I predict no derailment. It would be a miracle (ha!) if the train ever leaves the station. — Kenosha Kid

Id be willing to place bets that it derails lol
We have a historical pattern of it, why would this be any different?

The primary problem theists typically have is that their reason in faith (for this particular task) is so deep, and so unexamined, that they don't realize it is reason. They take faith's qualifications for considering the very largest of questions, those most far removed from human scale, to be an obvious given. And so it doesn't occur to them to questions those qualifications.

Most religious people were born and raised into their religion, they didn't choose (in the sense of "coming to a conclusion after careful study of religious scriptures and practices"). They do have reasons for their religiosity, but those reasons amount to "I trust what my parents told me on the topic of God (religion), because it makes sense to trust the people who feed me, clothe me, clean me, keep me warm and safe." Of course, they are not likely to ever say that, as framing their religious choice in such banal, down-to-earth terms would take away its power. — baker

Nicely put.

Nobody has faith in reason. People have very repeatable patterns of reliability that prove its efficacy. — DingoJones

This is the common atheist error, the assumption that because reason is proven good for many things (agreed) it is therefore automatically qualified for everything. And because they hold this typically unexamined assumption, they see no need to inspect or challenge those qualifications.

And so, ok, let us reason together. Let us apply the very same degree of challenge we reasonably aim at theist authorities to atheist authorities. This process is often called intellectual honesty.

This is the common atheist error, the assumption that because reason is proven good for many things (agreed) it is therefore automatically qualified for everything. And because they hold this typically unexamined assumption, they see no need to inspect or challenge those qualifications. — Foghorn

I explicitly did not make that assumption. I said repeatable patterns of reliability. Thats true, reason has that and that reliability can be tested in real time, pretty easily. It is neither unexamined nor an assumption im afraid. This is not the same as saying it is “automatically” qualified for everything, you inserted the automatic part all on your own.
Also not true that it is a trait of atheism to not inspect or challenge the qualifications of reason, this is a human thing not an atheist thing.

And so, ok, let us reason together. Let us apply the very same degree of challenge we reasonably aim at theist authorities to atheist authorities. This process is often called intellectual honesty. — Foghorn

Im not sure what you mean but I’m game. Im not sure how much we actually disagree here, but I did notice you are somewhat cherry picking my posts for responses.
Ive been patient because you seem a decent fellow but since you mentioned intellectual honesty I would be remiss if I didn’t bring it up now. Please address my arguments instead of just making more of your own.

I said repeatable patterns of reliability. — DingoJones

Please show us the reason based repeated patterns of reliability in generating provable claims on the subject of gods. Your claim, your burden.

Of course some people propose to have such evidence, it's their reason for being atheists. E.g. "If God existed, I wouldn't lose my job/my partner wouldn't get cancer/the Nazis wouldn't kill Jews." — baker

Not logically. One could say something like, 'There is no perfect, omnipotent God who would not allow a Holocaust."

Because 3017 will probably never give his opening argument, and 180 won't provide a counter-argument until he does so.

Ya see you aren’t acting in good faith here. I made a number of points that you havn’t addressed, you have not been engaging with what Im saying. I pointed this out fairly plainly and your response was to ignore that as well.
Im done, but to show clearly which of us is not being intellectually honest here I will rebut your question:

Do you believe in Zeus? I hope not.
Well Zeus is a god and I’m happy to abandon reason for whatever method you used to determine that Zeus doesnt exist and apply it to all of them.

Good day sir.

Ah, I gotchya now. Slow on the uptake sometimes.

I made a number of points that you havn’t addressed — DingoJones

Please don't take it personally. I didn't respond to every point because I've already done so at least a billion times for 25 years. Everything you're saying, word for word straight out of the atheist dogma bible, endlessly repeated everywhere. Meaning no personal offense, really, just saying, nothing new here.

Well I was wrong as it turned out. Never take gambling advice from me.

No its not (dogma), you are taking what Im saying and reframing it to these “typical” atheist responses and tilting at windmills and strawmen. Lol, I mean come on your mode of engagement is to ignore what I’m saying because you know it all already. Thats a neat way of not having to defend anything you say or points made against you.
Anyway, I din’t take it personally Im just not a fan of wasting my time. Since you already know everything on the matter I would imagine a waste of yours as well.
Glad we nipped that in the bud.

I mean come on your mode of engagement is to ignore what I’m saying because you know it all already. — DingoJones

I do know it already. Again, please calm down, I mean you no personal offense. And if you find me offensive, just ignore me in turn.

