Physics Guy wrote: ↑Thu Oct 27, 2022 8:05 pm
If Christian apologists jump too quickly from an ultimate being to their specific deity, then I think this criticism can be applied to a lot of assertive atheists, too. They make the same jump, just in the opposite direction.
Chap wrote: ↑Thu Oct 27, 2022 9:13 pm
Oh - them. That weird straw-man sect of atheist people.
Try me, on the other hand. I listen to people talking their various deity-talks, and I think "Does adding that stuff to what I say or think add anything to my understanding of the world about me? Nope. So deities are just not part of my tools for making sense of things.' So far I have seen nothing to make me change my mind.
You OK with that?
Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 11:11 am
Far be it from me to be OK, or not, with what others believe, or do not, about God. If I thought you gave even a slight bit of damn what I thought about your views on this subject, I would try to discourage you from giving that damn. No damn at all should be given.
A particular logical fallacy had just been attributed to Christian apologists, and I said that the same fallacy is committed by a lot of assertive atheists. Do we disagree about that?
I'm sure we agree that not all atheists commit the fallacy. I didn't even mean to imply that a large proportion of atheists made it. Enough people are atheists that even a small proportion of them can still be a lot of people. You do run into the folks I mean, now and then, so they can't be too few.
1. I am glad to see that my description of why one might be an atheist does not draw your criticism - which, since this is a discussion board, would have been perfectly OK. It is, I think, a mere reformulation of the "I just don't need that stuff" reaction to theism that is increasingly common in most western societies. To be an non-scientologist, one is not obliged to produce a proof that its claims about the being called Xenu are false: it is enough to say "No thanks" to the person trying to get you into the storefront for a "free personality test". It's up to the scientologists to convince you that you need their services. Being an atheist does not oblige one to be ready with a proof that any given deity is non-existent: it is enough to say "No thanks" to (e.g.) the Mormon missionaries at your door. It's up to the theists [= 'believers in a deity who is a person, rather than an impersonal cosmic order''] to convince you that you need to believe in one.
2. On your point about logical fallacies committed by believers and by atheists, and the supposed parallel between them: we agree that a would-be believer in the deity taught by some particular religion is making an error if they jump from a supposed proof of the existence of something like "a First Cause" to claiming that they have proved the existence of (say) the particular deity worshipped by Southern Baptists.
3. I am not sure, however, that it is fair to say that there are a substantial number of "assertive atheists" who make an error that is the reverse of this. In the example cited in (2), the error would consist in arguing that the deity of Southern Baptists has certain characteristics that make it unlikely that such a deity really exists, and moving on to claiming that one had that thus shown that no personal deity at all could exist. In fact, the atheist who is willing to engage with religious belief claims (which is what I think you mean by an "assertive atheist") is rarely confronted by someone who puts forward a general argument for the existence of the whole class of possible personal deities. The encounter is nearly always with somebody who believes in a particular variety of personal deity, such as KevinSim on this thread, who I gather believes in the deity of Mormonism. If one chooses to engage with with KevinSim or any other theist, the context demands that one should address his or her particular kind of belief claim in order to resist the claim that the atheist's position is unsound. I do not think that the atheist can reasonably be reproached for not offering KevinSim a general reputation of all possible existence claims for all possible personal deities before being able to say that his or her atheism is unchallenged by the encounter.
