It's bizarre that you keep saying things like this. Like we get it, the way YOU interpret the world is by stuffing betting odds in everywhere, often in places where it is a really ill fitting lens. But that isn't the criticism: it's that you consistently - despite repeatedly been told otherwise - seem to believe that everyone else uses the same lens you use. They don't. Most people don't know what laying 11 to 10 even means, let alone put this at the core of how they interpret their world.

So this is conflict with Dered's post where not believing that one of the options is true, either by rejecting it as not true, or simply by withholding assent to it's truth value, is not necessarily choosing the other option.

This is my dilemma.

Suppose I have a bucket that contained 11 white balls and 10 black balls. I pull out a ball at random. How do you feel about the claim "the ball is white"? Would you agree that you're a believer of the claim that the ball is white?

According to this definition, you would be forced to believe the ball is white because you would be willing to lay these odds.

However, people who have more depth of thought than what the definition provides would not do that. They would assent to "the ball is more likely to be white than black" (and even pronounce the odds that they are correct), but this isn't the same as assenting to the claim "the ball is white."

You can't understand cognition without logic (eg formal semantics).

Religion is a lot weirder than you are giving it credit. As I've already said, social pressure is not the only counterexample to your view of religion. I personally know someone who is an open and avowed atheist, including to her rabbi and fellow congregrants, but yet also a religious Jew, in part of because of religious experiences of God (which she views as not being veridical).

You should read Gottlob Frege's "The Thought."

David's example is useful for measuring commitment and filtering out a lot of BS, but it also has its flaws. People commit to religion because they believe it is true, but they also commit for other reasons. For instance, I don't find it implausible to think that people would be willing to knowingly accept losing bets for the sake of religion.

As a gambler, David should know this. Many people like to bet on the home team, not necessarily because they genuinely think they will win or are the better team, but as a way of being a fan or showing loyalty. I know someone who has bet substantially that Donald Trump will not be impeached this year, not because he believes he won't be impeached, but as a "life" hedge against him not being impeached (he figures he can't lose this bet). Or think about war - are the soldiers giving up their lives because they truly believe their country is in the right and patriotism? Sure, that is no doubt true of many, but many others do so out of peer pressure and group loyalty, cowardice, recklessness, and so on.

From SEP

Given this consider two propositions

1) There is a god
2) There is no god

Assenting to proposition 1 entails rejecting proposition 2 given the principle of non contradiction. but a person can withhold assent to both. Neeeel's example is worth restating again here;

1) The number of stars in the sky is an even number
2) The number of stars in the sky is not an even number

Now this is clearer because in this instance the probability of 1 and 2 are both .5 but it shows how it is entirely coherent to withhold assent to a proposition without assenting to it's negation.

It's even coherent to reject a proposition on probability grounds. "The total number of stars in the universe is a prime". That is probably untrue, but I cannot reject it. I would ask you for evidence of it. If it was not strong, I would reject your proposition probabilistically.

And that only considers the classes of things that are true and false.

Q: Do you believe in Ksdfsfgerd?
A: What?
Q: Ksdfsfgerd is the concept that there is a something undefinable yet powerful, personally interested in us.
A: I don't have an opinion an because I don't really understand what you're asking, but it's probably bull**** if you can't define it better than that.

Then there's probability as an answer. So I think there's a fourth and fifth category:

1) Understand the question and agree
2) Understand the question and disagree
3) Understand the question, believe there is an answer, but think it is unknowable
4) Understand the question, believe there is an answer, but think it is unknowable but improbable
5) Find the question not to be valid; reject it as a class of question which are improperly defined

I think 5 covers a lot of atheists. When someone posits God, it's really a feeling salad, with no meaning whatsoever outside of the individual.

A supernatural entity who created the universe is so horrifically undefined that it's meaningless. People give it meaning by associating it with feelings and stories, but it's not a meaningful concept or logical proposition; it is entirely too vague to mean anything. I think we are entitled to reject vague undefined propositions and be avaguepropositionists.

