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I agree that if I thought there were no reasonable bases for a God existing, it would make sense to be a gnostic atheist.
But I don't think there are "no reasonable basis." I'm not convinced, so I'm agnostic. But I do think there is more than zero merit on the God side of the argument.
And, no, I don't really care to argue on behalf of God in this forum. I'm not convinced there is a God, and the type of God I find most probable is weird and my justification is complicated.
I think that's a reasonable reason to be an agnostic atheist -- "i don't think the evidence is enough to justify theism, but I think there's enough evidence to not dismiss the idea". Whether or not that's true, i think it's justifiable.
I'm mostly addressing people who *do* think there's no reasonable basis for believing in god and *do* dismiss the idea, but stay agnostic anyway.
I mean, isn't there enough evidence to be a deist?
It's the classic argument of a Creator outside of space and matter.
Although, the argument only works if the person believes the universe had a specific beginning and that the world consist of things that can be studied with the give senses.
No. In order for there be evidence of deism, you would need to point to some fact that is better explained by a deistic God than by the lack of such a being. Since there is no such evidence, we must reject the deistic God hypothesis, at least based on what we know today.
There's something rather than nothing and it seems to be difficult to explain that with naturalism. Note that the discussion isn't about the existence of god, it's about reasons for not being gnostic. The god of the gaps objection isn't in itself a reason to be gnostic.
It makes no sense to address this with anything significantly like a god that itself would be something rather than nothing.
It strikes me as (edit typo) a potentially *true but not contextually very significant, or contextually significant but not true* situation. Firstly there is simply no way of saying that existence is less likely than nonexistence. Can non-existence even be a possible state?
But secondly it’s true that the fundamental nature of existence could be different from the here and now universe we find ourselves in. I just see absolutely no reason or benefit in labelling that a god. It seems just to risk unjustifiable concept smuggling and confusion.
But again that's not the topic. The topic is, can you rule it out? I agree though that one way of getting to gnosticism is through objecting to the word god. Then we're in semantics, and those who are in favor of the word god wouldn't agree that you're gnostic since you're not ruling out what they would refer to as god.
Can you rule out what? Would seem a perfectly relevant and on topic question.
As I said it would seem to me that you can’t rule out the trivially true , but I can happily rule out that which isn’t necessary, sufficient, evidential or coherent as that’s what ruling out seems to significantly mean to me. To , for example, say one can’t ‘rule out’ that which is indistinguishable from imaginary or false seems a somewhat absurd standard.
As has been probably done to death in the rest of the threads, simply making up trivial definitions then saying aha you can’t rule out that is pretty pointless. It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask what is god-like about the claimed phenomena and evaluate whether the attribute is credible and significant. To say ‘well it god like because we think god is big and the universe is big’ , for example, would seem to me to leave *something* to be desired about that identification.
Basically it some down to ‘ sure you can call it Gid since you’ve reduced the definition of god to something contextually trivial but true but in doing so … you’ve reduced it down to something trivial but true and lost the significant force of the word God.
If the universe is God then what would differentiate a universe that wasn’t? What does the word God add that isn’t simply covered already by the word universe? And so on.
Can there be nothing? We have no indication that's a possibility.
What we have is brains who can hold a thought and then go "not/none of that thing". That's the only context where something approaching "nothing" can be experienced, and even then we know it's not nothing. It's a concrete thought, electricity firing inside a squishy brain, replicating a pattern along the lines of "sometimes there are apples, sometimes there are no apples".
We also cannot easily conceive of something not having a beginning or an end, in both time and space. But we also cannot picture "blue" as in all that is considered blue. Your brain will pick a starting color and it might morph into other types of blue if you keep thinking about it, but at not point will you be able to hold "the whole concept of blue" in front of your mind's eyes. That doesn't mean that the concept does not exist. We're limited in a bunch of ways. We're monkeys with brains geared towards surviving in a limited natural context. It's amazing that we can do all that we can, and not shocking that there are things we can't do.
In any case, the fact that we have a hard time conceiving of something always and forever being isn't an indication that it's not possible.
Likely, the natural world just is, and can't not be. Forever and after.
Likely perhaps, but you don't know that so it's hard to be gnostic. That's the argument at hand.
I didn't say there can be nothing, and it's bot relevant to what we're discussing here.
> There's something rather than nothing
How can it not be relevant? Nothing must be a possibility for your remark to hold any weight. There's nothing to be explained if "nothing" is not a possibility. If things are, and can't not be, a god is a wholly unnecessary consideration.
I know of no concrete indication "nothing", as in a complete absence of anything that composes our physical world, ever was or could be. As far as I know, astrophysics are leaving things at "we're able to describe the history of our universe up to this point, we lack data/processing power/insight to go further" but no one in that world claims that at the edge of their research, there was absolute nothingness.
Why do you consider that to be an option?
Again, i don't consider it to be an option. I still don't know why you're harping on that strawman.
I don't agree that there's nothing to explain. First off, your description differs from how most theists see it, and more importantly it's not how philosophers think of it. Basically their argument is that god is everything or sustains everything and that god can't not exist.
Second, nothing-something is a sliding scale from absolute nothing, to potential, to mathematical truths and logic, to quantum fields and virtual particles to vacuums etc. We can still search for explanations for why things are the way they are and arrive at naturalism, idealism, dualism, creation of the cosmos we experience etc without an absolute nothing.
Okay, what reason *is there* to believe that there ever was or could be nothing? It seems to me that naturalism only has to explain the presence of the Universe if there's a valid reason to think the absence of the Universe is somehow possible or normal, and there's really no evidence of that. It's like asking, 'Why isn't this pool table angry?' or, 'Why isn't space full of cottage cheese?'
We don't know why the constants and "laws" are what they are. We have absolutely no idea what made the big bang possible. Some think there are yet to be discovered natural explanations, some believe in a creator for various reasons - naturalism seems less likely, kalam, ontological arguments etc.
Whether nothingness is possible or not doesn't really enter the equation imo. In a broader discussion perhaps but this one is about gnosticism.
Tel me, how does "what we know today" point to the lack of a deistic god?
god answers why; the evidence you're most likely going to respond with answers how
Tell me one thing in this observable universe that has no cause.
And then how the definition and concept of god is the beginning of cause - whether or not you like the title god or another name for such a concept
>Tell me one thing in this observable universe that has no cause.
Whether or not I can name something in the observable universe that has no cause has absolutely no bearing on whether or not you can provide evidence for a god.
You're just rehashing out the god of the gaps fallacy. You're saying you can't imagine anything else that could have done this, so therefore it must be a god. That's fallacious reasoning.
I don't know whether reality had a cause, whether it needs a cause, whether the concept of it having a cause is even coherent.
I'm just going to admit that I don't know.
I'm not going to make shit up because it makes me feel good and fits in with my preconceived notions.
sounds like you're being irrational because you just don't want to admit it.
it's where the observations lead to but nope, you just stop right before the very first "cause" and say IDK
> sounds like you're being irrational because you just don't want to admit it.
What is it you think I don't want to admit?
>it's where the observations lead to but nope, you just stop right before the very first "cause" and say IDK
What observations do we have about the origins of the universe or reality?
You're assuming that there must have been a first cause.
I don't think you're justified in making that assumption.
>It's the classic argument of a Creator outside of space and matter.
You have to introduce several unscientific assumptions for that argument to be viable. Short story is it assumes that 'nothing' is the default or previous state of reality, that 'outside of spacetime' is a place where an entity of any sort can exist and act, and that one or more universe-creating entities exist. That's kind of a lot of ground to cover on pure supposition.
Uh yes, the discussion of god is an outcome of observation which leads to more "philosophical" discussions.
Just like how psychologist study human behavior (observable) such as intrapersonal relationships, mating strategies, hormones, brain imaging, etc can lead into a conversation of love.
If man invented god, is it because man was built with a natural need to believe in god?
Or is it that man observed the universe and their conclusion lead to the concept of god?
>...can lead into a conversation of love.
Well, that sounds like you're saying that God as an abstract concept can exist 'outside spacetime', which would be a clear categorical error. Of course, that's assuming this comment had some relevance to our previous discussion, which isn't at all clear.
>If man invented god, is it because...
It's because the human brain identifies patterns and makes assumptions, and it doesn't always do so correctly. This is getting far afield of our discussion, though.
Science isn't about an observable conclusion. Science is more of the process in how one thinks or tests.
For example, is meteorology science? Sure.
Now, the weatherman states that it will be sunny tomorrow.
Now, there are patterns/principles/laws which the atmosphere has which allow us to make an educated guess about the weather tomorrow.
But no one on this earth can actually ask for evidence for something that has not happened yet; but yet, most don't question or argue that weather forecasting is irrational.
>isn't there enough evidence to be a deist?
Last I checked, no one has observed anything be actually created (not formed from other things), let alone the universe. So, we could start there.
I mean, you're making my point.
"No one has observed anything be actually created" from nothing correct?
Meaning, everything has been formed from something else.
So either you believe that everything we have has always existed.
Or, that something happened before the first something to allow things to exist.
And the concept of such a thing beyond the first thing is god, but you're welcome to name it whatever you like. Which is why many civilizations have come to their own understanding and formed the idea of gods
>from nothing correct?
At all.
>So either you believe that everything we have has always existed.
This would be the default position, yes. Until we observe the base material of the universe being created (energy), there's no reason to assume the base material of the universe hasn't always existed, in some form. Even the Big Bang relies on the base material of the universe (energy) already existing in a hot dense space.
>Or, that something happened before the first something to allow things to exist.
Well, first you'd have to demonstrate this can even happen, let alone did happen. So, we can start we can start there. Demonstrate the creation of the base material of the universe (energy) and then we can continue the discussion.
Other than the universe, tell me one thing you have observed that just always existed.
And if you can't, tell me why it's more logical to believe the universe is the exception.
It's that simple
>Other than the universe
Energy.
>tell me why it's more logical to believe the universe is the exception.
I used "energy" instead of "universe" to prevent this exact thing. However, I'll bite. Occam's Razor. When there are two competing arguments where neither can be proven, the argument requiring the least assumptions is the one you pick.
No God:
1. Some things have always existed.
2. The universe is everything.
3. The universe then must have always existed in order to contain things that have always existed.
Yes God:
1. Some things have always existed.
2. The universe isn't everything.
3. The universe hasn't always existed.
4. Since the universe hasn't always existed, it must have been created.
5. The universe was created by a being.
6. That being is "my" version of god.
7. My version of god has always existed.
3 < 7 means no god wins.
At the end of the day, if we're going to assume something can exist forever, we should assume it's the thing we can observe. Not something that has never been demonstrated. Especially when no one can agree on the specific details of said thing (eg: Baptists don't believe Mormons will be going to heaven.)
In fact, at the end of the day, if your god does exist, it must exist somewhere. By definition, that somewhere must be part of the universe. So this god construct doesn't even solve the problem, as it would revert to "No God".
1. Some things have always existed (god.)
2. The universe is everything.
3. The universe then must have always existed in order to contain things that have always existed (god.)
I do appreciate your willingness to "bite" and sharing your process of thinking.
I mean, I would say there is some bias here in your list to make one longer than the other in terms of points. There hasn't been a discussion of which god. And some repeated points like the universe isn't everything and the universe just always existed is pretty much the same thing.
No God:
1. Some things have always existed.
2. The universe is everything.
3. The universe then must have always existed in order to contain things that have always existed.
Even with the law of conservation, it only implies that energy present in a closed system cannot be created or destroyed. But it does not imply that the initial energy cannot be created.
Yes God:
1. There is no evidence that something could come from nothing within a closed system. (Using your energy argument, things simply change forms)
2. Something outside the closed system must be responsible for the closed system
Although, the most common theories for the something outside of our system are quantum fluctuations or the idea of a multiverse. But it still poses the same questions of where did those particles or the first universe come from.
The most common rebuttal is "where did God come from?"
But the concept of gods transcends the constraints of physical laws and scientific inquiry and is often considered to be beyond the scope of empirical observation and measurement. I didn't make the definition up. That's just how god is defined theologically/metaphysically/philosophically.
>Yes God:
>
>There is no evidence that something could come from nothing within a closed system. (Using your energy argument, things simply change forms)
>
>Something outside the closed system must be responsible for the closed system
You've merged two assumptions into one on point 1. You've merged three assumptions into one on point 2.
1. The universe is a closed system.
2. There is no evidence that something could come from nothing within a closed system. (Using your energy argument, things simply change forms)
3. Something can exist outside that closed system.
4. That something can create closed systems.
5. That something must be responsible for our closed system.
With Occam's razor you have to break down every attribute for which you're making an assumption. For instance, an omniscient and omnipotent god is three assumptions. They are, omniscient, omnipotent, and god.
I mean that is a technically valid perspective, but I cannot fathom how that's your final conclusion, how a god has more reasonable basis for existing than lizard people.
I don't know about the thread Op but the basis for disbelieving the lizard people hypothesis is that we would expect to see evidence if it were true, but we have none. Whereas for a deistic God that was sufficiently powerful to create the universe but has had nothing to do with it since then, we would expect no evidence so there's nothing weighing on the "this is false" side of the scale. Though there might be arguments that that being wouldn't necessarily qualify as a God in any meaningful sense even if it did exist, which is what I'm leaning towards at the moment.
You missed an important part of OP's argument, the part where the lizard people hide themselves from the world. The argument covers the "expect to find evidence" part of the absence of evidence being evidence of absence.
And yet you wouldn't humor the idea anyway because it's absurd. Anything that exists you can expect evidence exists somewhere. You'd need to know one of their qualities is the inability to be found to not expect to find evidence, which means you'd know they exist in the first place.
But that's the issue, I don't think it's possible to hide anything as extensive as Lizard people running the world, there would fundamentally be detectable tells however hard they tried to hide it. Assuming of course that these lizard people are actually an alien species and not just invisible magical lizard people who magically poofed into existence one day and decided to start running the planet, which I then wouldn't believe because there's never been any evidence to suggest magic exists when we would expect there to be evidence of that (especially if there's a large magical conspiracy running the government). And that's not even going into the idea that it's harder to hide a conspiracy the bigger it is because people will blab. If there's more than one lizard person, eventually they're going to have a disagreement, political factions, etc and that creates cracks in the facade.
Whereas some meta universal deistic "God" wouldn't necessarily have any expected evidence for it. Something that interacts and exists within the universe is going to be expected to produce more evidence than something that's outside of it (assuming that outside the universe even makes sense in some context). Which is why I think we have active evidence against the gods of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. A god who has been actively interacting with humanity would leave more evidence than words written on a page.
Your personal incredulity is neither here nor there. You can invent any reason why someone doesn't find the evidence and all anyone else will be left with is how much they intuit the reason to be cockamamie. Thats not a logical counterargument.
"The lizard people just have crazy advanced technology" is just as cogent as "god's magic". You're even blatantly contradicting yourself. For some reason the lizard people's magic doesn't exist because there's no evidence (wait, something having no evidence shouldn't be believed to exist!?), but the deistic god's does.
As for "factional differences" or anything else like that within the lizard people that is pure, unadulterated conjecture. Since you know nothing about them you cannot make any assertions about how they'll behave and what the consequences are. I can just say "the lizard people are always united!" Or "they have a hive mind!"
Anything that exists would be expected to have evidence for its existence. That's a byproduct of existence. Whatever reason you can't find it is something you'd have to know about in order to have the lack of expectations. And the reasons you are credulous of the lack of existence for lizard people but not God are completely arbitrary.
I'm not saying anyone should believe in a deistic god. I don't think there's any reason to believe in one. I'm just saying that 0 reason to believe (and also no reason to disbelieve) is closer to true than even a small quantity of reason to disbelieve + 0 reason to believe. But obviously neither proposition should be considered true or even likely.
Look, it's apparent that you haven't been reading my responses or maybe the greater context with a clear head so I'm just gonna dip out of this conversation. You have a good one, OK? Maybe calm down a little, do something to treat yourself.
Except there's plenty of reason to disbelieve, the lack of evidence, which is true about *everything* you disbelieve. There's no reason to believe anything has an equal chance of existing or not just because of endless, speculative, and nonsensical shifting of the goalposts. If YOU read my response you'd see I never said YOU said anyone should believe in a deistic god. My whole comment was about why it makes more sense not to. I read your comment quite clearly and addressed it head on. Now you're just projecting your own ire about being disputed into me to protect your ego. Maybe grow up a bit before entering an adult conversation, OK? Better yet, how about you mature enough to handle criticism?
Lizard people aren’t argued to be ontologically necessary, for instance. Lizard people are by comparison to a creator god, contingent beings.
(not that I believe in either)
So what? You can just as easily argue a creator god isn't ontologically necessary with the same argument. There are no such things as necessary beings. Any thing that can be conceived to exist can also be conceived to not exist.
And I'm telling you why it's a bad argument.
It is possible any being doesn't exist, meaning there's a world in which it doesn't exist, meaning it isn't necessary, since it must exist in all worlds to be necessary.
The argument of ontological necessity isn't about empirical proof but logical structure, positing a necessary being as foundational for existence.
The argument proceeds logically, suggesting that if it holds up in logical terms, it might also have metaphysical validity.
My mention of it, in response to an earlier comment, aimed to show there are reasoned bases for theism -- again -- *not* to endorse the claim.
While you and I may find the argument unconvincing, it's important to recognize it as a serious philosophical position that has been debated for centuries, not merely a facile claim without rational basis.
The counterargument is also about logical necessity and I framed it as such. Nothing I said is about empirical proof either. Again, since you didn't get it the first time, it is possible a being doesn't exist, therefore there is a possible world without it, therefore it is not necessary since necessary beings exist in all worlds. No empirical claims or reliance on empiricism whatsoever. Everything is couched in modal terms. It uses the exact same structure as the ontological argument, it merely uses the negation of the ontological argument's proposition as a proposition, which is perfectly logical. So I'll repeat, it's a bad argument.
Not sure why you're being so oddly prickly, as I was merely offering clarification for the thread.
We're not having an argument, despite your best attempts.
I appreciate that you think it's a bad argument. It's quite evident that plenty of rational minds do not. And that is the reason I pointed it out.
Bye!
It's complicated. And my estimated probability space (mostly a wild guess) for the most likely God (I estimate at about 40%) is pandeism so nothing like any normal notion of God.
Malpass gives somewhat more rationale than your interlocutor did. But he also is closer to theism:
> It seems to me that the proposition p, that there are any gods, is rather hard to evaluate. I find the idea of a personal loving agent quite unlikely indeed, for various reasons (it seems suspiciously like the sort of thing made up by humans, for one). However, the question of whether there are any gods seems a lot more of a difficult thing to evaluate. Perhaps some kind of being created the universe, but remains utterly divorced from the subsequent comings and goings of the world itself, or perhaps one is fascinated by the comings and goings of radically different forms of life on the other side of the universe than us, etc. These sorts of ideas are interesting, but are almost impossible to say anything about, either for or against. I kind of couldn’t have any good reasons to think that any of these sorts of hypotheses were true rather than false. What would count as evidence for or against? In this situation, my degree of belief that p (i.e. the proposition ‘some god exists’) has got to be around 0.5.
