Yep. And most theists are closet atheists. It's all so confusing!

how sad. you've spent all this time on RGT, and you still are absolutely clueless on what atheism is.

Don't we all think God is pretty unlikely? I thought strong atheism was saying gods definitely did not exist (i.e. impossible)?

It's impossible to get past the fact that you are wrong, because it is your fundamental assumptions and definitions which are completely asinine.

About the only argument you have posted is "weak atheists on this board are strong atheists who won't admit it" - I wouldn't speak to loudly about mental age of arguments when you are basing your case on psychic powers.

Let me perfectly clear: Our views are nowhere near similar just because we both get to say "I know Jehova does not exist".

If you can get why this is and accept it, then we can argue like grownups - untill then this just you saying "nuh uh".

1) If God exists, and he wants us to have evidence of his existence, then we would have evidence of his existence.
2) We don't have evidence of God's existence.
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3) Therefore, it either false that God exists and or false that he wants us to have evidence that he exists.

4) If God exists, there is no evidence that God exists.
5) There is no evidence that God exists.
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6) God exists.

That second argument is invalid of course. Part of my concern here is that the weak atheism of some posters here seems to reduce to Cartesian skepticism. If we think that (4) is true, I'm worried that we are dealing with Descartes evil demon again.

fwiw i dont think there is any meaningful difference between strong atheism and weak atheism. i could be categorized either way, and it wouldnt matter. the end result is the same, im not a theist, and god plays no part of my life.

Eh, I'm very nearly - if not quite - a noncognitivist; I'm prepared to accept a little fuzziness over the nature of things I don't believe in. 'Ground of All Being' holds no meaning for me, and gravitation is gravitation, and doesn't need an alias.

We could probably waste a lot of time 'imagining a god-space' and suchlike, but I think we can keep it reasonably simple. My atheism is, of necessity, restricted to all claims of god I'm currently familiar with - experience tells me that its scope will expand to meet future claims, though I can't be certain of that. I can't really define absence in terms of all the things that are not where the absence is - I just call it 'absence' and have done with it.

There are too many possible permutations of 'the Christian god' for me to believe in the non-existence of all of them. Per above, it's simply:

[ ] Believes in the existence of 'the Christian god'

Like I said - I'm okay with a little fuzziness.

But whither your 'strong atheism', then? Consider different versions of 'god' - let's say a deistic god, one with whom no possible state of affairs is really irreconcilable - do you believe that no such entity exists?


Most definitions hinge on this point. (Certainly regarding the term's origin - the res publica was what replaced the Roman Kings - always amuses me how similar the phrase is to 'cosa nostra' - but I digress).

A distinction could be made by consequence - we take no position on the number of stars because we are indifferent to the number of stars. We take a position on the US king because, in my case at least, we would need to revise our definition of 'republic' if the US did have a king.

I don't want to get into the mess about induction, it looks like a dead-end sidetrack to me, though I suppose I'll muck in if you can persuade me otherwise.

(shrug) I'm not here to convert.

Ummm...Holy defensiveness, Batman! Look really closely at the OP and you will see that I am asking why weak atheists claim that strong atheism is unjustified, not presenting an argument against weak atheism. What you think is my argument is not an argument, but an observation, one which I admitted was largely offered in jest and then retracted.

I've been clear and explicit in defining my terms while you have primarily used lots of adjectives to describe your emotional reaction to my question. Your inability to get past this reflects poorly on you.

More seriously, why the reaction? What would lead you think that I am not being sincere? I didn't think this was typical of your posting style, but maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention.

According to you I'm either a strong atheist or I shouldn't care about theism or atheism. Which makes absolutely no sense, since I'm the one who thinks revelation is not as of yet possible.

Pretty wrapping doesn't buy you grace. I don't want it to seem like I'm talking your arguments very seriously.

And you have been making arguments.

Okay, this is useful. I don't understand what you mean by saying you are a noncognitivist here. Perhaps you can explain? But let me see if this makes sense.

So for sure your weak atheism is descriptive of the fact that you do not believe that gods with which you are not familiar do not exist. Here I agree with you--I am a weak atheist regarding these gods. In fact, I would assume that everyone is a weak atheist regarding unknown gods (indexed to each person of course). So hopefully weak atheism extends beyond this claim or it becomes trivial.

