What is an Atheist?

[TheVisionofEr]

delete

[Sculptor]

The idea that you can believe without evidence is an abdication of reason.

I don’t know what this comment refers to.

EXACTLY

So Catholic bad; other theist good?

I don’t know why you would conclude that.

That was YOU! LOL

Darwin was NEVER a Catholic.

All Christianity stems from the combined life of the Greek and Latin Churches, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox. Theology in England after Henry the Eighth broke from Rome didn’t start from zero.

SO what? You misrepresented Darwin. Protestantism is very different.
Darwin was not a Catholic. He died a good atheist, having applied reason to his understanding of the world after a lifetime of hard work and study.

Nature is nature.

Childish apodictic blather. All our concepts are historical, they have evolved like our bodies, and are the product of centuries of discussion. Including that of nature.

Back at ya!
God is NOT nature. Such a statement is idiotic.
What we call nature has always existed; god just a recent invention by the ignorant.

I give you a proof. Nature does not mean green stuff and primordial forests and beautiful stones in contradistinction to the human built world and to the poetic life of the sage, as it does in China. Which is to say the idea one gets by birth in China. Nature does not mean simply by birth, it has a peculiar and artificial meaning in the west, and most of all in western science which is the current form of philosophy now popular.

You are off the point and confused. Have you anything worthy to say?

[TheVisionofEr]

SO what? You misrepresented Darwin. Protestantism is very different.
Darwin was not a Catholic. He died a good atheist, having applied reason to his understanding of the world after a lifetime of hard work and study.

He goes through his thinking both in his autobiography and especially in the letter with the analogy about the "mind of Newton" which I commend to you. Then one can see what the questions are about in detail instead of just having the empty title cards.

Protestantism is a generic. There was a Church of England. There still is. It has doctrines worked through by theologians. Beyond that Darwin was not someone who accepted teachings passively. He was quite aware of the Catholic theologians. It's not a question of confessing to a faith (as for social or political reasons), but of whether the teachings are TRUE.

[popeye1945]

An atheist is the counterpoint of the believer, both guilty of the same logical fallacy of pretending to know what cannot be known.

[Immanuel Can]

An atheist is the counterpoint of the believer, both guilty of the same logical fallacy of pretending to know what cannot be known.

Not quite.

They don't end up on an equal footing.

Now, the business of definining "Atheist" is perplexed by the fact that many people who call themselves "Atheists" do not want to be caught professing the analytic definition, i.e. "a person who says there is no God."

Instead, they want to equivocate that in some way. Some say things like, "I don't believe there is no God; I don't believe in any gods." Others say, "I don't say I know there's no God; I just say I have no evidence for God." Others say, "I don't disbelieve anything; I just 'lack belief' in gods," and so on. Still others are just hard agnostics, and say, "There might be a God, but I strongly, strongly think there isn't." And finally, you have these silly types called "Apatheists," who absurdly claim, "I have no interest in anything about God," as if that were some sort of answer. And I have no doubt that after I've composed this list, somebody else will come up with yet another variant on the same kinds of evasions. Whatever an "Atheist" is, it seems they don't want to be pinned down to anything.

So what is an "Atheist"? It seems to be a chameleon position -- committed to nothing definite, but rather to sliding between contradictory positions so as to avoid being pinned down. Speaking to Atheists easily becomes like trying to nail jelly to a wall; it just slides off the hook every time.

But let's go with the basic definition, just for the moment: an Atheist is somebody who says there is no God (or gods).

The next question you should ask is this: when you say "I'm an Atheist," do you mean that as a personal claim only, or as something you are recommending / advising / arguing should be the same for others?

If it's a personal claim only, then it's very probably true. But granting it amounts to nothing. The speaker says, "I don't believe in God." Well, big deal. It's not even surprising. There must be many people who don't know of what evidences might exist for God, because they just lack that experience. But it implies nothing at all for anybody else -- and certainly does not suggest a Theist is dishonest, irrational, unscientific, in bad faith, or whatever. In fact, it implies nothing at all but that one man has no knowledge of God.

Hardly surprising.

But if it is intended as a claim for others, then those others have every right to ask what evidence the Atheist can offer that should compel everybody else to think there's no God. Why should we make one man's personal experience, if that's all it is, the arbitrator of any truth for other people who may have a different set of experiences? Obviously, we shouldn't; at least, not unless the Atheist has evidence warranting his disbelieve in God.