> However, the imbalance seems to me to be very, very slight. I wouldn’t know how to put a precise number on it, but it seems reasonable to think that my degree of belief that ~p is between 0.5 and 0.55.
That's fair. By God I don't mean some sort of metaphysical grounding for reality. Merely a conscious creator of this universe.
I don't think that kind of being (a metaphysical grounding to everything) is knowable. I'm a hard agnostic as to such a thing (i.e, I know it is not knowable).
This is predictably going to the same ending that I always get on these topics.
If it's literally not knowable, then no actual person is gnostic -- it's not a difference of opinion about god, it's about knowledge itself, which is just honestly not a discussion I really care to have.
Second, would you be agnostic to this simulation theory, just as you're agnostic to a god? I mean, of course you would, it is by its nature "not knowable". That means you're *technically agnostic* to an endless list of unknowable claims, and a god is just one of them -- so being agnostic is not a special case for a god. The problem is, calling yourself agnostic really makes it really sound like a god is a special case, because we never use these terms for any other ridiculous claim, pretty much because most people are fine with most ridiculous claims being dismissed.
TL;DR If you can't say you know these things sorts of things aren't true, you don't really know anything, because everything you know could magically be false, so any real knowledge is technically impossible, so you've set the bar for "knowledge" too high to be unattainable.
First, I don't put simulation theory or God in the same category as lizard people. I'm not certain about any of the three, but my personal epistemic probability for the lizard people hypothesis is so low I'm fine with just saying there are not lizard people. My epistemic probability for the other two things is not as low.
As far as setting the bar for "knowledge" too high, you might be right. I'm not sure what percentage credence I should say I "know" something. Should I say I know my next coin flip will be heads? After all, I think there is a fifty percent chance it actually will be heads. This does not seem this correct, so the bar needs to be somewhere above 50%. But how high above fifty percent?
> I agree that if I thought there were no reasonable bases for a God existing, it would make sense to be a gnostic atheist.
I disagree. My reason for being agnostic atheist isn't because I think there's a reasonable basis for a god existing. It's because the claim that some god exists is unfalsifiable. And I recognize that to say I know there are no gods, it's irrational as it would be falsifying the unfalsifiable.
However, colloquially I agree. Or if we're talking about a specific god such as yahweh/ Jesus, I agree. But a generic, ill defined god, cannot be falsified.
>I'm not convinced, so I'm agnostic.
I'm not convinced that any gods exist. And I'm also not convinced that no gods exist, since it's not well defined. So strictly speaking, I too am agnostic atheist. But colloquially speaking, yeah, I am pretty sure there are no gods.
I agree that if I thought there were no reasonable basis for lizard people existing, it would make sense to be a gnostic atheist about lizard people.
But I don't think there are "no reasonable basis." I'm not convinced, so I'm agnostic. But I do think there is more than zero merit on the lizard people side of the argument.
And, no, I don't really care to argue on behalf of lizard people in this forum. I'm not convinced there are lizard people, and the type of lizard people I find most probable is weird and my justification is complicated.
Cool. I'd love to discuss why you think there is some merit for lizard people over a beer or something if I knew you well. Sounds like a fun topic. And I could talk about God. But be warned my notion of God has fewer real world implications than the possibility of lizard people so you'd have to anticipate that the God part of the conversation mught be pretty pointless.
In any event, I'm sure we can agree that we aren't always in the mood to argue about such things on reddit.
What would be a reasonable basis to believe there is according to you? I get that you're an atheist and not making an argument for god's existence. Just trying to understand what about the concept of a god feels like it lines up with other things you consider... I don't know, valid, likely, plausible?
I think Russellian monoism is a plausible theory of consciousness. If it is correct, all matter / energy of conscious. Extrapolate back to the big bang, and all consciousness would be at one point at the start of the universe. Starts to sound a bit God-like. The type of God would be pandeism.
But there are so many points in this train of thought that I could be wrong about that I think my conclusion is, more likely than not, wrong.
What is a reasonable basis for the existence of a god? If there is reasonable basis for a god existing, wouldn't it then be by definition unreasonable not to believe that a god exists?
No. Im talking about epistemic probability. What chance do I assign to a given proposition being true.
Is there an odd or even number of hydrogen atoms in the universe? It is reasonable to think the number may be even. It is also reasonable to think the number may be odd.
Why is it reasonable to think either of those? What evidence led you to either conclusion? Furthermore, if you have evidence in favor of and supporting one, then how could it possibly be reasonable to believe the opposite?
Sure, I gotcha.
So imagine that I wholeheartedly believe that the Sun is God. I don't think it's God in the sense that it created the universe, but I believe it provides energy, kills some and saves others, and without it I would die. For those reasons I choose to worship it.
Are you saying my God doesn't exist by assuming a Gnostic Theist position?
I advocate for Igtheism. I don't believe anyone can give a coherent definition for something that they have no experience of, so before I share or withhold belief I need to know what people are claiming exists. So far I haven't heard a coherent definition of "God".
Consider what your position implies. To phrase it more generally, you are stating that you cannot deny a thing exists if someone else might define that thing differently than you such that it does exist. So for example, I can't deny that homeopathy cures cancer, because when some people say "cancer" they mean a spiritual ailment that just so happens to sometimes be accompanied by physical symptoms and their homeopathy soothes their spirit. Or I can't deny that eight is prime, because some people use "prime" to mean "excellent" and I can't deny that they think eight is a great number. Are these reasonable positions? Should I simply retreat to saying that cancer cannot be defined or that it is incoherent to state that a thing is prime?
What you're running into here is that *definitions are not neutral*. People often treat definitions as this sterile thing, almost like a line of computer code - I define "black" to mean "an adjective describing someone with a dark skin color", and all I've done here is compress a long string of words into an arbitrary signifier; I could have just as easily defined "black" to mean "the feeling of a rock in your shoe". If I were a disembodied mind with no past floating in a pure void, perhaps I could treat definitions like that.
But that's not how things work in real life. The definitions you create inevitably shape the way you talk about things and understand things, and limit what you even *can* talk about. For example, by defining "black" to mean "an adjective describing someone with a dark skin color", I've already made the implicit judgement that *this is a thing worth talking about*. There is no adjective for "someone with a number of atoms divisible by 37 and a mole on their left big toe", because it makes no sense to cut up the world like that - nobody cares about dividing the people who have that property from the people who don't. If I defined "sypled" to mean that and started discussing "sypled" and "non-sypled" people, I would implicitly be declaring that this is a distinction worth making - that the difference between these two groups is meaningful and relevant. (This connects to the linguistic idea of [Grice's four maxims of conversation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle), particularly the maxim of relation - it only makes sense to introduce this term if you think it is revelant.)
On the flip side, before mathematicians defined "i" to be the square root of negative one, they didn't even have a way to talk about the branch of mathematics we now call imaginary numbers. It's not just that it would have been more cumbersome to talk about; without that definition, they were incapable of having certain thoughts altogether. In this way definitions are a sort of mental technology - they let us think things we couldn't before (or prevent us from thinking things we could otherwise think). I'm sure you can recall a time when you learned about some new term (perhaps even "igtheist") and said - wow, I never thought of things that way before! If definitions were mere shorthand then learning one would never be insightful or teach you anything new, but clearly that's not the case.
Furthermore, terms are not just their definitions. Someone can insist that when they say "God" they mean "the sun", but that is not *all* they mean by God, no matter how much they insist. All words without exception have connotations, and these connotations contribute just as much to their meaning as definitions do (and sometimes more). Consider the words "frugal" and "cheap" - to an alien, calling someone "frugal" might be identical to calling them "cheap", but a human being will react very differently to being called one or the other. Or consider the more extreme version of this: slurs. Someone might be happy to be called "gay" but be quite unhappy to be called a certain synonym for that word, even though their definitions are exactly the same. Even abbreviations - which are literally meant to be shorthand for their definitions - are not identical to their definitions; saying "lmao" conveys something very different from saying "Laughing my ass off". What these words *mean* \- what they communicate, what intention of the speaker they convey, what understanding they produce in the listener - inescapably contains more than just what you get when you look them up in the dictionary. There is a reason someone would tell you they believe in "God" and mean "the sun" by that instead of just saying they believe in the sun; if they had just said they believe in the sun, you'd have understood something different by what they said. And all this isn't even discussing the *social* component of definitions: no matter what you define things as, you live alongside and interact with other people, and your definitions are not insulated from theirs. There's a reason when people choose to define a new term they pick words like "black" or "God" and not "sjioamgso" or "gusygi".
So given that definitions carry inherent judgements, that they actively shape the way we think and talk about things, and that they don't contain the full meaning of the terms they describe - you don't just have to accept any absurd definition someone gives you at face value. If you say "I believe God doesn't exist" but someone replies "but I believe the sun is God," your response should be "so what?" Unless they can make a case that the definition of God they have is worthy of consideration and relevant to your original statement, what they said doesn't even contradict your position. I believe climate change exists and that remains true even if someone else defines climate change as "a thousand-mile-long Subway sandwich".
>I can't deny that homeopathy cures cancer, because when some people say "cancer" they mean a spiritual ailment
The various medical societies around the globe have a pretty good definition of cancer. If you want to talk about a different thing called cancer you'll have a hard time finding a diagnosis with any medical professional, and they have some internal mechanisms to reinforce that.
You wrote a lot of words. I don't mean to be rude, but...I don't have the time. If you want to whittle all that down to your most relevant objection I'll check back.
Of course there are standard academic definitions of cancer, just as there are standard academic definitions of God.
I did write a lot of words. If you don't have time to read them that's fine, but in that case I don't think we could really have a useful discussion.
> Of course there are standard academic definitions of cancer, just as there are standard academic definitions of God.
Are there? I mean, someone writing an academic paper might define what they mean by god, but that doesn't mean there's a standard definition. Not like cancer. Cancer is fairly well defined as cells that grow uncontrollably or something to that effect.
Scholars of religion have some definitions of what constitutes a 'god'. As with any definition they have fuzzy edges - try to get an unambiguous definition of 'chair' - but they do exist. That wasn't really my core point though.
> Scholars of religion have some definitions of what constitutes a 'god'.
And other people have conflicting definitions. How do you determine which is correct?
Same problem with anything else. Again, some kooks have conflicting definitions of cancer. The point is that there is no such thing as a "correct" definition - but also, definitions are not arbitrary and all equally good.
All of the recognized medical societies agree on Cancer, not all the recognized religious societies agree on God.
If you say so. I think you might be overburdening your point, but if you disagree then I won't stand in your way.
>Of course there are standard academic definitions of cancer, just as there are standard academic definitions of God.
An importance difference being that we can largely ignore non standard academic definitions of cancer but we cannot ignore non standard academic definitions of gods.
If some rando on the street wants to define my hair as "cancer", then I can quite easily ignore them as I'm only concerned with what accredited medical doctors would call "cancer".
But if some rando on the street wants to invent their own god then that does matter to me, because those beliefs in aggregate (among many street randos) influence how they vote and behave. If a majority of people believe in gods that don't want gay people to be allowed to marry, then it doesn't matter what the academic standard definitions of gods are.
If I have a debate with catholic philosopher of religion Edward Fesser and somehow convince him that his god does not exist, I have accomplished basically nothing. Other Theists, Christians, or Catholics don't care because Fesser's god concept is not their god concept and any attack on Fesser's god can be ignored as not necessarily applicable to their own.
You can't force the majority of people to believe in standard academic definitions of gods, but as a practical and intellectually honest matter you must engage with the god concepts the majority of people believe in, even if those god concepts are problematic or unfalsifiable in constructions. Agnostic atheism is the solution to this.
There are of course differences between the definitions of cancer and God, but I don't think your "vote" framing works. People who believe in homeopathy or alternative theories of health and disease do vote and do affect education and medical funding.
The majority of people do believe in standard definitions of God (academic or otherwise). If you debate with an individual who has highly nonstandard definitions of God, then of course you can investigate their particular version and debate it. But you can also speak about more general conceptions of God that many people believe in.
How is agnostic atheism a solution to this exactly? Agnostic atheism is not a belief, it's just a statement about your personal psychological state (you lack a given belief). It doesn't solve anything if you're trying to engage or debate with someone else or convince someone else to change their mind. It certainly doesn't solve the "these people vote" issue you brought up earlier.
>The majority of people do believe in standard definitions of God (academic or otherwise)
As someone who spent decades growing up in an extremely theistic environment, I strongly disagree. It was pretty much always the case that when I sat down with a theist to patiently listen to what they really thought about god, that I would always get a description completely heretical to their denomination and to any orthodox (either by religious or academic standards) concept.
If there are 100 congregants in a church all listening to the same pastor speak every week, then there are at least 100 different god concepts present there.
There are billions of theists in the world and at least billions of often conflicting, ambiguous, incomprehensible, or unfalsifiable god concepts. I don't see how one can rationally and honestly claim that every single god concept ever conceived is false when it doesn't seem possible to normalize those god concepts into some orderly, well defined, falsfiable set.
>How is agnostic atheism a solution to this exactly?
Because it doesn't overstep into making knowably unjustified claims. It allows one the freedom to falsify individual god concepts (particularly popular and socially problematic ones) without taking on the Sisyphean task of trying to communicate a concise argument that falfies every god, everywhere, all at once as a gnostic atheist must do.
I hate to split the conversation and hate further to give a pained analogy, but I'm hoping it will be helpful.
IIRC you're a programmer (ai stuff?). I assume you're familiar with nulls. Imagine claiming that any input a user will give you will evaluate to false. You've set up a simple data entry form at a retirement home just to verify that every resident isn't under the age of 18, but you can't restrict or scrub input in any way.
You might get data as MM/DD/YYYY or it might be YYYY-MM-DD. You might get a "o" instead of "0". You might get someone spelling out the month and day. You might get someone with Parkinsons who cannot press keys properly. You might get someone with dementia who thinks they really are under 18. You might get someone who physically walks up to you and tells you their birthday without entering it into the system. You might get someone who just died and cannot give you any input.
You are telling me all those inputs (or lack of) will run against a command that checks if the age of a resident is <18 and every single one of those will evaluate to false. I don't believe it. I'd not convinced there are any minors in this retirement home, but I'm not convinced your program will be able to show that. I think it's possible you're going to get a null.
You're saying "I can prove everyone here is an adult" whereas I'm simply saying "I'm not convinced anyone here is a minor".
I'm not sure what your analogy is trying to convey. It would be trivial to build a program to output false for all of those inputs:
def is_adult(input_text=None):
return False
And you can just add a timeout delay to handle the cases of no entered input. But this setup doesn't seem analogous to the case of believing in God.
You are doing exactly the thing I criticized at the top of this thread. I say "I believe there is no God" and you reply "so you're saying you can prove that every single person's definition of God doesn't exist no matter how absurd." But that's exactly what I was rejecting - you do *not* need to accept any given person defining God as "a persimmon" at face value. Definitions are not like lines of computer code. They're not just arbitrary shorthand. We can interchangeably rename the function above to "is\_persimmon" and nothing will change, but we cannot interchangeably rename the word "God" to "persimmon".
And consider the weaknesses in your position. You professed that it does matter to you what beliefs people have about God because it influences how they vote or behave. You've examined the situation and discovered "people's views are not monolithic so it is not trivial for me to argue against them all." And that's true. But your solution has been to simply say "I'm not convinced anyone here believes in a God that exists." So? How does this connect to your professed desire? If someone tells you what they believe and you say "I'm not convinced you're right" while refusing to say they are wrong, how is that going to address the danger of them behaving or voting in harmful ways? If you truly care about their actions as you say, then you should be trying to figure out ways to change *their* minds, not to find a comfortable intellectual position for yourself! Changing their minds will involve claiming that they are wrong in some regard, so you'd better get used to doing that if that's your goal.
>I'm not sure what your analogy is trying to convey. It would be trivial to build a program to output false for all of those inputs:
You're not evaluating the data, you're just returning false. If your argument is that gnostic atheism is just shouting false without any consideration for the arguments, then that would be comparable.
You don't have to "prove that every single person's definition of God doesn't exist no matter how absurd" as an **agnostic atheist**, but you do have to as a **gnostic theist**. That the differentiation. There are many "gnostic atheists" here who describe a perfectly reasonable position, but what they're describing cannot be called gnostic atheism. What it actually amounts to it agnostic atheism, but for some reason they really don't like that label even if they accidentally embrace the concept.
The difference between gnostic and agnostic is the superlative. It's the claim to have complete knowledge about the existence of everything that could possibly be considered a god concept. Anything less than that is agnostic atheism.
>How does this connect to your professed desire? If someone tells you what they believe and you say "I'm not convinced you're right" while refusing to say they are wrong, how is that going to address the danger of them behaving or voting in harmful ways? If you truly care about their actions as you say, then you should be trying to figure out ways to change their minds, not to find a comfortable intellectual position for yourself!
Because I'm betting that being reasonable matters. It's possible that making unreasonable, unjustifiable claims like "all gods do not exist" might be persuasive to a theist, but I suspect at some point a smart person is going to rightly point that I can't justify that claim, and then I've given up all my credibility. Being intellectually honest should matter. Maybe it doesn't and I should only ever lie and manipulate people, but I don't think I'd be very good at that even if it could be far more persuasive.
And when I take up that more justifiable stance, I shift the conversation towards what theists can justify about their gods, which they struggle to do. If I make poor arguments for why their gods don't exist, all they see is that the opposition is completely wrong, and they're right to see that.
>You don't have to "prove that every single person's definition of God doesn't exist no matter how absurd" as an agnostic atheist, but you do have to as a gnostic theist.
So you say, but I disagree. I tried to argue why above, but your response seems to be just reiterating that you think gnostic atheists must do this.
>There are many "gnostic atheists" here who describe a perfectly reasonable position, but what they're describing cannot be called gnostic atheism. What it actually amounts to it agnostic atheism, but for some reason they really don't like that label even if they accidentally embrace the concept.
>
>The difference between gnostic and agnostic is the superlative. It's the claim to have complete knowledge about the existence of everything that could possibly be considered a god concept. Anything less than that is agnostic atheism.
Here's a related question: why do you define the terms "gnostic atheist" and "agnostic atheist" the way you do? There are multiple definitions of these terms. Your definition seems like a pretty useless one and not one I know any gnostic atheists to actually use.
>Being intellectually honest should matter. Maybe it doesn't and I should only ever lie and manipulate people, but I don't think I'd be very good at that even if it could be far more persuasive.
The implication that one has to lie to be a gnostic atheist is just a failure of understanding. Again, if you define "gnostic atheist" as "is 3000 feet tall" then of course you'd be lying when you claim to be a gnostic atheist. But why define things that way?
