Yazata said:
If you are equating exist with physical object, then you would appear to be more of a materialist than I am.
I'm not equating that, atheists tend to.
The parade example being Russel's teapot.
My impression is that 'Russell's teapot' is kind of a reductio-ad-absurdem of the idea that there's no problem in believing in something provided that there isn't any evidence against it. It doesn't depend on the teapot being a physical object, it revolves instead around the teapot being ridiculous. It's saying that if it's ok to believe in anything you want to believe, provided there isn't any evidence against it, that opens the door to believing in no end of ridiculous things.
There are many kinds of atheism, and I am a very different kind of atheist than most atheists here.
I'm not convinced that you are an atheist.
I get the impression that you have a very exalted idea of theism. (You still seem to believe that theists are superior people, compared to non-theists.) Unfortunately, something happened to you that estranged you, something that drove you away. (That's just a speculation, but you hint at it often.) I sense that you still believe in God and still long for him, passionately with all of your heart. You just feel so distant...
Perhaps you are one of the theists for whom the problem of the 'hiddenness of God' is a deep and existential problem. Or maybe not, I don't know.
Frankly, I don't want to become one of them [atheists], for a number of reasons.
I have no objection to that. I'm curious what those reasons are, but it's up to you whether you want to discuss them.
I'm rather unlike the more militant and outspoken sort of atheist myself. I was raised in a secular and religiously eclectic home.
When I was a youth, I never felt any anger or hostility towards or from the other kids whose families belonged to various Christian churches (and occasionally Jewish congregations). It fascinated me. Sometimes I accompanied them to church and talked to the clergymen. My Jewish friend tried to teach me the Hebrew that his congregation was teaching him. Catholicism particularly fascinated me, maybe because of the church's history, its style (in those days they still had Latin masses), the nuns (they still had those too) and Catholic schools and stuff. My best friend's family was Catholic and the father was a very nice guy, ethical and spiritual, committed to a contemplative form of the faith.
But having said all that, from my earliest recollection, I was always aware that I didn't literally believe any of it. I never have. There was never any fear, never any defense mechanisms. Never any of the anger that so many other atheists wear on their sleeves. No bad experiences with theism or with religion ever, really. My atheism, such as it is, is entirely philosophical.
I guess that's what motivated me to study philosophy and religion at the university.
Which is why trying to find evidence of God in the same manner one would try to find evidence of chairs and tables is simply misleading in that it is operating out of a non-theistic definition of "God."
And yet atheists tend to do it.
I don't understand the point that you are trying to make. The objection to 'tables and chairs' doesn't seem to be that they are material objects. You denied that was it up above.
You seem opposed to the whole idea of making religious decisions based on reasons for making them. I don't understand that. How do you propose to distinguish true religious ideas from heathen supersitition? (Provided that distinction makes sense, which many theists think is the case.)
You've mentioned virtue epistemology several times. I don't understand that either. How does consideration of the knower's virtues dissolve all the questions about how it is that he or she knows particular things?
I get the impression from all these threads the last week or two that there's an implicit argument hidden under the surface of these discussions, often hinted at but never clearly stated by anybody. There are repeated suggestions that theists possess virtues that non-theists don't. Perhaps they are faithful to God or something. And in religion, these religious virtues arguably are simultaneously epistemological virtues. So the theist is justified claiming to know that God exists, and that belief is not only true, it's the ultimate and highest truth. Provided only that the theist has suitable faith. (Or whatever the theist virtues supposedly are.)
You didn't like that paraphrase the last time I mentioned it. But even if it's wrong, that's the impression I've gotten. I'm sensing that the traditional Christian idea of knowing by faith is floating around. So if that isn't what you are talking about, and it very likely isn't, feel free to fill out the details and explain what your own idea really is.
One cannot define "God" as "Supreme Being", "Creator" and "Controller of the Universe," then proceed to look for evidence of "God" in the same manner that one seeks evidence of chairs and tables - and still think one is being consistent.
Why not? I'm not sure what the phrase "the same manner that one seeks evidence of chairs and tables" means. Nor am I sure what you are objecting to. Are you objecting to the whole idea of basing one's belief in A rather than B on there being reasons to believe A rather than B?
Working with the definition of "God" as "Supreme Being", "Creator" and "Controller of the Universe" has the implication that one posits that one's own existence and all one's actions, including this very contemplation of "God," are contextualized by God, and so there can be no evidence of God that one could come by independently from God, on one's own.
What does "work with" mean? Obvously if we choose to believe a-priori that God really is Supreme Being, Creator and Controller, then the whole problem of God's existence would evaporate because we would already believe that God is Supreme Being, Creator and Controller. But why should somebody believe that the definition states a truth? That whole line of argument looks circular to me.
Perhaps the argument instead is that if somebody really understands a 'Supreme Being, Creator and Controller' definition of God, even if one isn't actually asserting its truth, then on that assumption no particular fact could stand out as evidence for God's existence, since everything without exception could equally be termed evidence of God's existence. That seems to land us right back where we started, with Russell's teapot again.
As you no doubt know, the logical positivists made arguments not entirely unlike that (though based on different premises) and concluded that if nothing can possibly count for or against its truth, God-talk was simply nonsense. I'm not a logical positivist and I do want to think that theological assertions can be meaningful, even if it's the case that we don't possess any means of determining which of them are actually true, assuming that any are.
I think that one can (and arguably must) continue to inquire into how people supposedly know, and hence what reasons exist for believing, the propositions that people assert are truths. If it appears that no reasons exist, or even possibly can exist for what they say, then that seems to tell us something important about the plausibility of the things being asserted.