Lol, I never take gambling advise from anyone so all good.

A debate between 3017Amen and 180 Proof? This has got to be the funniest, most hilarious debate of the millenium. You might as well have pitted a sea mollusk and Frisbee, or a Christian and a Lion, or a San Francisco 49ers fan and a coat hanger against each other. But this will be funnier.

And they say philosophy is a dry, boring, non-juicy area of inquiry. How wrong they were!

@180 Proof I’ve located the post of yours that @3017amen is quoting, since you said you couldn’t find it:

I accept such a challenge provided you posit something other than a strawman – e.g. (A) weak/negative atheism ... OR (B) strong/positive atheism ... OR (C) antitheism (my current position, having long since "outgrown" both (A & B)) ... OR (D) ??? — 180 Proof

here's one definition of Atheism, does this describe your belief accurately?

Atheism: a disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods. — 3017amen

No, but that will suffice for (A) weak/negative atheism on my list of coherent positions for me to defend. — 180 Proof

So I think 3017 has taken it that you are willing to defend atheism as thus defined, and now he is asking you to do so.

You, however, also make the great point that he has yet to actually formulate an attack on that position, so there is as yet nothing to defend from.

3017, please see my earlier comment in this thread:

The starting point of any inquiry is that everything (and its negation) might be logically possible. Then someone or another shows some reason or another why something is not possible, and so its negation is necessary. The question at hand is about whether or not atheism is logically possible, not whether it is definitely true. 180’s position is, of course, “I don’t see any reason why not”, because if he did see any reason why not then he wouldn’t hold that position. So everything really rests on 3017 offering some supposed reason why not, the merits of which can then be debated.

180 probably also has some reasons why theism isn’t possible, but that’s not the subject of this debate. — Pfhorrest

Of course some people propose to have such evidence, it's their reason for being atheists. E.g. "If God existed, I wouldn't lose my job/my partner wouldn't get cancer/the Nazis wouldn't kill Jews." — baker

This got me thinking about Darwin this morning, a man who lost his Christian belief in the face of facts. I was not raised in any religion at all, and was about 7 years of age when I first realised that people actually believed this stuff (the fundamental difference between Jesus and Superman). So for this brand of atheism -- clean atheism, perhaps -- there are no facts that lead one to conclude that there is no God, rather, as I said before, an absence of facts to conclude that there is one.

For a religious person, or an atheist more deeply embedded in a religious culture, facts such as those presenting themselves to Darwin can and do lead to a conclusion of no God.

I was not raised in any religion at all, and was about 7 years of age when I first realised that people actually believed this stuff (the fundamental difference between Jesus and Superman). — Kenosha Kid

Strangely, I WAS raised in a religious family and it STILL took me by surprise some time during my growing-up when I realized that adults didn’t think of Jesus and Santa Claus the same way: stories you tell children as if they were true as a kind of game or moral lesson but not something grown-ups literally believe in.

My family gave me all kinds of religious fiction (as in, stories even the believers knew was fiction) that featured angels in modern times and prayer saving people via miracles, or events in ancient times featuring fantastic monsters defeated by righteous soldiers of God, that so far as I could tell was indistinguishable from urban or high fantasy respectively. So that probably (unintentionally on their part) helped me to categorize religious mythology in the same category as any avowedly fictional mythopoesis.

I suppose by "prove" you mean the formal sense, rather than just convincing someone? That does seem like an impossible bar to meet. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not sure but the word "prove" seems to encompass both the rigor of deduction and the uncertainties of induction and abduction. Your objection seems unfounded and, may I add, too pedantic; nevertheless it's good to know that technically, "prove" is reserved for deduction. By the way what word would describe abductive and inductive inferences? Any ideas?

Atheism is simply accepting logic and reason over belief and experience. Even an atheist can experience religious-like feelings, awe, mystery and so on, but the key difference is that the atheist doesn't accept anything as true or logical until there are sufficient logical conclusions to be made. There doesn't have to be any evidence, even if it is prefered, that something is true, it basically has to be logical that it might be true and from that derives a hypothesis.

A common argument against atheists is that they need to prove everything beyond any kind of doubt while theists can believe whatever they want. But an atheist that doesn't have a logical foundation for a hypothesis isn't really an atheist anymore, he has belief.

An atheist doesn't have a lack of belief in God, there's nothing lacking, there's just no logical assumption that there is a God, so it's not even on the list. The only reason atheists speak and think about the concept of "God" is because theists have proposed such ideas in society.