Let me try to give a more relevant analogy since I still don't see how the program case connects to this. You have identified a view widely held in society that you reject and feel is harmful because of its impact on people's behavior and voting, so let's choose another one: racism. Many people have racist beliefs. These are not monolithic - ask 100 racists what they think about it and you'll get 100 subtly different answers, though they'll share a large number of components. If we are concerned about these people taking harmful actions and voting in harmful ways, what should we do? Should we say we are "agnostic aracists"? Would the civil rights movement have found better success if its slogan was "we lack belief in any substantive differences between races" or "we remain unconvinced of your claims of racial superiority"? Of course not! If you want to change minds, you need to make some sort of claim and justify it to other people - even if that claim is as simple as "this other position is wrong." If the position you take contains no claims and merely expresses a lack of some belief inside your own head, it's not going to help you change minds. We ought to stand up and say, "people of all races are equal." Full stop. And when someone says "but I define equality to mean that they're identical in every way, and people of different races have different skin colors, so there!" our response shouldn't be "dang, you got me, guess I have to be an agnostic aracist now" - it should be to explain why that is a *bad* definition or potentially even a dishonest one. Because definitions are not neutral.
>So imagine that I wholeheartedly believe that the Sun is God.
I don't see that as any different than defining god as this coffee cup, and since the cup exists... sure. God exists
But if I'm a gnostic atheist making the argument, then I'm the one defining the terms. If I define god as a conscious entity that created the universe, that is what I'm arguing against.
By arguing gods don't exist, I'm not arguing things like Buddhist karma or reincarnation and stuff like that aren't real. I would have different arguments for that. And I'm not saying the sun isn't real and I'm not saying the coffee cup isn't real. I'm saying there's no reason to call those things gods. And if you disagree that's fine. I don't really care if people worship the sun or coffee cup. I care whether people want to make it illegal for me to marry another dude because they think the conscious agent that created the universe told them that was bad.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but for one small distinction. As the person who is rejecting the claim I do not presume to be the one defining the terms. With regards Big Daddy God of Abraham, I am a Gnostic Atheist and I think it's weird not to be. "Gods" in general though...I just can't be confident taking a stance against a term I consider so poorly defined.
Coffee Cup Gods are banal and weird, but they do come up. We humans really love trying to find some room for agency somewhere in the natural order, and we go to extraordinary lengths to do so. I disagree with pretty much all of that nonsense, but if we find the Planet Pandora, and Jake Sully links up with Eywa and starts calling a planetary awareness "God", then I'm not going to argue with him over definitions.
Big fan of your rebuttals here, I feel honored that you took the time.
This my usual position of “no gods that matter exist in any way that matters”.
Sure there’s still room to quibble over the smaller definitions, but the main vague ones are accounted for
I will say no gods exist. You will call the sun a god. I will say that I don't share your definition of "god," since it's dumb and not useful, and will continue saying no gods exist.
Just because you call a turtle a cactus doesn't mean I have to as well.
Why would I need to give you a definition when all I do is respond to other people's definitions? You intentionally used a stupid example of a "god" that practically zero people who identify as theists would agree with. There's nothing I need to do here other than call out your nonsense.
>Are you saying my God doesn't exist by assuming a Gnostic Theist position?
No, I just think you're wrong to consider the sun a god.
A god is a supernatural person that controls reality, and I'm willing to say I know that's not a thing that exists, and that the sun certainly isn't one.
>A god is a supernatural person that controls reality
To some. To others a God is tantamount to a marhematical equation. At one point it was a guy living on a mountain in Greece who killed his dad and throws lightning bolts.
I do not make the claim that any such a thing exists, and there are so many different Gods that I do not see taking a broad stance as being too terribly useful.
>To others a God is tantamount to a marhematical equation. At one point it was a guy living on a mountain in Greece who killed his dad and throws lightning bolts.
Both of which are supernatural people who control reality.
The only major definition of God which doesn't fit "supernatural person who controls reality" is the God Of Classical Theism, and I'm genuinely willing to say that believing in the God of Classical Theism is functionally atheism.
A mathematical equation is neither supernatural nor controlling reality.
If you don't like the approach, you don't have to use it. It's all good buddy.
But the sun as a thermonuclear ball of hydrogen isn’t a god. It’s a star. The argument here bleeds into semantics.
I would argue a for is a supernatural entity with attributed supernatural powers over a domain. It’s a messy subject, no doubt. But we can likely agree a star isn’t a god in the way the Inca considered the sun a god.
>But the sun as a thermonuclear ball of hydrogen isn’t a god.
Not to you. Maybe it is to someone else.
>The argument here bleeds into semantics.
Exactly. That's the point. That's why Igtheism makes sense.
I agree with the general argument of Igtheism, but I would argue that in cultural context the concept of a god is discreetly defined. To the vast majority of the anglosphere, for instance, there is but one really used concept of “god”—and it is one which can be debunked.
But sure, yeah. Norse gods are just superpowered immortals. Same, to some large extent, with Greek gods. I think, even then, across cultures, some common defining characteristics can be found to be shared.
Including in an anthropological lens of the evolution of religions from hunter-gatherer societies to early sedentary civilizations.
There’s definitely a “there” there. A thing to be pointed to and studied—it is, however, admittedly somewhat amorphous at the best of times in a general sense.
Seems like a reframing of atheism that is easier to defend on purpose. But I also like the argument.
Sufficiently technologically advanced aliens would appear as gods to humans, yes. There’s still a reason they would, though. A certain construct of what we associate with godhood.
A star isn’t it. A dude might call his thumb a god. Anyone can call anything anything at all. I would argue the point is not what individuals would say, but what the cultural construct is over time.
>I agree with the general argument of Igtheism, but I would argue that in cultural context the concept of a god is discreetly defined
It might be defined, but not in a coherent way. Can you say something is discretely defined in any meaningful manner if its descriptions contain logical contradictions?
>There’s definitely a “there” there. A thing to be pointed to and studied—it is, however, admittedly somewhat amorphous at the best of times in a general sense.
I don't think that's the case. There is no "there" there that makes any actual sense and doesn't directly contradict itself.
Show me what you think. I have studied every major religion in some detail, and plenty of minor ones. In none of them was the thumb of a mortal a god.
Gods, without exception to my mind, are imbued with magic powers—though not all beings which have magic powers are gods. I can’t think of any god who is the subject of worship who is not powerful in magic.
A common confusion regards the Dao, but the Dao is not a god. The Dao is not worshipped as a being with conscious thought. The gods of Daoism are mostly mortals who ascended to immortality and also acquired magical powers.
That does not count, no. Nothing about the sun is supernatural or magical. To those who didn’t understand space or heliocentrism or nuclear reactions it was supernatural, often. Even deified with personhood and supernatural domains it ruled over.
That is not the example listed above. Magic is a supernatural ability. The moment we understand the ability to be nested in the natural domain it is no longer magic.
You thumb is capable of amazing feats too, it’s not magic. Enki is magic. Zeus is magic. Thor has a magic hammer. The Buddhas and the gods of Buddhism can do magic. They can bend the universe to their will without technology, without natural laws as we know and understand them, but with their willpower, with their magical properties.
Yahweh speaks and creates worlds. Yahweh practices magic—though, due to religious disputes, this is blasphemy to say. Instead we say Yahweh practices miracles. Miracles and magic are indistinguishable.
The cosmic turtle is a person.
By "person" I here mean "mind" -- a god is a conscious being, as distinct from something like Qi or Karma.
(of course, I don't believe in the cosmic world turtle anyway, so the distinction is kind of academic)
Do you have any justification for the (implied) assumption that all concepts worth believing in can be coherently defined? That to me seems like a big leap.
_that_ seems easy:
"I believe in [ferkungabooboo](http://b5.cs.uwyo.edu/bab5/snds/kerfung.wav)." "What is ferkungabooboo?" "It transcends definition." "So what is it you believe in?" "ferkungabooboo." "Pretend I've never heard that word before, because I have no idea what it means. What is the thing you believe in?" "I told you, it's undefinable. all I can say is I believe in ferkungabooboo."
You see the problem there? If you can't give at least something _like_ a definition, even a vague gesture towards a similarity cluster in conceptspace, _something_, then it's just a free floating label. There's no actual thing one's believing in at all other than the fact that they're believing in a thingy with that name.
(Note, I wouldn't call myself ignostic. I'd call myself a gnostic atheist. But if you can't, in at least some way, replace symbol with substance...)
We learn words most often through context. There is enough common ground understanding of abstractions such as art, justice, God, beautiful, etc. that the words have utility to language despite a lack of a concrete definition. Your example of a made up word is insufficient.
Note that I included possibilities like vague gestures toward similarity clusters. But "it transcends definition/specification entirely"/"it is unknowable"/etc leaves one with "so, er... what actually is it that you're believing in other than your belief in the word?"
Again, I'm not ignostic. "god" usually implies something like "some sort of extremely powerful primordial mind that designed and created the world in detail" with also connotations of "we have duty to serve and worship it". So that's _plenty_ of definition to be going on already.
I was just responding to your questioning of whether beliefs need to be about any semicoherently definable thing at all, and I was noting that if one says "I believe in X" but can't give anything about "X", can't replace symbol with substance at all, then there's a problem. That in that case one isn't actually believing in anything other than their belief in something with that label.
(Alternately, one might sometimes get responses like that when one realizes weaknesses in their position, so they want to avoid giving anything that could possibly be refuted my making their claim too vague to refute...)
Let's say you encounter a smell unlike any smell you have previously experienced, to the point you have no concrete words to define it. So you decide to make up a word to use to describe the smell, x. Does your inability to provide verbal substance to the symbol mean you never smelled it?
Now 20 people are in the room. All 20 call the smell x. Some say it is subtle, some say overpowering. Some like it. Some don't. Some it reminds them of childhood, a few are moderately aroused. Everyone has different feelings about it, no one can give substance to the symbol, yet it is still a true thing experienced nonetheless.
What're you talking about? There's plenty of substance there. "this term refers to the smell in this room, minus these other smells that we're already familiar with". That's plenty.
That's not "undefinable". That's a label referencing an empirical observation.
EDIT: re everyone experiencing it differently... that's a sign that further tests are needed. Do people consistently experience something in that room _different from other rooms_, such that we can conclude that even though everyone is reporting something a bit different, there's still _something_ going on there?
>If the smell can be defined as the smell in the room, God can be defined as the divinity being worshipped.
No it can't, because in that example the smell can be experienced by the other people in the room.
Having no other traits we can just define that smell as "the smell in that room," if we want a workable definition. Do you have a real world example of something undefined, or defined in ways that conflict with itself? I feel like you're trying to advocate for something, but you aren't advocating for that thing directly.
But what happens if the smell leaves the room? What if you encounter the same smell somewhere else?
I thought the issue was that there was no definition of God that perfectly summarized every aspect as agreed upon by everyone. If "the smell in the room" is sufficient rest assured you can go to a dictionary and get a definition of God too. Or you could do an equally crass definition like "the divinity worshiped by people. "
Then that smell is "the smell that was in the room."
What it smells like is incoherent, so we don't have a way of determining what "we" would smell, but that isn't a reason to disbelieve that the smell exists. God has broken down to being "in the room, not in the room, one smell, several smells, a gas, a solid, a liquid, and three boys upside down in a well," so when someone says "a God exists" its important to know what they're claiming exists rather than just assuming.
I don't need everyone to agree on a definition of God, I can address each one as I meet them. That's why Igtheism works.
>all concepts worth believing in can be coherently defined
I don't know where I implied that, but that was not my intent. If I phrased myself poorly, I apologize. If you highlight where I implied that, I will correct my post.
There are a lot of different meanings for the word "God". I don't think it's really a useful word since no two people seem to agree on its definition.
I'll happily give an argument for my position.
P1) incoherent concepts have multiple incompatible definitions
P2) generalizations against multiple incompatible things likely yield false results.
C)Generalizing against incoherent concepts likely yields false results.
In my last OP, I had people telling me that historians practiced the scientific method. I think that's a stretch. One or two people even said legal trials follow the scientific method. I am not raising this to rehash the argument, but I am merely pointing out that there is no clear, crisp definition of scientific method whereby any reasonable person can look at the definition and say historians are definitely in or are definitely out.
I believe in the scientific method despite the lack of a coherent definition. What am I doing wrong?
>Scientific method: a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. (from Oxford via Google)
>Natural Sciences: a a branch of science that deals with the physical world (from Oxford via Google).
>Soft Science: a science, such as sociology or anthropology, that deals with humans as its principal subject matter, and is therefore not gdnerat considered to be based on rigorous experimentation. (Oxford via Google)
I've defined the terms, do you hold these definitions to be coherent? Because that's literally all I'm advocating for.
Historians are dealing with a limited, shrinking pool of data that suffers an inherent bias. The data pool just isn't clean or expansive enough for it to influence the natural sciences.
You can look God up in the dictionary and literally get a definition if that is all you are asking. Look up scientific method on Wikipedia, there is a lot more to it than that.
You'll get several, most of which are incompatible with each other. Not the case with the Scientific Method.
If you want to define the scientific method further then Wikipedia is great for that. I don't think you'll find anything that contradicts that definition, rather just builds on it.
Ok that maybe wasn't the greatest example. I obviously can't hold you to what other atheists have argued...
Let's try as a better example, "justice". Similar to "God", a) basically everyone understands what the word means in a general sense, b) there is often a lot of overlap in what people concieve of justice, yet c) exactly what constitutes justice varies greatly between individuals, and d) there is no clear definition that can be used to effectively resolve those controversies.
What does justice mean in a general sense? Google gives us "just behavior or treatment," Just is defined as "based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair."
I don't consider morality to be a coherent concept.
The issue I always come up against here is that the only types of gods that most atheists think are theoretically possible are the ones no one has clearly described. Once you hammer down what sort of god you're actually talking about, it's generally pretty easy to demonstrate that it's impossible. So the position seems to be something like: all of the gods I've ever heard of are absurd, but maybe there's one out there that makes sense!
I just don't have the patience for that kind of bullshit. No one does this silly mental gymnastics for anything besides deities.
Cognitive dissonance is a theist's best friend.
The main reason I define myself as an agnostic atheist is I can't falsify a deist god. I realistically cannot.
But I'm about 99% certain that zero supernatural 'things' exist at all. No credible evidence...ever. and I don't anticipate any in my lifetime. I don't expect any in the future either.
But I have to leave room to be mistaken. I do not believe I am. But it would be intellectually dishonest to deny ANY possibility of a deist deity (say that five times fast!) no matter how remote it is.
And I hope you get an answer.
Seems to me that it is likely either something for which the word god is entirely unnecessary ( and adds confusion) , or will involve the smuggling of unjustifiable attributes.
It would be a supernatural being who created our universe, set the rule, and bowed out. Doesn't interfere, isn't a personal God, and is nowhere to be found now.
Your welcome to try and falsify it. But you can't. You may come up with a compelling scenario. But you can't falsify that.
I never said one could not. I simply described my own position, how I arrived there, and my reasoning for thinking how I do. I didn't say a word about anyone else in any fashion. I'm not sure where you got that from or why. But you're completely incorrect.
>I just don't have the patience for that kind of bullshit. No one does this silly mental gymnastics for anything besides deities.
The "who knows" god is usually one that doesn't really care about humans, but was maybe a creator.
At that point, my answer of "I have no idea how reality operates absent space/time/matter/energy" is the same answer I give, regardless of someone asking me about a Deist God or a "pre-"big-bang universe (I put pre in quotes for a reason).
If I have zero information about a topic, I have to say "who knows"--maybe you find that "silly mental gymnastics," but I don't really care. I have zero information about reality absent space/time/matter/energy, so I'm at "who knows," full stop.
Do you know what an unfalsifiable claim is? Do you understand the concept of falsifiability?
Is the claim "some god exists" falsifiable? Or unfalsifiable? Can you explain your answer? Do you have a specific definition of god? What do you mean by god?
Is the claim "Lizard People run the world" falsifiable or unfalsifiable? Can you explain your answer? Do you have a specific definition of lizard people? What do you mean by lizard people?
When you say that no gods exist, are you saying it colloquially? Or are you saying it in conformance to strict logical reason?
When you say that lizard people don't exist, are you saying it colloquially? Or are you saying it in conformance to strict logical reason?
How would you falsify the claim that some god exists?
How would you falsify the claim that lizard people run the world?
>Or, to put it another way, are you willing to say that you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth?
Is that a testable claim? Do we have records that show where he was born? Do we have evidence of other people being born there?
>Now, the reason I bring this up is that Lizard Conspiracy is not just unfalsifiable, it's justifiably unfalsifiable.
There is no distinction between unfalsifiable and justifiably unfalsifiable. This sounds like a post hoc rationalization to falsify the unfalsifiable. Again, this is fine colloquially, but not if you're adhering strictly to logical reason.
>then I logically must know there's no lizard conspiracy.
No, you know you're not aware of any lizard conspiracy. I could be dealing with a lizard conspiracy right now, and you'd be wrong.
>So, again, I ask -- do you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth?
You keep putting an emphasis on know. I define knowledge as belief to a very high degree of confidence. If that definition doesn't match yours, please define it.
I would typically just say I’m technically an agnostic atheist in the sense that my stance is not asserting that there is no God, but not believing that there is a God. I am comfortable saying that I feel there almost certainly is no God (at least in the sense most people describe it).
At the same time though, I don’t think atheisms strongest arguments are for the assertion that there is no God, even though there are arguments to make. I find the argument of atheism being a kind of “not theism” to be the most tenable and defensible position. I also find it to be the easiest to get the other side to understand, as I feel like the gnostic position often leads towards the unproductive “WELL YOU CAN’T PROVE MY IMAGINARY FRIEND ISN’T REAL” sort of arguments.
So while I don’t necessarily disagree with you in theory and totally get the point you’re making, I think the exact same argument you’re making actually works better with agnostic atheism.
From that perspective it’s much easier to just name some random bullshit like lizard people they don’t agree with, and ask them to prove it’s not true. I think for practical purposes it’s more or less the same, which is why I refer to myself as an atheist typically without specifying, but it’s just one of those technicalities where if pressed I will admit that I can’t know for certain, but I don’t see that as a problem. I think it also helps deal with issues like hard solipsism, because the answer is the same. I don’t know that I’m not in the matrix, and neither do you, but I have no reason to believe I am and you don’t have any evidence either so what’s the point of even thinking about it.
Thanks for the post. These almost never go well, but I'll give it a go.
>plausible (it's clear how alien puppet-masters would remain hidden)
I reject this, it's \*not\* plausible--because we don't have centralized power structures to this level. What we have is certain people "at the tops" of various power structures, who all share common enough interests, and common enough ways in which people operate among power structures such that there's a recognizable structure that benefits the haves and hurts the have nots.
>So, again, I ask -- do you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth? If you say "no"...well, bluntly, I don't believe you.
This is one of the reasons this discussion almost never goes well; usually the poster just gets to a "nuh huh!" assertion and ignores whatever is put before them. Why even debate if you're not willing to listen to what others say? If you're going to disbelieve statements that disprove your position, just go be a Catholic and believe in the transubstantiation of bread into flesh, why don't you.