Then there are a number of gods with which you are somewhat familiar. So, regarding these gods, which of them would you say that you do not believe that they do not exist?

One you seem to propose is the deistic god. I suppose this is a God that doesn't interfere with nature and isn't benevolent towards humanity and so most of the reasons I hold for not believing in God are not relevant. Hmm...yeah, this is probably the hardest case. I suppose the real reason is that it seems epistemically acceptable to believe however you please for unfalsifiable beliefs. Not sure if that is sustainable.

But doesn't that imply that the belief that there is no God is more like the U.S. king than the number of stars?
My point here is that you have to show here not only that my arguments do not justify my belief, but that this belief requires justification.

Okay, tame_deuces, I'm wrong, you really care about theism and atheism. Now that that is settled, can we move on?

I have no idea why you are talking about revelation or grace. And no, what you quoted was an observation, not an argument. But mainly, you'll be much more convincing about not taking me seriously if you just ignored me. Please.

Well, I said 'very nearly'. TI is an interesting perspective. Basically, I mean that the term 'god' is not clearly, or maybe better not properly or completely defined. There are things to which the label 'god' is attached that I understand as well as I suppose anyone can - but then there are things the label is attached to that I don't really understand at all.

Sure. Take incarnations of Yahweh which don't invoke omnibenevolence, or which hold that omnibenevolence from an omniscient perspective differs greatly from 'benevolence' as we understand it from our limited perspective. I understand these gods about as well as I think anyone can - and I can't say I believe not one of them exists (if only because, I mean good grief - the effort!).

I'd go so far as to say that the idea of 'evidence against' all possible cases of Yahweh - per the above description - is nonsensical. This is about as close as I want to come to actively arguing that your position is unjustified - theism, strong atheism - both are positions held with insufficient evidence.
I'd go further than 'unsustainable', all the way to 'untenable'. But the attitude you describe falls under the purview of 'belief' in my book, and I'm just about as doxastically involuntarist as you can get (ie, I'm pretty sure you can't 'help' believing as you do - a huge part of my lack of desire to convert).
If you mean that the god question means more to us than the number of stars, then yes. If you mean that (all) gods are like kings of republics or married bachelors, then no.

What criteria do you apply to beliefs to determine whether they need justification?

Also, as a side note: just what the hell is your avatar? Apart from a fiendish plot to make me think my monitor's dirty?

tame, OP, please kiss and make up if at all possible, BTW. I know you two could have a really productive discussion (I also kind of want tame to flank OP and sneak up behind him while he's distracted by my prolixity).

The problem is that ad hoc definitions of God are apparently perfectly acceptable. You can never be sure if God does or does not exist because the definition might change any minute now! This is not acceptable for anything other than God that I am aware of.

This has been my understanding as well.

I think I am a strong atheist by Original Position's definition, but I've always considered myself a weak atheist by my understanding of the terms.

The thread IS called weak atheists attack, and I take exclamation marks very, very seriously.

I don't know if there is much to flank. OP seems to be a weak atheist, not a strong atheist.

Sure, one could claim that there isn't a definition of strong atheism that is set in stone - but that just makes the term useless and it could just be dubbed atheism.

Strong atheism is usually the position that any position saying a god exists or could exist is false.

If it isn't, then there is no difference between weak atheism and strong atheism.

Isn't it more like saying that you believe that no God of any kind exists or could exist? Whereas weak atheists do believe that a God could exist? So It's saying you believe their position is false, but you don't necessarily claim to have that knowledge objectively.

So there is a difference, although not necessarily the one you would suggest in this quote.

As I said, the term is not set in stone...but if we're going to debate different views held by weak atheists and strong atheists then we should probably go with one which is accepted fairly widely and which actually separates the two terms and doesn't bring the fuzziness that is "beliefs" into the equation.

As I said, I don't think Original Position's view is very different from most weak atheists on this board. He has merely taken another name for his view.

Maybe my distinction between the two views was not clear enough. So here are a few things which do not describe strong atheism. Strong atheism does not require that you think that no god could exist. That is, a strong atheist can claim that God exists in some possible worlds, but not in the actual world. Furthermore, strong atheism doesn't imply that any position that says a god exists is false. After all, some people define "God" in very strange ways (the examples I've already used is definitions of God as the Ground of All Being or as natural forces such as gravitation). Rather, in my view, strong atheists deny that God exists, based on a range of applicable values for God. The values I specified were the traditional conceptions of God found in the major Western religions and the so-called "God of the philosophers."

