Posted on 04/14/2002 12:31:25 AM PDT by sourcery
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As has been pointed out in the past, in a purely logical argument "atheist" and "agnostic" resolve to the same thing. One can make a separate distinction for "strong" agnosticism versus "weak" agnosticism, but I don't think most agnostics actually claim to be agnostics in the strong sense a majority of the time (though a mathematician might). So-called "strong agnosticism" ("it is not possible to know if God exists") can also be construed as absolutely correct and resolveable to the definition of "atheist" in a purely logical construction if one really wants to step into the mathematics of logic and set theory.
The problem with the way I see "atheist" used as a definition is that people are attaching characteristics of a specific individual to a word definition that has no such subjective interpretation. "Atheism" does not denote a "faith-based" or "religious" characterization even though many people who are atheists have religious-like personality traits. This is essentially a fallacy of categorization and incorrect association, and being of an incorrect construction such as "some priests are pedophiles, therefore all priests are pedophiles", a violation of first-order logic.
One might as well, were there no such
a thing as evidence. Fortunately, the
body of science in support of evolution
leaves one in no need of coin flipping any
more than determining the roundness of
the earth by drawing straws.
Darwinian evolution evidently
denies a free will. It might describe it as a "random" will.
I don't see how you come to that.
Now we're getting close to solipsism. I know a fellow who has talks with the Blessed Virgin when he's not on his meds. (He's been diagnosed as schizophrenic). No, I find all this inner experience stuff totally unconvincing.
Yes, in my opinion. Neither is a theist. Where they differ is in the emphasis they place on the burden of proof. The atheist might critize the agnostic thusly: "Why do you even consider the possibility of X when there's no reason to do so? If you are open to the existence of X (with utterly no evidence for X) then why not UFOs, ghosts, etc.?" So the atheist would view the agnostic as incapable of deciding when there's nothing to decide. I don't know if I'm explaining this well at all.
You really can't say what the laws defining fitness, the adaptive landscape, etc, will be like, since we don't know what they are.
IMO Darwin's insight that the environment treats organisms rather like an animal breeder does, and that this plus lots of time suffices to explain the diversity of life, will stand.
And I've conceded that there's no reason you should, beyond faith... that was the point of the little tangent that VadeRecto and I took regarding the ramifications of agnosticism and science on atheists and theists.
Science helps neither prove their point.
BTW, doesn't the atheist's argument from the absence of an inner experience also fall into solipsism?
This is an obviously false characterization. An atheist/agnostic/whatever doesn't have the answer, so they don't make one up to fill the gap i.e. they can no more accept "God did it" as an answer to something they don't know than "the Leprechaun did it". There are an infinite number of stupid answers for every undiscovered correct answer. There is nothing in "God did it" that distinguishes it from the huge set of stupid reasons. If there was, it could be considered as a useful theory. As it stands, "God did it" is utterly undistinguished as an answer. Evolution (which has nothing to do with the existence of God, no matter how many people try to frame it that way) distinguishes itself in a number of ways from "the set of all stupid answers".
That is actually what the argument is about. What distinguishes "God did it" from the myriad of other apparently stupid reasons? If we could answer this, life would be easy.
Very nice and I couldn't agree more!
In my teens, when I'd recently figured out that I'd been an agnostic for years, I thought that an atheist "knew" that there was no God, whereas an agnostic just couldn't tell and didn't see how everybody else was acting so cocksure.
As I use and understand the terms in their common parlance, an atheist believes that God doesn't exist, a theist believes He does, and agnostic reserves judgement.
Since God's existence is neither provable nor disprovable, both atheists and theists are persuaded to their conclusions by some other means... "Faith" seems a reasonable term for belief in the absence of proof.
That the faith of atheists is manifested differently than that of theists doesn't change the fact of their belief in the absence of proof.
Since science attempts to describe aspects of nature by way of theory, evidence, and proof, it seems to me that scientific agnosticism on matters beyond nature is appropriate.
Which is a reflection of the individual's personality, and doesn't have any bearing on the basic facts. I'm cocksure that 43*13=559, whereas someone else might not be so confident offhand. That I am confident and the other party is unsure does not make my position less correct, nor does the reverse.
"Of course solipsism is the only true philosphy, but that's just one man's opinion" (I forget the source, Martin Gardner quoted it). Who knows? How do you tell mania from enlightenment or prophecy? Is an atheist like a blind person, or is a believer like a delusional person? I have to go along with the skeptics here, the 'inner experiences' contradict themselves too often, and resemble mental illnesses (and acid trips) too much to convince me that they have any reality outside of the experiencer's head.
It's hardly solipsism to observe that there is no-one present when my friend sees the BVM.
Let me whip out my knotted-string calculator. One, two, three, four, five . . .
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n the last decade or so, creationism has grown sophisticated. Oh, the old-fashioned creationists are still around, especially in the Bible Belt. They're the ones who believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, that God created it and all its inhabitants in six days and that fossils are a product of Noah's flood. In the early 1990's, however, a new breed of creationists appeared. These ''neo-creos,'' as they have been called, are no Dogpatch hayseeds. They have Ph.D.'s and occupy positions at some of the better universities. The case they make against Darwinism does not rest on the authority of Scripture; rather, it proceeds from premises that are scientific and philosophical, invoking esoteric ideas in molecular biology, information theory and the logic of hypothesis testing. 