In a blank slate of a world where there are none of the religions we have in the world today, but unexplained natural phenomena that previously were sources for many religious events, are explained logically, reasonably, and with science, i.e a world where we developed a scientific method before any religious explanations for events in nature around us: there wouldn't be any religions. The religious ideas today have their foundation in building upon previous generations beliefs all the way back to when someone wanted to understand why something like thunder happens, or why crops die. If there were no such sources and we already logically explained that thunder happens because of differences in temperature and moving air, while crops die because of infestations and stuff, there wouldn't be any supernatural phenomena that caused them and we wouldn't have such belief systems around it.

An atheist looks at the world as it is, disregard any previous "guesses" about anything, don't care for previous generations that can't logically explain anything and focus purely on what logic and reason can explain. It doesn't have to be proven beyond all doubt, it has to make sense.

Like ideas about quantum mechanics or possible string theories. We don't have much evidence of anything for that, but we have a lot of hypotheses that make sense, some are even so logical that we are already inventing technology using the phenomena we have discovered through those hypotheses, even without fully know how they work. But nothing of this is "belief", it's rooted in logic and reason.

So I think that the idea that atheism is "a lack of belief in God", is a bit misleading to the core of what atheism is. Because even if someone isn't believing in God, and starts to believe in ghosts, new age or other superstition/supernatural events, that aren't directly related to "God", they are still theists in the sense of belief. Atheists focus on logic and reason, they are closer to being immune to believing in anything that doesn't have a logical foundation underneath. And a belief system about God is at its core something that does not have a logical foundation and because much of the atheist movement has its modern roots in western society, where Christianity also has its roots, the idea that atheists lack a belief in God has become the norm explanation for atheism, which I don't think is accurate to what drives an atheist.

I don't think that's entirely accurate but it is true for some atheists. There are, of course, many different kinds of atheist, with different approaches and views. Some believe in astrology and hold superstitions. Some are logical positivists. And many are untheorised. They don't really know why they don't believe in god (which is generally a cartoon conception), they just think it's nonsense. Atheism is not accepting the proposition that a god exists, and in some stronger cases it is believing that no god exists. It doesn't come with other presuppositions, unless the person is also a secular humanist or into philosophy.

Atheism is simply accepting logic and reason over belief and experience — Christoffer

Yes, agreed. The debate is a choice of which authority to reference.

The problem God thread philosophers on all sides face is that in centuries of such debate nobody on any side has been able to prove the qualifications of their chosen authority for this particular task.

The next problem is that nobody cares about that. :-)

God debates are like dancing. There's a series of steps that everyone has memorized, and it's fun to get together on the dance floor and do the dance yet again.

There's no crime in it. Life is short and fun is good. It's just not philosophy, that's all.

I don't think that's entirely accurate but it is true for some atheists. There are, of course, many different kinds of atheist, with different approaches and views. Some believe in astrology and magic. — Tom Storm

This implies that atheism is only in opposition with the concept of "God" and the belief in one or a pantheon. But I wouldn't call someone who believes in astrology an atheist. It's the same kind of belief system, just not focused on the concept of God.

It's just not philosophy, that's all. — Foghorn

I agree that theism shouldn't be considered philosophy because philosophy should require reason and logic as the foundation. Atheism works in this sense since it's founded on thinking with reason and logic.

In philosophy, it's as if we have five people who are all claiming to be correct about five different topics. Four of them get questioned by a moderator, and they are forced to logically explain why they think they are correct. Every little detail of these four people's arguments is scrutinized to the core, chopping away until the most logical conclusions are made by each of these four people. The fifth person then claims something without any kind of rational logic behind it and the moderator of this event just says "ok". The other four ask why the fifth person didn't get the same kind of rational scrutiny and treatment and the moderator replies, he's a theist.

This is why I don't think irrational belief, religion, and theism have any place in philosophy. It's the very antithesis of what philosophy aims to do. Theism is like a bubble of philosophy, a playground for the special children where the rules are totally different and everyone else just has to accept it, occasionally invite them out of that bubble and accept that irrationality and lack of logic.

An atheist doesn't have a lack of belief in God, there's nothing lacking, there's just no logical assumption that there is a God, so it's not even on the list. The only reason atheists speak and think about the concept of "God" is because theists have proposed such ideas in society. — Christoffer

The problem is that "such ideas" are arguably, the foundation of society; and here's where the atheist must falter - short of an alternate higher power in which to invest ultimate authority. Science has not been allowed to step into that role; even while science describes a literal truth, and way of thinking that decentralises the divine mystery.

