Yeah. That's why I say it's not "agnosticism", it's "confusion".

That's not a weak atheist, that's a tolerant atheist! It's still meaningless to say "there exists a god" in the hand-waving version of "god". I might as well say "there exists a flurgleflagle". That's great, but it imparts no information. Except that when we say "god" we really do mean something. In that case, we mean something internally incoherent.

Regardless, note that they are no longer referring to something nonsensical when they say "the theist is deluded".

One thing, though: I'm arguing that there's no need to qualify the belief that no gods exist. You don't have to "know" that something that someone can't define (or defines incoherently) doesn't exist. You can even just have the feeling that they're full of shit. Either way, you're a strong atheist.

Do not blaspheme agaisnt the flurgleflagle! He flurged you into existence and he can just as well flurgle you into eternal damnation!

Taking 'function' in a mathematical sense shouldn't have given you any trouble with it at all, that's how I intended it.

As for what is a function of what, Here's how I worked it. When you've got a lot of variables making up some function with a result in a known domain, and if you have evidence of consistency in the operations applying to the variable combination, you can reduce the complexity by assuming a point on the function (x1, x2.... xn) implies a majority of the variables as a function of just one or two of them.

So then model the dynamic interactions of a world as a function of several variables, set the function to this world, and define "disapproval" (x1) as a function of another variable, the existence of identity (x2) , then test the assumptions analytically:

a. is the variable (x2) such that a change in x1 with respect to x2 is defined at the point? Yes, identity solidifies around divisions, and there is a clear correlation between the formation of strong identity and direct opposition.

b. are the operations consistent in the domain, yes, so much so that it goes directly to an axiom from which everything else follows. A and Not A are both ways to define A.

So then, by implication, 'disapproval' is a function of some stuff which is entailed in a world. And from my original claim, God is in the world, I can positively state a capacity for disapproval on behalf of my god.

 

That's the premise. From the angles I can see, it bears out, but I'll see if I can't find some PhDs to run it by.

No, certainly not. It's about how they deal with their belief. It's my contention that nobody has to qualify "atheism". You don't have to say "I lack a belief in gods" as a softened version of "I believe no gods exist", because neither statement really reflects the situation. What an atheist is really saying is, "theists are full of shit". There's no reason to qualify that even philosophically, because theists are literally talking nonsense when they introduce the god concept.

It's not even about true or false. As todangst pointed out, we're extending the principle of generosity beyond its reasonable limits by accepting nonsense terms.

It's possible, but I would have to still say that the "weak" atheist is merely confused as to what his or her responsibility is concerning epistemology. It seems that many sensitive, intelligent atheists decide they are weak atheists because they're expressing the limits of their own knowledge. But they don't really have to hold themselves to such standards when language gets thrown around like this.

If we were talking about a natural phenomenon, then certainly an atheist would be right in pointing out the limits of knowledge, but that's not the case here. Gods fall into a category of things specifically designed to outrun the explorer. The supernatural, by its definition, will never be discovered. It is beyond nature, and not merely an unknown part of nature. It's beyond nature by design of the concept itself.

The "vague supernatural" is a trick, is what I'm saying. So when the atheist says to the trickster, "you're just making shit up", the atheist is justified in doing so, because the supernatural (and gods) are specifically designed to escape "gnosis". The vague supernatural was invented so that we'd all have to be agnostic with regards to it!

The "specific supernatural" (e.g. specifically defined gods) is universally internally incoherent. I can say that with confidence because any time you define a god, in any way, you end up with nonsense because of the basic premises involved. These gods are completely indistinguishable from fantasy. If the atheist attacks these god-concepts as fantasy, the apologist can pare the gods down to a basic vagueness, but notice that we're back at the vague supernatural above, which stands as obviously pure trickery.

You may still think to yourself, "yes, but in all of this, there may still accidentally exist something that happens to coincide with a god description." But notice that you're asking for something that both exists and does not exist. Naturally, the only thing that matches that description is fantasy.

