Where is the hope in atheism?

[apogee]

Who's 'we'? I wasn't.



No. They will believe, provided reasons. They are very simple reasons, sometimes they are even unspoken, but they are there. I never believed 'automatically' as a child. Neither do any of the kids I work with.

Anecdotes don't really get us anywhere, though. So I will point out, if you have to tell them about it, then they could not have been believing it prior to your telling. So again, we agree that belief isn't the default.



So kids don't form beliefs automatically. I am glad that we agree.



I don't either. You agree that belief is not the default position. You agree that ignorance is the default position with regard to concepts we have no conscious apprehension of.

But for some reason, you do not agree that disbelief is the default position with regard to concepts we do have conscious apprehension of. So I have to ask again - when can I sell you this bridge?



I never did such a thing. In fact, I said from the very outset that there is nothing special at all about atheism. My disbelief in gods comes from exactly the same place as my disbelief in leprechauns, ghosts, unicorns and any other concept for which I have no sufficient reason to believe, from the 'supernatural' to the utterly mundane. There is nothing 'magical' about that. I do it numerous times, every day. So do you. So does everyone.

This is all very confused, ‘beliefs’ may either be appropriated or derived. There is no such thing is ‘disbeliefs’, these are simply ‘beliefs’ which possess an extrinsic rather than intrinsic definition, i.e. they are defined by the thing that they are not.

There are no default beliefs, apart perhaps from any gifted to us by instinct. Everything else is acquired at some point, by some process. There is no default position, on anything (excluding instinct..potentially) because the default, is to have no position.

I’m really not sure why this seems so controversial, other than it really is great to have a magical power up your sleeve.

 

[Eight Foot Manchild]

This is all very confused, ‘beliefs’ may either be appropriated or derived. There is no such thing is ‘disbeliefs’, these are simply ‘beliefs’ which possess an extrinsic rather than intrinsic definition, i.e. they are defined by the thing that they are not.

There are no default beliefs, apart perhaps from any gifted to us by instinct. Everything else is acquired at some point, by some process. There is no default position, on anything (excluding instinct) because the default, is to have no position.

I don't think 'instincts' are beliefs at all, categorically. Babies don't 'believe' in the rooting reflex, in any meaningful sense.

'No position' would be equivalent to ignorance, which again, I have no problem calling the default with regard to concepts we have no apprehension of.

I’m really not sure why this seems so controversial

Welcome to the club.

 

[apogee]

I don't think 'instincts' are beliefs at all, categorically. Babies don't 'believe' in the rooting reflex, in any meaningful sense.

I wouldn’t neccesarily disagree.

'No position' would be equivalent to ignorance, which again, I have no problem calling the default with regard to concepts we have no apprehension of.

Unless you instantly pass judgement on every new concept you encounter, I'd suggest there is a process, however brief, where you move from apprehension, to evaluation, to acceptance / rejection / ambivalence or further evaluation.

 

[bhsmte]

I disagree with the 'rational' part, but yeah there sure is a lot of it. Still comparatively very little, though, in regard to the sheer amount of stuff written about gods.



Ah, nope. Not gonna spend however many untold hours it will take to go over every single theistic concept I have ever encountered and explain in turn why I find each one of them incoherent or otherwise unconvincing. If you have a specific ontological or epistemological case you'd care to focus on and defend in your own words, you can name it.



I never said anything about 'good' or 'bad' reasons. Just reasons. Reasons are why people believe things, not out of 'default'.

If that's true, my view isn't meaningless. It's correct.



It's not random. It's a point of illustration, that gods aren't special. They are just one thing in the enormous category of things not believed in by me.



Again, if they have reasons for believing, then they're not believing on 'default', and my view is correct.

Agree, people believe things for all sorts of reasons and many unique to them. These reasons develop through our experiences and psyche.

Psychology of belief, is an interesting subject to delve into, to understand what motivates people to arrive at the beliefs, they do.

 

[Silmarien]

I don't either. You agree that belief is not the default position. You agree that ignorance is the default position with regard to concepts we have no conscious apprehension of.

But for some reason, you do not agree that disbelief is the default position with regard to concepts we do have conscious apprehension of. So I have to ask again - when can I sell you this bridge?

If I were in the business of, say, refurbishing old bridges and you were a businessman who worked in infrastructure, then I would have ever reason to be interested in knowing more about this bridge you're trying to sell me. I would not say to myself, "Oh, well, I would disbelieve that this person actually had a bridge, but the context of this discussion gives me sufficient reason to accept this claim." That would be pretty crazy.

There is no default position because everything is always contextual. It is a gross oversimplification of human psychology and belief formation to posit some sort of magical default position of disbelief that can be overcome once a threshold of sufficient reason is reached.

I never did such a thing. In fact, I said from the very outset that there is nothing special at all about atheism. My disbelief in gods comes from exactly the same place as my disbelief in leprechauns, ghosts, unicorns and any other concept for which I have no sufficient reason to believe, from the 'supernatural' to the utterly mundane. There is nothing 'magical' about that. I do it numerous times, every day. So do you. So does everyone.

