jack | (no subject)

One of the thoughts about different aspects of atheist belief is that the natural one is not believing "God exists", but some people do believe something like "If He does exist, He's a bastard."

But it occurred to me, that's basically the point of the Northern Lights trilogy. The central message is "God doesn't exist because he's a bastard". If that sounds confusing, well, exactly, that's why the message the books send seems to be confusing :)

It's not a wrong way to go about it. Narnia could be described as partly carrying the message "God *does* exist because he's nice," and does it very well indeed. Using God's metaphorical absence as a metaphor for his literal absence is a good metaphor -- I can see if the books had clicked for me more, it might be quite exciting, if instead of having no unifying message, atheism was a crusade against an uncaring God and a malicious power-hungry arch-angel. Yay!

For that matter, in some sense, it's a real argument: if you say "If God were running the world, I don't like it," you might get from there to "then He isn't," via "if he's not doing it right, he's not God or not there".

But Pullman's presentation didn't really work for me, and so all the flaws in the presentation continued to bother me.

Contrariwise, sometimes people do over-seize on the second aspect of atheism, especially if they're used to their religion being the default and assume an atheist *is* not someone factually thinking God doesn't exist, but someone morally choosing not to follow Him.

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oedipamaas49.livejournal.com

maybe, although I still get in a mighty tangle just figuring out whether to call myself atheist or agnostic

cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com

I've got a long explanation of my views on that somewhere, but if you can accurately describe what you think, I've got bored of the question of where the words do and should apply.

I don't see any evidence that there is a god

I'd describe that as atheist, but might say agnostic if you though it plausible that some might turn up, but if you merely think it's theoretically possible that evidence would turn up, that's not enough to make you agnostic.

However, other people think of the terms differently (and sometimes think there's some great truth in the way they do). Some people would say you're only atheist if you think it's *certain* or *proved* that there's no God. Or that you're only agnostic if you think God is at least as likely and that possibility influences your life.

yeah, I agree it gets tedious. I quite like Pullman's own formulation, actually:

Now, it's possible to describe my own beliefs for example, as being both atheist and agnostic, depending on where I put the camera. If I look at the total amount of things I know, and compare it with the things I don't know, the things I know; the tiniest possible, little remote, little speck of light in the middle of a great, vast encircling darkness; which is everything I don't know. And in all the things I don't know, there may be a God. There may be a God out there, but I don't know. However, when you move the camera, when you come in a bit closer and get closer to this little speck of light, so it gets bigger and bigger, and finally sort of spreads out beyond the edges of the vision and fills everything you can see.. Here, I can see no evidence whatever for God. So on this level, I'm an atheist; further out, I'm an agnostic; depends on where you're standing.

...and there I'll leave it, since I don't think either of us want to run through a big thread on terminology.

Yeah, that sounds like quite a good description, thanks.

I do want to examine the terminology at some point, but hope to have something that settles the matter, rather than inviting disagreement from people who would prefer different terms, and don't want to try to start in a comment thread.

robhu.livejournal.com

You can be both depending on what you mean by the words.

I identify as a weak atheist (in general, verging to strong about the Christian god in particular) and a weak agnostic.

There are endless debates about what the words mean (often by people trying to score points in internet arguments), but I find those two terms helpful in explaining the position that I hold, so I'm happy to use them.

You can be both depending on what you mean by the words.

Of course. The link is a very good description, and I think I'd agree with what you belief (at a guess) but if so disagree with the way it's described. This is the meat of the post I want to make about atheist and agnostic.

The thing is, in the very first sentence, there's the comment "accept as true the proposition" which is a good description, putting the assertion up front, but I think that the meaning of the terms revolves so closely around different levels of "think true" that that's insufficient.

For instance, in normal English, I would describe myself as thinking all the following are true:

* There's no-one in the kitchen here
* There are no teapots on pluto
* Roman Empire used to exist
* Africa exists
* The sky often has a blue colour
* 2+2=4

However, there's a definite spectrum. I could be proved false on almost all of those, with different levels of conceivability. There could perfectly well be someone hiding in a cupboard in the kitchen. I just don't expect it, assume there isn't and proceed as if it were true. If asked, I'd give an probability of some sort, probably about 99%, but be perfectly willing to be corrected on this point.

Several of the others I *could* be wrong about, but it seems very unlikely.

The last is (with appropriate definitions) essentially a tautology -- I could have misunderstood something so tragically it's false, but that would shake nearly everything I believe.

Where on that scale do I put the non-existence of God? I don't think it being a belief in absence makes it any less a belief, that you might be certain of, but in theory proved wrong about, but describing it that way acknowledges that I see the absence as the default position, and in the absence of evidence, am as confident of the absence as I am of anything else short of things I've a personal experience of or consider tautologies.

So AFAICT I'm unable to describe my position between atheist and agnosticism without trying to explain these levels of belief, though would like to see consistent explanation of "strong" and "weak" atheist in these terms, that I could then just identify as and link to :)

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