It's not about "how likely is it that such and such a thing exists", because we'd actually have to re-define "exist" to accommodate this nonsense. If you're getting caught by the sophomoric, "but how do we know that there's nothing beyond nature?" The problem is that we have no way of saying that something is "beyond" nature, so it's a nonsense question. Conceptually, we can come up with a "place" that is beyond nature, but that means we've just invented another nature.

At any rate, if gods end up inhabiting a "location" separate from our reality, then they certainly aren't real in the sense that our reality is real. In that case, we can't ever know them either. Once again, agnosticism is a redundancy, and atheism doesn't need to be "weak".

Even given the multiple worlds hypothesis, you have two or more physical worlds. Those aren't supernatural worlds, they're physical worlds that operate with the same physical laws as ours does.

In summary, we have neither need nor reason to accommodate the nonsensical supernatural, except as fantasy. Supernatural = fictional.

I've been trying to figure some way that it would work out, though. It just seems as though either we have a specific definition, and it's incoherent (thus we cannot apply evidence to it), or we have a definition that's so vague ... as to be impossible to apply evidence to it. So if you know of a situation where that dichotomy doesn't apply, I'd welcome it.

I mean, it's fun to argue for this dichotomy, don't get me wrong. It's practically a sport at this point! But it would be good to see if some more objections could be thrown around.

Right.

But what would that evidence be for? If there's no way to get a handle on a hypothesis, there isn't any evidence that could ever apply. Ever.

But that's the trap that the weak atheist (or agnostic) falls into: they're forced to apply evidence to a hypothesis that doesn't match, and then get berated by theists for being "closed-minded". It's silly.

I just don't think there's any reason for the atheist to qualify atheism, when the only thing that might make you a "weak" atheist is an argument that is pure nonsense.

Yes, this was part of the dichotomy that I described. Either we have meaningful god descriptions that are unfalsifiable (like your example), or we have a definition that is so vague as to be unfalsifiable as well.

With a celestial teapot, we'd stand a chance: we would know what we're looking for. (We're looking for a teapot.)

I'm not sure I follow. Could you give an example where we have some hope of finding out something about a being that thus far can't be defined in a useful way?

I've yet to find one that doesn't fall into these two categories of unfalsifiability, though.

 

True. My argument is that weak atheism doesn't really know what it implies, and that Smith's non-cognitivism hits one aspect of the problem. But yes, I'd say that upon closer inspection, weak atheism is "weak" as an argument.

The deeper problem, though, is that when we say "mind" we're actually referring to ourselves, because that's the only kind of mind we could possibly recognize. So as long as a god ends up being like us, we will have found what we're looking for.

And I agree! I think that we are, in fact, the source of gods, so it shouldn't be a surprise.

Not only that, a human mind, because it would be responding to an insult, having understood an insult in exactly the same way a person would.

Haha! Well exactly! First we would have to conceive of a mind that can know everything (none of the minds we know of can know everything, as the only minds we know of are associated with brains) and then we'd have to find a way for it to be invisible ...

I'm thinking we're back to the "quantum computer" bit. If we assume that the universe is a kind of brain, then the emergent property of universe-intelligence could be thought of as "god", if you want. That's the only case where I find a real hole in the argument. Essentially, the weak atheist is one who only believes in the possibility of an undefined emergent-intelligence property of the universe.

Unfortunately, that's also too vague to be falsifiable, as we only understand intelligence through our own intelligence.

Eloise's "God is everything" is pretty good, because then, contradictions like "God is jealous" and "God is perfectly loving" are no longer contradictions. If God is everything, you can give God any attribute you like, and it will be true. I guess we only disagree on what "everything" is.

That's exactly why Seth Lloyd (a huge proponent of the "universe as quantum computer" idea) discounts any possibility of consciousness. There's no current concept of how it might gain intelligence in the first place. His concept is essentially, "The universe is a quantum computer that is constantly calculating the next state of the universe." Which is still pretty fuzzy, but it gives a framework by which to calculate the entire processing power of the universe, which is a cool concept.

I'm not sure how you can get god from any of that, really.

