But wouldn't it be correct to say that someone that holds contradictory beliefs and/or does not believe all of the logical implications of their beliefs are not being logically consistent?

I question whether it is logically consistent to hold no believe while holding a belief. Lacking a belief is just that, not holding a positive belief or a negative believe.

We had this conversation in one of the other threads. I believe that the mistake you are making is that there is not many explanations of the universe of which God is just one. There is God (God representing some sort of mindful purposeful creator) and no-God. If we were talking about a specific God, say the God represented in the bible, then I would agree but that is not what we are talking about.

In the thread that I started on this topic I used an advance calculus problem where the answer was 1 or 0. I have no believe (or a lack of belief) about the answer being 1. There is no way that I could assign any probability to my belief in the answer being 1 as I have no belief. I have no way of assigning certainty as I hold such a lack of information about the problem that I could not even formulate one.

We are not just talking about creation here. We are talking about how the universe/reality came to be the way that it is now. Reality is not unchanging. So even if we grant that reality has always existed it has not always existed exactly how it is right now. Which means that there must be an explanation as to how reality got to where it is right now from any previous state.

Ah, ok. There is not much out there on this (nothing in SEP), but it seems like an absurd position to me, but whatever.

Sure we are - you were quite explicit about what you meant by God and hence what you meant by someone who was an atheist as in a believer in no-God. If you recall, you summed up what you meant by the brand of atheism you were referring to (I'm one of them):

"If you believe that the universe was not created by an intentional mindful being, then you by negation believe that the universe was created not by an intentional mindful being. Which requires acceptance."

The non-bolded part is not true, but the bolded bit is explicitly about creation.

You could revise your definition of God, but you're not going to make luckyme any happier.

The fact that reality has changed does not imply there must be an explanation as to why it changed. It's even less obvious that there must be a comprehensible (to us) explanation - even if there is some underlying reason.

I dont think it's fair to characterise it as absurd. After all, nobody (theological professor on down) has ever actually come up with an uncontroversial definition of God. So the idea that such a thing is impossible is at least plausible.

I just think it's a fundamental misunderstanding about how we learn about the world. Physicists talked about fundamental particles with their quantum weirdness for ages before they began to understand them (if they really do). It doesnt mean that nothing fruitful can come from such discussions until they are clearly defined - nor that Niels Bohr wasnt speaking sensibly when he formed theories about 'electrons' without actually being able to accurately define them.

We are using created in two different ways here.

I mostly agree with this.

But my point is that this is not a belief. Let me show you. Let's go back to my detective story. Now, of any particular suspect, the detective thinks that there is 99% chance that she is innocent. Does this mean that the detective believes that she is innocent? No. After all, if the detective did believe she was innocent, then the detective would have to believe on the same grounds that every single one of the suspects were also innocent, but yet the detective knows that one of them is in fact guilty. Thus, a high enough known probability that a proposition is true is not enough on its own to make us believe that proposition is true.

Yes, there are many explanations of the origin of the universe of which God is just one. For instance, maybe the universe has always existed because of scientific law 1. Or maybe the universe has always existed because of scientific law 2, etc. Or maybe there is no comprehensible explanation of how the universe came to exist. Or maybe the Big Bang is a result of brute chance. Or maybe the universe doesn't actually exist as more than a simulation. Or maybe God created the universe in way#1, or way #2, etc.

What you are doing is dividing these explanations into two categories--ones that require a God and ones that don't. Now it seems like there are only two options. But this division is entirely artificial. I can also divide up possible explanations into these categories--ones that were thought up on a Monday and ones that were not. Does this mean that there is a 50% probability that the correct explanation is one that was thought up on a Monday? Obviously not.

Yeah, but in your example you are not illustrating a general principle, but rather a specific feature of math problems. The prior probability of any scientific hypothesis with little to no evidence is very low.

Here's the main difference. In your math problem, we are very confident that the answer is either 1 or 0, and since we have no reason to prefer one to the other, we say that the prior probability of it being one or the other is 50%. However, notice that if the possible answers were 0, 1, and 2, then the prior probability would be 33%. Thus, we see that there isn't anything special about 50%, rather it is the number of possible answers that determines the probability that any one of them is correct.

So, the claim that I am making is that the number of possible answers to the question of how the universe came to exist (if it came to exist) is either much larger than two, or that we are not confident enough that it is just two to warrant giving it a prior probability at all. So the initial probability of there being a god is either much lower than 50%, or we have so little information as to make it impossible to justifiably have any belief here.

nit: Why do you say "no-god" with the dash? I don't get it.

Err...where?

Luckyme is going to have a fit.

This is very good (and I quite like the detective analogy too - I think that's worth stealing).

You seem to be using creation to only describe the act of bringing reality from non-being to being. I am using creation to mean all of reality and how it got the way that it is today.

And I am not really concerned with Luckyme, I don't read many of his posts anyway.

I don't believe that there is any real controversy revolving around the dominant definitions of God.

Ok.


But what if there were only two possible suspects, would it be possible to believe that one is 99% likely to have committed the crime while no holding a belief in who committed the crime?