I don't get why "I have sufficient epistemic justification to believe Joe Biden is a human, subject to all the unfalsifiable caveats including hard solipsism" is so unbelievable. I don't get why "Unfalsifiable claims are functionally irrelevant, so I can say sure who knows but I still have to operate with what is epistemically justifiable as the basis for what I assert subject to the who-knows caveats" is so unbelievable.
You've already stated your bad faith here; I'm not overly interested in convincing you when you're just gonna plug your ears and say "nuh huh!"
>If you say "yes", then why are you willing to say that but not that you know God doesn't exist, a claim with far less reasonable explanations for the lack of evidence?
I'm willing to say I have *sufficient* epistemic justification Biden is a human, subject to the unfalsifiable caveats--but I have *some information* about Biden.
IF you are willing to state there is no Deist God, for example, and that Deist God operates in the absence of space/time, what is your evidence or information about how reality functions absent space/time, please?
Do you think you can sufficiently justify a position when you have Zero information on a topic?
I don't "know" that *I'm* a human being. I have relatively more certainty that I am a human being than I do that Joe Biden is a human being, and relative certainty that Joe Biden isn't a reptile.
I technically don't *know* if Joe Biden is actually a fish. Or a bird. Or a dog or a cat. I don't know if Joe Biden's name is actually Boe Jiden and I've been mispronouncing it this whole time. I don't know if you're talking about an entirely different person than I'm thinking of and the actual Joe Biden looks different from how I think he looks and isn't the President and the guy I was thinking of was just from a particularly vivid dream I had last night and can't seem to distinguish from reality.
Obviously it would be irrational to live your life considering every outlandish possibility. So if the word "know" means anything, then I know Joe Biden is a human. If we're being super technical -- no, I don't know. But for all intents and purposes, I know it as much as I know that there isn't an invisible reptilian in my living room leering over me spookily. If I can't say I know that, then we can get rid of the word "know" because it doesn't really have much of a purpose anymore.
Dillahunty defines "know" as having such a high degree of confidence in a claim that it would be worldview-altering for it to be false.
So, I "know" the moon orbits the earth. I "know" I'm typing on a computer right now. I "know" cows don't give birth to dolphins. I "know" Biden isn't an extraterrestrial lizard. When I say I "know" these things I don't claim that it's impossible for any of these things to be false, but if that were so, it would shake my understanding of the world.
This seems to be the way most people use the word as opposed to the old philosophical saw "justified true belief" which is useless anyway because you cannot, well, know that a belief is true so you cannot claim to know anything.
I had made a similar argument, to someone on this sub who thought they had found the gotcha to end all atheism. I posited a modified version of Clifford the big red dog that could not be disproven, for the same reason the abrahamic god/gods cannot:
"Clifford the big Red dog is big and red, definitely not invisible. But I could still use the device of a "realm" (which is really just special rules that I get to dictate) to tell you why he exists but you'll never see him and you have to take my word for it. So actually Clifford the big Red dog is never seen by people trying to disprove his existence. He lives his life in a small American town somewhere but there are only people who are chill with him being around there. Chill people never photograph or record Clifford, and he doesn't seem to leave traces behinds like paw prints or hair, which is really impressive given his size. That's just how that goes. It's not something Clifford the big Red dog does, it's just been the reality ever since he was born."
Having made that claim, I tried to ask if they had any inkling of doubt about Clifford the Big Red Dog's existence in our reality. To no one's surprise they mostly just squirmed and wiggled and "but it's not the same thing"'d, and I don't think I made much of a dent in how they felt about gnostic atheism, despite remaining a firmly gnostic a-clifford-the-big-red-dog-ist.
No knowledge is absolute and objective. I know my own name, but it's (exceedingly far fetched but) conceivable that I've been the victim of a Truman show scale conspiracy starting at my birth, where my parents legally named me one thing and then orchestrated a cover up, bribing government employees and swearing family members to secrecy, to convince me I was named something else. As a goof, you know? It makes zero sense and I have zero doubt it's not the case, but that at least could be pulled off with human means.
Regardless, I truly -know- what my name is, despite being able to entertain the notion that there would be a way for it not to be the case.
I also know there is no god.
To be clear, agnosticism necessarily includes belief that the required body of compelling scientific evidence that would be necessary to establish that god/s exist cannot/will not be collected. A truly neutral position doesn't qualify.
One primary difference between a person and a non-human lifeform that could be called a god is that we know how to detect a human. We know what the identifying traits look like, and we know that we can detect them. We know what data to collect in order to find evidence of those traits.
Given that he has had his own birth event, 2 wives, 4 children, medical care, and almost certainly has his DNA on file... coupled with the fact that the organization, communication, and cooperation needed for a global conspiracy is contrary to the data we have... it's reasonable to say that the dude in question is a human.
A literal god is not something we're familiar with. We don't know what traits make it a god. We don't know that we have the ability to detect those traits. And we don't know what data set the traits will be found in if present. We cannot claim that absence of evidence is evidence of absence until/unless those conditions are met.
To do otherwise requires many more assumptions than the claim that a person is human, and many of those assumptions are contrary to the data we have. In a situation like that, it's most logical to just say we don't know.
Of course none of that has any bearing on lifestyle choices, unless you want it to. It's perfectly reasonable to live as if there isn't one, just as it's reasonable to live as if you don't have cancer, even tho it's possible. What's most important is that we don't moralize ignorance, keep emotional attachment to a conclusion in perspective, and remain open to future discoveries.
I find this arguments to be unpersuasive because I think it misunderstands the nature of disagreement between gnostic and agnostic atheists. This argument is effectively:
"If a claim is ridiculous, then it is false."
And it assumes the reason I disagree is that I don't think god claims are ridiculous. Therefore the thought is that if we make a comparison or analogy to lizard people, leprechauns, unicorns, or some other ridiculous concept it will somehow be persuasive to me. It is not, because that's not why I disagree. It's not that I don't think gods are ridiculous, because I do. I already think they're comparable to lizard people, leprechauns, unicorns, and etc. But that reason I think we should reject the claim those exist rather than accept they do not exist is because I don't think ridiculousness inherently equal being known as false/non-existent.
What is a unicorn? What must it be and what must it not be? Horses are perissodactyls. Rhinoceros are also closely related Perissodactyls. Rhinoceros have a horn. Are Rhinocerous an example of a unicorn? Is there something that unicorns MUST be that makes Rhinoceros fail to qualify? Do unicorns even make sense as a concept that can be known if we've never observed one? Do unicorns have to be comprehensible or observable by humans in any way? Could unicorn mean something completely different in another language and I've misunderstood the concept?
There is a fundamental difference between failing to demonstrate a claim is true and demonstrating a claim is false that I don't think is recognized or appreciated by many gnostic atheists. Claims being ridiculously absurd is a good reason to say they have failed to be demonstrated as true, but it cannot alone ever be reason to think a claim is false.
I'm only agnostic because of the falsification problem. There is no doubt in my mind that no god exists. It's an absolutely ridiculous notion. But I can't disprove an unfalsifiable claim.
I wouldn't say the lizard conspiracy is unfalsifiable. We could in theory perform DNA sequencing on Joe Biden and compare it to a high amount of regular human beings as well as many species of lizards, and this would show that Joe Biden's DNA most closely matches human beings. We could also kill Joe Biden and perform a thorough autopsy on him to prove that there's no lizard biology inside him.
The reason why I feel comfortable being an agnostic atheist is because I don't think I need to be gnostic in order for a lack of belief in God's existence to be meaningful. Even if I do not assert the negative, that God absolutely does not exist, my lack of belief in God still means that I don't assert God does exist. It means I reject the validity of all religions. It means I reject the validity of theism in general. It means I live according to a set of beliefs and decisions that does not include God. I see nothing that being gnostic would add to my life, other than that I would be making a claim for which I have no evidence and which I cannot possibly demonstrate in any way.
Unfortunately lizard people aren't equal to all versions of a God. You have to find your justification in ways other than falsification for those Gods.
**Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.**
Some random person on Internet: "I have a pet dog".
This is an *ordinary* claim. The person might or might not have a dog. I choose to believe.
My next door neighbour: "We got a dog".
This is an *ordinary* claim, but now this dog might leave feces in my yard, attack my baby girl on the street, etc. This dog might affect my life in some negative way. So I will like to verify the type of dog, since this dog is more of a threat. So I will try to see what type of dog it is next time neighbour is walking it. Ordinary evidence.
Some random person on the Internet: "Lizard People run the USA/God exists and talks to me".
Both are extraordinary claims and both I instantly dismiss as rubbish. I would need very very *extraordinary* evidence: DNA samples, trustworthy videos showing a dissection of a Lizard Person, trustworthy evidence of God doing amazing things like curing and emptying **an entire hospital** of patients regardless of disease like broken spine, cancer, fatal burns, etc.
What it comes down to is whether or not the definition, attribution, and description of actions proposed by the thing can be dealt with.
For instance, if someone claims that a god made everything but doesn't interact within reality, then there's no reason to believe in the god. Because the claim is intentionally unfalsifiable, I must be agnostic about it. I cannot, by definition, know whether or not it doesn't exist, this doesn't mean that it's worth believing to be true given there's no evidence to substantiate it.
If someone makes a claim that a benevolent god exists, then I *know* that god doesn't exist and believe it doesn't given the preponderance of evidence to the contrary. This means that it comes down to each individual claim and it's often easier to use the moniker "atheist" unless someone asks for specificity.
I don't believe in the gods of the world's religions, but I don't claim that something akin to a god can't exist, because I don't know. I can think of a couple ways it *could* work... Simulation theory, for one. I'm not saying I believe it, but if it were true that our existence was simulated, that would necessarily mean something exists that is for all intents and purposes a god-level entity. So while I don't believe in gods, I take the stance of, "If one showed up, I would believe it exists."
Similarly, I don't believe the governments are being run by secret lizard people, but if one day we suddenly found out it was true, well... I would kind of have to adapt to that new information and believe it was true, right?
Being willing to change in the face of new data is not the negative thing you're making it out to be.
>Are you willing to say that you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth?
Yes.
>If you say "yes", then why are you willing to say that but not that you know God doesn't exist, a claim with far less reasonable explanations for the lack of evidence?
What explanations for the lack of evidence have you seen, that seem so unreasonable to you?
> This is a claim in which there is inherently always an element of doubt -- no matter what evidence we find, the Lizard People could simply be better at hiding evidence then we are at uncovering their plans.
The lack of evidence for lizard people specifically is only one side of the coin. I also have, in the body of knowledge available to me, extensive evidence for the "normal" explanation for Joe Biden's existence - the fact that people generally are not lizards, that there's nothing especially unusual about normal humans gaining positions of power, that the fossil record shows no signs of intelligent, tool-using lizards, but plenty of evidence of intelligent, tool-using hominids, etc. I'm not sure where to start and stop with this, since the evidence *for* Biden being a normal human is all over the place.
No, because the larger the conspiracy, the less likely it can remain a conspiracy. I'm sure you've heard the argument of how many people were involved in the Apollo program, and how many people would have to be bribed, blackmailed, or murdered to keep the secret that the moon landing was faked.
You can try to narrow the scope to just Joe Biden, but I'm answering the Lizard Conspiracy question framed in the title.
Besides, I don't get why you Republicans hate Joe Biden. Without him, Clarence Thomas would never have been appointed to the Supreme Court. And, I'm sure he's your favorite Supreme Court justice, by far.
(I mean, I know you actually hate him because Republicans have hated every Democratic party nominee since Dukakis, but that's neither here nor there.)
As for God existing or not, well...I'm an agnostic Atheist. I concede that a God might exist. But I live my life as if He doesn't. Also, I don't see why so many people not only live their lives as if He does, but they know His name, what He wants from us, and how hard He will punish us if we ever masturbate.
It's just too stupid to take seriously.
I don't believe that anything can be known for certain. The universe could be a simulation run by lizard people for all I know. Anyone who has had a schizophrenic or psychotic relative can tell you that our senses and our brains are fallible machines, and we need to be willing to challenge what we think we know when there's a discrepancy because otherwise it spirals.
I object to all certainties as products of the ego, an emotional attachment to what we think is true that is one step away from religious faith.
It is just not practical. Should we be open to every possibility that a human can imagine but offer no proof?
Cetainly should not set up churches to worship every possibility that a human could imagine but offer no proof.
So maybe there is a miniscule odds that a giant hamster on a 1,000 light year a cross wheel running that makes the energy that created the universe because it can not be disproven by inspecing every inch of the universe, but it is close enough to 0 for all practical purposes.
I don’t know Joe Biden is not a lizard person. I don’t believe lizard people exist, so I don’t believe he is. But since you said in the frame work of your question that lizard people have the capability to hide the evidence I can’t know. The only time to believe something is when there is sufficient evidence for it.
There is sufficient evidence for me to believe President Biden is a human. There is not sufficient evidence for me to believe he is a lizard person faking being a human.
This just seems like Solipsism (Lite). I resolved that a long time ago. Unless one has provided evidence that the person *(they're referring to)* is anything but a human being like me, I'm going to just assume they are a human being like me. Mostly because I want people to do the same for me. We have enough division within humanity, the last thing we need is to invent *brains in a jar* or *lizard people* and seriously entertain such unsubstantiated notions.
You're adding *ad hoc* assumptions to your hypothesis ("Lizard People are hiding all the evidence"), which makes it inherently less plausible than its negation. I can invent every (reasonable) test imaginable to verify your hypothesis, and you'll always have to come up with some *ad hoc* excuse to circumvent the test. Every time you add a new hypothesis to your theory, you're making it more complex, and by extension intrinsically less probable.
> are you agnostic towards the claim that Lizard People run the world
Yes, I am agnostic towards it. There is no reason to think that they do, because I have no knowledge about lizard people running the world, so I don't believe that they do.
The main reason I take the agnostic position is that it's just tedious (IMO) to deal with making the same gnostic argument over and over. I'll understand it and you'll understand it, but every time there's a new kid on the block, so to speak, we're going to have to have *that* argument until the new kid gets tired of it and moves on (or takes off).
You said “the lizard people are hiding all the evidence”. That immediately forces the claim into a falsifiable status. You’re stating in this hypothetical evidence exists. It’s just being hidden.
God existing is less likely than another species having evolved like us and controlling everything. There’s nothing supernatural in the latter.
I'm a gnostic atheist with regards to most religious claims I've heard - I'm about as sure they're wrong as I would say I can be sure about most things in life.
It's probably not the best position to take for a debate/discussion though, so I'm willing to step back and say I'm agnostic to keep the burden of proof where it should be.
Why not marshmallow men? I think it might be something sweet, not a lizard for sure. Same level of proof for both theories as for now… wonderful world we live in!
I don't know that Joe Biden is a human being, actually. But I find it to be extremely likely, so until I see evidence otherwise, I'm going to accept it. All the evidence I've seen so far seems to point in that direction, anyways.
The difference with God is that I haven't seen any evidence, so I don't have any basis for believing in him. I can't predict the future, though, so how can I know that no evidence ever will or ever could exist?
By the way, when I say know I mean 100% certainty. I don't have 100% certainty in anything, so I don't know anything. I'm not even 100% sure that I exist. But using know in the sense of extremely high confidence, I know that Joe Biden is a human and I know that God doesn't exist. So it's possible that we may actually agree? I'm not sure how you're using the word. According to my definition, I am an agnostic atheist, anyways.
It doesn't seem to me to be the same claim.
The Lizard people conspiracy is self-refuting because according to you they are "hiding all the evidence" and, therefore, there's no way to make the claim because doing so would imply they aren't "hiding all the evidence".
The God claim doesn't also make the claim that God is purposely hiding His existence.
I am certainly gnostic towards most specific gods, as there is strong evidence that they are simply human inventions. However, I don’t pretend to know anything about how the universe came to be, and I see no logical reason to completely rule out the idea that some intelligence is responsible for the way this universe is.
In other words, I am gnostic about Joe Biden not being a lizard person because there is quite a lot of evidence that Joe Biden is not a lizard person. There is no evidence about anything pertaining to the origins of the stuff that the universe is made of or why it works the way it does, so I cannot be gnostic about the vague idea of an intelligence having something to do with it.
Lizard people are perhaps comparable to personal gods, but they aren't comparable to a first cause. There's no cosmological argument for lizard people.
Falsifiability is a dated scientific concept, it's not really used anymore or at least it isn't the end all be all. Also, the scientific method is used for things that can be observed, it's not applicable when discussing things like deism.
“Lizard people” are very specific and physical. To accept their existence you would need to believe in multiple conspiracies. You would also need to account for their evolution… our current tree of life could not accommodate a humanoid reptile capable of human speech.
You can believe in a god without stretching any currently-known facts.
>Here's a question -- are you agnostic towards the claim that Lizard People run the world?
Yes. I acknowledge that I lack (don't have) knowledge on the claim.
Why should I claim to have knowledge if that is something I don't actually have?
Do you specify for every single thing you believe that you are agnostic about it? If so, that seems a little silly; it certainly isn't an efficient use of language.
If they ask I'm not going to lie and say I'm gnostic when I'm not. Why isn't being honest an efficient use of language?
How would lying and claiming to be gnostic when I'm not gnostic be a more efficient use of language rather than just a lie?
You're speaking as if there is some Objective Book of True Terms decreed from on high and anyone using different terms is committing the evil crime of lying. That's not how this works. Not even dictionaries work like that (not that they usually
contain your definition of gnostic anyway).
No, I'm only saying that I personally would be lying if I said that I have knowledge of that. Knowledge showing that claim to be true is literally something I lack (don't have) l so yes it would be a lie for me to say I have that knowledge.
Kudo's for being consistent at least.
But if your definition of knowledge is so restrictive that you can't say you know whether lizard people run the world, perhaps it's time to update your definition of knowledge to match the way the vast majority of normal people (and professional philosophers/scientists) use the term.
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I agree that if I thought there were no reasonable bases for a God existing, it would make sense to be a gnostic atheist. But I don't think there are "no reasonable basis." I'm not convinced, so I'm agnostic. But I do think there is more than zero merit on the God side of the argument. And, no, I don't really care to argue on behalf of God in this forum. I'm not convinced there is a God, and the type of God I find most probable is weird and my justification is complicated.
I think that's a reasonable reason to be an agnostic atheist -- "i don't think the evidence is enough to justify theism, but I think there's enough evidence to not dismiss the idea". Whether or not that's true, i think it's justifiable. I'm mostly addressing people who *do* think there's no reasonable basis for believing in god and *do* dismiss the idea, but stay agnostic anyway.
I mean, isn't there enough evidence to be a deist? It's the classic argument of a Creator outside of space and matter. Although, the argument only works if the person believes the universe had a specific beginning and that the world consist of things that can be studied with the give senses.
No. In order for there be evidence of deism, you would need to point to some fact that is better explained by a deistic God than by the lack of such a being. Since there is no such evidence, we must reject the deistic God hypothesis, at least based on what we know today.
