God is defined, not described.

Jan Ardena:

Your recents posts consist mostly of repeats of your ongoing errors, evasions and conflations.

Regarding Write4U: he has described himself as a strong atheist, which means he believes there is no God. On the other hand, he has also acknowledged Baldee's posts and he recognises that weak atheism is a perfectly valid form of atheism. The distinction between strong and weak atheism should not be news to you, and it is certainly nothing for you to crow about if you manage to find somebody who declares there is no God. The fact that some people express strong atheism doesn't detract from the fact that many atheists are so-called weak atheists. Moreover, many atheists are not aware of the distinction, and many are quite willing to adopt or accept that their own position is closer to weak atheism, once the difference is explained to them.

Atheism, in general, is not "the belief that God does not exist", no matter how often you dishonestly try to assert that it is. Atheism includes that as a subset, but atheism does not in any way require "the belief that God does not exist". For example, I'm an atheist, and I do not have "the belief that God does not exist". You know this, because I have told you over and over again.

You claim "the actual position of most atheists is that God does not exist", but that is false. The actual position of atheists is that they do not believe that God exists, which is not the same thing. You know this, because it has been explained to you over and over again. For you to continue to pretend not to understand the difference is, it goes without saying, dishonest, and it reflects poorly on you once again. It either shows loose morals, or a lack of basic intelligence, and I don't know why you would want to set yourself up for a reputation that involves either of those.

You mistake lies in the false dilemma you try to present: i.e. a person is either a theist or a strong atheist, with no other possibilities allowed. Your dishonesty lies in the fact that you have been repeatedly told about weak atheism, and yet you continue to deny that it exists, claiming instead that all atheists believe there is no God. Your dishonesty in this regard reflects very poorly on you, and I wish you could do better.

Regarding the way in which God exists: you claim that God has a special, exceptional mode of existence different from the mode of existence of everything else we know about. I reject you exceptionalism, because I think it is an ad hoc rationalisation and nothing more.

Regarding your ongoing conflation of subjective and objective reality, I doubt there is anything more I can do for you. You will have to work that problem out for yourself. You need to understand that if there is a God, that God is there regardless of what people believe, and if there is no God, then God isn't there, regardless of what people believe. You are apparently unable to discuss whether God is real in any objective sense. And yet, at the same time you keep insisting that atheism implies that God is real, and there you must be referring to objective reality since atheists do not subjectively believe that God is real. What this means is that you're essentially trying to make something the basis for your argument, while at the same time refusing to discuss the matter. This might well be because you realise at some level that your argument is built on a tower of unjustified assumptions, but you don't want to or are mentally unable to face that.

Regarding your repeated claim that "For an atheist, there is no God": it is dishonest of you to keep making that claim, even as a subjective matter of belief, when you have been told over and over again that (weak) atheists do not believe there is no God. And as an objective matter, your claim makes no sense, because on the one hand you hold that "God Is", while on the other you would be arguing "There is no God". Clearly, both of those things cannot be objectively true at the same time. This is Logic 101.

Regarding whether God's existence is an "issue", you (deliberately?) conflate what is an issue in a discussion thread such as this one with what is an issue in daily life, or as a pragmatic matter. You tell us that theists are "not concerned" with whether God exists, and that they "do not go around asserting God exists". In daily life, that is true, of course. In daily life, theists like yourself take it for granted that God exists. When mixing with co-religionists, there is no need to discuss on a daily basis whether God exists, because you already know you share the belief that God exists. In repeated interactions with people, it is usually not necessary to go back to basics all the time when you have a shared history and social context. In a similar way, atheists usually have more interesting things to discuss with one another when they meet than the basic of whether God exists, because they too share a social context in which certain common ground need not be continually stated as a matter of course.

When a theist has a discussion with an atheist on a discussion forum, things are often different. In that case, there is a contest of ideas. Most of the time, there is debate about objective reality, because it can be taken for granted that when somebody self-identifies as "theist" or "atheist" they hold or do not hold certain beliefs.

Coming back to this thread, the question of God's objective existence is very much at "issue", because your entire argument here is that atheists can only be atheists if God is objectively real. This is disputed by the atheists, who claim that they can be atheist regardless of whether God is real. If you want to argue, as you have been doing, that being atheist requires God's Is-ness (or whatever you want to call it), then you'll be expected to establish God's Is-ness as a pre-requisite to the rest of your argument. When you make a positive claim, the onus is on you to support it.

Regarding how people come to be theists or atheists: you claim this is "natural". It is not clear exactly what you mean by "natural" - I don't think you have explained that, and I think you're being deliberately vague. If atheism and theism are about subjective belief - which I assert they are - then the question becomes a general one of how and why people adopt certain beliefs, which could potentially include a discussion of both "natural" and "supernatural" reasons. On the other hand if, as you are insisting, theism and atheism are really about the objective reality of God, then the question that needs exploring is the demarcation between what is "natural" and "supernatural" about God, and as a pre-requisite to that we would first need to establish the objective reality of God, once again.

To summarise and emphasise ...
You write:

"Either God Is, or there is no God.
Either you believe in God, or you don't.

That's what's on the table."

You write this as if it is one issue, with the implication that if God Is, then everybody believes in God, or, more importantly, that if you don't believe in God then there is no God. That, is you argue that the statement "I believe in God" is indistinguishable from "God Is", and that "I don't believe in God" is indistinguishable from "There is no God".

There are two issues here, not one. There is the issue of the objective reality of God: either God Is, or there is no God, as you put it. That is completely separate from what people believe: either you believe in God or you don't, as you put it.

Like I said earlier, there are 4 options:

1. God Is, and I believe in God.
2. There is no God, and I believe in God.
3. God Is, but I don't believe in God.
4. There is no God, and I don't believe in God.

Until you accept that options 2 and 4 are logical possibilities, there is no hope for anybody to have a rational discussion with you about theism and atheism.

 

This is off-topic, and should really be the subject of a different thread, but I can't just let it pass.

Jan is being shifty here, as usual, or at least he is not explaining what he means in sufficient detail.

What, exactly, is Jan advocating here?

One possibility is that by "teaching" Intelligent Design, he means teaching it in a class on critical thinking about pseudoscience, or teaching it in a religion, history or social studies class about the negative influence of fundamentalist religion in society, or something like that.

A second possibility is that Jan is advocating a pseudoscientific, religious agenda, in which he wants teachers to pretend that ID is science, and he wants it taught as science in science classes.

It would be nice if Jan can clarify what he regards as "common sense" in this respect - whether he thinks it is "common sense" to teach critical, rational, thinking, or whether to the contrary he thinks it is "common sense" to teach religiously-inspired pseudoscience to school kids in the pretence that it is science.