when they don't have any burden of proof, and thus there was a popular attempt to redefine the word 'atheism' to connote a mere lack of belief. It is a superficial but also an uninteresting position. — Leontiskos

Ha! I see why you might say this but I think that’s an uncharitable view. As an aside, New Atheism was just a publishing gimmick, it didn't amount to a movement (as David Bentley Hart points out). Most atheists I know found the famous four fairly underwhelming as thinkers, more like good polemicists. But most of us are not philosophers either.

I personally think the idea that an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe the proposition that gods exist is a vast improvement on those who say, There Is No God. It seems less militant and more open to discourse.

I hold the same position on morality and beauty. I don’t believe them to be objective (outside of contingent human experience and communities of shared values). I am happy to hear arguments that might change my mind. I am open. I like theists and have as good friends a Catholic priest and a Sister. I harbour no hatred towards all religions or people of faith.

I think if someone says they are an atheist we should be fine with their self-identification. Just as I am fine with anyone identifying as Christian, even in those instances where they might be following a prosperity cult of grotesque bigotry which ignores Christ. People in most cases should be allowed to choose their preferred appellation.

I am in no doubt about my lack of belief. I am certain/confident that the gods I am aware of don’t exist. The Abrahamic, the ancient and the Hindu. But I cannot talk to versions of God I have not heard of yet. I dislike the word atheist as it comes with significant baggage.

I would like to see more collaboration and goodwill between theists and atheists. The spiritual hollowness of consumer capitalism needs addressing, as does fundamentalism and its penchant for violence and division. We can only tackle this together.

For anyone that thinks computers are (or someday will be) conscious, what do you say to Bernardo Kastrup's argument here: — RogueAI

I was wondering if this was going to come up. I'm curious too.

:up: Overall I've had good and bad experiences in both.

I can sum it up like this.

Private work is driven by profit.

Public work lack drive. — mentos987

I have worked in both sectors, here in Australia, and I have spent significant time working with senior executives in banking and law, along with years spent working in media and some television. And advising government on social policy.

There doesn't appear to be much difference in motivation, wastefulness or competence in both sectors from what I can see. Humans sometimes take short cuts, settle for easy, get things wrong and make lazy choices in both sectors. Public work is often driven by immense scrutiny and rigorous KPI's that make the private sector look tame. Private work is often about friendships and alliances that support sloth and complacency. Overall I think both sectors will suck unless they are overseen by leadership dedicated to transparency and continual improvement.

Thank you, I appreciate the effort, but I am unable to make sense of any of this. Perhaps some others will find it useful.

I'd probably call you an atheist but I see why you say agnostic deist.

I believe a God of religion does not exist. — Relativist

I'd go along with this too.

We can't have knowledge of very many things, because knowledge is strictly defined as belief that is justified, true, and the justification is adequate to eliminate Gettier problems. But we can (and should) strive for justified beliefs. — Relativist

I thought JTB was not much held to these days in epistemology circles - we have competing approaches such as reliabilism; defeasibility theory; constructive empiricism, epistemic contextualism, virtue epistemology? I'm no expert in epistemology, but it would seem to me to be a contested space, with various competing approaches.

:up:

I agree. The impact of words on people can be significant, so word choice can be a moral act. If we believe that morality is largely about trying to reduce harm or suffering, then being mindful of how words are experienced remains an important ethical consideration. The old joke is probably true: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words do permanent damage.

:up: No problem. I would also add that I never know who a person really is. This would seem to require some divine attributes. :wink: . All I can do is go by experience of how people present and what they do and say.

Maybe I am totally wrong. But the problem today is that I am afraid to learn. We live in a world where we are taught to suppress all thoughts that are not politically correct. — Eros1982

Really? Where do you live? Seems to me racism, bigotry and even hatred are frequently expressed in mainstream culture.

I have generally found that there is almost no correlation between a person's appearance and who they are. But it is true that people who scowl and frown a lot may well be unpleasant or preoccupied...

I think it's fine for people to hold different views on this matter. As an atheist, I'm not significantly concerned about definitions and I know there are a range of strongly held positions. This might be why many people prefer to talk about weak and hard atheism. For them, it is a question of how confident you are in your disbelief in god. I feel the best I can say in this space is that I do not believe and that the existence of a god seems unlikely to me. To me the arguments in favour of the proposition are unconvincing.