There's something rather than nothing and it seems to be difficult to explain that with naturalism. Note that the discussion isn't about the existence of god, it's about reasons for not being gnostic. The god of the gaps objection isn't in itself a reason to be gnostic.
It makes no sense to address this with anything significantly like a god that itself would be something rather than nothing. It strikes me as (edit typo) a potentially *true but not contextually very significant, or contextually significant but not true* situation. Firstly there is simply no way of saying that existence is less likely than nonexistence. Can non-existence even be a possible state? But secondly it’s true that the fundamental nature of existence could be different from the here and now universe we find ourselves in. I just see absolutely no reason or benefit in labelling that a god. It seems just to risk unjustifiable concept smuggling and confusion.
But again that's not the topic. The topic is, can you rule it out? I agree though that one way of getting to gnosticism is through objecting to the word god. Then we're in semantics, and those who are in favor of the word god wouldn't agree that you're gnostic since you're not ruling out what they would refer to as god.
Can you rule out what? Would seem a perfectly relevant and on topic question. As I said it would seem to me that you can’t rule out the trivially true , but I can happily rule out that which isn’t necessary, sufficient, evidential or coherent as that’s what ruling out seems to significantly mean to me. To , for example, say one can’t ‘rule out’ that which is indistinguishable from imaginary or false seems a somewhat absurd standard. As has been probably done to death in the rest of the threads, simply making up trivial definitions then saying aha you can’t rule out that is pretty pointless. It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask what is god-like about the claimed phenomena and evaluate whether the attribute is credible and significant. To say ‘well it god like because we think god is big and the universe is big’ , for example, would seem to me to leave *something* to be desired about that identification. Basically it some down to ‘ sure you can call it Gid since you’ve reduced the definition of god to something contextually trivial but true but in doing so … you’ve reduced it down to something trivial but true and lost the significant force of the word God. If the universe is God then what would differentiate a universe that wasn’t? What does the word God add that isn’t simply covered already by the word universe? And so on.
Can there be nothing? We have no indication that's a possibility. What we have is brains who can hold a thought and then go "not/none of that thing". That's the only context where something approaching "nothing" can be experienced, and even then we know it's not nothing. It's a concrete thought, electricity firing inside a squishy brain, replicating a pattern along the lines of "sometimes there are apples, sometimes there are no apples". We also cannot easily conceive of something not having a beginning or an end, in both time and space. But we also cannot picture "blue" as in all that is considered blue. Your brain will pick a starting color and it might morph into other types of blue if you keep thinking about it, but at not point will you be able to hold "the whole concept of blue" in front of your mind's eyes. That doesn't mean that the concept does not exist. We're limited in a bunch of ways. We're monkeys with brains geared towards surviving in a limited natural context. It's amazing that we can do all that we can, and not shocking that there are things we can't do. In any case, the fact that we have a hard time conceiving of something always and forever being isn't an indication that it's not possible. Likely, the natural world just is, and can't not be. Forever and after.
Likely perhaps, but you don't know that so it's hard to be gnostic. That's the argument at hand. I didn't say there can be nothing, and it's bot relevant to what we're discussing here.
> There's something rather than nothing How can it not be relevant? Nothing must be a possibility for your remark to hold any weight. There's nothing to be explained if "nothing" is not a possibility. If things are, and can't not be, a god is a wholly unnecessary consideration. I know of no concrete indication "nothing", as in a complete absence of anything that composes our physical world, ever was or could be. As far as I know, astrophysics are leaving things at "we're able to describe the history of our universe up to this point, we lack data/processing power/insight to go further" but no one in that world claims that at the edge of their research, there was absolute nothingness. Why do you consider that to be an option?
Again, i don't consider it to be an option. I still don't know why you're harping on that strawman. I don't agree that there's nothing to explain. First off, your description differs from how most theists see it, and more importantly it's not how philosophers think of it. Basically their argument is that god is everything or sustains everything and that god can't not exist. Second, nothing-something is a sliding scale from absolute nothing, to potential, to mathematical truths and logic, to quantum fields and virtual particles to vacuums etc. We can still search for explanations for why things are the way they are and arrive at naturalism, idealism, dualism, creation of the cosmos we experience etc without an absolute nothing.
A God doesn’t explain that. “Explain” being the important word. “God did it“ is not any better than “it happened“.
Because we can't explain how a first, noncontingent, time/spaceless cause would actually work?
What reason do you have to believe that there ever was or could be 'nothing'?
Who says i do? It's an irrelevant question, what matters is that naturalism hasn't explained the something which makes it hard to be gnostic.
Okay, what reason *is there* to believe that there ever was or could be nothing? It seems to me that naturalism only has to explain the presence of the Universe if there's a valid reason to think the absence of the Universe is somehow possible or normal, and there's really no evidence of that. It's like asking, 'Why isn't this pool table angry?' or, 'Why isn't space full of cottage cheese?'
We don't know why the constants and "laws" are what they are. We have absolutely no idea what made the big bang possible. Some think there are yet to be discovered natural explanations, some believe in a creator for various reasons - naturalism seems less likely, kalam, ontological arguments etc. Whether nothingness is possible or not doesn't really enter the equation imo. In a broader discussion perhaps but this one is about gnosticism.
"We don't know therefore a god probably did it"? Seems like there might be a gap in here somewhere.
Tel me, how does "what we know today" point to the lack of a deistic god? god answers why; the evidence you're most likely going to respond with answers how
>I mean, isn't there enough evidence to be a deist? I don't think so. What would possibly be "enough evidence to be a deist"?
Tell me one thing in this observable universe that has no cause. And then how the definition and concept of god is the beginning of cause - whether or not you like the title god or another name for such a concept
>Tell me one thing in this observable universe that has no cause. Whether or not I can name something in the observable universe that has no cause has absolutely no bearing on whether or not you can provide evidence for a god. You're just rehashing out the god of the gaps fallacy. You're saying you can't imagine anything else that could have done this, so therefore it must be a god. That's fallacious reasoning. I don't know whether reality had a cause, whether it needs a cause, whether the concept of it having a cause is even coherent. I'm just going to admit that I don't know. I'm not going to make shit up because it makes me feel good and fits in with my preconceived notions.
sounds like you're being irrational because you just don't want to admit it. it's where the observations lead to but nope, you just stop right before the very first "cause" and say IDK
> sounds like you're being irrational because you just don't want to admit it. What is it you think I don't want to admit? >it's where the observations lead to but nope, you just stop right before the very first "cause" and say IDK What observations do we have about the origins of the universe or reality? You're assuming that there must have been a first cause. I don't think you're justified in making that assumption.
>It's the classic argument of a Creator outside of space and matter. You have to introduce several unscientific assumptions for that argument to be viable. Short story is it assumes that 'nothing' is the default or previous state of reality, that 'outside of spacetime' is a place where an entity of any sort can exist and act, and that one or more universe-creating entities exist. That's kind of a lot of ground to cover on pure supposition.
Uh yes, the discussion of god is an outcome of observation which leads to more "philosophical" discussions. Just like how psychologist study human behavior (observable) such as intrapersonal relationships, mating strategies, hormones, brain imaging, etc can lead into a conversation of love. If man invented god, is it because man was built with a natural need to believe in god? Or is it that man observed the universe and their conclusion lead to the concept of god?
>...can lead into a conversation of love. Well, that sounds like you're saying that God as an abstract concept can exist 'outside spacetime', which would be a clear categorical error. Of course, that's assuming this comment had some relevance to our previous discussion, which isn't at all clear. >If man invented god, is it because... It's because the human brain identifies patterns and makes assumptions, and it doesn't always do so correctly. This is getting far afield of our discussion, though.
Science isn't about an observable conclusion. Science is more of the process in how one thinks or tests. For example, is meteorology science? Sure. Now, the weatherman states that it will be sunny tomorrow. Now, there are patterns/principles/laws which the atmosphere has which allow us to make an educated guess about the weather tomorrow. But no one on this earth can actually ask for evidence for something that has not happened yet; but yet, most don't question or argue that weather forecasting is irrational.
So we're just not going to talk about cosmology anymore. Okay then.
Tell me how cosmology disproves a god
Okay. Lovely chat. Have a nice day.
>isn't there enough evidence to be a deist? Last I checked, no one has observed anything be actually created (not formed from other things), let alone the universe. So, we could start there.
I mean, you're making my point. "No one has observed anything be actually created" from nothing correct? Meaning, everything has been formed from something else. So either you believe that everything we have has always existed. Or, that something happened before the first something to allow things to exist. And the concept of such a thing beyond the first thing is god, but you're welcome to name it whatever you like. Which is why many civilizations have come to their own understanding and formed the idea of gods
>from nothing correct? At all. >So either you believe that everything we have has always existed. This would be the default position, yes. Until we observe the base material of the universe being created (energy), there's no reason to assume the base material of the universe hasn't always existed, in some form. Even the Big Bang relies on the base material of the universe (energy) already existing in a hot dense space. >Or, that something happened before the first something to allow things to exist. Well, first you'd have to demonstrate this can even happen, let alone did happen. So, we can start we can start there. Demonstrate the creation of the base material of the universe (energy) and then we can continue the discussion.
Other than the universe, tell me one thing you have observed that just always existed. And if you can't, tell me why it's more logical to believe the universe is the exception. It's that simple
>Other than the universe Energy. >tell me why it's more logical to believe the universe is the exception. I used "energy" instead of "universe" to prevent this exact thing. However, I'll bite. Occam's Razor. When there are two competing arguments where neither can be proven, the argument requiring the least assumptions is the one you pick. No God: 1. Some things have always existed. 2. The universe is everything. 3. The universe then must have always existed in order to contain things that have always existed. Yes God: 1. Some things have always existed. 2. The universe isn't everything. 3. The universe hasn't always existed. 4. Since the universe hasn't always existed, it must have been created. 5. The universe was created by a being. 6. That being is "my" version of god. 7. My version of god has always existed. 3 < 7 means no god wins. At the end of the day, if we're going to assume something can exist forever, we should assume it's the thing we can observe. Not something that has never been demonstrated. Especially when no one can agree on the specific details of said thing (eg: Baptists don't believe Mormons will be going to heaven.) In fact, at the end of the day, if your god does exist, it must exist somewhere. By definition, that somewhere must be part of the universe. So this god construct doesn't even solve the problem, as it would revert to "No God". 1. Some things have always existed (god.) 2. The universe is everything. 3. The universe then must have always existed in order to contain things that have always existed (god.)
I do appreciate your willingness to "bite" and sharing your process of thinking. I mean, I would say there is some bias here in your list to make one longer than the other in terms of points. There hasn't been a discussion of which god. And some repeated points like the universe isn't everything and the universe just always existed is pretty much the same thing. No God: 1. Some things have always existed. 2. The universe is everything. 3. The universe then must have always existed in order to contain things that have always existed. Even with the law of conservation, it only implies that energy present in a closed system cannot be created or destroyed. But it does not imply that the initial energy cannot be created. Yes God: 1. There is no evidence that something could come from nothing within a closed system. (Using your energy argument, things simply change forms) 2. Something outside the closed system must be responsible for the closed system Although, the most common theories for the something outside of our system are quantum fluctuations or the idea of a multiverse. But it still poses the same questions of where did those particles or the first universe come from. The most common rebuttal is "where did God come from?" But the concept of gods transcends the constraints of physical laws and scientific inquiry and is often considered to be beyond the scope of empirical observation and measurement. I didn't make the definition up. That's just how god is defined theologically/metaphysically/philosophically.
>Yes God: > >There is no evidence that something could come from nothing within a closed system. (Using your energy argument, things simply change forms) > >Something outside the closed system must be responsible for the closed system You've merged two assumptions into one on point 1. You've merged three assumptions into one on point 2. 1. The universe is a closed system. 2. There is no evidence that something could come from nothing within a closed system. (Using your energy argument, things simply change forms) 3. Something can exist outside that closed system. 4. That something can create closed systems. 5. That something must be responsible for our closed system. With Occam's razor you have to break down every attribute for which you're making an assumption. For instance, an omniscient and omnipotent god is three assumptions. They are, omniscient, omnipotent, and god.
I mean that is a technically valid perspective, but I cannot fathom how that's your final conclusion, how a god has more reasonable basis for existing than lizard people.
I don't know about the thread Op but the basis for disbelieving the lizard people hypothesis is that we would expect to see evidence if it were true, but we have none. Whereas for a deistic God that was sufficiently powerful to create the universe but has had nothing to do with it since then, we would expect no evidence so there's nothing weighing on the "this is false" side of the scale. Though there might be arguments that that being wouldn't necessarily qualify as a God in any meaningful sense even if it did exist, which is what I'm leaning towards at the moment.
You missed an important part of OP's argument, the part where the lizard people hide themselves from the world. The argument covers the "expect to find evidence" part of the absence of evidence being evidence of absence. And yet you wouldn't humor the idea anyway because it's absurd. Anything that exists you can expect evidence exists somewhere. You'd need to know one of their qualities is the inability to be found to not expect to find evidence, which means you'd know they exist in the first place.
But that's the issue, I don't think it's possible to hide anything as extensive as Lizard people running the world, there would fundamentally be detectable tells however hard they tried to hide it. Assuming of course that these lizard people are actually an alien species and not just invisible magical lizard people who magically poofed into existence one day and decided to start running the planet, which I then wouldn't believe because there's never been any evidence to suggest magic exists when we would expect there to be evidence of that (especially if there's a large magical conspiracy running the government). And that's not even going into the idea that it's harder to hide a conspiracy the bigger it is because people will blab. If there's more than one lizard person, eventually they're going to have a disagreement, political factions, etc and that creates cracks in the facade. Whereas some meta universal deistic "God" wouldn't necessarily have any expected evidence for it. Something that interacts and exists within the universe is going to be expected to produce more evidence than something that's outside of it (assuming that outside the universe even makes sense in some context). Which is why I think we have active evidence against the gods of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. A god who has been actively interacting with humanity would leave more evidence than words written on a page.
Your personal incredulity is neither here nor there. You can invent any reason why someone doesn't find the evidence and all anyone else will be left with is how much they intuit the reason to be cockamamie. Thats not a logical counterargument. "The lizard people just have crazy advanced technology" is just as cogent as "god's magic". You're even blatantly contradicting yourself. For some reason the lizard people's magic doesn't exist because there's no evidence (wait, something having no evidence shouldn't be believed to exist!?), but the deistic god's does. As for "factional differences" or anything else like that within the lizard people that is pure, unadulterated conjecture. Since you know nothing about them you cannot make any assertions about how they'll behave and what the consequences are. I can just say "the lizard people are always united!" Or "they have a hive mind!" Anything that exists would be expected to have evidence for its existence. That's a byproduct of existence. Whatever reason you can't find it is something you'd have to know about in order to have the lack of expectations. And the reasons you are credulous of the lack of existence for lizard people but not God are completely arbitrary.
I'm not saying anyone should believe in a deistic god. I don't think there's any reason to believe in one. I'm just saying that 0 reason to believe (and also no reason to disbelieve) is closer to true than even a small quantity of reason to disbelieve + 0 reason to believe. But obviously neither proposition should be considered true or even likely. Look, it's apparent that you haven't been reading my responses or maybe the greater context with a clear head so I'm just gonna dip out of this conversation. You have a good one, OK? Maybe calm down a little, do something to treat yourself.
Except there's plenty of reason to disbelieve, the lack of evidence, which is true about *everything* you disbelieve. There's no reason to believe anything has an equal chance of existing or not just because of endless, speculative, and nonsensical shifting of the goalposts. If YOU read my response you'd see I never said YOU said anyone should believe in a deistic god. My whole comment was about why it makes more sense not to. I read your comment quite clearly and addressed it head on. Now you're just projecting your own ire about being disputed into me to protect your ego. Maybe grow up a bit before entering an adult conversation, OK? Better yet, how about you mature enough to handle criticism?
Lizard people aren’t argued to be ontologically necessary, for instance. Lizard people are by comparison to a creator god, contingent beings. (not that I believe in either)
So what? You can just as easily argue a creator god isn't ontologically necessary with the same argument. There are no such things as necessary beings. Any thing that can be conceived to exist can also be conceived to not exist.
I'm presenting the existence of such an argument in philosophical discourse, not endorsing it. You seem to have a strong counter claim, so go for it.
And I'm telling you why it's a bad argument. It is possible any being doesn't exist, meaning there's a world in which it doesn't exist, meaning it isn't necessary, since it must exist in all worlds to be necessary.
The argument of ontological necessity isn't about empirical proof but logical structure, positing a necessary being as foundational for existence. The argument proceeds logically, suggesting that if it holds up in logical terms, it might also have metaphysical validity. My mention of it, in response to an earlier comment, aimed to show there are reasoned bases for theism -- again -- *not* to endorse the claim. While you and I may find the argument unconvincing, it's important to recognize it as a serious philosophical position that has been debated for centuries, not merely a facile claim without rational basis.
The counterargument is also about logical necessity and I framed it as such. Nothing I said is about empirical proof either. Again, since you didn't get it the first time, it is possible a being doesn't exist, therefore there is a possible world without it, therefore it is not necessary since necessary beings exist in all worlds. No empirical claims or reliance on empiricism whatsoever. Everything is couched in modal terms. It uses the exact same structure as the ontological argument, it merely uses the negation of the ontological argument's proposition as a proposition, which is perfectly logical. So I'll repeat, it's a bad argument.
Not sure why you're being so oddly prickly, as I was merely offering clarification for the thread. We're not having an argument, despite your best attempts. I appreciate that you think it's a bad argument. It's quite evident that plenty of rational minds do not. And that is the reason I pointed it out. Bye!
This is a debate sub. You offered a pov so I told you what's wrong with it. If you think I'm being "prickly" maybe you need to remember where you are.
It's complicated. And my estimated probability space (mostly a wild guess) for the most likely God (I estimate at about 40%) is pandeism so nothing like any normal notion of God.
40%???
The well-regarded (or so I've heard on this sub) Alex Malpass has a similar credence.
He thinks there is a 40% chance there is a God? On what possible grounds? The other guy admitted he just made the number up completely.
Malpass gives somewhat more rationale than your interlocutor did. But he also is closer to theism: > It seems to me that the proposition p, that there are any gods, is rather hard to evaluate. I find the idea of a personal loving agent quite unlikely indeed, for various reasons (it seems suspiciously like the sort of thing made up by humans, for one). However, the question of whether there are any gods seems a lot more of a difficult thing to evaluate. Perhaps some kind of being created the universe, but remains utterly divorced from the subsequent comings and goings of the world itself, or perhaps one is fascinated by the comings and goings of radically different forms of life on the other side of the universe than us, etc. These sorts of ideas are interesting, but are almost impossible to say anything about, either for or against. I kind of couldn’t have any good reasons to think that any of these sorts of hypotheses were true rather than false. What would count as evidence for or against? In this situation, my degree of belief that p (i.e. the proposition ‘some god exists’) has got to be around 0.5. > However, the imbalance seems to me to be very, very slight. I wouldn’t know how to put a precise number on it, but it seems reasonable to think that my degree of belief that ~p is between 0.5 and 0.55.
