Is agnosticism actually atheism without the attitude?

[MrSmith]

My point was that since Santa (according to the story) lives at the North Pole & visits children at Christmas to give them presents it would be possible to create an experiment to prove or disprove his existence. You could monitor every house in the world for fat men going down chimneys, use radar to detect flying reindeer, etc.

 

The same isn't true for a deity.

 

One doesn't need to disprove that which is impossible; you just know it doesn’t exist because it’s not possible.

[anywebsite]

One doesn't need to disprove that which is impossible; you just know it doesn’t exist because it’s not possible.

 

How do you know what's possible?

[MrSmith]

How do you know what's possible?

 

A white black board isn't possible; if it contradicts itself then it isn't possible.

[Cyclone]

All of science is based on disproving other people's theories.

 

Some claims can be disproven, some can't. That's the line between scientific theories & religion, one can be disproven & the other can't.

 

If I tell you the sky is purple with orange polka dots, you can easily disprove that.

By proving that it's blue.

I'm not proving a negative in that case, I'm proving a positive from a bounded set. (This is the case where a negative can be proven, when it's from a bounded set, or a limited range of potential outcomes all of which are mutually exclusive).

 

If I tell you there's an immortal supernatural being who operates outside our known universe that you can't percieve in any way... then you can't prove I'm lying.

That's right, I can't, I can't prove that negative (didn't I say that before?)

 

I can use what I know about the universe and weight the evidence you present (none) and conclude that you are wrong. It's not proof, I didn't claim it was), but it does make me an atheist and not an agnostic.

[Cyclone]

You are defining the word differently to the rest of us.

 

To me (and etymologically speaking) being an atheist simply means not being a theist. The reason why doesn't come into the definition.

I'm using the common definition of the word, wasn't this definition established earlier in the thread.

An atheist is not simply someone who is not a theist. It is someone who does not believe a/any god(s) exist(s).

 

No they aren't. Not believing something is not the same as believing the opposite.

It is if the two believes are a binary set.

Not believing in Santa means believing that santa doesn't exist. There is no other option.

I think we're at an impasse at this point. All I will say is that using my definition it describes every single person who's ever self-identified as an atheist, using yours it only describes about 5 people that I've ever come across.

A theist is someone who believes in a god.

An atheist is someone who does not.

 

We are using the same definition.

 

You are just refusing to accept that non belief means you have concluded something, an illogical position to adopt which are doing presumably as it allows you to keep conflating the two terms. Believing that there is no god (atheism) precludes you from believing that you can't know (agnosticism).

[Cyclone]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism

If a man has failed to find any good reason for believing that there is a God, it is perfectly natural and rational that he should not believe that there is a God; and if so, he is an atheist... if he goes farther, and, after an investigation into the nature and reach of human knowledge, ending in the conclusion that the existence of God is incapable of proof, cease to believe in it on the ground that he cannot know it to be true, he is an agnostic and also an atheist – an agnostic-atheist – an atheist because an agnostic... while, then, it is erroneous to identify agnosticism and atheism, it is equally erroneous so to separate them as if the one were exclusive of the other...

In this case I'd say that having discovered agnosticism after his atheism, the person is no longer atheist, they are no longer in a position to decide on belief or non-belief in a logical way. And who'd want to claim to be an atheist through faith or feeling or some other non logic based way of determining your belief...

 

Maybe such people exist, but like I said, they must be a little bit dim.

[barleycorn]

Sorry Barley, I've had a look at your links and none of them touch on your idea that you would need a definition of God to be without belief in one. They seem to be more about ignosticism.

 

It is not so much that one needs a definition of God to be without belief but that without a definition of God the term itself is meaningless.

 

The problem with discussing theism/atheism/agnosticism is therefore the assumption that each of the three positions accepts “God exists” as a meaningful proposition. By calling oneself (or indeed anyone else such as a new born baby) an atheist you are giving tacit acceptance to the concept of God because it (atheism) assumes that there actually is something understandable to lack belief in.

 

For any non-analytic proposition of the form “X exists” to be meaningful it must be either verifiable or falsifiable. Conversely a proposition would be cognitively meaningless or nonsensical if it expressed a proposition which was unfalsifiable.

An example of a cognitively meaningless proposition would be…

“There exists outside of space and time an invisible pink unicorn”

… which, whilst expressing an idea the idea is incoherent and unverifiable/unfalsifiable. To say one lacked belief in such an entity would therefore be nonsensical and pointless.

 

From an attribute based perspective one must have positively defined attributes for the proposition to have any meaning.

In cataphatic theology God is defined through positive attributes or terminology. Such definitions however impose limits on God and thus may not be compatible with notions such as omnipotence. The implication of cataphatic theology is that God is knowable (through his works and the divinely inspired Bible for example) and as such open to verification or falsification (with the exception statements such as “God is Love”, which whilst meaningful in a conversational context they do not express any meaningful proposition).