Thanks for the discussion. I appreciate your perspective and understand why you are arguing for your position. I like your idea about finding a different word.

Seems like an unnecessary distortion of agnostic and atheism that causes confusion for someone who's not comfortable saying what they know. — Philosophim

It's ok by me if you have problems with this. As an atheist, I find it useful. :wink:

Perhaps we need a new word. — Philosophim

You may be right about this.

Agnosticism as long as I've heard it has mean that you don't know enough to determine one way or another where there is a God or not. An atheist asserts there is no God. — Philosophic

Like many atheists I do not say there is no god since that is a positive claim which requires demonstration. I find agnostic atheist to be a useful formulation for me but in general I am happy to be called an agnostic an atheist or a freethinker. As long as the idea that I have no belief in gods is understood.

"Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system" Ah, ok, so its knowledge then. — Philosophim

Amusing. No, it's not a belief system it's about one belief: Gods. There are atheists who are into reincarnation, astrology and all kinds of New Age stuff. So it doesn't always directly correlate with the secular humanist belief system - which is often the assumption.

From the American Atheist website:

Atheism is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes. It is simply a rejection of the assertion that there are gods. Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system. To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.

Agnostic isn’t just a “weaker” version of being an atheist. It answers a different question. Atheism is about what you believe. Agnosticism is about what you know. — Tom Storm

But I don't understand when an atheist say I don't believe in "God". Because it already presupposes there is only one singular definition to which they refer. Their own one.
But this doesn't apply to everyone's concept of it. — Benj96

This is inaccurate and atheists don't say that unless they are in America, say, and dealing with the presumption of the single Christian god. They tend to respond in kind: so an atheist in a monotheistic country will tend to respond to that brand of monotheism.

As an atheist I (and most atheists I have met over 30 years) have generally put it thus: I have heard no reason to believe the proposition that any gods exist. AC Grayling an atheist philosopher puts it like this - "I do not believe that gods and goddesses exist."

I have generally also added that I do not find any arguments for any of the gods I have had described to me convincing. Whether the arguments come from Aquinas, Cornelius Van Til, Paul Tillich or Alvin Carl Plantinga . That's all there is to it.

I think he is suggesting that our conventional understanding/description of the world is based on premises as contestable as those of idealism. It is us who organise and interpret the world, so when we arrive at a model of reality this itself is like a form of idealism. But I have asked for more to check on how this tracks with Joshs.

So, you detest materialism? Post herein a picture of your right index finger after you’ve chopped it off.
— ucarr

If you feel that crude metaphor conveys anything about the point at issue, perhaps it is because you don't understand it. — Wayfarer

Perhaps this is the Tarantino inspired version of Johnson's, "I refute it thus!"

As long as an organizing contribution of a subject can be detected in the description of physical phenomena, then a species of idealism is at work. — Joshs

I think I follow - can you say some more?

Okay ... if you say so. — 180 Proof

Ha! I agree. The point they are making is shaky.



From the American Atheist website:

Atheism is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes. It is simply a rejection of the assertion that there are gods. Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system. To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.

Agnostic isn’t just a “weaker” version of being an atheist. It answers a different question. Atheism is about what you believe. Agnosticism is about what you know.

I wasn't aware of their definition until recent years. But this construction has generally made sense to me.

The hallmark of trouble for me is often when people get bogged down in definitions and marooned in the words. Usage is much more efficacious. I am happy to be an atheist or agnostic or freethinker (the term I used to use) as long as people understand that I do not accept the proposition that god's exist. I have encountered no reason why I should believe in them and a lack of belief fits with my overall sense making.

Neither do agnostics, so you need more reason than that to call yourself an atheist. — Hallucinogen

I will continue to use atheist as my own personal label since it is more useful. The agnostics I know do not say they do not believe in gods they typically say they can't answer the question of belief since they do not know. Odd to me and as a consequence I consider most agnostics to be atheists. But I fear we will continue to disagree on this so I am happy to move on and let common usage amongst atheists determine where this one heads.