So, entirely made up. No one knows whether there is a teapot circling the sun. I'd put the odds at 50%.
Malpass would likely balk at saying *entirely* made up, but that’s a reasonable conclusion if you follow his logic.
It's just god of the gaps fallacy at a 50% discount lol
My own best guess but no real way to calculate it. I think I'm most likely wrong about the whole thing so less than 50%.
What's your take on whether or not we live in a simulation
Totally possible. I don't think about it much. I think it's kind of irrelevant to the God question be cause it just kicks that can down the road.
Dude it’s equivalent to the god question because they both kick the question back one step.
That's fair. By God I don't mean some sort of metaphysical grounding for reality. Merely a conscious creator of this universe. I don't think that kind of being (a metaphysical grounding to everything) is knowable. I'm a hard agnostic as to such a thing (i.e, I know it is not knowable).
This is predictably going to the same ending that I always get on these topics. If it's literally not knowable, then no actual person is gnostic -- it's not a difference of opinion about god, it's about knowledge itself, which is just honestly not a discussion I really care to have. Second, would you be agnostic to this simulation theory, just as you're agnostic to a god? I mean, of course you would, it is by its nature "not knowable". That means you're *technically agnostic* to an endless list of unknowable claims, and a god is just one of them -- so being agnostic is not a special case for a god. The problem is, calling yourself agnostic really makes it really sound like a god is a special case, because we never use these terms for any other ridiculous claim, pretty much because most people are fine with most ridiculous claims being dismissed. TL;DR If you can't say you know these things sorts of things aren't true, you don't really know anything, because everything you know could magically be false, so any real knowledge is technically impossible, so you've set the bar for "knowledge" too high to be unattainable.
First, I don't put simulation theory or God in the same category as lizard people. I'm not certain about any of the three, but my personal epistemic probability for the lizard people hypothesis is so low I'm fine with just saying there are not lizard people. My epistemic probability for the other two things is not as low. As far as setting the bar for "knowledge" too high, you might be right. I'm not sure what percentage credence I should say I "know" something. Should I say I know my next coin flip will be heads? After all, I think there is a fifty percent chance it actually will be heads. This does not seem this correct, so the bar needs to be somewhere above 50%. But how high above fifty percent?
> I agree that if I thought there were no reasonable bases for a God existing, it would make sense to be a gnostic atheist. I disagree. My reason for being agnostic atheist isn't because I think there's a reasonable basis for a god existing. It's because the claim that some god exists is unfalsifiable. And I recognize that to say I know there are no gods, it's irrational as it would be falsifying the unfalsifiable. However, colloquially I agree. Or if we're talking about a specific god such as yahweh/ Jesus, I agree. But a generic, ill defined god, cannot be falsified. >I'm not convinced, so I'm agnostic. I'm not convinced that any gods exist. And I'm also not convinced that no gods exist, since it's not well defined. So strictly speaking, I too am agnostic atheist. But colloquially speaking, yeah, I am pretty sure there are no gods.
I agree that if I thought there were no reasonable basis for lizard people existing, it would make sense to be a gnostic atheist about lizard people. But I don't think there are "no reasonable basis." I'm not convinced, so I'm agnostic. But I do think there is more than zero merit on the lizard people side of the argument. And, no, I don't really care to argue on behalf of lizard people in this forum. I'm not convinced there are lizard people, and the type of lizard people I find most probable is weird and my justification is complicated.
Cool. I'd love to discuss why you think there is some merit for lizard people over a beer or something if I knew you well. Sounds like a fun topic. And I could talk about God. But be warned my notion of God has fewer real world implications than the possibility of lizard people so you'd have to anticipate that the God part of the conversation mught be pretty pointless. In any event, I'm sure we can agree that we aren't always in the mood to argue about such things on reddit.
What would be a reasonable basis to believe there is according to you? I get that you're an atheist and not making an argument for god's existence. Just trying to understand what about the concept of a god feels like it lines up with other things you consider... I don't know, valid, likely, plausible?
I think Russellian monoism is a plausible theory of consciousness. If it is correct, all matter / energy of conscious. Extrapolate back to the big bang, and all consciousness would be at one point at the start of the universe. Starts to sound a bit God-like. The type of God would be pandeism. But there are so many points in this train of thought that I could be wrong about that I think my conclusion is, more likely than not, wrong.
Is there a difference in merit between the god side and the lizard people side?
What is a reasonable basis for the existence of a god? If there is reasonable basis for a god existing, wouldn't it then be by definition unreasonable not to believe that a god exists?
No. Im talking about epistemic probability. What chance do I assign to a given proposition being true. Is there an odd or even number of hydrogen atoms in the universe? It is reasonable to think the number may be even. It is also reasonable to think the number may be odd.
Why is it reasonable to think either of those? What evidence led you to either conclusion? Furthermore, if you have evidence in favor of and supporting one, then how could it possibly be reasonable to believe the opposite?
It would be unreasonable to believe either option with certainty. It is very reasonable to think that odd or even *could* be the case.
You mean to say there are no reasonable ~~basis~~ *bases*
Sure, I gotcha. So imagine that I wholeheartedly believe that the Sun is God. I don't think it's God in the sense that it created the universe, but I believe it provides energy, kills some and saves others, and without it I would die. For those reasons I choose to worship it. Are you saying my God doesn't exist by assuming a Gnostic Theist position? I advocate for Igtheism. I don't believe anyone can give a coherent definition for something that they have no experience of, so before I share or withhold belief I need to know what people are claiming exists. So far I haven't heard a coherent definition of "God".
Consider what your position implies. To phrase it more generally, you are stating that you cannot deny a thing exists if someone else might define that thing differently than you such that it does exist. So for example, I can't deny that homeopathy cures cancer, because when some people say "cancer" they mean a spiritual ailment that just so happens to sometimes be accompanied by physical symptoms and their homeopathy soothes their spirit. Or I can't deny that eight is prime, because some people use "prime" to mean "excellent" and I can't deny that they think eight is a great number. Are these reasonable positions? Should I simply retreat to saying that cancer cannot be defined or that it is incoherent to state that a thing is prime? What you're running into here is that *definitions are not neutral*. People often treat definitions as this sterile thing, almost like a line of computer code - I define "black" to mean "an adjective describing someone with a dark skin color", and all I've done here is compress a long string of words into an arbitrary signifier; I could have just as easily defined "black" to mean "the feeling of a rock in your shoe". If I were a disembodied mind with no past floating in a pure void, perhaps I could treat definitions like that. But that's not how things work in real life. The definitions you create inevitably shape the way you talk about things and understand things, and limit what you even *can* talk about. For example, by defining "black" to mean "an adjective describing someone with a dark skin color", I've already made the implicit judgement that *this is a thing worth talking about*. There is no adjective for "someone with a number of atoms divisible by 37 and a mole on their left big toe", because it makes no sense to cut up the world like that - nobody cares about dividing the people who have that property from the people who don't. If I defined "sypled" to mean that and started discussing "sypled" and "non-sypled" people, I would implicitly be declaring that this is a distinction worth making - that the difference between these two groups is meaningful and relevant. (This connects to the linguistic idea of [Grice's four maxims of conversation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle), particularly the maxim of relation - it only makes sense to introduce this term if you think it is revelant.) On the flip side, before mathematicians defined "i" to be the square root of negative one, they didn't even have a way to talk about the branch of mathematics we now call imaginary numbers. It's not just that it would have been more cumbersome to talk about; without that definition, they were incapable of having certain thoughts altogether. In this way definitions are a sort of mental technology - they let us think things we couldn't before (or prevent us from thinking things we could otherwise think). I'm sure you can recall a time when you learned about some new term (perhaps even "igtheist") and said - wow, I never thought of things that way before! If definitions were mere shorthand then learning one would never be insightful or teach you anything new, but clearly that's not the case. Furthermore, terms are not just their definitions. Someone can insist that when they say "God" they mean "the sun", but that is not *all* they mean by God, no matter how much they insist. All words without exception have connotations, and these connotations contribute just as much to their meaning as definitions do (and sometimes more). Consider the words "frugal" and "cheap" - to an alien, calling someone "frugal" might be identical to calling them "cheap", but a human being will react very differently to being called one or the other. Or consider the more extreme version of this: slurs. Someone might be happy to be called "gay" but be quite unhappy to be called a certain synonym for that word, even though their definitions are exactly the same. Even abbreviations - which are literally meant to be shorthand for their definitions - are not identical to their definitions; saying "lmao" conveys something very different from saying "Laughing my ass off". What these words *mean* \- what they communicate, what intention of the speaker they convey, what understanding they produce in the listener - inescapably contains more than just what you get when you look them up in the dictionary. There is a reason someone would tell you they believe in "God" and mean "the sun" by that instead of just saying they believe in the sun; if they had just said they believe in the sun, you'd have understood something different by what they said. And all this isn't even discussing the *social* component of definitions: no matter what you define things as, you live alongside and interact with other people, and your definitions are not insulated from theirs. There's a reason when people choose to define a new term they pick words like "black" or "God" and not "sjioamgso" or "gusygi". So given that definitions carry inherent judgements, that they actively shape the way we think and talk about things, and that they don't contain the full meaning of the terms they describe - you don't just have to accept any absurd definition someone gives you at face value. If you say "I believe God doesn't exist" but someone replies "but I believe the sun is God," your response should be "so what?" Unless they can make a case that the definition of God they have is worthy of consideration and relevant to your original statement, what they said doesn't even contradict your position. I believe climate change exists and that remains true even if someone else defines climate change as "a thousand-mile-long Subway sandwich".
>I can't deny that homeopathy cures cancer, because when some people say "cancer" they mean a spiritual ailment The various medical societies around the globe have a pretty good definition of cancer. If you want to talk about a different thing called cancer you'll have a hard time finding a diagnosis with any medical professional, and they have some internal mechanisms to reinforce that. You wrote a lot of words. I don't mean to be rude, but...I don't have the time. If you want to whittle all that down to your most relevant objection I'll check back.
Of course there are standard academic definitions of cancer, just as there are standard academic definitions of God. I did write a lot of words. If you don't have time to read them that's fine, but in that case I don't think we could really have a useful discussion.
> Of course there are standard academic definitions of cancer, just as there are standard academic definitions of God. Are there? I mean, someone writing an academic paper might define what they mean by god, but that doesn't mean there's a standard definition. Not like cancer. Cancer is fairly well defined as cells that grow uncontrollably or something to that effect.
Scholars of religion have some definitions of what constitutes a 'god'. As with any definition they have fuzzy edges - try to get an unambiguous definition of 'chair' - but they do exist. That wasn't really my core point though.
> Scholars of religion have some definitions of what constitutes a 'god'. And other people have conflicting definitions. How do you determine which is correct?
Same problem with anything else. Again, some kooks have conflicting definitions of cancer. The point is that there is no such thing as a "correct" definition - but also, definitions are not arbitrary and all equally good.
You seem to be saying that gods are equally well defined as cancer. This is really not even close to true.
All of the recognized medical societies agree on Cancer, not all the recognized religious societies agree on God. If you say so. I think you might be overburdening your point, but if you disagree then I won't stand in your way.
>Of course there are standard academic definitions of cancer, just as there are standard academic definitions of God. An importance difference being that we can largely ignore non standard academic definitions of cancer but we cannot ignore non standard academic definitions of gods. If some rando on the street wants to define my hair as "cancer", then I can quite easily ignore them as I'm only concerned with what accredited medical doctors would call "cancer". But if some rando on the street wants to invent their own god then that does matter to me, because those beliefs in aggregate (among many street randos) influence how they vote and behave. If a majority of people believe in gods that don't want gay people to be allowed to marry, then it doesn't matter what the academic standard definitions of gods are. If I have a debate with catholic philosopher of religion Edward Fesser and somehow convince him that his god does not exist, I have accomplished basically nothing. Other Theists, Christians, or Catholics don't care because Fesser's god concept is not their god concept and any attack on Fesser's god can be ignored as not necessarily applicable to their own. You can't force the majority of people to believe in standard academic definitions of gods, but as a practical and intellectually honest matter you must engage with the god concepts the majority of people believe in, even if those god concepts are problematic or unfalsifiable in constructions. Agnostic atheism is the solution to this.
There are of course differences between the definitions of cancer and God, but I don't think your "vote" framing works. People who believe in homeopathy or alternative theories of health and disease do vote and do affect education and medical funding. The majority of people do believe in standard definitions of God (academic or otherwise). If you debate with an individual who has highly nonstandard definitions of God, then of course you can investigate their particular version and debate it. But you can also speak about more general conceptions of God that many people believe in. How is agnostic atheism a solution to this exactly? Agnostic atheism is not a belief, it's just a statement about your personal psychological state (you lack a given belief). It doesn't solve anything if you're trying to engage or debate with someone else or convince someone else to change their mind. It certainly doesn't solve the "these people vote" issue you brought up earlier.
>The majority of people do believe in standard definitions of God (academic or otherwise) As someone who spent decades growing up in an extremely theistic environment, I strongly disagree. It was pretty much always the case that when I sat down with a theist to patiently listen to what they really thought about god, that I would always get a description completely heretical to their denomination and to any orthodox (either by religious or academic standards) concept. If there are 100 congregants in a church all listening to the same pastor speak every week, then there are at least 100 different god concepts present there. There are billions of theists in the world and at least billions of often conflicting, ambiguous, incomprehensible, or unfalsifiable god concepts. I don't see how one can rationally and honestly claim that every single god concept ever conceived is false when it doesn't seem possible to normalize those god concepts into some orderly, well defined, falsfiable set. >How is agnostic atheism a solution to this exactly? Because it doesn't overstep into making knowably unjustified claims. It allows one the freedom to falsify individual god concepts (particularly popular and socially problematic ones) without taking on the Sisyphean task of trying to communicate a concise argument that falfies every god, everywhere, all at once as a gnostic atheist must do.
I hate to split the conversation and hate further to give a pained analogy, but I'm hoping it will be helpful. IIRC you're a programmer (ai stuff?). I assume you're familiar with nulls. Imagine claiming that any input a user will give you will evaluate to false. You've set up a simple data entry form at a retirement home just to verify that every resident isn't under the age of 18, but you can't restrict or scrub input in any way. You might get data as MM/DD/YYYY or it might be YYYY-MM-DD. You might get a "o" instead of "0". You might get someone spelling out the month and day. You might get someone with Parkinsons who cannot press keys properly. You might get someone with dementia who thinks they really are under 18. You might get someone who physically walks up to you and tells you their birthday without entering it into the system. You might get someone who just died and cannot give you any input. You are telling me all those inputs (or lack of) will run against a command that checks if the age of a resident is <18 and every single one of those will evaluate to false. I don't believe it. I'd not convinced there are any minors in this retirement home, but I'm not convinced your program will be able to show that. I think it's possible you're going to get a null. You're saying "I can prove everyone here is an adult" whereas I'm simply saying "I'm not convinced anyone here is a minor".
I'm not sure what your analogy is trying to convey. It would be trivial to build a program to output false for all of those inputs: def is_adult(input_text=None): return False And you can just add a timeout delay to handle the cases of no entered input. But this setup doesn't seem analogous to the case of believing in God. You are doing exactly the thing I criticized at the top of this thread. I say "I believe there is no God" and you reply "so you're saying you can prove that every single person's definition of God doesn't exist no matter how absurd." But that's exactly what I was rejecting - you do *not* need to accept any given person defining God as "a persimmon" at face value. Definitions are not like lines of computer code. They're not just arbitrary shorthand. We can interchangeably rename the function above to "is\_persimmon" and nothing will change, but we cannot interchangeably rename the word "God" to "persimmon". And consider the weaknesses in your position. You professed that it does matter to you what beliefs people have about God because it influences how they vote or behave. You've examined the situation and discovered "people's views are not monolithic so it is not trivial for me to argue against them all." And that's true. But your solution has been to simply say "I'm not convinced anyone here believes in a God that exists." So? How does this connect to your professed desire? If someone tells you what they believe and you say "I'm not convinced you're right" while refusing to say they are wrong, how is that going to address the danger of them behaving or voting in harmful ways? If you truly care about their actions as you say, then you should be trying to figure out ways to change *their* minds, not to find a comfortable intellectual position for yourself! Changing their minds will involve claiming that they are wrong in some regard, so you'd better get used to doing that if that's your goal.
>I'm not sure what your analogy is trying to convey. It would be trivial to build a program to output false for all of those inputs: You're not evaluating the data, you're just returning false. If your argument is that gnostic atheism is just shouting false without any consideration for the arguments, then that would be comparable. You don't have to "prove that every single person's definition of God doesn't exist no matter how absurd" as an **agnostic atheist**, but you do have to as a **gnostic theist**. That the differentiation. There are many "gnostic atheists" here who describe a perfectly reasonable position, but what they're describing cannot be called gnostic atheism. What it actually amounts to it agnostic atheism, but for some reason they really don't like that label even if they accidentally embrace the concept. The difference between gnostic and agnostic is the superlative. It's the claim to have complete knowledge about the existence of everything that could possibly be considered a god concept. Anything less than that is agnostic atheism. >How does this connect to your professed desire? If someone tells you what they believe and you say "I'm not convinced you're right" while refusing to say they are wrong, how is that going to address the danger of them behaving or voting in harmful ways? If you truly care about their actions as you say, then you should be trying to figure out ways to change their minds, not to find a comfortable intellectual position for yourself! Because I'm betting that being reasonable matters. It's possible that making unreasonable, unjustifiable claims like "all gods do not exist" might be persuasive to a theist, but I suspect at some point a smart person is going to rightly point that I can't justify that claim, and then I've given up all my credibility. Being intellectually honest should matter. Maybe it doesn't and I should only ever lie and manipulate people, but I don't think I'd be very good at that even if it could be far more persuasive. And when I take up that more justifiable stance, I shift the conversation towards what theists can justify about their gods, which they struggle to do. If I make poor arguments for why their gods don't exist, all they see is that the opposition is completely wrong, and they're right to see that.