However, the distinction between weak and strong atheism is usually made by distinguishing their epistemic commitments. So regarding belief in God, there are three different views you can take, based on your acceptance or rejection of belief.

1. Do believe that there is a God.
2. Do not believe that there is a God.
3. Do believe that there is not a God.
4. Do not believe that there is not a God.

Theists accept (1) and (4), strong atheists accept (2) and (3), and weak atheists accept (2) and (4). So the crucial distinction between strong and weak atheism (on this account) is that the strong atheist will affirm that there is no God, and the weak atheist will not affirm that there is no God.

My motivation for starting this thread was in trying to figure out why we call the person who accepts (2) and (4) a weak atheist rather than a weak theist. That is, the rejection of a positive belief is symmetrical between the strong atheist and (strong?) theist belief, so why is this view considered a form of atheism?

The easiest way to make sense of this is to point out that the atheist belief (3) is a general statement, and so can be disproven by a single counterexample, and the theist belief (1) is a singular statement. That is (4) is not false if you believe, regarding some gods, that they do not exist as long as you do not believe, regarding some god, that they do not exist. On the other hand (2) seems to be false if you believe, regarding any god, that it exists.

It is this interpretation that makes me worried that the reason why people are avoiding the strong atheist position is because they are worried about the problem of induction or other classic skeptical problems. It is very difficult to prove that any generalization is true, but nonetheless, we do believe many of them. So can we show a way to believe the atheist generalization (3)?

One way is by identifying a feature that is characteristic of all conceptions of God, then showing how that features implies a false result. Of course, this requires a narrowing, or a making explicit, of the concept of God. But I think that is okay. It would require that theological terms have content but, except for AIF, it seems like most people on this forum, and certainly the theists accept this.

But what is required of the weak atheist is that of at least one value of God in the definition given, she can say that she does not believe that that god does not exist. Otherwise she is a strong atheist.

Also, this shows why deism is a problem for the strong atheist. Most of the arguments used by the strong atheism appeal to general features of God that are not true of the deistic god. So if you include the deistic god as part of your conception of God, then your strong atheism might end up unjustified.

This conflates possibility (a metaphysical notion) with proof or epistemic certainty. Modern philosophy views these ideas as very different.

If I say that all mammals are warm-blooded, but you then change the definition of mammals to include snakes, the my original claim is false using your definition. But obviously that doesn't mean that my original claim is false, nor does it mean that we should make generalizations using terms with a relatively fixed meaning.

I think most weak atheists here are strong atheists by your account - it's the 'according to most commonly proposed conceptions of God' part which is causing the disagreement, imo. I expect you consider a strong atheist to be rejecting maybe a dozen (?) gods whereas many here would take a strong atheist to be rejecting billions of Gods (treating each individual believer's God as an individual case, not to mention all the 'potential' Gods with no actual believers but which are trivial to generate).

There may also be a different use of agnosticism. From what I understand you take it to mean "knowledge of God is inherently impossible" whereas it is often portrayed as "I personally am not able to know if God exists". Even theism is taken to mean "believes in one or more gods" rather than a believer in an omni3 God as I always understood it - I suspect that's why the problem of evil is not seen as estabilshing strong atheism (whereas, if unresolable, it clearly refutes an omni3 god).

I dont understand the difference between "lack of evidence" and "very little positive evidence for the existence of God" (or was that an error from typing quickly and including something twice?)

I also dont see why God is inconsistent with the scientific worldview (or do you mean that postulating the existence of God without evidence is what is inconsistent?)

Ultimately, it seems to me you are relying on Ockham's Razor which as far as I' m aware is only justifiable on inductive grounds. The trouble I see with applying it to God is that all the instances from which you are generalising are from objects, phenomena or states of affairs within the universe - I dont see how that generalisation is justifiably extended to also apply to explanations of things outside of spacetime and even (on some concpetions of God) to the cause of the laws of logic.

