/atheism/ - Atheism

>Most atheists seem to classify themselves as agnostic

Into the trash it goes.

>>7908

What? It's true at least in my experience.

>This is usually because they can't provide positive proof that there are no gods and/or they aren't 100% certain there are no gods (although they may be close to 100%).

>positive proof

>for a negative statement

That does indeed seems like a pretty hard thing to do.

Anyway, agnosticism is a statement of knowledge, whereas atheism is a statement on the existence of god(s). I really don't know why people keep using these terms as referring to the same thing when they have nothing to do with each other.

Also, I really disagree with justificationism. I also disagree with instrumentalism and subscribe to fallibilism. Basically, I believe that knowledge can always be challenged and that explanations of reality are constantly improved on by new ideas, new data, etc.

Atheist to da max! Classicly defined it means "without gods". That definition's good enough for me.

Why must people bring this spectrum upon atheists? Do people classify christianity or islam by the degree to which they believe in their god?

Besides that, most atheists are practical atheists, meaning they can't 100% prove their view, just as nothing is 100% provable. I can't prove that there's an invisible, flying, observable only by me, micro-bug that flies around nor can I 100% disprove everyone's spirits, ghosts, entities they experience that I can't but to be practical, I have no proof other than what you said so I assume it's false or has no relevance to me in all practical manner.

That's practical atheism and there's nothing philosophically wrong with it. No atheist I know says 100% there's no gods. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem may or may not apply on this scale but nothing is 100% knowable until we know *everything*. Why must you try to apply this to atheists and say they're not intellectually honest yet not claim the same for all other factions of belief that can't claim 100% proof of their view?

>>7913

Atheists don't become Atheists by first deciding they knew something with 100 percent certainty. If they had that personality they most likely would have remained Christian.

>>7904

we have discussed it before. you might want to visit this dying thread OP:

>>6074

you know what the philosophers say about the Agrippa/Münchhausen trilemma in epistemology: absolute knowledge most certainly does not exist.

the thing is that most atheists are humble enough to admit that strong evidence could in principle change their atheism, no matter how absurd the god hypoteses are. that is, if your atheism isn't dogmatic then you might as well call yourself an agnostic atheist.

>>7908

it's true though. if you still think agnosticism is a middle-ground between theism and atheism then you my friend have just been carried away with the fallacious mainstream bandwagon. I recommend you reading the aforementioned thread

>>7910

>I really don't know why people keep using these terms as referring to the same thing when they have nothing to do with each other.

it's a mistake but it plays a psycho-social role:

by making agnosticism an alternative position to atheism the non-theists can safely express their rejection of belief without feeling the backlash and discrimination that a more edgy word atheism would bring to them.

also theists find it very pleasant that the numbers of atheism aren't reported in great quantities because many refrain from calling themselves atheist even though all non-theists are by definition atheists.

And this weird notion is very extended, even in academic circles. You see scientific studies on demographics using agnosticism to mean a compromise between theism and atheism or something like that. the problem wouldn't be so pervasive if people had a clearer conception of what atheism is: lack or rejection of belief in the existence of gods, which doesn't imply you are a strong/positive atheist.

of course what i said doesn't hold true for agnostic theists, which is a far less popular category than the others.

>>7913

>Godel's Incompleteness Theorem

groundbreaking science usually has the property of producing very profound philosophical speculation, which in turn gets derailed by popular media and pseudo-scientific stretches.

in this case Godel's incompleteness theorem isn't science but a result in mathematical logic. I having studied it formally as a logician or mathematician, but I have become more familiar with it over the course of the last 5 years or so, specially after studying some computational theory. And I can tell you it is formulated in very precise terms, like any other mathematical theorem, which really doesn't leave room for speculation like that. At least not in an intellectually honest interpretation of it.

Godel's incompleteness theorem simply says that in first-order deductive/mathematical/symbolic/formal logic (also called propositional calculus) and higher-order logics, which are often required to define most of the mathematics we deal with, including common arithmetic, is an incomplete system in the sense that there are well-formed logical formulas and thus mathematical statements which can be proven neither true nor false. it's kind of mathematical fatalism because it also means that successful resolution and computation of problems is only guaranteed for restricted, less expressive forms of thinking.

The only attempt at formal definition of God I have seen is Godel's own ontological proof using modal logics, but Godel's incompleteness theorem doesn't say that no formula is possible provable or disprovable, only that some are. (there are actually infinitely many provable and unprovable statements, but if I recall correctly the unprovable ones are infinitely more than the other infinite). On the other hand, trying to apply Godel's incompleteness theorem to factual statements about the universe is philosophical crazy talk at best, not mathematical truth.

>>8326

>I having

fuck, I meant I haven't

>>8326

>propositional calculus

I fucked up once again. it is predicate calculus, not propositional calculus. propositional calculus is complete

>>8319

>if you still think agnosticism is a middle-ground between theism and atheism then you my friend have just been carried away with the fallacious mainstream bandwagon.

I don't. That's what I meant by into the trash it goes.

>>7904

>Most atheists seem to classify themselves as agnostic

That's missleading. Most atheists have a agnosic approach to god(s).

But that doesn't mean they can't draw conclusions.

I don't know that if bigfoot exists or the inner core of the moon is out of nougat or the universe is only 5s old and was created that it looks like several billion years old.

But it's so unlikely to be true that I bet all my money on "No".

>>8354

This!