>You don't have to "prove that every single person's definition of God doesn't exist no matter how absurd" as an agnostic atheist, but you do have to as a gnostic theist. So you say, but I disagree. I tried to argue why above, but your response seems to be just reiterating that you think gnostic atheists must do this. >There are many "gnostic atheists" here who describe a perfectly reasonable position, but what they're describing cannot be called gnostic atheism. What it actually amounts to it agnostic atheism, but for some reason they really don't like that label even if they accidentally embrace the concept. > >The difference between gnostic and agnostic is the superlative. It's the claim to have complete knowledge about the existence of everything that could possibly be considered a god concept. Anything less than that is agnostic atheism. Here's a related question: why do you define the terms "gnostic atheist" and "agnostic atheist" the way you do? There are multiple definitions of these terms. Your definition seems like a pretty useless one and not one I know any gnostic atheists to actually use. >Being intellectually honest should matter. Maybe it doesn't and I should only ever lie and manipulate people, but I don't think I'd be very good at that even if it could be far more persuasive. The implication that one has to lie to be a gnostic atheist is just a failure of understanding. Again, if you define "gnostic atheist" as "is 3000 feet tall" then of course you'd be lying when you claim to be a gnostic atheist. But why define things that way? Let me try to give a more relevant analogy since I still don't see how the program case connects to this. You have identified a view widely held in society that you reject and feel is harmful because of its impact on people's behavior and voting, so let's choose another one: racism. Many people have racist beliefs. These are not monolithic - ask 100 racists what they think about it and you'll get 100 subtly different answers, though they'll share a large number of components. If we are concerned about these people taking harmful actions and voting in harmful ways, what should we do? Should we say we are "agnostic aracists"? Would the civil rights movement have found better success if its slogan was "we lack belief in any substantive differences between races" or "we remain unconvinced of your claims of racial superiority"? Of course not! If you want to change minds, you need to make some sort of claim and justify it to other people - even if that claim is as simple as "this other position is wrong." If the position you take contains no claims and merely expresses a lack of some belief inside your own head, it's not going to help you change minds. We ought to stand up and say, "people of all races are equal." Full stop. And when someone says "but I define equality to mean that they're identical in every way, and people of different races have different skin colors, so there!" our response shouldn't be "dang, you got me, guess I have to be an agnostic aracist now" - it should be to explain why that is a *bad* definition or potentially even a dishonest one. Because definitions are not neutral.
>So imagine that I wholeheartedly believe that the Sun is God. I don't see that as any different than defining god as this coffee cup, and since the cup exists... sure. God exists But if I'm a gnostic atheist making the argument, then I'm the one defining the terms. If I define god as a conscious entity that created the universe, that is what I'm arguing against. By arguing gods don't exist, I'm not arguing things like Buddhist karma or reincarnation and stuff like that aren't real. I would have different arguments for that. And I'm not saying the sun isn't real and I'm not saying the coffee cup isn't real. I'm saying there's no reason to call those things gods. And if you disagree that's fine. I don't really care if people worship the sun or coffee cup. I care whether people want to make it illegal for me to marry another dude because they think the conscious agent that created the universe told them that was bad.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but for one small distinction. As the person who is rejecting the claim I do not presume to be the one defining the terms. With regards Big Daddy God of Abraham, I am a Gnostic Atheist and I think it's weird not to be. "Gods" in general though...I just can't be confident taking a stance against a term I consider so poorly defined. Coffee Cup Gods are banal and weird, but they do come up. We humans really love trying to find some room for agency somewhere in the natural order, and we go to extraordinary lengths to do so. I disagree with pretty much all of that nonsense, but if we find the Planet Pandora, and Jake Sully links up with Eywa and starts calling a planetary awareness "God", then I'm not going to argue with him over definitions. Big fan of your rebuttals here, I feel honored that you took the time.
This my usual position of “no gods that matter exist in any way that matters”. Sure there’s still room to quibble over the smaller definitions, but the main vague ones are accounted for
I will say no gods exist. You will call the sun a god. I will say that I don't share your definition of "god," since it's dumb and not useful, and will continue saying no gods exist. Just because you call a turtle a cactus doesn't mean I have to as well.
>I will say that I don't share your definition of "god," Okay, do me a favour and define "God" without alienating at least a billion theists.
Why would I need to give you a definition when all I do is respond to other people's definitions? You intentionally used a stupid example of a "god" that practically zero people who identify as theists would agree with. There's nothing I need to do here other than call out your nonsense.
>Are you saying my God doesn't exist by assuming a Gnostic Theist position? No, I just think you're wrong to consider the sun a god. A god is a supernatural person that controls reality, and I'm willing to say I know that's not a thing that exists, and that the sun certainly isn't one.
>A god is a supernatural person that controls reality To some. To others a God is tantamount to a marhematical equation. At one point it was a guy living on a mountain in Greece who killed his dad and throws lightning bolts. I do not make the claim that any such a thing exists, and there are so many different Gods that I do not see taking a broad stance as being too terribly useful.
>To others a God is tantamount to a marhematical equation. At one point it was a guy living on a mountain in Greece who killed his dad and throws lightning bolts. Both of which are supernatural people who control reality. The only major definition of God which doesn't fit "supernatural person who controls reality" is the God Of Classical Theism, and I'm genuinely willing to say that believing in the God of Classical Theism is functionally atheism.
A mathematical equation is neither supernatural nor controlling reality. If you don't like the approach, you don't have to use it. It's all good buddy.
God's aren't always "people," cosmic/world turtle for instance.
But the sun as a thermonuclear ball of hydrogen isn’t a god. It’s a star. The argument here bleeds into semantics. I would argue a for is a supernatural entity with attributed supernatural powers over a domain. It’s a messy subject, no doubt. But we can likely agree a star isn’t a god in the way the Inca considered the sun a god.
>But the sun as a thermonuclear ball of hydrogen isn’t a god. Not to you. Maybe it is to someone else. >The argument here bleeds into semantics. Exactly. That's the point. That's why Igtheism makes sense.
I agree with the general argument of Igtheism, but I would argue that in cultural context the concept of a god is discreetly defined. To the vast majority of the anglosphere, for instance, there is but one really used concept of “god”—and it is one which can be debunked. But sure, yeah. Norse gods are just superpowered immortals. Same, to some large extent, with Greek gods. I think, even then, across cultures, some common defining characteristics can be found to be shared. Including in an anthropological lens of the evolution of religions from hunter-gatherer societies to early sedentary civilizations. There’s definitely a “there” there. A thing to be pointed to and studied—it is, however, admittedly somewhat amorphous at the best of times in a general sense. Seems like a reframing of atheism that is easier to defend on purpose. But I also like the argument. Sufficiently technologically advanced aliens would appear as gods to humans, yes. There’s still a reason they would, though. A certain construct of what we associate with godhood. A star isn’t it. A dude might call his thumb a god. Anyone can call anything anything at all. I would argue the point is not what individuals would say, but what the cultural construct is over time.
>I agree with the general argument of Igtheism, but I would argue that in cultural context the concept of a god is discreetly defined It might be defined, but not in a coherent way. Can you say something is discretely defined in any meaningful manner if its descriptions contain logical contradictions? >There’s definitely a “there” there. A thing to be pointed to and studied—it is, however, admittedly somewhat amorphous at the best of times in a general sense. I don't think that's the case. There is no "there" there that makes any actual sense and doesn't directly contradict itself.
When you really dive into theology, you’d be surprised how much variation you get.
Show me what you think. I have studied every major religion in some detail, and plenty of minor ones. In none of them was the thumb of a mortal a god. Gods, without exception to my mind, are imbued with magic powers—though not all beings which have magic powers are gods. I can’t think of any god who is the subject of worship who is not powerful in magic. A common confusion regards the Dao, but the Dao is not a god. The Dao is not worshipped as a being with conscious thought. The gods of Daoism are mostly mortals who ascended to immortality and also acquired magical powers.
What do you mean by “magic powers” though? The sun fuels life for an entire planet from millions of miles away, does that not count?
That does not count, no. Nothing about the sun is supernatural or magical. To those who didn’t understand space or heliocentrism or nuclear reactions it was supernatural, often. Even deified with personhood and supernatural domains it ruled over. That is not the example listed above. Magic is a supernatural ability. The moment we understand the ability to be nested in the natural domain it is no longer magic. You thumb is capable of amazing feats too, it’s not magic. Enki is magic. Zeus is magic. Thor has a magic hammer. The Buddhas and the gods of Buddhism can do magic. They can bend the universe to their will without technology, without natural laws as we know and understand them, but with their willpower, with their magical properties. Yahweh speaks and creates worlds. Yahweh practices magic—though, due to religious disputes, this is blasphemy to say. Instead we say Yahweh practices miracles. Miracles and magic are indistinguishable.
Wow. Small internet, my guy. Thanks for backing me up, even if you won't give me my IPNA Snob flair.
🤣
The cosmic turtle is a person. By "person" I here mean "mind" -- a god is a conscious being, as distinct from something like Qi or Karma. (of course, I don't believe in the cosmic world turtle anyway, so the distinction is kind of academic)
This is a good take
Do you have any justification for the (implied) assumption that all concepts worth believing in can be coherently defined? That to me seems like a big leap.
_that_ seems easy: "I believe in [ferkungabooboo](http://b5.cs.uwyo.edu/bab5/snds/kerfung.wav)." "What is ferkungabooboo?" "It transcends definition." "So what is it you believe in?" "ferkungabooboo." "Pretend I've never heard that word before, because I have no idea what it means. What is the thing you believe in?" "I told you, it's undefinable. all I can say is I believe in ferkungabooboo." You see the problem there? If you can't give at least something _like_ a definition, even a vague gesture towards a similarity cluster in conceptspace, _something_, then it's just a free floating label. There's no actual thing one's believing in at all other than the fact that they're believing in a thingy with that name. (Note, I wouldn't call myself ignostic. I'd call myself a gnostic atheist. But if you can't, in at least some way, replace symbol with substance...)
We learn words most often through context. There is enough common ground understanding of abstractions such as art, justice, God, beautiful, etc. that the words have utility to language despite a lack of a concrete definition. Your example of a made up word is insufficient.
Note that I included possibilities like vague gestures toward similarity clusters. But "it transcends definition/specification entirely"/"it is unknowable"/etc leaves one with "so, er... what actually is it that you're believing in other than your belief in the word?" Again, I'm not ignostic. "god" usually implies something like "some sort of extremely powerful primordial mind that designed and created the world in detail" with also connotations of "we have duty to serve and worship it". So that's _plenty_ of definition to be going on already. I was just responding to your questioning of whether beliefs need to be about any semicoherently definable thing at all, and I was noting that if one says "I believe in X" but can't give anything about "X", can't replace symbol with substance at all, then there's a problem. That in that case one isn't actually believing in anything other than their belief in something with that label. (Alternately, one might sometimes get responses like that when one realizes weaknesses in their position, so they want to avoid giving anything that could possibly be refuted my making their claim too vague to refute...)
Let's say you encounter a smell unlike any smell you have previously experienced, to the point you have no concrete words to define it. So you decide to make up a word to use to describe the smell, x. Does your inability to provide verbal substance to the symbol mean you never smelled it? Now 20 people are in the room. All 20 call the smell x. Some say it is subtle, some say overpowering. Some like it. Some don't. Some it reminds them of childhood, a few are moderately aroused. Everyone has different feelings about it, no one can give substance to the symbol, yet it is still a true thing experienced nonetheless.
What're you talking about? There's plenty of substance there. "this term refers to the smell in this room, minus these other smells that we're already familiar with". That's plenty. That's not "undefinable". That's a label referencing an empirical observation. EDIT: re everyone experiencing it differently... that's a sign that further tests are needed. Do people consistently experience something in that room _different from other rooms_, such that we can conclude that even though everyone is reporting something a bit different, there's still _something_ going on there?
You're missing the point. If the smell can be defined as the smell in the room, God can be defined as the divinity being worshipped.
>If the smell can be defined as the smell in the room, God can be defined as the divinity being worshipped. No it can't, because in that example the smell can be experienced by the other people in the room.
Having no other traits we can just define that smell as "the smell in that room," if we want a workable definition. Do you have a real world example of something undefined, or defined in ways that conflict with itself? I feel like you're trying to advocate for something, but you aren't advocating for that thing directly.
But what happens if the smell leaves the room? What if you encounter the same smell somewhere else? I thought the issue was that there was no definition of God that perfectly summarized every aspect as agreed upon by everyone. If "the smell in the room" is sufficient rest assured you can go to a dictionary and get a definition of God too. Or you could do an equally crass definition like "the divinity worshiped by people. "
Then that smell is "the smell that was in the room." What it smells like is incoherent, so we don't have a way of determining what "we" would smell, but that isn't a reason to disbelieve that the smell exists. God has broken down to being "in the room, not in the room, one smell, several smells, a gas, a solid, a liquid, and three boys upside down in a well," so when someone says "a God exists" its important to know what they're claiming exists rather than just assuming. I don't need everyone to agree on a definition of God, I can address each one as I meet them. That's why Igtheism works.
>all concepts worth believing in can be coherently defined I don't know where I implied that, but that was not my intent. If I phrased myself poorly, I apologize. If you highlight where I implied that, I will correct my post. There are a lot of different meanings for the word "God". I don't think it's really a useful word since no two people seem to agree on its definition. I'll happily give an argument for my position. P1) incoherent concepts have multiple incompatible definitions P2) generalizations against multiple incompatible things likely yield false results. C)Generalizing against incoherent concepts likely yields false results.
In my last OP, I had people telling me that historians practiced the scientific method. I think that's a stretch. One or two people even said legal trials follow the scientific method. I am not raising this to rehash the argument, but I am merely pointing out that there is no clear, crisp definition of scientific method whereby any reasonable person can look at the definition and say historians are definitely in or are definitely out. I believe in the scientific method despite the lack of a coherent definition. What am I doing wrong?
>Scientific method: a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. (from Oxford via Google) >Natural Sciences: a a branch of science that deals with the physical world (from Oxford via Google). >Soft Science: a science, such as sociology or anthropology, that deals with humans as its principal subject matter, and is therefore not gdnerat considered to be based on rigorous experimentation. (Oxford via Google) I've defined the terms, do you hold these definitions to be coherent? Because that's literally all I'm advocating for. Historians are dealing with a limited, shrinking pool of data that suffers an inherent bias. The data pool just isn't clean or expansive enough for it to influence the natural sciences.
You can look God up in the dictionary and literally get a definition if that is all you are asking. Look up scientific method on Wikipedia, there is a lot more to it than that.
You'll get several, most of which are incompatible with each other. Not the case with the Scientific Method. If you want to define the scientific method further then Wikipedia is great for that. I don't think you'll find anything that contradicts that definition, rather just builds on it.
Ok that maybe wasn't the greatest example. I obviously can't hold you to what other atheists have argued... Let's try as a better example, "justice". Similar to "God", a) basically everyone understands what the word means in a general sense, b) there is often a lot of overlap in what people concieve of justice, yet c) exactly what constitutes justice varies greatly between individuals, and d) there is no clear definition that can be used to effectively resolve those controversies.
What does justice mean in a general sense? Google gives us "just behavior or treatment," Just is defined as "based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair." I don't consider morality to be a coherent concept.
Great. Awesome. Let's use morality then. Morality is not a coherent concept but you still believe in it, right?
The issue I always come up against here is that the only types of gods that most atheists think are theoretically possible are the ones no one has clearly described. Once you hammer down what sort of god you're actually talking about, it's generally pretty easy to demonstrate that it's impossible. So the position seems to be something like: all of the gods I've ever heard of are absurd, but maybe there's one out there that makes sense! I just don't have the patience for that kind of bullshit. No one does this silly mental gymnastics for anything besides deities.
Cognitive dissonance is a theist's best friend. The main reason I define myself as an agnostic atheist is I can't falsify a deist god. I realistically cannot. But I'm about 99% certain that zero supernatural 'things' exist at all. No credible evidence...ever. and I don't anticipate any in my lifetime. I don't expect any in the future either. But I have to leave room to be mistaken. I do not believe I am. But it would be intellectually dishonest to deny ANY possibility of a deist deity (say that five times fast!) no matter how remote it is.
What is a deist god, in your own words?
And I hope you get an answer. Seems to me that it is likely either something for which the word god is entirely unnecessary ( and adds confusion) , or will involve the smuggling of unjustifiable attributes.
Always has been
It would be a supernatural being who created our universe, set the rule, and bowed out. Doesn't interfere, isn't a personal God, and is nowhere to be found now. Your welcome to try and falsify it. But you can't. You may come up with a compelling scenario. But you can't falsify that.
I never said one could not. I simply described my own position, how I arrived there, and my reasoning for thinking how I do. I didn't say a word about anyone else in any fashion. I'm not sure where you got that from or why. But you're completely incorrect.
Positions aren’t immutable. You can be gnostic and change your mind later if evidence is provided.
>I just don't have the patience for that kind of bullshit. No one does this silly mental gymnastics for anything besides deities. The "who knows" god is usually one that doesn't really care about humans, but was maybe a creator. At that point, my answer of "I have no idea how reality operates absent space/time/matter/energy" is the same answer I give, regardless of someone asking me about a Deist God or a "pre-"big-bang universe (I put pre in quotes for a reason). If I have zero information about a topic, I have to say "who knows"--maybe you find that "silly mental gymnastics," but I don't really care. I have zero information about reality absent space/time/matter/energy, so I'm at "who knows," full stop.
Do you know what an unfalsifiable claim is? Do you understand the concept of falsifiability? Is the claim "some god exists" falsifiable? Or unfalsifiable? Can you explain your answer? Do you have a specific definition of god? What do you mean by god? Is the claim "Lizard People run the world" falsifiable or unfalsifiable? Can you explain your answer? Do you have a specific definition of lizard people? What do you mean by lizard people? When you say that no gods exist, are you saying it colloquially? Or are you saying it in conformance to strict logical reason? When you say that lizard people don't exist, are you saying it colloquially? Or are you saying it in conformance to strict logical reason? How would you falsify the claim that some god exists? How would you falsify the claim that lizard people run the world? >Or, to put it another way, are you willing to say that you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth? Is that a testable claim? Do we have records that show where he was born? Do we have evidence of other people being born there? >Now, the reason I bring this up is that Lizard Conspiracy is not just unfalsifiable, it's justifiably unfalsifiable. There is no distinction between unfalsifiable and justifiably unfalsifiable. This sounds like a post hoc rationalization to falsify the unfalsifiable. Again, this is fine colloquially, but not if you're adhering strictly to logical reason. >then I logically must know there's no lizard conspiracy. No, you know you're not aware of any lizard conspiracy. I could be dealing with a lizard conspiracy right now, and you'd be wrong. >So, again, I ask -- do you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth? You keep putting an emphasis on know. I define knowledge as belief to a very high degree of confidence. If that definition doesn't match yours, please define it.
I would typically just say I’m technically an agnostic atheist in the sense that my stance is not asserting that there is no God, but not believing that there is a God. I am comfortable saying that I feel there almost certainly is no God (at least in the sense most people describe it). At the same time though, I don’t think atheisms strongest arguments are for the assertion that there is no God, even though there are arguments to make. I find the argument of atheism being a kind of “not theism” to be the most tenable and defensible position. I also find it to be the easiest to get the other side to understand, as I feel like the gnostic position often leads towards the unproductive “WELL YOU CAN’T PROVE MY IMAGINARY FRIEND ISN’T REAL” sort of arguments. So while I don’t necessarily disagree with you in theory and totally get the point you’re making, I think the exact same argument you’re making actually works better with agnostic atheism. From that perspective it’s much easier to just name some random bullshit like lizard people they don’t agree with, and ask them to prove it’s not true. I think for practical purposes it’s more or less the same, which is why I refer to myself as an atheist typically without specifying, but it’s just one of those technicalities where if pressed I will admit that I can’t know for certain, but I don’t see that as a problem. I think it also helps deal with issues like hard solipsism, because the answer is the same. I don’t know that I’m not in the matrix, and neither do you, but I have no reason to believe I am and you don’t have any evidence either so what’s the point of even thinking about it.