Ockham's Razor is justifiable because it has worked so well in explaining physical phenomena in the past - it doesnt have any track record for or against in helping us understand putative objects outside of the universe so there's no reason to suspect it will or won't be useful. In my mind it's analogous to making various observations of physical objects and concluding* that under ever increasing heat all objects passes from solid to liquid to gas. Whilst it would be reasonable to inductively conclude that some newly discovered type of matter would also have that property, it would be fallcious to ascribe the same property to a newly discovered Mersenne prime.

Hopefully it's clear my objection is with induction itself - how can we justifiably "induce" anything about objects or "events" outside the universe?

One reason I used to be a strong atheist was as a consequence of being a materialist (which if true refutes all things we might plausibly call gods). I think this suffers from a similar objection - a materialist is probably best characterised as claiming that everything which exists within the universe is matter or some property of matter. I mention that more out of curiosity as to whether you are a materialist or not...

*incorrectly as it happens

Yeah, this might be the case. I don't think it makes sense to treat each believer as having a different conception of God. When I say, for instance, that I believe Santa Claus is not real, I am relying on a core concept (a set of descriptions) that provides a meaning for "Santa Claus." Similarly, if I say that I believe that God is not real, I am relying on a core concept (a set of descriptions) to provide the meaning of "God." If someone says, well, that is not what I mean by "God," then I'm not bothered as my original statement that I believe there is no such God has a different meaning and so could still be justified.

Nope, that isn't how I use "agnosticism." It seems like people understand "agnosticism" in two primary ways. One way is that an agnostic claims that it is impossible to be able to prove that God exists or that God doesn't exist. Usually this is meant to refer to the same traditional understanding of God that I am using. I just think this view is wrong--most of the arguments are based on anti-metaphysical empiricist biases that I am suspicious of. But this view is certainly defensible.

The least convincing version of this view, one that is disappointingly common, is to claim that in order to "know" that God exists you have to be able to prove it with 100% certainty, and since we can't prove it with that much certainty, no one can know that God exists (or doesn't). In my view this is just bad epistemology. If this were the requirement for "knowledge," then we would end up knowing almost nothing and so this claim about knowing that God exists or not is completely trivial.

The other way that people seem to use "agnosticism," is just to say that they personally do not know whether or not God exists. Whether it is in principle impossible is not part of this claim, it is rather a statement of a specific individual's epistemic standing in relation to claims about the existence of God. I obviously don't have a problem with this claim.

I don't think we should identify either form of agnosticism with either weak or strong atheism or theism. The reason why is that the agnostic can accept weak atheism or theism (e.g. Kierkegaard, or you, as far as I know) or even strong atheism.
Yeah, I think that was just typing quickly. My mistake.

I think this is mainly just bias on my part. I accept a broadly naturalistic epistemology and it is difficult to know how to even talk about God on this view.

I think this is basically right, regarding my reliance on Ockham's Razor (plus the argument from evil). I think what I want to see is why Ockham's Razor doesn't justify strong atheism. That is, it is a methodological principle about belief acceptance. Your argument is that while we are justified in accepting it as good methodological principle about scientific theories, we are not justified in doing so regarding non-scientific theories. I tend to view metaphysical theories as continuous with scientific theories and use a broadly coherentist epistemology a la Quine for questions that are central to my "web of belief." One of these central claims is that materialism is correct. I could be wrong that this is an important claim, but I would have to see why.

I should note that I suspect that theism can also be justified on these grounds as well. That is, if theism is central to your web of belief, and your worldview is broadly coherent and explanatorily successful, then that would seem like a good reason to accept theism.

If it is even conceivable that "a god who doesnt want to be noticed" can exist, then I think it becomes absurd to make any sort of claims about God's nonexistence. It is impossible to distinguish between a world where God exists and one where God does not. Thus, any "evidence" you think you have that would make you lean one way or the other is quite obviously a sham.

And it seems conceivable that such a God could exist.

I do not think God is unlikely. Just like I dont think intelligent alien life in the universe is likely. I think that it is impossible to determine the likelihood one way or the other. There is no framework for doing so. The problem of evil and all that jazz is basically the equivalent of the Drake equation. Its a cool way of framing the possible analysis....IF WE HAD ANY INFORMATION. The Drake equation would be great if we had any way of coming up with good estimates of the variables, but we do not. The problem of evil and all that is useful if we had some information that God was moral or that God impacted the universe, but we do not.

As far as I can tell there is no possible way to determine whether god is likely or unlikely, to any degree at all.