[qoute]Yes, there are many explanations of the origin of the universe of which God is just one. For instance, maybe the universe has always existed because of scientific law 1. Or maybe the universe has always existed because of scientific law 2, etc. Or maybe there is no comprehensible explanation of how the universe came to exist. Or maybe the Big Bang is a result of brute chance. Or maybe the universe doesn't actually exist as more than a simulation. Or maybe God created the universe in way#1, or way #2, etc. [/quote]

But scientific law 1 and scientific law 2 etc are just apart of the no-god theory. For every explanation that you come up with for the no-god theory you can come up with for the god theory. Then would not have 1 God theory and 20 no-god theories, but say 20 God theories and 20 no-god theories.

I would disagree that it is artificial as everyone of your possible explanations that do not require God still fall under the no-god explanation. But allowing one side to elaborate on an explanation giving it an equal chance of being probable while not allowing the same to be said of the other side seems like special pleading.

If I was to say that the God of the bible was one explanation and that Allah was another explanation and Vishnu was yet another explanation I feel you would object.


As far as I can tell you are not disagreeing with me here, except that you believe that there should be more than two possible answer of which God is only one.

Then we need to focus on your claim that there are many possibilities for the universe in which God can only be one.

To differentiate a claim about god and a claim that lacks god. For example naturalism isn't really a claim about God, but it is a claim that does not involve God.

Why?!? What would the objection be?

Perhaps we'll settle the other bit, but can't see any accounting for this.

Rather, it should be vigorously encouraged. It would illustrate how bankrupt this approach is once we had 10,000 different possible explanation it would be obvious that a) we could group them in a huge varieties of ways depending on which variables we wanted to focus on, and b) any one of them would need very heavy-duty evidence to get past the 1/10,000 interest level.

Probably covered, but some forms of atheism...like strong atheism, does require belief.

Undoubtedly there also both weak atheists and agnostic atheists who hold beliefs about god(s) not existing but on an intellectual level in debates etc adopt a more solid stance....I guess one could say they are strong atheists in belief, but weak atheists in method.

Furthermore, culturally speaking...atheism sometimes takes on more content than merely lack of belief in god(s)...often it comes to mean an academically inclined person who is skeptic about the supernatural...not only by people on the outside, but also by persons who identify themselves with that particular culture.

But in the strict sense...you are right that it does not require belief.

You should start. I think he or she has a knack for getting to the heart of the argument in a succinct manner.

You should ponder the reason you felt it appropriate to use the plural of definition.

I'm not really speaking about creation at all - whatever you mean by creation is fine (though if its something other than creating something - why not just add another property to your definition of God rather than shoehorning it into a word which doesnt usually entail anything more than creating something?).

All I'm doing is pointing out that you're incorrect in your claim that an atheist (like me) who believes there is no such thing as a mindful, intelligent being who created the universe must logically accept that the universe is a product of nothing, plus some mindless processes. There are many strong atheist positions (some of which correspond with people I know, some of which I've made up) which do not necessitate believing the universe is a product of nothing (mine happens to be one of them).

The negation of a compound statement entails at least one of the component statements to be false, not all of them.

A very unwise position to adopt, in my view. Luckyme is irritating if you intend to play a significant part in what the conversation is going to be about, but it's illuminating to just go with him wherever he wanders, in my experience.

Yes.

There is no "no-god" theory that explains the origin of the universe. Rather, there are explanations which do not posit the existence of a god. So there is no reason to group explanations into these two categories. However, the main point is that you are correct--no theory that we've come up with yet has much plausibility. That means that when thinking about the probability of the explanations on hand being correct, we should probably give "other" the highest probability.

How have I not allowed this to the other side? You are welcome to come up with as many explanations that require the existence of a god as you wish.

Your feeling would be wrong (although I do view Allah and the God of the Bible as being the same God).

Well, yeah. That is kind of my main point though. If we had narrowed the possible answers to only two, and one of which required that a god exist, and the evidence was roughly equal for both of them, then I would view the probability of a god existing as being around 50%. But none of those conditions apply.

I've not said that there is only one explanations which requires the existence of a deity.

Either you guys are talking so far above my head that I have no business in this discussion, or you are grossly misunderstanding what people here are trying to tell you.

Either the universe was created by a god, or it wasn't. It's either true or false. On this much, I think we can agree, right?

If it was created by a god, then you are right and everyone who believed there was no god is wrong. Period. You win. But if there is no god... Then we are still left with needing an explanation. And there are a myriad of different possibilities that it might end up being. Re-read Original Position's post where he explains what you are doing wrong here by artificially creating two categories.

btw- I also have to chime in and add that I think you are missing out on a lot by not reading luckyme posts. He is definitely on my 'A' list of top posters here.

This is me calmly expressing the frustration I feel while reading through this thread.

There are different strains of atheism, just as in there are different strains of theism.

The weak atheist argument would be i reject theistic claims, whereas a strong atheist position would be I reject theistic claims and assert there are no deities.

And yet even more extreme would be anti-theism, which states that there are no deities and asserting that the belief in deities is wrong or irrational.

All of them are logically defensible, although weak atheism doesn't even need to be defended. It's merely a response to theistic claims.

Whenever a claim is made, the burden of proof is always on the claimer. It's not up to atheists in general to prove there is no god in the face of a theistic claim. If you make a strong atheist or anti-theistic claim, then the burden of proof is on you.

For the most part, I see atheists on this forum simply rejecting theistic claims, which is fine. Theists who claim 'atheism' is a belief system like theism are overgeneralizing and usually just plain wrong.