In contrast apophatic theology (or negative theology) seeks to define God not by what it is but by what it is NOT. In essence an apophatic God eludes definition by definition. Examples of negative attributes include:

God was not created

God is not conceptually defined in terms of space, time or location (a cataphatic statement would be "God is everywhere" whereas an apophatic approach would expand upon this stating that God is also outside of creation, and furthermore we don’t know, nor can we know everywhere that God is).

As such negative attributes are unfalsifiable by definition and the concept of an apopthatic god itself meaningless.

 

Given the reliance of atheism upon theism to provide meaning to the terms one cannot say one is an atheist until the question “what is God” has been answered with falsifiable attributes. In lieu of a coherent definition of God any discussions for or against its existence are therefore meaningless.

Atheistic claims therefore need to be considered in respect to a particular concept of what one claims to consider "God" to represent, or in the words of Theodore Dange:

 

“Since the word "God" has many different meanings, it is possible for the sentence "God exists" to express many different propositions. What we need to do is to focus on each proposition separately. … For each different sense of the term "God," there will be theists, atheists, and agnostics relative to that concept of God”.

 

 

I would also to touch briefly on whether it is right to call babies atheists. Arguments as to the meaningfulness of the concept aside I think that to call a baby an atheist is about as sensical as saying babies lack belief in the pre-election Tory manifesto. It would be more accurate I think to state that ‘babies lack belief’, or babies are abelief.

 

 

jb

[barleycorn]

Creationism is the idea that the universe has a creator isn't it?

 

No, Creationism refers to a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative.

 

jb

[barleycorn]

You can't prove or disprove a deity.

 

The lack of any test for whether a deity exists or not does seem to prove that they don't matter. Even if a God exists they don't do anything that we can possibly notice.

 

So we should all be apatheist.

 

That's is not strictly true. For example, the God of YECs can be easily falsified.

 

jb

[Cyclone]

It is not so much that one needs a definition of God to be without belief but that without a definition of God the term itself is meaningless.

 

The problem with discussing theism/atheism/agnosticism is therefore the assumption that each of the three positions accepts “God exists” as a meaningful proposition. By calling oneself (or indeed anyone else such as a new born baby) an atheist you are giving tacit acceptance to the concept of God because it (atheism) assumes that there actually is something understandable to lack belief in.

 

For any non-analytic proposition of the form “X exists” to be meaningful it must be either verifiable or falsifiable. Conversely a proposition would be cognitively meaningless or nonsensical if it expressed a proposition which was unfalsifiable.

An example of a cognitively meaningless proposition would be…

“There exists outside of space and time an invisible pink unicorn”

… which, whilst expressing an idea the idea is incoherent and unverifiable/unfalsifiable. To say one lacked belief in such an entity would therefore be nonsensical and pointless.

It's coherent, we understand what it means. It's almost redundant to profess your lack of belief in it, but if someone else is professing a belief then it makes sense to make it clear that you don't agree and that you're not delusional like he is.

 

From an attribute based perspective one must have positively defined attributes for the proposition to have any meaning.

In cataphatic theology God is defined through positive attributes or terminology. Such definitions however impose limits on God and thus may not be compatible with notions such as omnipotence. The implication of cataphatic theology is that God is knowable (through his works and the divinely inspired Bible for example) and as such open to verification or falsification (with the exception statements such as “God is Love”, which whilst meaningful in a conversational context they do not express any meaningful proposition).

In contrast apophatic theology (or negative theology) seeks to define God not by what it is but by what it is NOT. In essence an apophatic God eludes definition by definition. Examples of negative attributes include:

God was not created

God is not conceptually defined in terms of space, time or location (a cataphatic statement would be "God is everywhere" whereas an apophatic approach would expand upon this stating that God is also outside of creation, and furthermore we don’t know, nor can we know everywhere that God is).

As such negative attributes are unfalsifiable by definition and the concept of an apopthatic god itself meaningless.

I don't quite follow why it becomes meaningless. I can see a meaning in the statement.

 

Given the reliance of atheism upon theism to provide meaning to the terms one cannot say one is an atheist until the question “what is God” has been answered with falsifiable attributes. In lieu of a coherent definition of God any discussions for or against its existence are therefore meaningless.

Atheistic claims therefore need to be considered in respect to a particular concept of what one claims to consider "God" to represent, or in the words of Theodore Dange:

 

“Since the word "God" has many different meanings, it is possible for the sentence "God exists" to express many different propositions. What we need to do is to focus on each proposition separately. … For each different sense of the term "God," there will be theists, atheists, and agnostics relative to that concept of God”.

 

jb

 

I don't think I agree that there is no point in expressing disbelief in something simply because it can't be defined with falsifiable attributes (ie tested). Maybe it should be redundant and there should be no need to state disbelief, but in a world where people don't communicate using formal logic and do express belief it's useful to make it clear that you don't agree.