But what would such evidence look like, if the Atheist had it? Most Atheists will simply say, "Well, I have no evidence, so there is none." That makes no sense at all, of course. And their implausibility is compounded by the fact that there are plenty of people who claim to have not only experiential evidence for God, but also empirical evidence they find inductive of the existence of God. If the Atheist wants to say we should disbelieve them and believe him instead, he needs to say why.

But here is where the Atheist and the Theist are not on equal footing. In order to have evidence warranting Atheism, the Atheist would need to prove that there is no God or gods. Not only that, he has to show that no claim of the opposite anyone has ever made has been true. In all of history. Anywhere in the universe. Without exception.

For if it were discovered that although the Atheist knows no evidence for God, if genuine evidence of God, or a genuine experience of God, even, had ever happened, anywhere, for any people group or culture or even a single person, any time in the history of the universe, in any corner of that universe, then Atheism itself is disproved. It takes only one countercase to destroy the claim "There is no God," so long as that case turns out to be genuine.

Meanwhile, how has the Atheist established that no such cases exist? What tests has he run? How has he divined (pun intended) this total absence of God or gods everywhere in the universe for all times? Of course, he has not. So his Atheism is a bluff, a wish, a vapour. It rests on nothing.

But what about the Theist? The situation is quite different, for him. Let there be just one case -- just one -- of something that truly is evidence of God, and he wins. Let there be one culture, one moment in time, one miracle, one revelation, one prophet, one existential moment, one Incarnation, one anything...and Atheism is once again disproved utterly and forever.

So the two are not in the same position at all. The Atheist is claiming something it would always be absurd for us to believe -- namely, that he personally has sufficient evidence to prove that nothing could have ever happened in the history of the universe to warrant belief in God. And the Theist has only to prove one thing...the plausible veracity of one incident in the entirety of human history...and the Atheist loses.

That's why so few Atheists want to be caught being Atheists...that is, if we understand "Atheist" as meaning, "Somebody who says there's no God, and that you should think so too." That sort of Aheism is just not a rational position. And the other types -- the ones that say they don't know about God, or are not telling other people what to believe -- are mere variations on personal agnosticism, rather than anything we should regard as "Atheism."

[popeye1945]

Immanual,

You are working very very hard to make this more complicated than it is, it is simply a logical fallacy on the part of the believer and the unbeliever. In the history of the gods, thousands have fallen into dust neither proved nor disproved.

[Immanuel Can]

Immanual, You are working very very hard

Not at all. It's been easy.

...it is simply a logical fallacy on the part of the believer and the unbeliever.

Do you know what a "fallacy" means? It means a rational inconsistency, such that a claim is deficient in logic. It does not mean a claim that is yet to be factually established. There are plenty of claims that are fine in logic, but not in fact, and some that are fine in both logic and empirical fact.

There's no "fallacy" involved in either position, actually. Both are logically coherent. The difference between true and false here is a matter of fact, not of logic. "God exists" is a rational proposition. "God does not exist" is also a rational proposition. The difference is not decided on the basis of fallaciousness.
However, establishing the fact of something existing requires only one case. The fact of establishing the non-existence of a thing requires as many cases as it takes to rule it out.

So it's all incredibly straightforward.

[popeye1945]

May Allah be with you!

[Immanuel Can]

May Allah be with you!

You're a Muslim?

Or just somebody who would rather not think about it?

[popeye1945]

May Allah be with you!

You're a Muslim?

Or just somebody who would rather not think about it?

lol!!! You are a believer, there is no point.

[Immanuel Can]

May Allah be with you!

You're a Muslim?

Or just somebody who would rather not think about it?

lol!!! You are a believer, there is no point.

Well, you don't know that. You don't know what I believe, or on what basis I believe it. And of course, if you're a self-declared Atheist, you have no way of knowing what's true about God. You just know that you, personally, don't want to think there's a God. But whether or not anybody else should, you don't know.

But conversation is always optional. You don't have to think if you don't want to. No problem.

[popeye1945]

LOL!!! Very gracious of you Christan---LOL!!

[Immanuel Can]

LOL!!! Very gracious of you Christan---LOL!!

I was just being factual. It takes no special grace to observe the necesssary.

[popeye1945]

Spoken like a true Christian, Christian--lol!!

[uwot]

An atheist is the counterpoint of the believer...

Ya got that right.

...both guilty of the same logical fallacy of pretending to know what cannot be known.

Ah well, you don't have to know to believe. Or not believe.