples beliefs. Cheshire wrote: Once you stop believing in god for a little while the nature of the delusion seems overwhelmingly apparent. And to say some one is deluded is such an insult generally that it makes the argument loaded from the start. Atheism feels like intellectual liberation and it is always painted with this brush of arrogant rejection. We aren't trying to take something away; just letting you know it was never there. People believing in a God for the wrong reasons is very, very probable. But the same apply to atheists who use faulty arguments to believe there is categorically not a God. There is no way you can wholly prove or disprove it you can just point out flaws in everyones arguments until we reach a stalemate and left with the unknown or God, call it what you will. ANd I'm very happy you found an answer but it is not everyone elses answer nor can it be 100% correct - it is arrogant to think as such. I will say this: It confuses me why throughout time people feel the need to eradicate theism or atheism. Say you eradicate theists new ones will appear we are human. Not eradicate atheists and very soon they will be back. All this shows is that we cannot know beyond doubt and so everyone can choose as they will and that we have no right to try and influence others.
"We do what we must, because we can." -GLaDOS

atightropewalker
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Posted 10/30/09 - 12:10 PM:	#367
Cheshire wrote: Once you stop believing in god for a little while the nature of the delusion seems overwhelmingly apparent. And to say some one is deluded is such an insult generally that it makes the argument loaded from the start. Atheism feels like intellectual liberation and it is always painted with this brush of arrogant rejection. We aren't trying to take something away; just letting you know it was never there. Not trying to be incendiary but as for Atheism being intellectual liberation, I would say otherwise. If you choose to go with the balance of probability then you are constraining yourself to one more law. I think it is far more intellectually liberating to not make a choice on the basis of probability, as we are told, but to believe what you want. I don't think I would feel intellectually liberated if I couldn't go for the girl at the club I had next to no chance of getting but instead lived my life assigning myself things on solely the balance of probability. I just wish people read more Kierkegaard.
"We do what we must, because we can." -GLaDOS

rigelrover
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Posted 10/30/09 - 12:19 PM:	#368
As I have suggested before the concern for the atheist's appeal to faith should not be in light of any particular well-defined god concept. 180 Proof suggests that if it is not definable/provable it is not reasonable to consider it (I think). It seems that this is an agreeable position for most atheists (but I am, or course, not sure about this), though some would prefer falsifiable I would think. Now my concern, in this regard, is not for the appeal to gods to explain natural phenomena locally (as in the god of the sun, rain, crops), we have long since decided publicly to accept less variable explanations. The trouble is that these explanations are all linked, ad infinitum, via a perceived causal chain. Of course it is critical to decide whether the chain, on the whole, is unbreakable. This is just the problem, however, with pure empiricism as a paradigm for gaining knowledge as I see it. It breaks down whenever it tries to answer the infinitude of why type questions without appealing to a meta-physical law. It is perfectly sound to show that there are causal laws that all for (perhaps even all) the relationships that we see today, but it is not sound (yet) to suggest that there is an empirical explanation for type of laws that have come about. No appeal to classical causality will uncover a consistent answer for the fact that something is the case rather than nothing. In light of this fact, and in light the systematic way of showing (Godel, Tarski, Smullyan, et. al) that an ultimate formal description from reality to reality is impossible, there is room for faith for both the atheist and the theist on the question of the 'ultimate nature of reality'. Of course, logical positivism would dismiss this phrase as so vague and inept to be meaningless, but all it takes is a bit of honesty to realize that it is an ask-able question from almost any domain of human-like epistemologies. From within strict empirical epistemology a hypothesis must be formed and tested to show how something in particular exists at all. The closest that I have heard of man-kind coming is Hawkings account of a self-creating universe (in which the dimension of time becomes more and more space-like near the event horizon of the big-bang). But even this solution begs the question: "How was the symmetry of nothingness, or the symmetry of space-space broken into space-time?". We can say, maybe with good reason, something like 'nature prefers a-symmetry', but why none-the-less (and perhaps further why this amount of a-symmetry. It is not a meaningless question. Inasmuch as we wish to pursue it, and it is meaningful; and given that empirical knowledge is the best (for 'most' things), the admission of a need for faith happens just here...for everyone. Aside from this, we often accept an appeal to the most comfortable answer instead of standing on the edge of the gap and staring into it for too long. Hey, it is just my position. I am willing to change it. Edited by rigelrover on 10/30/09 - 12:25 PM
I am more interested in questions than answers; dialog than dictation. If we can reasonably believe that there is not just a breach, but a fundamentally unclosable gap between the individual mind and the ultimate nature of the reality; the primordial thing in itself, then 'true' mystery does exist.

Cheshire
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Posted 10/30/09 - 12:27 PM:	#369
sheps wrote: Well, I know that the UK still has its religious elements, but amongst people I know (all people under 30) being a theist is very rare. The resurgence of creationism (perhaps as a knee jerk reaction to the growth of political Islam in the Middle East?) in the US does seem to have brought about a big atheist reaction. Us Brits don't tend to get too into creationism, yet ironically some of the best known atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens) are British. The resurgence of creationism is do to increasing popularity of radical Christianity. The intellectual Christians prefer a boring church service. The fundamentalists put on a better show on a larger scale, so the creationism issue is more significant to larger percentage. I know people that think they speak in tongues.
Or not.

Cheshire
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Posted 10/30/09 - 12:31 PM:	#370
walker wrote: But gravity didn't exist before Newton. It took a 'Eureka' moment and while we know from experience that gravity seems to have always existed so the same can surely be true of a God. Unless you disprove gravity or God they can exist independent of peoples beliefs. Take a good long look at your argument.
Or not.

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