As for Eloise's conception of god: I'm still completely unclear what that conception is. Considering the precision of her writing style, I'm having a terribly hard time comprehending what she's trying to say a lot of the time. It indicates either I don't have enough of a grounding in either metaphysics or theoretical physics, or she has these grand concepts in her head that are resistent to language.

In any case, all this seems to indicate that all theism does reduce to incoherence.

Well yeah. First, we'd have to re-define "thinking", considering the only reference we have for a thinking thing is the brain (or the whole nervous system, if you want to be picky). So what the universe isn't doing is thinking. It's doing something else that we have yet to describe adequately. Likewise for "consciousness", if that's an emergent property of the universe as a quantum brain. I'd have to see how we could apply "quantum brain" to "consciousness" before I'd take that as a given, too.

To be fair to Seth Lloyd, I've presented only the rudiments of his intent. His proposition is that our search for quantum computing is really a search for the fundamental physics of the universe. (This could be because his speciality is quantum computing.) Information processing is as fundamental as mass and energy, and there can be no understanding of quantum mechanics without also understanding how information processing works in the realm of the quantum.

I have to admit, I am biased, due to my career programming computers. Also, I've noticed that almost every system has an informational component. Even in physics, entropy is all about information. In biology, evolution has a strong information processing component. And so on.

Even with my bias, I still recognize it as an outlandish proposal, though.

I have to agree. I can't see any compelling reason to turn the universe into a "computer", unless to illustrate some other point. So once again, we're back to a "god" being an empty name, completely non-referential.

AND in that case, it would still be an unfortunate waste of time to wait for evidence for something to which evidence cannot be applied.

So once again:

• Theism makes a claim that is unverifiable,
• Weak atheism is waiting for evidence that applies to something unverifiable, and
• Strong atheism (the argument against "gods exist" ) is justified, given that
  1. "gods" is an empty name referencing nothing, or
  2. any definition that matches even an intuitive understanding of "gods" is incoherent.

 

Yeaaah... nobody gets me... lol.
Actually I can explain why that is. It's because my God isn't a concept per se, as I've said, it is a corollary to a totally different proposition about the actual nature of the universe.

So basically it goes:
A. argument to evidence that the universe is such that there are no closed systems and individual systems can be modelled as injection mappings of the total system  --> problem of personal identity is soluble, mind-body problem is soluble --> solution.
B. God, as per theology, is a self evident characteristic of the solution set.

No, that's just saying "God's there because God's obviously there". I don't see a connection between the theological God and your solution set. I understand that you could argue for no closed systems (we've already had that discussion), but simply because a solution presents itself, it doesn't follow that the premises of theology can be considered a self-evident characteristic thereof.

By that line of reasoning (if I'm following), God exists as much as Pegasus does.

 

Is it too much to ask what qualifies as "information processing" in this discussion?  If not, is it unreasonable to ask what would count as a "thing that processes information"?

 

 

Yes, that's what I meant to say... ie:

1. here's the universe....

1a. yep that, over there, is God.

2. this is what else it does...

 

To be fair, I've barely drawn the connection at all in any post here so I'm not surprised if you don't see it. In the hundreds of threads I've posted to here there is only a fraction where the subject has even been broached and in most cases has sunk into obscurity fairly quickly thereafter. The reason I hardly post about it is because it's not a priority to me, God can take care of her own business of being believed. I am concerned with more practical issues. For the record, if asked, I will endeavour to make the connection plain but I usually fail to keep that person's interest when I do, anyhow.

I don't see why not.

No that seems strange to me. Maybe you are not following. Can you explain how you get to that conclusion?

Well, seeing as it doesn't make sense to give patience any kind of numerical value, I was clearly being metaphorical.
For the record, the definition I had in mind was more "A mind that would not lose it's patience under any possible circumstance."

You got me on that one.
Knowledge of the future does indeed create a free will paradox.
A coherent God concept would indeed have to qualify what kind of knowledge this God had.

Agreed. Bear in mind that I'm merely arguing for the coherence of a non-material mind.
And even then, to stay coherent one would need to allow for breakages of the well established laws of physics.