No, I don't believe in gods, I consider myself an atheist. You don't get to tell me how I identify. :cool: Mind you, the word probably doesn't matter. I am happy to skip both agnostic and atheist and just say I don't believe in gods. I just takes more time to type. I don't believe in the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot either but I don't say they do not exist. How could I, when it can't be demonstrated? Does this mean I am a Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot agnostic? Maybe I have to say I don't believe in either and skip the contentious terms.

I think you may be confused.

I am an agnostic atheist - a fairly common term these days in freethinking circles. Atheism goes to belief, agnosticism goes to knowledge.

I do not believe there are gods. But I do not know that there are no gods. Yet I can't help what I believe. My intuition is to say there are no gods. None of the reasons I have heard are convincing. But I cannot make a positive claim that there are no gods since that would require a demonstration. That's my take.

As I have stated elsewhere, I don't think arguments for or against gods are as significant as some think. You either believe or you don't and this seems to me to be similar to one's sexual preferences. You can't help what you are attracted to. And yes, just as people may change sexual preferences, they might move from belief to disbelief. I suspect people form their views of gods through sense making and intuition more than the arguments we keep rehashing.

The American public glorifies crudity and ignorance -- so is it any surprise they love a leader who is like them? I have been reading some of Trump's latest tweets, and they have grammatical and spelling errors, and random capitalizations. They look like they were written by a 7th grader with ADHD. Can you imagine a president or ex-president from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or any other time in our history, who would write like that? Even if you agree with the tweet -- you have to admit it just looks sloppy, careless, and unprofessional. Each Trump tweet is like a proud celebration of incompetence: "Look, I can tweet without the least bit of proof-reading or care!"

It may seem petty of me to point this out, and indeed it is the least of my concerns about Trump. But he does seem barely literate and to have the emotional maturity of a middle school kid whose favorite thing to do is come up with novel insults and name-calling. You can call him a liar and he doesn't care, but if you say he stinks he flips out. He's like a little kid. But his base seems to love it, because they also are like little kids. — GRWelsh

Interesting. I've been wondering about this. There was a time when people seemed to want more lofty personalities for high office. But I guess populism in the current era has embraced an aesthetic nadir. It seems to me that we are at a point in history where people in many cultures are sick of intellectuals and fed up with the complexities and ambiguities that seem to be required from public life and citizenship. We don't want to be lectured at by technocrats and professors and politically correct celebrities. So there's a kind of counterreformation. A retreat back to old certainties and comfortable prejudices and leaders who give us permission to be unsophisticated, regressive and proud to be so.

he surprising effectiveness of mathematics in making accurate, sometimes unexpected predictions about the natural world suggests a deeper connection between mathematical structures and physical reality. This view opposes the idea that mathematics is just a tool invented for practical purposes, instead hinting at some intrinsic relationship between mathematical concepts and the fabric of the universe. — Wayfarer

Could it be that maths, like space and time are part of our human cognitive apparatus in some way?

What is the motivation for westerners to do equality?
I think the most basic motivation for Taiwanese and Chinese to do equality is for health. — YiRu Li

Preventing suffering and promoting flourishing - often based on a human rights or sacredness of the individual frame.

If people do inequality things or abusing others, we'll think that person will be short life or unhealthy. — YiRu Li

I'm known many abusive, nasty people who lived very long lives. Hence the well known expression 'only the good die young.'

But I think we don't need history to prove it.
Modern Greeks can also prove Chinese medicine is correct.
Please check this guy's picture in this interview video at 12:20.
He is 104 years old and still looks young ! — YiRu Li

No. I'm not going to accept the example of one guy or even 100 guys. My grandfather lived to 98 and was healthy as a horse. He smoked two packets of cigarettes a day and drank half a bottle of gin a day. He died in his sleep, having had very few sick days in his life.

Would I argue that cigarettes and gin were the secret of his longevity?

I would need a mountain of good scientific evidence to accept any claims of alternative medicine.

Even if the term were not obsolete, most people who refer to antisemitism either are not aware of the inclusion of Arabic-speakers, or don't care: they just mean 'discrimination against Jews' either as an ethnic minority or as a religion, usually both, they never include the anti-Arab sentiment so prevalent today in various countries. — Vera Mont

Exactly. It's in the usage.

talent, physique, intelligence, inheritance, education, power, social standing, opportunity, wealth, or personal morality. Nevertheless, every individual from the lowest to the highest socially is the source of values, and as such is infinitely valuable to themselves. and this is the source of the equality that founds the moral brotherhood of man. for a Christian - — unenlightened

And given the above, for me, one of the important aspects of the Western tradition in more recent times (contested though it might be in some parts) is that the state can and has played a key role in helping to level out some of those differences by providing or subsidising medical care, education, training and housing for those less privileged citizens, particularly those on the margins.