Had science been recognised as the means to decode the word of God made manifest in Creation, and pursued and integrated as divine enlightenment over the past 400 years or so - we'd have both science and God as sources of authority; and knowing what's true, and doing what's morally right in terms of what's true, we'd be healthy, upright and prosperous.

But that's not what happened; and what we have, in some respects, is the worst of both worlds. The rationalising influence of science is blunted; merely serving to disenchant, and so undermining traditional bases of authority, without quite ushering in the scientific miracle of a rational development of resources - that ideally, would have occurred as (circumstantial) proof of divine benevolence.

Consequently, IMO - anyone less than a Marxist radical must surely err on the side of agnosticism; not least because, science doesn't actually rule out the existence of God. Strictly speaking, opinion aside - agnosticism is a rightful epistemic status, and always has been. No-one really knows! Hence the mystery!

the idea that atheists lack a belief in God has become the norm explanation for atheism, which I don't think is accurate to what drives an atheist. — Christoffer

At the very least, the concept of God is an important social and political phenomena, the atheist would declare false without proof for what reason? I wonder!

I agree that theism shouldn't be considered philosophy because philosophy should require reason and logic as the foundation. Atheism works in this sense since it's founded on thinking with reason and logic. — Christoffer

Any method which declines to challenge it's own fundamental assumptions is not philosophy, but instead merely ideology. It's not reason and logic to refuse to examine and challenge the qualifications of reason and logic.

Every little detail of these four people's arguments is scrutinized to the core — Christoffer

Except that it's not. In atheism the core (blind faith in reason) is very rarely touched. Most atheists don't even know it's there. There's typically far more doubt honestly expressed in theism than in atheism.

Not trying to be pedantic. The claim that the ontological proof was the only surviving one was what made me think we were talking about deduction alone.

There are other decent(ish) arguments that don't rely on deduction. For example, the Anthropic Principal. Forces in the universe are seemingly arbitrary in their values (e.g. gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, the speed of light). However, tweak these a bit and intelligent life bearing any resemblance to us becomes impossible. Planets become impossible. We have a razor thin band of possibilities for these arbitrary values to take or the universe can't support multicellular life.

Since we have no observations of other universes to consider as data, this is merely an (IMO a decent) appeal by analogy. Things don't end up perfectly ordered elsewhere in nature, why should they at the fundemental level. It's like stumbling across a perfectly square copse of trees in the woods; sure it could be chance, but chance doesn't tend to create these sorts of things. Why should there be unchanging laws in the first place? These are all appeals to the idea of the universe being designed for life. If these constants don't all get set precisely, you don't get life, but they are all set precisely. However, this isn't deductive, and it's not based on an analysis of compatible data of multiple universes' laws, which we'll never have, but rather an inductive argument based on the chaos of most natural phenomenon, and the unchanging fixed nature of the fundemental laws. Still, it's a problem that theists and simulation theory advocates have a better answer to at the moment.

This is why I don't think irrational belief, religion, and theism have any place in philosophy. It's the very antithesis of what philosophy aims to do. — Christoffer

First, atheists typically assume that theism is nothing but a pile of ideological assertions, thus revealing the ignorance which prevents them from being effective critics. This misunderstanding is particularly RAMPANT on philosophy forums.

Next, generally speaking, taken as a whole, religion is more realistic than atheism about the human condition, and more compassionate in serving that reality. This not because theists are smarter, but only because they've been doing their thing far longer. Here's the evidence...

To this day, religion continues to thrive in every time and place. It's been doing so for thousands of years. That is, religion is a "creature" very well adapted to it's environment, the human mind. Natural selection is demonstrating the power of religion to anyone willing to listen to the evidence.

This implies that atheism is only in opposition with the concept of "God" and the belief in one or a pantheon. But I wouldn't call someone who believes in astrology an atheist. It's the same kind of belief system, just not focused on the concept of God. — Christoffer

In my view you make a common mistake by trying to include a whole world view under the rubric of atheism. It only pertains to theism, nothing more. Over 30 years I've certainly met more than my share of atheists who believe in fortune telling and astrology. The idea that logic or reason is involved is a myth. This pertains to those atheists who are theorised.

Where is the logic and reason to prove that logic and reason are better than experience and belief?
Logical positivism is inconsistent.
And most atheists do not live their lives purely by logic and reason. That's impossible.
And the believers in rationality just assume rationality can explain everything. Whence and why this faith?