This is a spinoff thread from AiF's thread on 5 years of RGT. I originally wrote it as a reply to a comment on strong atheism, but I didn't want to derail the thread - so I am making a new one.

Why is it that I don't respect strong atheism?

The point is that "gods do not exist" isn't even an interesting claim to refute. People like to liken god to a green martian or a unicorn, but some undefined version of god isn't even that. It doesn't matter if somebody claims god exists, since it has absolutely no consequence if it does.

What matter is if God exists. And versus the revealed God it is only weak atheism that can be used to argue properly. Strong atheism is a gap argument, essentially an argument of faith and acceptance that metaphysic knowledge is possible. If such an argument is valid, then revealed religion must be equally valid.

To put it simply, it is the weak atheist who gets to state "Your God does not exist, and there is no reason to hold your belief". The strong atheist must say "Your God does not exist, but there is reason to hold your belief".

I also have a pet theory that it is the word "weak" that puts people off. It reminds them of weakness. What they are forgetting is that weak in this sense means skepticism, and skepticism is an epistemological strength not a weakness.

This was covered extensively here.

Original Position's argument is/was much stronger than yours, which is why myself and others (e.g. asdfasdf) changed from identifying as weak to identifying as strong.

Also, you are still (despite the philosophy postgrad explaining it to you ad nauseum) not really grasping what strong and weak mean in philosophy.

You are absolutely correct tame. The thread zumby mentioned certainly discussed the issue at length, but did not by any means present a convincing conclusion. I suspect this will just launch a rehash of the same discussion, but not much in this forum is anything but a rehash of old ideas. That is not intended to be a criticism, just the inevitable situation given that the subject is very old.

The problem for the strong atheist is that a statement that God does not exist requires either a proof or a statement of belief. The latter is just religion of a different sort. The former does not exist. You can end up with statements like this:

but basically these are for attempts to disprove God that are individually not conclusive. As a group they could be argued to reduce the probability of God (arguable of course as they are not complete as stated) but four inconclusive proofs do not equal a conclusive proof.

All this can equally be said of the theist side.

Well, my intention was certainly not to bring up debates where everyone's views are already set in stone. I don't even remember the linked thread, and if this was something that was quarrelled over extensively then my apologies.

I'm an empiricist. My atheism is basically a derivative of being an empiricist, and this is what causes me to confront revealed religion: I view it as wrong, and I don't accept personal faith as evidence. It is not really a complicated viewpoint. I'm sure it can infuriate and it has certainly sparked many a debate (and quarrel), but it is simple enough and I'm also sure most believers understand where I'm coming from.

That said I am of-course aware of the implications and limitations of (pragmatic) empiricism: Knowledge is not absolute, knowledge can be revised and the strength of empiricism is not certainty, but skepticism. This doesn't mean I doubt the certainty of the bridge I drive across to work, it merely means that the method and perspective used to attain knowledge of that bridge can't be exempt from scrutiny and possible revision.

However, since strong atheism is not an empirical position either, and thus something I must reject on the same grounds I reject the faith aspect of revealed religion, I would feel like a complete hypocrite if I didn't voice an opinion against it.

On these grounds, I also find it hugely questionable that strong atheism is used to voice criticism of revealed religion. It becomes not so much a debate as waving around a trump card: One questions the possibility of "an opponent" to attain knowledge, but hold ones own exempt from skepticism.

Absolutely.

I think that is tame's point, that strong atheism and theism are actually quite similar. I basically agree with him.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

I think you are also a bit guilty of a blanket statement here; Theism comes in many shapes and variants, and this certainly includes varying views on epistemology.

Well, that sums it up nicely I guess.

I'm a weak atheist in regards to weak gods.

The better defined and the more claims made about a specific god the more sure I am of its non-existence.

I don't like to present myself as a strong atheist because it's frequently much harder to give a disproof of very weak god claims. For instance the general deist position of an initial non-interventionist cause is so weakly presented that coming up with a strong rebuttal is difficult. I am happy enough to say that the god is so weak that I don't even know why you would believe in it and would prefer to debate the reasons for belief as oppose to demonstrating the impossibility of the claim (which may or may not be possible).

I don't want to derail this thread but there are reasons my drift from theism took me to deism rather than atheism. Not all of them obvious or intellectually honest.

I only use deism because it generally presents as impossible to disprove, whereas if you claim your god lives on Mt Olympus then yeah, I'm a strong atheist to that.

then how do you justify being a theist when you seem to think that strong atheists arent justified in holding that position?

My guess would be that he thinks they are wrong, as opposed to me who think they are using the wrong method.

This is no different than how he or most theists (presumably) thinks the religions they do not adhere to are wrong (for the record; I am not calling strong atheism a religion).

no, he agreed ( seemed to , anyway) that "the statement that God does exist requires either a proof or a statement of belief. The latter is just religion . The former does not exist. "

maybe this wasnt what he meant when he said "absolutely", i dunno

I don't think your definitions are even close to standard here...

I can't speak for RLK, but I assume he is saying that to close the gap from uncertainty to certainty on god's existence you must either have an absolute proof or personal faith. Since there are precious few ways (read: none) to attain absolute proofs, you are then left with personal faith as a premise.