Theological noncognitivism isn't that widely held of a position, and I think it's a pretty lazy position to take if you're taking it to mean a definitional problem (as it appears you're doing here). If you want to talk about noncognitivism from a verificationist perspective, that's something else.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...-quot-1632107/

God is essentially an untestable thing beyond human comprehension who may or may not interact with the universe, may or may not care for humans, may or may not be jealous, may or may not have a consciousness or be merely a force.

Non-cognitivism seems pretty strong to me when confronted with such ridiculousness.

I think the only reason God has survived as a concept is because we're such social beings, and our parental imprinting at a young age (of our parents are all-powerful loving entities who we look to as protectors) is strong, and transfers quite easily to a God concept.

I think aliens who didn't have such powerful social imprintings would find our views of God to be bizarre and reject them out of hand as meaningless inventions of primitive psychology - even if a supreme force of some kind pervaded the universe.

But this isn't the type of non-cognitivism you're putting forward. Untestability has to do with verificationist approaches to the question. You're doing something different.

You are free to think whatever you want to think. None of this has any bearing on the issue that has been raised.

It is not in conflict. Tame_deuces gave an example of a system with only two options and a forced choice, whereas dereds is assuming that it is not a forced choice.

There is an interesting debate in philosophy whether a forced choice is even possible here, with some philosophers claiming that knowledge is a norm of assertion. In other words, by asserting that p you are also (implicitly) asserting that you know that p. Thus, you can't (on this view) properly assert that there is an even number of stars because you don't know whether there is an even number of stars. More relevantly, you can't sincerely assert that there is (or is not) a God unless you also think you know that there is a God. Thus, if you don't know if there is a God or not, you can only assert a lack of belief on this view.

That debate sounds silly to me.

You can assert or disavow p based on the class of the claim without knowing a thing about the subject matter or even knowing if you can know the subject matter.

Philosophers do it all the time when they argue the internal logic of something and thus reject the conclusion - even if the conclusion is right. This is essentially what I'm doing with my cognition argument - I'm rejecting the cognition that produced God even though I know nothing about God or the specific God-related claims

You do it all the time when you trust your friend's account of an event even though you have no ability to verify or know if it is true. You're basing it on their cognition. You can do it the other way too, more reliably than all the convoluted logical arguments every printed about God.

Occam's razor is another form of this in action.

Propositions aren't pure things. They exist and can be viewed in various frames, from the cognition of the person who produced the proposition (why are we ultimately listening to a proposition rather than random noise or monkeys? Because we ascribe the ability to discern truth to another mind), to all kinds of frames around the cogency of a general type of proposition, in all kinds of clever ways (Occam's razor, for instance), on general principles of structure.

OrP explained very well why there isn't a conflict between what I wrote and what Dereds wrote, so I won't repeat that. Let's instead consider an example which is a bit more relevant to how things crop in real life.

Scenario: You have a pile of 10 000 oranges. Your machines have checked 1000 oranges for rot and found none.

Now choose one answer, but choosing one answer means you believe that to be true, and also that you believe the other can't be true: Is your batch good or bad?

Do you see now that using a contrived question and a forced choice is not necessarily useful?

Atheism means you disbelieve in God.

I believe in God = theism/deism
I don't believe in God = atheism
I neither believe nor don't believe in God = agnosticism

Atheists have hijacked the last definition and made it a form of atheism.

No, this is wrong. Agnosticism (in its classical definition) is the view that the existence of God is unknowable. It even goes further than that, because as used by Huxley (the "father" of modern agnosticism) it means a complete rejection of spiritual or religious knowledge. Basically the agnostic would state "You can't know that, so I reject your claim".

It certainly bears a resemblance to weak atheism (not believing in gods, but not necessarily asserting that there are none) but weak atheism does not imply a rejection of spiritual or religious knowledge. A weak atheist (and a strong one, for that matter) could for example be a religious Buddhist, but this would be very difficult to reconcile with agnosticism.

In everyday parlor agnostic has often come to mean "undecided", a person who has not made an active choice. This is a bastardization of the term, because agnosticism as the term was actually meant to be used would point to someone who has made a very strong choice in regards to religious and spiritual beliefs.