Agreed. This is why I'm more than just a "Weak Atheist"
I see the world around me, and based on how the universe does actually behave, the idea that nature purely follows the laws of physics seems to fit, and the idea that the universe is governed by a "mind" or "will" doesn't.
I think that the time in my life when I found theism the most appealing, when I most considered it possible, was when I was used to reading stories.
Stories that depicted a world and storyline that had actually been designed.
Even when the stories were non-fictional, the human story tellers would tell the story that focused on the human interest elements.
E.g. only revealing the 0.0001% of the details - the interesting bits that made the story worth telling, and focusing on the human significance of the events that happened.
I think that the more you are in touch with the real world as it is, the less sense the God concept makes.

I see a bit of a continuum between "Weak Atheism" (No evidence for or against) and "Strong Atheism" (an absolute argument against e.g. incoherence)
The continuum of how strong the argument is against there being a God and I see mine and lying somewhere in between.
I think that George Smith's a priori argument based on incoherence works against certain conceptions of God, but some (like the one I described) are unaffected.
For these conceptions, my own argument is that they just "don't fit" what I know about the world.
It's not an absolute argument, because it might just turn out that the "worldview" of mine that it didn't fit with was flawed.
But it's still a stronger position against theism than just not seeing evidence in favour.

I should really change the original post, because I didn't state my position as clearly as I have since. I'm saying that one of two things happens when discussing gods:

1) Smith is correct, and all talk of them is meaningless (empty name problem), OR

2) they have a definition that is meaningful, but internally inconsistent.

Either way, neither agnosticism nor weak atheism are solid positions, if one is to take testability seriously, which I do.

By "empty name", I mean a word which has no actual referent. So, for example, the sentence

"Centaurs wear hats"

is meaningful, but contains an empty name (centaurs) for something that only exists as a fiction. It still has meaning, but we can only imagine centaurs, since no one has ever actually seen one.

This dynamic holds true of gods, as well, who are present in fiction and literature, but not elsewhere.

On a nit-picky note, I'd say that internally inconsistent definitions are meaningless.
On a less nit-picky note, I can't see how this "empty name problem" can be used to support Strong Atheism.
Let's see what you said about empty names:

So an "empty name" is a word that holds no actual referent.
Like Centaurs, Unicorns, Pokémon etc...
If you are an atheist then you believe that God is among this number.
The thing is, I don't see how you infer Strong Atheism from this.
I don't even see a problem in this "empty name problem".
Certain concepts describe an object that can potentially exist.
Those that actually exist have referents, those that don't actually exist don't have references so the words can be called "empty names".

What am I missing here?

NOW we're talking! I think I understood that last post.

I'm glad you clarified that pantheon part -- I was meaning to ask. But the second part sounds a lot like us in reverse. We're an identifiably autonomous form that evolved into a continuum of conscious identity. (That is, the population could be considered that way.) But

you have conscious identity spawning an autonomous form. So where does the continuum of conscious identity come from?

N.B.: I'm not asking you if this is a form of infinite regress or anything, I'm just wondering where the necessity for the continuum comes from conceptually. I can see us as identifiably autonomous forms (and other creatures, too) but I'm not sure about the continuum.

Everything, you say. So does it accompany everything, or is it a physical presence, or what?

 

That's a tough one. I take it you're applying a kind of "kernel of truth" argument to religious expressions, past and present. That's fair, but that implies we should be able to find a common definition in there somewhere.

I'm guessing that trophy in your avatar says "Most Creative Ontological Arguments" on it, because I went looking for some clever arguments elsewhere on the internet, and it looks like you're holding the fort for pretty much the entire world. There's a lot of what you just called "enforcing religious ego", and not a lot of fun arguments happening.

You were? Cause I was waiting for someone to ask. I've deliberately skimmed over it because I figured once I'd explained my first proposition well enough to someone they'd indicate as much by asking if I also saw it justifying polydeities; plus introducing multiple gods too early would just muddy the point anyway.