When you have opened that door, you can't close it for others. If personal faith is acceptable evidence for you, it must also be acceptable evidence for them.

This may not be entirely accurate, but didn't Dawkins suggest a probability scale from high to low to denote the belief in God, where anyone in this scale falls into agnosticism, in essence eliminating weak atheists? He leaves the term strong atheism for those who believe there is no God with certainty - whatever that may mean.

I'm not sure this is right, but I've always felt this is more of a semantics issue than a philosophical one, since this debate often confuses knowledge versus belief.

Strong atheism has nothing to do with certainty.

Yeah, I think Dawkins is a major reason people confuse strong atheism with "100% certain there is no god".

I consider myself a strong atheist, but do not assign probability 1 to the non-existence of god.

In the other thread, this was the point that OrP was trying to make in terms of traditional epistemology's distinction between believing that P and knowing that P, but at the time tame_deuces' seemed to reject that distinction.

It seems from that thread that the disagreement (at least with t_d) is as much about what knowledge, belief, and faith mean as how a strong atheist differs from a weak one.

It does seem a bit silly to claim certainty, but my question is if we eliminate the possibility of certainty, wouldn't strong vs weak simply fall somewhere along the scale Dawkins suggested? Maybe not in terms of probability but in confidence at least? Seems too simple to be right, I could never wrap my head around this debate.

I was going to mention this in the 5yr RGT thread but this seems better suited for it: one of the terms I picked up this year is "Ignosticism" (wiki: "the view that any religious term or theological concept presented must be accompanied by a coherent definition. Without a clear definition such terms cannot be meaningfully discussed"), also called theological non-cognitivism. Something I hear from atheists is that if Yahweh really did exist, it would be nothing like the god described in the Bible. I don't think atheism can be applied to such undefined gods, and you would need to take an ignostic position.

I don't think these weak/strong definitions are right either. Strong atheists don't take the position that "no gods exist", do they? If they did, I think I would agree with you. I think the atheists position is a conclusion drawn from each proposed god definition.

Suppose a theist provides their 5 best pieces of evidence for their religion, and each of them is easily explained naturalistically by both the atheists (lets call them unassuming_treys and ImprovedStance).
unassuming_treys might tell the theist "You have failed to show that your religion is true".
ImprovedStance says "You have shown that your religion is false"

In the past I might have said what unassuming_treys said. Now I take the stronger position of Original...I mean of ImprovedStance. It's not that unassuming_treys is wrong, but I think he stops short. The question is whether going further is supportable.
It's not just 'absence of evidence' (which can be very informative...a lung is claimed to be riddled with cancer, and multiple biopsies are performed, each of which comes up clean, do you take the position that the patient is riddled with cancer but they just missed it on every single poke, that the patient might be riddled with cancer if they missed it on every single poke, or that the lack of cancer everywhere you expected to find it is evidence that the lung is not riddled with cancer?)
It's that all the evidence this theist relies on for their belief, you have shown a 'better' explanation for each of them, leaving no room for it to be true.

(perhaps you also feels that the strong position implies they are past the point of looking at more evidence? But in the riddled with cancer example, a final biopsy showing cancer will persuade both the weak and strong positions)

Strong atheism is traditionally defined as someone for whom the statement "there is at least one god" is viewed as false. In practice this would be indistinguishable from Dawkin's strong atheist.

The issue is a bit more than semantic, as this is more than dressing weak atheism up as strong atheism and calling yourself a strong atheist. Because from everything I have seen people tend to go on and invoke evidence to support their strong atheism, namely empirical evidence. And then you get a problem, because you can't with empiricism show that the statement "there is at least one god" is false.

So it probabably starts of as merely semantic, but then detours into a really ugly blunder.

We can talk in terms of Bayesian probability or in terms of confidence intervals or Dawkins scale: they are all rhetorically equivalent imo. We'll use Dawkins scale just now as it is the simplest.

I agree that - setting aside 100% certainty - we might say that a strong atheist is a 6-7 on Dawkins scale, and a weak atheist is a 5-6. The actual values aren't really important. The idea would be that a weak atheist is less confident that there is no God, or assigns a slightly higher probability to the existence of god than the strong atheist.

However, often people who claim to be weak atheists appear to assign extremely low probabilities to the existence of God in a way commensurate with the strong atheist. This phenomena was the subject of OrP's thread, which I won't rehash here, save to say that I agree with OrP that ultimately that subset of weak atheists choose to self-label in that way because they have either a poorly (if at all) thought-out epistemology, or a definition of strong atheism that is not held by actual strong atheists.

Does this definition involve certainty?

Well, to use the "no atheists in foxholes" counter; That isn't an argument against atheism, but an argument against cancer.

But yes, I'm being overly critical and I'm probably finding this a fair bit more funny and enjoyable than I should, which leads me to being unfair. For that is what this is to me, somewhat of a satire; a take on the "atheists vs theists" arguments that crop up ever so often on RGT. Though, like most satire, there is a serious side to it as well. I don't like it when people play dress-up with terms and beliefs.

The simple point for me is that it is the weak part of weak atheism that lends it credibility. Skepticism is the one thing today's religions don't pass, so it should be embraced - not avoided. When the religious believer says "well, you can't know for sure!" the best reply isn't "I sure can", it is "precisely".