Exactly tame_deuces is correct, a(theism) is an ontologicial claim as to whether or not god exists (a)gnosticism is an epistemic claim regarding the possibility of knowledge of God.

I guess several prominent dictionaries, Carl Sagan, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and JEOPARDY! are all apart of some conspiracy theory to hide the true meaning of the term atheism.

Dictionaries


Carl Sagan


Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism

JEOPARDY!

No, there is no conspiracy. "Atheism" at its core it means simply "not a theist", a person who does not hold a belief in god(s).

And of course not holding a belief in something can come down to many reasons. That is completely trivial, and the only reason people go into the line of argument you do now is because of the subject matter at hand.

For example if I don't believe in the existence of the Yeti it could be because...

a) I have never seen a Yeti or evidence for one, but I'm not rejecting that there could be one (weak disbelief)
b) I think the entire thing is born out of superstition and that the search has sufficiently shown that Yetis do not exist (strong disbelief)
c) And myriads of others, it doesn't even have to be an informed decision. Maybe I'm just stubborn and don't like the idea.

Your line of argumentation would mean only b is relevant and this is the only way to not believe in Yetis. That's a completely absurd argument, and dumping cherry-picked quotes to support your point only makes it look like are looking for a quarrel.

Ok, thanks, but when we say 'I don't believe P is true', are we withholding assent for P, or explicitly rejecting P?

In normal conversation we can be doing either, we're only explicitly rejecting P when we say that "I believe that P is false".

Also my using apostrophes wrong wrecks my head.

Define God more rigidly (like Jesus was God) and you will turn many of those you define as agnostics into people you define as atheists.

Trying to push the i dont know out of atheism is something some theists and atheists have in common...

I think these three statements are different:

1. God most certainly does not exist because....
2. I do not find the claims of God to be plausible or compelling enough to believe.
3. I do not know if there is or isn't a God

1 & 2 are atheists. 3 is agnostic. There is a big difference between 1 and 2, but both are atheist.

I mean, my own position is that the ultimate, fundamental nature of reality is unknowable (both philosophically and to very limited human minds), but that all the conceptions of God I've come across are either unsatisfying as explanations or theories, or meaningless, and thus I lack belief in them.

I'm entitled to do that without taking the hard position of believing strongly in a negative.

I'm curious, are you part of (or a lurker in) any G+ / YT communities, as this topic blew up recently in a particular G+ community?


Anyway, within philosophy, atheist is generally taken to mean the position that no god(s) exist, i.e. strong atheist. More commonly and recently, atheist has taken on the broader definition that is weak atheist, or simply non-theist. One difference is that an agnostic would be considered an atheist under the broad definition, but not under the philosophical definition.

Here's another way of looking at the true vs false issue you're having: a proposition P is either true or false (by law of excluded middle), but without having access to the objective truth of P, you can only providing your beliefs about P. When you evaluate a proposition, you are able to do so one prong at a time. eg "Do you believe P is true?" and "Do you believe P is false?" are two separate evaluations. Affirming either prong obviously negates the other, but not-affirming either prong does not necessitate negation of the other.

A common way of looking at this kind of question is a court of law, a jury is only asked to evaluate one of the prongs: "Do you believe there is sufficient evidence to find the defendant guilty?" (or "Do you believe P is true?"). If the evidence is lacking, the defendant is not found guilty* (or "I do not believe P is true"). This can still mean the defendant might be guilty OR innocent but the evidence was insufficient to make the determination for the defendant being guilty.

To translate this back to a theological position, the question can be thought of as "Is there sufficient evidence to find god(s) guilty of existing?". Not affirming this does not mean you think god(s) do not exist (though the philosophical atheist will go as far as to take that position).



* The defendant might be legally described as "found not guilty", but logically the correct description would be "not found guilty".

My point is that hardly anyone ever says that God is "more likely" or less likely". Almost everyone seems to think that they must make him a giant favorite or underdog to exist.

That's fine. My point is that the "definition" of belief you provided was awful for the reason you're not actually continuing forward with it now.