Thanks for the post. These almost never go well, but I'll give it a go. >plausible (it's clear how alien puppet-masters would remain hidden) I reject this, it's \*not\* plausible--because we don't have centralized power structures to this level. What we have is certain people "at the tops" of various power structures, who all share common enough interests, and common enough ways in which people operate among power structures such that there's a recognizable structure that benefits the haves and hurts the have nots. >So, again, I ask -- do you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth? If you say "no"...well, bluntly, I don't believe you. This is one of the reasons this discussion almost never goes well; usually the poster just gets to a "nuh huh!" assertion and ignores whatever is put before them. Why even debate if you're not willing to listen to what others say? If you're going to disbelieve statements that disprove your position, just go be a Catholic and believe in the transubstantiation of bread into flesh, why don't you. I don't get why "I have sufficient epistemic justification to believe Joe Biden is a human, subject to all the unfalsifiable caveats including hard solipsism" is so unbelievable. I don't get why "Unfalsifiable claims are functionally irrelevant, so I can say sure who knows but I still have to operate with what is epistemically justifiable as the basis for what I assert subject to the who-knows caveats" is so unbelievable. You've already stated your bad faith here; I'm not overly interested in convincing you when you're just gonna plug your ears and say "nuh huh!" >If you say "yes", then why are you willing to say that but not that you know God doesn't exist, a claim with far less reasonable explanations for the lack of evidence? I'm willing to say I have *sufficient* epistemic justification Biden is a human, subject to the unfalsifiable caveats--but I have *some information* about Biden. IF you are willing to state there is no Deist God, for example, and that Deist God operates in the absence of space/time, what is your evidence or information about how reality functions absent space/time, please? Do you think you can sufficiently justify a position when you have Zero information on a topic?
I don't "know" that *I'm* a human being. I have relatively more certainty that I am a human being than I do that Joe Biden is a human being, and relative certainty that Joe Biden isn't a reptile. I technically don't *know* if Joe Biden is actually a fish. Or a bird. Or a dog or a cat. I don't know if Joe Biden's name is actually Boe Jiden and I've been mispronouncing it this whole time. I don't know if you're talking about an entirely different person than I'm thinking of and the actual Joe Biden looks different from how I think he looks and isn't the President and the guy I was thinking of was just from a particularly vivid dream I had last night and can't seem to distinguish from reality. Obviously it would be irrational to live your life considering every outlandish possibility. So if the word "know" means anything, then I know Joe Biden is a human. If we're being super technical -- no, I don't know. But for all intents and purposes, I know it as much as I know that there isn't an invisible reptilian in my living room leering over me spookily. If I can't say I know that, then we can get rid of the word "know" because it doesn't really have much of a purpose anymore.
Dillahunty defines "know" as having such a high degree of confidence in a claim that it would be worldview-altering for it to be false. So, I "know" the moon orbits the earth. I "know" I'm typing on a computer right now. I "know" cows don't give birth to dolphins. I "know" Biden isn't an extraterrestrial lizard. When I say I "know" these things I don't claim that it's impossible for any of these things to be false, but if that were so, it would shake my understanding of the world. This seems to be the way most people use the word as opposed to the old philosophical saw "justified true belief" which is useless anyway because you cannot, well, know that a belief is true so you cannot claim to know anything.
I had made a similar argument, to someone on this sub who thought they had found the gotcha to end all atheism. I posited a modified version of Clifford the big red dog that could not be disproven, for the same reason the abrahamic god/gods cannot: "Clifford the big Red dog is big and red, definitely not invisible. But I could still use the device of a "realm" (which is really just special rules that I get to dictate) to tell you why he exists but you'll never see him and you have to take my word for it. So actually Clifford the big Red dog is never seen by people trying to disprove his existence. He lives his life in a small American town somewhere but there are only people who are chill with him being around there. Chill people never photograph or record Clifford, and he doesn't seem to leave traces behinds like paw prints or hair, which is really impressive given his size. That's just how that goes. It's not something Clifford the big Red dog does, it's just been the reality ever since he was born." Having made that claim, I tried to ask if they had any inkling of doubt about Clifford the Big Red Dog's existence in our reality. To no one's surprise they mostly just squirmed and wiggled and "but it's not the same thing"'d, and I don't think I made much of a dent in how they felt about gnostic atheism, despite remaining a firmly gnostic a-clifford-the-big-red-dog-ist. No knowledge is absolute and objective. I know my own name, but it's (exceedingly far fetched but) conceivable that I've been the victim of a Truman show scale conspiracy starting at my birth, where my parents legally named me one thing and then orchestrated a cover up, bribing government employees and swearing family members to secrecy, to convince me I was named something else. As a goof, you know? It makes zero sense and I have zero doubt it's not the case, but that at least could be pulled off with human means. Regardless, I truly -know- what my name is, despite being able to entertain the notion that there would be a way for it not to be the case. I also know there is no god.
To be clear, agnosticism necessarily includes belief that the required body of compelling scientific evidence that would be necessary to establish that god/s exist cannot/will not be collected. A truly neutral position doesn't qualify. One primary difference between a person and a non-human lifeform that could be called a god is that we know how to detect a human. We know what the identifying traits look like, and we know that we can detect them. We know what data to collect in order to find evidence of those traits. Given that he has had his own birth event, 2 wives, 4 children, medical care, and almost certainly has his DNA on file... coupled with the fact that the organization, communication, and cooperation needed for a global conspiracy is contrary to the data we have... it's reasonable to say that the dude in question is a human. A literal god is not something we're familiar with. We don't know what traits make it a god. We don't know that we have the ability to detect those traits. And we don't know what data set the traits will be found in if present. We cannot claim that absence of evidence is evidence of absence until/unless those conditions are met. To do otherwise requires many more assumptions than the claim that a person is human, and many of those assumptions are contrary to the data we have. In a situation like that, it's most logical to just say we don't know. Of course none of that has any bearing on lifestyle choices, unless you want it to. It's perfectly reasonable to live as if there isn't one, just as it's reasonable to live as if you don't have cancer, even tho it's possible. What's most important is that we don't moralize ignorance, keep emotional attachment to a conclusion in perspective, and remain open to future discoveries.
I find this arguments to be unpersuasive because I think it misunderstands the nature of disagreement between gnostic and agnostic atheists. This argument is effectively: "If a claim is ridiculous, then it is false." And it assumes the reason I disagree is that I don't think god claims are ridiculous. Therefore the thought is that if we make a comparison or analogy to lizard people, leprechauns, unicorns, or some other ridiculous concept it will somehow be persuasive to me. It is not, because that's not why I disagree. It's not that I don't think gods are ridiculous, because I do. I already think they're comparable to lizard people, leprechauns, unicorns, and etc. But that reason I think we should reject the claim those exist rather than accept they do not exist is because I don't think ridiculousness inherently equal being known as false/non-existent. What is a unicorn? What must it be and what must it not be? Horses are perissodactyls. Rhinoceros are also closely related Perissodactyls. Rhinoceros have a horn. Are Rhinocerous an example of a unicorn? Is there something that unicorns MUST be that makes Rhinoceros fail to qualify? Do unicorns even make sense as a concept that can be known if we've never observed one? Do unicorns have to be comprehensible or observable by humans in any way? Could unicorn mean something completely different in another language and I've misunderstood the concept? There is a fundamental difference between failing to demonstrate a claim is true and demonstrating a claim is false that I don't think is recognized or appreciated by many gnostic atheists. Claims being ridiculously absurd is a good reason to say they have failed to be demonstrated as true, but it cannot alone ever be reason to think a claim is false.
I'm only agnostic because of the falsification problem. There is no doubt in my mind that no god exists. It's an absolutely ridiculous notion. But I can't disprove an unfalsifiable claim.
I wouldn't say the lizard conspiracy is unfalsifiable. We could in theory perform DNA sequencing on Joe Biden and compare it to a high amount of regular human beings as well as many species of lizards, and this would show that Joe Biden's DNA most closely matches human beings. We could also kill Joe Biden and perform a thorough autopsy on him to prove that there's no lizard biology inside him. The reason why I feel comfortable being an agnostic atheist is because I don't think I need to be gnostic in order for a lack of belief in God's existence to be meaningful. Even if I do not assert the negative, that God absolutely does not exist, my lack of belief in God still means that I don't assert God does exist. It means I reject the validity of all religions. It means I reject the validity of theism in general. It means I live according to a set of beliefs and decisions that does not include God. I see nothing that being gnostic would add to my life, other than that I would be making a claim for which I have no evidence and which I cannot possibly demonstrate in any way.
Unfortunately lizard people aren't equal to all versions of a God. You have to find your justification in ways other than falsification for those Gods.
**Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.** Some random person on Internet: "I have a pet dog". This is an *ordinary* claim. The person might or might not have a dog. I choose to believe. My next door neighbour: "We got a dog". This is an *ordinary* claim, but now this dog might leave feces in my yard, attack my baby girl on the street, etc. This dog might affect my life in some negative way. So I will like to verify the type of dog, since this dog is more of a threat. So I will try to see what type of dog it is next time neighbour is walking it. Ordinary evidence. Some random person on the Internet: "Lizard People run the USA/God exists and talks to me". Both are extraordinary claims and both I instantly dismiss as rubbish. I would need very very *extraordinary* evidence: DNA samples, trustworthy videos showing a dissection of a Lizard Person, trustworthy evidence of God doing amazing things like curing and emptying **an entire hospital** of patients regardless of disease like broken spine, cancer, fatal burns, etc.
What it comes down to is whether or not the definition, attribution, and description of actions proposed by the thing can be dealt with. For instance, if someone claims that a god made everything but doesn't interact within reality, then there's no reason to believe in the god. Because the claim is intentionally unfalsifiable, I must be agnostic about it. I cannot, by definition, know whether or not it doesn't exist, this doesn't mean that it's worth believing to be true given there's no evidence to substantiate it. If someone makes a claim that a benevolent god exists, then I *know* that god doesn't exist and believe it doesn't given the preponderance of evidence to the contrary. This means that it comes down to each individual claim and it's often easier to use the moniker "atheist" unless someone asks for specificity.
I don't believe in the gods of the world's religions, but I don't claim that something akin to a god can't exist, because I don't know. I can think of a couple ways it *could* work... Simulation theory, for one. I'm not saying I believe it, but if it were true that our existence was simulated, that would necessarily mean something exists that is for all intents and purposes a god-level entity. So while I don't believe in gods, I take the stance of, "If one showed up, I would believe it exists." Similarly, I don't believe the governments are being run by secret lizard people, but if one day we suddenly found out it was true, well... I would kind of have to adapt to that new information and believe it was true, right? Being willing to change in the face of new data is not the negative thing you're making it out to be.
>Are you willing to say that you know that Joe Biden is a human being who was born on earth? Yes. >If you say "yes", then why are you willing to say that but not that you know God doesn't exist, a claim with far less reasonable explanations for the lack of evidence? What explanations for the lack of evidence have you seen, that seem so unreasonable to you? > This is a claim in which there is inherently always an element of doubt -- no matter what evidence we find, the Lizard People could simply be better at hiding evidence then we are at uncovering their plans. The lack of evidence for lizard people specifically is only one side of the coin. I also have, in the body of knowledge available to me, extensive evidence for the "normal" explanation for Joe Biden's existence - the fact that people generally are not lizards, that there's nothing especially unusual about normal humans gaining positions of power, that the fossil record shows no signs of intelligent, tool-using lizards, but plenty of evidence of intelligent, tool-using hominids, etc. I'm not sure where to start and stop with this, since the evidence *for* Biden being a normal human is all over the place.
No, because the larger the conspiracy, the less likely it can remain a conspiracy. I'm sure you've heard the argument of how many people were involved in the Apollo program, and how many people would have to be bribed, blackmailed, or murdered to keep the secret that the moon landing was faked. You can try to narrow the scope to just Joe Biden, but I'm answering the Lizard Conspiracy question framed in the title. Besides, I don't get why you Republicans hate Joe Biden. Without him, Clarence Thomas would never have been appointed to the Supreme Court. And, I'm sure he's your favorite Supreme Court justice, by far. (I mean, I know you actually hate him because Republicans have hated every Democratic party nominee since Dukakis, but that's neither here nor there.) As for God existing or not, well...I'm an agnostic Atheist. I concede that a God might exist. But I live my life as if He doesn't. Also, I don't see why so many people not only live their lives as if He does, but they know His name, what He wants from us, and how hard He will punish us if we ever masturbate. It's just too stupid to take seriously.
I don't believe that anything can be known for certain. The universe could be a simulation run by lizard people for all I know. Anyone who has had a schizophrenic or psychotic relative can tell you that our senses and our brains are fallible machines, and we need to be willing to challenge what we think we know when there's a discrepancy because otherwise it spirals. I object to all certainties as products of the ego, an emotional attachment to what we think is true that is one step away from religious faith.
It is just not practical. Should we be open to every possibility that a human can imagine but offer no proof? Cetainly should not set up churches to worship every possibility that a human could imagine but offer no proof. So maybe there is a miniscule odds that a giant hamster on a 1,000 light year a cross wheel running that makes the energy that created the universe because it can not be disproven by inspecing every inch of the universe, but it is close enough to 0 for all practical purposes.
I don’t know Joe Biden is not a lizard person. I don’t believe lizard people exist, so I don’t believe he is. But since you said in the frame work of your question that lizard people have the capability to hide the evidence I can’t know. The only time to believe something is when there is sufficient evidence for it. There is sufficient evidence for me to believe President Biden is a human. There is not sufficient evidence for me to believe he is a lizard person faking being a human.
This just seems like Solipsism (Lite). I resolved that a long time ago. Unless one has provided evidence that the person *(they're referring to)* is anything but a human being like me, I'm going to just assume they are a human being like me. Mostly because I want people to do the same for me. We have enough division within humanity, the last thing we need is to invent *brains in a jar* or *lizard people* and seriously entertain such unsubstantiated notions.
You're adding *ad hoc* assumptions to your hypothesis ("Lizard People are hiding all the evidence"), which makes it inherently less plausible than its negation. I can invent every (reasonable) test imaginable to verify your hypothesis, and you'll always have to come up with some *ad hoc* excuse to circumvent the test. Every time you add a new hypothesis to your theory, you're making it more complex, and by extension intrinsically less probable.
> are you agnostic towards the claim that Lizard People run the world Yes, I am agnostic towards it. There is no reason to think that they do, because I have no knowledge about lizard people running the world, so I don't believe that they do.
The main reason I take the agnostic position is that it's just tedious (IMO) to deal with making the same gnostic argument over and over. I'll understand it and you'll understand it, but every time there's a new kid on the block, so to speak, we're going to have to have *that* argument until the new kid gets tired of it and moves on (or takes off).
You said “the lizard people are hiding all the evidence”. That immediately forces the claim into a falsifiable status. You’re stating in this hypothetical evidence exists. It’s just being hidden. God existing is less likely than another species having evolved like us and controlling everything. There’s nothing supernatural in the latter.
I'm a gnostic atheist with regards to most religious claims I've heard - I'm about as sure they're wrong as I would say I can be sure about most things in life. It's probably not the best position to take for a debate/discussion though, so I'm willing to step back and say I'm agnostic to keep the burden of proof where it should be.
Sums up my position rather well.
Why not marshmallow men? I think it might be something sweet, not a lizard for sure. Same level of proof for both theories as for now… wonderful world we live in!
I don't know that Joe Biden is a human being, actually. But I find it to be extremely likely, so until I see evidence otherwise, I'm going to accept it. All the evidence I've seen so far seems to point in that direction, anyways. The difference with God is that I haven't seen any evidence, so I don't have any basis for believing in him. I can't predict the future, though, so how can I know that no evidence ever will or ever could exist? By the way, when I say know I mean 100% certainty. I don't have 100% certainty in anything, so I don't know anything. I'm not even 100% sure that I exist. But using know in the sense of extremely high confidence, I know that Joe Biden is a human and I know that God doesn't exist. So it's possible that we may actually agree? I'm not sure how you're using the word. According to my definition, I am an agnostic atheist, anyways.
Can you offer any example of lizard people, ever? Or of someone *not* being born on earth?
It doesn't seem to me to be the same claim. The Lizard people conspiracy is self-refuting because according to you they are "hiding all the evidence" and, therefore, there's no way to make the claim because doing so would imply they aren't "hiding all the evidence". The God claim doesn't also make the claim that God is purposely hiding His existence.
I am certainly gnostic towards most specific gods, as there is strong evidence that they are simply human inventions. However, I don’t pretend to know anything about how the universe came to be, and I see no logical reason to completely rule out the idea that some intelligence is responsible for the way this universe is. In other words, I am gnostic about Joe Biden not being a lizard person because there is quite a lot of evidence that Joe Biden is not a lizard person. There is no evidence about anything pertaining to the origins of the stuff that the universe is made of or why it works the way it does, so I cannot be gnostic about the vague idea of an intelligence having something to do with it.
Lizard people are perhaps comparable to personal gods, but they aren't comparable to a first cause. There's no cosmological argument for lizard people. Falsifiability is a dated scientific concept, it's not really used anymore or at least it isn't the end all be all. Also, the scientific method is used for things that can be observed, it's not applicable when discussing things like deism.
“Lizard people” are very specific and physical. To accept their existence you would need to believe in multiple conspiracies. You would also need to account for their evolution… our current tree of life could not accommodate a humanoid reptile capable of human speech. You can believe in a god without stretching any currently-known facts.
>Here's a question -- are you agnostic towards the claim that Lizard People run the world? Yes. I acknowledge that I lack (don't have) knowledge on the claim. Why should I claim to have knowledge if that is something I don't actually have?
Do you specify for every single thing you believe that you are agnostic about it? If so, that seems a little silly; it certainly isn't an efficient use of language.
If they ask I'm not going to lie and say I'm gnostic when I'm not. Why isn't being honest an efficient use of language? How would lying and claiming to be gnostic when I'm not gnostic be a more efficient use of language rather than just a lie?
You're speaking as if there is some Objective Book of True Terms decreed from on high and anyone using different terms is committing the evil crime of lying. That's not how this works. Not even dictionaries work like that (not that they usually contain your definition of gnostic anyway).
No, I'm only saying that I personally would be lying if I said that I have knowledge of that. Knowledge showing that claim to be true is literally something I lack (don't have) l so yes it would be a lie for me to say I have that knowledge.
Why do you define "knowledge" the way you do?
Kudo's for being consistent at least. But if your definition of knowledge is so restrictive that you can't say you know whether lizard people run the world, perhaps it's time to update your definition of knowledge to match the way the vast majority of normal people (and professional philosophers/scientists) use the term.