I know you are dismissive of attempts to elucidate the meaning of "true" and "know" but a quick question.

What is the difference, in your eyes, between:

A) "Unicorns do not exist"
B) "It is true that unicorns do not exist."

I don't think we disagree on how to treat the actual claims of God. As for your last point if God is defined as "just the laws of physics" then I do believe in God. Of course language is will get easily muddled if we just shift our bearers of information around arbitrarily, so I don't think that is a very important point. Or rather, it is very important but not necessarily all that relevant here.

I'll give a more thoughtful reply to this post later, but for now I have to run.

I was making the point that it isn't an attitude. I think that "fictional" covered that I'm not saying that the religions have the existence of God thing correct.

Just a plain old watchmaker who yells "big bang" and then moves on? That doesn't fit the definition of God. Quite simply it isn't what people mean when they say God.

I'm not particularly interested in trying to figure out whether something that no one believes is true or false.

The Watchmaker is an analogy of this concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument

It is not compatible with science in general.

I mean that you (and everyone else for that matter) doesn't place as high of a bar as you are placing. You wouldn't wink out of existence due to you setting such a high bar, but you'd certainly not call yourself a social psychologist.

Yes.

Trying to figure out where you are going with this, and you are perfectly correct that I am not at all worried about the existence of Gods that no one believes in. That would be like worrying about whether Grargliglians exist with no other information. I can assure you that strong atheists are silent on the existence of Grargliglians.

The deists you would be talking about would be a very small percentage of the actual deists.

The deists you are proposing are ok would say 'I believe in God even though it doesn't matter, have no logical or empirical reason for believing in such a God and have absolutely no idea what that God would like me to do.'

I'm not at all sure that no-one believes in a watchmaker.

I don't know what you mean by 'an analogy for the TA'. The TA is an argument that sufficient evidence exists to accept purposive creation. Entirely separable from the deity it purports to demonstrate.

Earlier you stated that:

So surely this small percentage of deists you are talking of can not possibly exist? It doesn't fit your definition after all. Well, or it could merely be that your blanket statements have crashed in the night.

Anyway, and far more importantly, modern day deism is typically the rejection of revelation - not logic, observation and reason. The common claim of deism is that a presupposed God's existence can be known by using these faculties, not vice versa as you try and make it out to be.

I've had a look around, I can't see anything like that.

I read the thread and I think OrP's winning post wins.

I'll try and summarise what I've gotten from it but if you or OrP wish to correct anything that's be cool.

My knowledge of epistemology is pretty shallow but I'll assume that (a)theism talks to belief and (a)gnosticism to knowledge. Although a lack of belief in god can be understood as atheist it requires that god be defined. God does not exist can only be understood as a proposition if we know what god refers to. If god refers beyond the traditional account of an omnimax then any atheist that wants their belief to be justified would have to be a weak atheist.

But there seems a couple of problems with this. If an atheist is presenting their atheism to a theist there's implicit some agreement of the account of god under discussion and the atheist seems entitled to claim strong atheism in the vast majority of cases. So given that the context of the discussion is generally belief then dropping the weak/strong labels and declaring only as an atheist seems entirely reasonable, retaining the weak/strong labels when the range of gods is the topic of discussion.

As an aside the other thing that struck me is that those people who have accounts of gods that an atheist may hold a weak position on are unlikely to be theists in the specific sense that theism is generally understood to include a present and personal God.

That you might presumably end up arguing the same as a strong atheist in a specific case doesn't strike me as a particularly good reason to state that you are a strong atheist.

I mean, I could presumably argue the same as many Christians in regards to Hindu deities - that doesn't make me a theist. It doesn't even make me a de facto theist.

td - as the direct approach doesn't seem to be getting you any closer to understanding our position, I think it will help you a lot if you tell us why you are not ignostic: "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"

Bonus points if you can explain why I don't call myself an ignostic. I'll give you a clue:

To give a clue, you need one.

Ignosticism has already been covered. Spend less time looking for pictures of cats next time.

RGT got snippier in the last couple of years. Isnt there some recently arrived evolution-denier everyone can rally around and be rude to?

Free Splendour?

I said the deists who simply believe in a Watchmaker God without other specifications for that God are quite rare. That has nothing to do with the claim that:

Deism came into favor because the Bible was found to be at odds with physical reality (plus some other important historical stuff). It (when keeping the other God qualities other than watchmaker) is just putting God into a smaller box.

I never said that they reject logic, observation and reason. I'm saying that they are incorrect in their conclusions, which is different.

Wat?!? The only way I can even connect your statement to OrP's is that you enjoy non sequiturs a lot and OrP likes stuff.

There are only specific cases of definitions of God (we can categorize them for convenience). If you don't define the God, you might as well be asking whether Glargliblians exist.

[super strong emphasis]We only care about conceptions of God(s) that actual people believe in. Specifically, the definitions that theists believe in[/emphasis].

did Concerto move on?

Yeah, i liked him but he was a bit of a lightning rod too.

What if it was the vast majority of cases. If every theist provided you with an account of god and you found that you denied 99% of the claims identically to the strong atheist you'd maintain you were a weak atheist because of the 1%?

You've stated previously that in order to discuss cultural phenomena it's appropriate to aggregate yet you seem reluctant to allow strong atheists to aggregate the accounts of theism they deny strongly.

That was so 2012.

The weak atheists attack thread got pretty snippy as well it seems

Of course, that is a rather vital 1% for the statement "there is no god". The statement "there is nothing to indicate there is a god" would be better. Aggregate data is not a problem, but aggregates are collections of measurements or observations.

Lastly I'm not denying strong atheists anything. I'm merely holding that their intellectual position justifies leaps of faith.

Sharkey had the fewest friends, I think.

I think overall the tone has fairly steadily improved. Some people overvalue the rhetorical weight of rudeness, but you get that everywhere, really.

Before my time i think.