If there's nothing special about your atheism, why do you keep on insisting over and over again that you do not have sufficient reason to believe? If you had sufficient reason, you would obviously be a theist instead. I don't care about your atheism one way or the other as long as you're not insisting that everyone is rationally compelled to agree with you.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Welp. There's another positive claim.

Saying that you don't know, when you don't know something, is not a claim. It's just an acknowledgement of ignorance.

And one that assumes that agnosticism isn't compatible with theism. It absolutely is.

Did I say otherwise?
I'm an agnostic atheist.

I'm not attacking atheism. I just think it's weird how some atheists seem to think that nobody is entitled to have questions that they themselves don't have. If you don't look at the world througha lens that presupposes atheism, you're doing it wrong. Anyway, bye!

Nobody said anything about not being entitled to asking questions.
The problem is not the questions. The problem is the made up answers.

And atheism is not something that is "presupposed". Theism is the thing that is being presupposed. Being an atheist, means that you don't presuppose to claims of theism as being correct. Atheism has no content in that sense - there is nothing there TO presuppose.

As long as you continue to misunderstand what it means to NOT believe something is true, and how that is not at all the same as positively believing that something is false, then you will continue to make this fundamental mistake.

 

[DogmaHunter]

This is all very confused, ‘beliefs’ may either be appropriated or derived. There is no such thing is ‘disbeliefs’, these are simply ‘beliefs’ which possess an extrinsic rather than intrinsic definition, i.e. they are defined by the thing that they are not.

There are no default beliefs, apart perhaps from any gifted to us by instinct. Everything else is acquired at some point, by some process. There is no default position, on anything (excluding instinct..potentially) because the default, is to have no position.

To have no position = to answer "no" to the question: "do you accept x is true?"
You either believe a claim or you do not. Saying "i don't know", means that you are not positively believing the claim. ie: you are disbelieving it.

Having no position = not believing = to disbelieve.

Not to be confused with the positive belief that X is false.

 

[apogee]

(I'm minded to blame Hogwarts School of Hitchcraft and Sophistry for this)

 

[DogmaHunter]

There is no default position because everything is always contextual. It is a gross oversimplification of human psychology and belief formation to posit some sort of magical default position of disbelief that can be overcome once a threshold of sufficient reason is reached.

The default of disbelief, refers to the "blank slate" situation, where no additional information is present to draw an informed conclusion.

Like if I would claim right now that I was just abducted by aliens who all looked like Jessica Alba. Your default position would be one of disbelief. Not because you actually have evidence to refute my claim (because you don't)... but simply because you have insufficient reason to accept my claim.

Not all reasons are rational - sure.
What is sufficient for one person, isn't sufficient for another - sure.

However, there's always SOME reason to accept something as true.
Even if you are a 3-year old and you're buying into your parent's lies about santa claus. Even that 3-year old has a reason to believe it: his parents are claiming it and he accepts their authority and trusts them. For that 3-year old, that is sufficient reason to believe. A bad reason, in retrospect, but a reason nonetheless.

Nobody believes anything "just because". There's always some reason. That reason isn't always rational, but there's always some reason.

Nobody believes anything for no reason at all.

The hard part, is differentiating good/rational reasons from bad/irrational reasons.

If there's nothing special about your atheism, why do you keep on insisting over and over again that you do not have sufficient reason to believe?

huh?

 

[DogmaHunter]

(I'm minded to blame Hogwarts School of Hitchcraft and Sophistry for this)

Is that in reply to me?
Not sure what you mean by that.

If it is, then answer me this simple question....

Let's consider claim X. X can be anything.
You are ignorant about X. You don't know.

If you are then asked "do you accept X is true?", what do you answer?
If you answer "i don't know", do you then accept X is true?

It seems to be rather obvious that you don't.
So, is it not so that answering "i don't know" is the equivalent of simply answering "no"?

Moving on...
If you do NOT accept X as true...
Does that then mean that you WILL accept that X is false?

I say: no, it doesn't mean that.
"X is true" and "X is false", are 2 seperate claims. They might overlap with one another, but they ARE 2 seperate claims.

And answering "no" to one does NOT mean that you'll answer "yes" to the other.



So in conclusion: to say that you disbelieve X, does NOT, in ANY way, mean that you'll believe "not X".




I wonder why this is so hard to understand.

(all this, off course, assuming that you were replying to my last post to you and that you disagree with it)

 

[apogee]

Just a note to DH, not ignoring your reply to me, just at work, and my last post was made before I saw yours.

 

[apogee]

Just a quick reply dh.
May I speak as one 'code monkey' to another?

What values do your variables contain when you first declare them? (random pointers to memory locations aside - depending on your programming language)

 

[DogmaHunter]

Just a quick reply dh.
May I speak as one 'code monkey' to another?