And so this is where we see that it just does not follow from alternate propositions about the nature of the universe (and by extension the human condition). That we are evolved into a continuum of consciousness is precisely the manner of direct inference that I'm talking about, it's presupposing that inherently dualistic concept of mind I mentioned in the other thread.

With the proposition that you're using (which I will henceforth call P.classic for brevity) we are seeing the universe as existing without mind x thus distinguishing mind and matter by implication. In P.classic we qualify this implication with the idea of an open void extending in one direction of potential such that at time t the universe (whole) is configured to some pattern where the form underpinning mind x exists as potential but mind x does not. However, 1. to propose the universe whole and consequently add something is inconsistent and continues to beg the duality of the original proposition and 2. most of the theory which supports such a conception of time has been falsified.

On the other hand, there is an alternative to P.classic, which I will call P.Eloise. Using this proposition we can say that there is no universe existing without mind x and neither is there a begged condition of dualism to justify. The capacity for phenomenal sentience is characteristic by definition of mind x. It is not, as in P.classic, emergent from some certain configuration of material attributes independent of their location in time-space. In P.Eloise there are no such independent sets of properties which can be said to be a complete entity.



Well to begin is much easier than you think. Inferring from P.classic with its voided end in one direction of potential, the conceivability of a continuum of consciousness is limited. There is no such limitation in P.Eloise, an entity is defined by a more complete set of properties, including those which are temporally void in P.classic. This is where the continuum of conciousness comes from. For example, your complete description as a human identity is a temporal continuum of states of consciousness, (even under P.classic) hence in P.Eloise the autonomous form evolving from this continuum is the momentary form of the human.




Everything as a total entity defined under the same conditions as any other entity in P.Eloise is an autonomous form evolving out of a continuum of consciousness. That is, it is essentially the same as the momentary form of a human, actually, the property set of the momentary form of the human and that of everything have the same cardinality. They map to each other.



Yeah thats about the size of it.

And we do, but generally in a mythical or esoteric sense.
This might seem like a copout, but all things considered, especially the fact that one's conception of the universe is only as clear as one's perception of the universe, it's reasonable.



I am very very keenly interested in the ontology itself, principally so, as I've said. I suppose being more interested in the debate over god is the distraction that is undermining other efforts, because that would be the main difference between them and me.


Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I have such affinity for what RRS is doing. I concur with the plan to rid our world of that phenomenal waste of air.

**Just a note, I'll most likely disappear for a few days after of tomorrow as I am going interstate to attend the funeral of an old friend.

Lol wow...talk about overthinking a simple topic.

Weak Atheist: Without belief in a God

Strong Atheist: Without belief in a God + Denies existence of God.

 

Both are weak, one is vocal. Burden of proof is on Strong Atheists for denying/disproving God(s). So no, weak atheism doesn't lead to strong atheism.

 

It's a simple topic? Reeeeeeaaaly?

That's exactly what I'm challenging. Why say you're a "weak" atheist? From the dichotomy:

1. Either the god in question is impossible to define

or

2. The god defined is impossible

So what are you not believing in?

In the strong atheist's case, they're even more confused, because it would be extremely difficult to provide any way to deny something that escapes definition.

Really, the title of this thread should be renamed "Does all atheism reduce to coherence?" but I don't think it would help at this point.

Anyway, welcome to the forums!

 Nigel, I think what you're saying is exactly the difference between a theist and an atheist.  Dawkins, I believe, spent a couple of chapters talking about the paradigm shift that occurred when man discovered that he had the power of reason.  It's kind of funny, really.  We had the power to reason before we reasoned that we had the power to reason.  It has to be this way, for how could we have discovered that we had the power to reason if we did not have the power to reason?

Ack... my brain hurts...

Anyway, a theist would say that there are some things which are unknowable but still true.  A naturalist would have to make a lot more disclaimers, but in essence, he would say that though some things may remain unknown, everything that exists is within the set of {Things which may be known}.

The problem with a theist's position is that it suffers from the same paradox as faith.  If it is true that anything at all is unknowable, it becomes necessary that everything must be ultimately unknowable.  Either everything is knowable, or nothing is.

