Why bother with God? (General)

by dhw, Sunday, May 29, 2011, 18:16 (4736 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: Many atheists go back to the root etymology of the word atheist. (I think I've used this one here before.) The prefix 'a' meaning "without", 'theism' meaning "belief in a deity." Therefore, "without belief in a deity." [...] (I've recently cruised through some postings on other atheist forums.) Agnostics are now categorized as atheists (fitting, because most theists ALREADY do that...), with atheism spanning a spectrum from strong atheism (Dawkins) to weak atheism (myself, dhw.) I know you have your trusty (Oxford?) dictionary dhw, but humans are allowed to change the meanings of things. -You do me an injustice. My half a dozen dictionaries (including Oxford) all define agnosticism in terms of the impossibility of knowing whether God exists or not. This was what Huxley meant when he coined the term. I am arguing AGAINST the dictionary definition, because as we have agreed in all our epistemological discussions, no-one ... including the most radical theists and atheists ... can actually KNOW such a thing.
 
"Agnostics are now categorized as atheists". By whom? You refer to atheist forums. Well this is an agnostic forum, and I categorically deny that I am an atheist. The blurring of distinctions through strong and weak atheism is, in my view, a diversionary tactic, because it attempts to ignore all the arguments that prevent an agnostic from being an atheist (e.g. the need for faith in chance, the mystery of consciousness, the inexplicability of certain "paranormal" experiences). As for "without belief in a deity", it is essential to distinguish between not believing and disbelieving. An atheist believes there is no deity. An agnostic has neither belief nor disbelief. Atheism is committed one way, and agnosticism has no commitment either way. The trend you have identified most certainly exists, and I am one agnostic who finds it repugnant.-MATT: How would you separate true "paranormal information event" from a correct intuition? You can't. How do you know its true? You describe something as unexplainable as when I discussed having dreams that predict completely inane futures.
 
You repeatedly ignore the type of experience I am referring to. Here is an extract from a Pim van Lommel website:-If deceased acquaintances or relatives are encountered in an otherworldly dimension, they are usually recognized by their appearance, while communication is possible through thought transfer. Thus, during an NDE it is also possible to come into contact with fields of consciousness of deceased persons (interconnectedness). Sometimes persons are met whose death was impossible to have known [= this sort of information especially intrigues me - dhw] ; sometimes persons unknown to them are encountered during an NDE. Quotation:
 
"During my cardiac arrest I had an extensive experience (...) and later I saw, apart from my deceased grandmother, a man who had looked at me lovingly, but whom I did not know. More than 10 years later, at my mother's deathbed, she confessed to me that I had been born out of an extramarital relationship, my father being a Jewish man who had been deported and killed during the second World War, and my mother showed me his picture. The unknown man that I had seen more than 10 years before during my NDE turned out to be my biological father."-I don't understand such experiences, but I am not prepared to call Pim van Lommel, his patients and his witnesses frauds, victims of delusion, or dreamers about inane futures... -dhw: Remember that "Chance did it!" is also a conclusion. I repeat: what hard questions do theists dodge which are not also dodged by atheists?-MATT: The atheist position (putting on my Dawkins hat) is that the question isn't dodged at all. We're working on a solution for that. We accept chance for now, because there is no other viable alternative, no scientific description that yet bridges the gap. -You seem to be saying that all atheists are scientists working on how the mechanisms for life and evolution came into being! An atheist, whether scientist or non-scientist, believes there is no designer, and the alternative to design is chance ... as you say, "there is no other viable alternative"! If he doesn't believe in either, he's an agnostic. As far as the origin of the mechanisms is concerned, there are only theories, NONE of which can prove whether life came about by chance or design. The hard question here is that of an unknowable, unprovable first cause, so if X says "Chance" and Y says "God", what hard question is the latter dodging that is not being dodged by the former? In fact, I don't think either of them is dodging anything! Time to move on?-MATT: "There aren't any theist scientists studying abiogenesis over the past 60 years, nor have there been to the extent I'm aware. I would say that their absence is evidence enough."
 
Of what? They are not studying the hard question of chance v. design, but of how life originated. Chance v. design is/should be irrelevant. In any case, I'd be interested to know what your "awareness" is based on. Although we learn from surveys that the majority of members of the National Academy of Sciences do not believe in God (it's not clear how many are atheists and how many agnostics), there are some who do.