Colonialism is not totally a bad thing.
The Chinese girls' Foot binding for 1,000 years ended because of Colonialism. — YiRu Li

Yeah, I guess that makes up for slavery, robbery, barbarity and genocide.

No.

:up:

So physics is not capable of giving an account of the simplest social interactions. — Banno

Do you believe there is a meaningful distinction between a physicalist and a naturalist?

The naturalist, presumably has a broader scope than a physicalist and will point to the notion that everything can be explained by natural laws and phenomena (as opposed to the supernatural), not necessarily limited to the physical - other disciplines beyond physics which would incorporate social interactions and codified behaviors, rituals, anthropology, biology, etc.

I guess the upshot of this might be that if we can confirm that there is an afterlife or a Platonic realm, then these become known as natural.

Why do you ask? — wonderer1

Just that for physicalists (and secular humanists) I know, they would argue that they hold to methodological naturalism and not philosophical (or metaphysical) naturalism. The latter being a truth claim about reality they believe is unwarranted, the former being a more (shall we say) pragmatic approach to philosophical enquires. I'm pretty sure AC Grayling puts it similarly although he calls himself a naturalist rather than a physicalist.

Don't some philosophers suggest that this comes down to the distinction between philosophical naturalism or methodological naturalism?

Well, I guess behavior is physical. We choose to follow a convention or choose not to be fined. Brain activity/chemicals, etc. Then we physically apply the brakes. We physically wait for the light to change. We accelerate when the lights are green.

Your suggestion takes the convention of stopping for red as a non-physical behavioral convention, right?

But how is this different to a dog being trained to bark for food? Isn't the causal chain which lead to the behavior determined by physical processes which can be explained by physics?

Perhaps you are saying that intentionality can't be explained by physics?

The simplest and cleanest way to understand physicalism is as the idea that only the stuff described in physics texts is true. — Banno

I don't disagree but can I ponder this with you for a bit?

My understanding of physicalism is that it tends to deny the existence of non-physical substances or entities and proposes that all phenomena, including mental states and consciousness, can be reduced to or explained by physical processes.

Physicalism can't explain how traffic lights work. — Banno

Perhaps not when seen from one perspective, but is it not the case that traffic lights and the convention that we stop can be explained by physical processes? Behaviors are physical. A code of conduct (which is what traffic lights amount to) is surely reducible to physical processes?

I always read what you post. I can't claim to always understand it, but I am getting better. :wink:

What Nietzsche calls the ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ is disclosed in the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from everyday conventions of perceiving and acting. Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open”. — Number2018

I wonder what that looks like outside of a paragraph - how does one do this in life?

Evan Thompson writes: — Joshs

Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned. — Joshs

Just checking is this Thompson? I always thought this quote was credited to Dan Zahavi, (2008) Internalism, Externalism, and Transcendental Idealism. Synthese 160:355-374

Will you tell your kids or students the wrong things? — YiRu Li

Not sure what you mean with this question but we all pass on incorrect information, prejudices, bigotries and dubious values to children and students all the time. Often we don't know we are doing this. And families often suppress secrets and scandals from each other, particularly the children.

Sometimes the parents and teachers went through wars or countless difficult times, but they still did their best to keep the knowledge and passed it to their kids and students. — YiRu Li

Such knowledge is generally a mix of facts, subjective values, myths and the usual prejudices of time and place.

Are there any westerner ancestors who passed things to your generation nowadays and you know it is valuable? — YiRu Li

I don't use this frame of reference. But obviously we have cultural, political and social practices and values we have inherited, some of which are valued. Including values themselves. But as a principle, I don't revere anything based on tradition. Much of what we inherit from previous generations is not valuable - things like misogyny, homophobia, colonisation, various approaches to capitalism.

The alternative is to avoid holding to substance ontologies altogether, which is my way of dealing with the issue. — Janus

Nice. Can I borrow this?