What values do your variables contain when you first declare them? (random pointers to memory locations aside - depending on your programming language)

In case of valuetypes, NULL if they are nullable or the default if they aren't.

A boolean's default is "false"
A numerical value's default will be "0"
A string's default will be "empty" (not null - but just an empty string)

In case of reference types, it will always be NULL.

 

[apogee]

To have no position = to answer "no" to the question: "do you accept x is true?"
You either believe a claim or you do not. Saying "i don't know", means that you are not positively believing the claim. ie: you are disbelieving it.

Having no position = not believing = to disbelieve.

Not to be confused with the positive belief that X is false.

Lets consider a boolean variable...

1 = positively believing - TRUE
0 = positively disbelieving - FALSE
null = no position, undetermined (neither ‘believing’, nor ‘disbelieving’) – ‘the default’ state

 

[apogee]

ha our posts have crossed....

 

[apogee]

In case of valuetypes, NULL if they are nullable or the default if they aren't.

A boolean's default is "false"
A numerical value's default will be "0"
A string's default will be "empty" (not null - but just an empty string)

You are either manually initializing all of these, or your favoured language is doing it for you.

 

[apogee]

The default of disbelief, refers to the "blank slate" situation, where no additional information is present to draw an informed conclusion.

Like if I would claim right now that I was just abducted by aliens who all looked like Jessica Alba. Your default position would be one of disbelief. Not because you actually have evidence to refute my claim (because you don't)... but simply because you have insufficient reason to accept my claim.

If you tell me, you’ve been kidnapped by aliens who all look like Jessica Alba, my response would be, to evaluate it according to my pre-existing beliefs, about you, Aliens and Jessica Alba, and any other evidence that you are able to provide.

It is not simply “No”, for all I know you could well be telling me the truth. Granted it’s a pretty weird scenario, but it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility.

Have you been kidnapped by Aliens that look like Jessica Alba?

Nobody believes anything "just because". There's always some reason. That reason isn't always rational, but there's always some reason.

Nobody believes anything for no reason at all.

The hard part, is differentiating good/rational reasons from bad/irrational reasons.

This is all really confusing and I'm not at all sure how this is supposed to apply to metaphysical beliefs. Other than perhaps you are suggesting that people that believe in God do so for 'bad' reasons, which is kinda just offensive, not that I'm particularly offended by it personally.

 

[Silmarien]

Saying that you don't know, when you don't know something, is not a claim. It's just an acknowledgement of ignorance.

No. It's insisting that the only proper answer is "I don't know" that is the claim. You are making claims about which answers are proper and which are not.

Did I say otherwise?
I'm an agnostic atheist.

Yes. Every time you imply that a theist cannot say "I don't know," you are implying that theism is not compatible with agnosticism.

Nobody said anything about not being entitled to asking questions.
The problem is not the questions. The problem is the made up answers.

Eh, the problem is quite clearly answers that you don't like.

And atheism is not something that is "presupposed". Theism is the thing that is being presupposed. Being an atheist, means that you don't presuppose to claims of theism as being correct. Atheism has no content in that sense - there is nothing there TO presuppose.

I disagree with this. I presuppose less as a theist than I did as an atheist.

As long as you continue to misunderstand what it means to NOT believe something is true, and how that is not at all the same as positively believing that something is false, then you will continue to make this fundamental mistake.

There is no fundamental mistake on my part. I do not care if you call this particular position of yours atheism or agnosticism--both rely upon similar presuppositions concerning the correct way of approaching the problem. You treat the questions that theism raises like a puzzle to be solved through scientific exploration, not like a mystery to be lived. There's a whole worldview underlying that approach, and it's one I don't share.

I'm just not interested in what you're selling. I find it all deeply nihilistic. Just deal with the fact that there are people who disagree with you at pretty much every level.

The default of disbelief, refers to the "blank slate" situation, where no additional information is present to draw an informed conclusion.

My point has always been that this "blank slate" situation is a fantasy. Everything is always contextual, so you're never going to get information in the absense of additional context that would push you in one direction or another. If the information adds up in such a way that you're waiting for additional factors, that is not a default position. It's just another potential stance.

I am not saying that belief is a default. I'm denying the possibility of any default whatsoever, except ignorance.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Lets consider a boolean variable...

1 = positively believing - TRUE
0 = positively disbelieving - FALSE
null = no position, undetermined (neither ‘believing’, nor ‘disbelieving’) – ‘the default’ state

Point?

 

[DogmaHunter]

You are either manually initializing all of these, or your favoured language is doing it for you.

With valuetypes in C#, you can declare them as nullable if you need them to be.
If they aren't nullable, then they get a default value upon declaration.

bool? aBooleanProp; => default value is NULL
bool aBooleanProp; => default value is false.

No idea where you are going with this. Well, no... I get the idea, I just don't think it's applicable to the points being discussed.

These are rather arbitrary "rules" inherent to programming languages.