This popped up today and I just had to talk about it. I’m not saying that all of them are especially egregious, but in my experience, a fair number of them are.
Over on Reddit, on a generally unrelated post, someone said that they knew that no gods were real. I asked him how he knew. It didn’t go well for him.
In fact, I had two very similar discussions and since I can’t be bothered to go back and separate them, I figure I’ll just lump the various dumb claims together. It doesn’t matter anyhow.
First, he tried to say that he “knew” no gods were real in the same way he “knew” that leprechauns weren’t real. How is that, I asked. Not believed, since that’s not what he was stating, but “knew”. How had he come to that knowledge?
I find in these conversations, quite often, that they simply do not understand the proper terminology to use. It is fine to “believe” that there are no gods, as beliefs are not necessarily facts. However, once you claim “knowledge”, that comes with certain evidential requirements. You have to be able to show how you “know”.
No, both of them insisted that they “knew” there were no gods, in the same way that theists “knew” that there were. That’s called faith, my friend. That is not where you want to go.
He said “I know there are no gods, the same way I know there are no pink crows!” Wow, is that the wrong example to use. First off, that’s a textbook case of the black swan fallacy. Just because you have no experience of evidence of black swans, or pink crows in this instance, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Besides, we know that albino crows exist. Albino crows are, in fact, a shade of light pink. Therefore, pink crows do exist!
We circled back around to leprechauns and I said the same. You have no way to show that leprechauns do not exist. You lack evidence for them and therefore are entirely justified in not believing that they exist, but to state, without question, that they absolutely do not, you have gone beyond the realm of rationality.
It went back and forth for a while, with him being entirely unable to produce evidence to support his claim and me rebuffing every irrational claim. Finally, he said “I can say anything I want!”
Sure, if you’re childish. That’s what the religious do. They say gods are real. Just saying it doesn’t make it true. That was about the point where I just stopped responding. It was a complete waste of time trying to discuss things with someone who was running on pure faith and fee-fees.
I find that to be the case with a lot of young atheists. Perhaps they have not yet thrown off their religious shackles. Maybe they’re just borrowing the tropes of religion and applying it to their new life. I don’t know and I don’t care. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I hold people personally accountable for their present beliefs and positions and even though I can understand the difficulty in setting aside their old positions, that doesn’t mean they don’t need to. Otherwise, they are just making fools of themselves.
This is why I am so adamant that people understand the words that come out of their mouths. The words that you choose to use matter. They tell people if you’re a rational individual or not, and in a lot of these cases, these people have just traded one blind faith for another. They are making themselves look stupid.
Sadly, because a lot of them are.
Yep. Everyone is agnostic. On everything, since there is no way to know for certain that anything exists outside of our minds. Anyone who says they know anything at all is, as you say, just running on faith.
In my mind, though, some things appear to be real because my senses relay information to my brain in a way which makes it feel as though they are real. I can interact with them on a way which appears to have consequences in what I perceive to be reality. I say I know they are real even though I cannot possibly be certain of that because it is a useful classification and easier than calling them things that I strongly believe to be real but which may not be.
In my mind all gods are in the class of things which I know are not real because they logically cannot exist as they have been described and defined. Leprechauns I’m not so sure about and chasing rainbows is proving to be a bit of a timewaster but on the other hand, what if there actually was a pot of gold at the end?
This is why I despise philosophy, it’s just a mental wanking game for people with too much time on their hands and no social or practical skills.
I agree. Agnosticism is the norm and people who claims knowledge, they need to be able to back it up in some demonstrable way. There are certain things that seem to be true and certain things that we have to agree on to even have a conversation, but we need to understand that none of it is proven. It’s just an agreed-upon convenience that we engage in, otherwise, what’s the point?
I see what you’re saying but the simple fact is there’s not one thing you or anyone can point to which shows that some kind of supernatural being exists.
In fact all of nature that we have observed to date is precisely as we would expect it to be if there is no god or other powerful supernatural being able to play games with reality. You can attempt to philosophise a god into existence but you can never make it do anything that can be perceived, measured or have any effect in the reality we inhabit.
You can argue that there may be other dimensions which are not visible or in any other way perceivable or measurable by us here in this dimension we inhabit but I say so what? If we’re unable to access any of those dimensions and they’re unable to interact with ours, what does it matter? It’s exactly the same to us as though they don’t exist.
So I feel that saying I believe there is no god is the most reasonable and sane position anyone can take. How much different is that to saying I don’t believe there is a god? Maybe in some philosophical gobbledegook mind bending word game you can make it appear different but effectively it’s not. There is no such thing as a gnostic position either because practically and philosophically it not possible to know anything for certain. Unless, of course, you invite god over for tea and he turns up. Let me know how that goes.
I agree, which is why nobody ought to believe that any supernatural beings exist. The time to believe a thing is when you have evidence to support it, not one instant before. That’s the problem with the religious. They just want to believe. They don’t care about truth, they care about comfort. They have certainty without evidence, which is not rational.
By the same token though, anyone who says for absolutely certain that something does not exist, without evidence to support it, they are making the same mistake. Just as you should not believe something does exist without support, you should not believe the opposite without support. The support is what gets you there. Now if you’re saying that something is logically contradictory, that’s one thing. A thing that cannot exist does not exist, but it is the contradiction that provides the evidence. That part, I’m fine with. It’s the people who say “no gods of any kind can possibly exist, so there!” that I have an issue with. There just isn’t any way to defend that rationally.
I struggle to see the difference between I don’t believe there is a god and I believe there isn’t a god. Is not believing there isn’t a god any different from believing there is one? I don’t see any myself to all intents and purposes.
To say categorically that there is or there is not a god is, as you say, something that really requires supporting evidence, though how you can have evidence that there isn’t a god is beyond me. Provide me with some evidence that I don’t have an invisible cold fire-breathing dragon floating around in my garage. You can’t. But to seriously consider that I might have is hardly the pinnacle of rationality.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who insists there is a god is not only irrational but delusional and should be getting medical help. On the other hand, anyone who insists there is not a god has an awful lot of lack of evidence for any god ever to back them up and is in a far stronger position rationally than the gnostic theist who has zero evidence for a god but continues to insist there is one.
Absolutely there is. One is a positive claim, which bears a burden of proof and one is a rejection of a positive claim and does not. I would probably agree that there is something wrong with anyone who asserts an irrational idea as an adult. Adults ought to be held to higher standards. An adult with an imaginary friend has problems. A child with one probably doesn’t.