 

 

 

At best, I think this can justify pantheism.  If you're counting that as theism, then yes, it justifies weak atheism.  Why you would want to do that is beyond me, since it's making a distinction between two words to describe exactly the same thing.  Gee, Bob, I'm a "Choco-milk" guy.  Sorry, Dick, I'm a "Hershey-milk guy."  Don't give me a soda.  Give me a coke.

The reason this only leads to pantheism is that when you move beyond god literally being the universe, you're going to have to define "will," and that's going to lead you back into the problem of will being tied to organic organisms, and you'll be stuck with an empty definition again.

It's simple.  We have two ways of having knowledge of a thing.  We can experience it, or we can be told what it is.  For someone to tell us what it is, either they have to have experienced it, or been told what it is.  We can continue with this chain as long as we want, but eventually, someone has to have experienced the thing.

Of course, I'm not necessarily talking about direct experience.  Nobody's been to Saturn, but we can quite accurately say that many people have experienced it.  I've seen it with my own telescope-aided eye, as have many others.  With the help of spaceships, we have received a great deal of first hand experiential data from a surrogate "experiencer."

In this conversation, experience must refer to empirical, scientific experience.  Otherwise, when someone tells us what they have experienced, we are being informed about the person's experience -- not the external thing they think they experienced.  In other words, if I say that Saturn visited me in a dream last night, you're not learning anything about Saturn.  You're learning about my perceptual experience that included a thing called Saturn.  You can gain no actual knowledge of Saturn from my dream -- only from empirical scientific data, which may or may not have been included in my dream.

So, barring any empirical data about god, what you have is a long chain of people relating their experience, but there's no actual "god content."  There is only "people content."  We can learn a lot about what people believe god to be based on their non-empirical experience, but we cannot come to any valid, scientific definition of god.  There's no genuine experience at the end of the chain.

Again, the "god hypothesis" works backwards from the scientific method.  It's backwards from Occam.  It's adding something to an equation which shows no need for an addition.

I'm not saying there's nothing we don't know.  I'm saying that whenever there's something we don't know, there's a scientific path towards investigation, and in no case whatsoever does the scientific path ever depend on or demand something outside of the physical universe.  So again, we're left with a dilemma.  Define god as part of the physical universe -- which would demand experiential knowledge of god, or admit that there is no definition of god which has coherence.

 

 

 

 

Yes. It's like asking if someone will eventually protest outside of wedding chapels because they disagree with same-sex marriage. Of course not. Those who actively participate in protests, who pass legislation that prohibits same-sex marriage, or speaks from a pulpit against how much God hates homosexuals, can be classified into the same conservative, fundamentalist category as any other member of society (most likely from utah). ;o

Also, I wasn't implying YOU were over thinking the topic. I was just surprised there was so much debate over such a simple subject which I consider just to be semantic in nature. I made a thread challenging agnostics to pick a side which could be considered similar, so I understand the frustration behind terminologies.

 

I consider myself a Strong Atheist and I'll explain why...

I am an Anti-Theist. That probably sums it up for not only me, but most Strong Atheists out there. A weak atheist simply doesn't believe in God. I on the other hand, want to break down the foundation that creates mythology. I don't go around trying to disprove GOD'S EXISTENCE, but instead to disprove belief without evidence. I take an active role in spreading understanding and explain to people how horribly wicked religion truly is and how it's been a bane for mankind.

So no, I don't think I'm confused because I'm not trying to prove the impossible. In fact, I rarely debate theists on such topics like the origin of life because there's too much unknown. I think such subjects should remain philosophical in nature and not brought up in debates because debates aren't designed to end in stalemate. However, I know what it's like to be human - I know what a human is capable of. I know how gullible and fearful people are; how history was written in blood. I know why we create Gods, why we exploit the weak into believing in them, and while I could just be content keeping my mouth shut and showing no interest in religion because of a lack of belief, I choose to be heard.

And hi, it's a pleasure to be here :3