Why Theists call atheism a Rejection of God

My point was that embracing the prescribed epistemology, which is what religious people tend to suggest one needs to do in order to come to a knowledge of the 'truth', can simply lead one to whatever 'truth' that epistemology has been tailored to lead them to.

Nothing I said is incompatible with the idea that these 'affirming' experiences are ultimately the result of God working in someone's life, which is something many theists actually believe.

What's with the inaccurate reformulation? I wasn't describing something as commonplace as a "gut feeling".

For the purposes of this discussion, I am not interested in how one justifies their own choices to other people. I am examining it all in the context of your comment about how atheists don't do anything to come closer to God. The point is that theists aren't necessarily doing anything to come closer to a possible actually existing God either, even if something like that does indeed actually exist. So any suggestion that atheists should emulate them in this respect needs to be accompanied by a pretty compelling argument concerning the effectiveness of their particular approach. That's kinda funny isn't it? Especially when you consider what form such an argument would have to take.

Sure, it's anecdotal, but it also serves to demonstrate that what many theists consider to be feedback from God is actually perfectly within the scope of normal human experience.

I've presented some arguments relating to how the system (that many theists actually use) is flawed. How about you explain what constitutes the correct approach, and how it is free of all the same basic pitfalls.

Perhaps it's because I wasn't comprehensive enough with my arguments (I was trying to keep the post short, if you can believe that in light of how lengthy it ended up), but I feel certain that you've made something of a straw man out of me. I will try to remedy that through further discussion.

 

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If you wish to show that there is more than the Universe, and that whatever "sourced" and "controls" the universe has the qualities of "God" then good luck with that.

Bear in mind that definition does not equal truth, nor evidence of existence.

After all, I could define Squitch as the puppetmaster who is pulling all your strings. He's invisible, he's undetectable, but he is the one that tells your hand to rise, your fingers to type, your mind to work the way it does.
Therefore you must reject Squitch (regardless of his feelings) if you don't accept this?
Or do you merely reject the claim that Squitch is certainly true?

IF the Universe is sourced AND controlled AND that the source and controller has all the attributes you associate with God, THEN you can claim that such a relationship exists.

But in the absence of knowledge I can not see how one can reject it, rather they reject the claim that it is certain truth.
One can only reject what exists... and with God it is not shown that there is anything to reject other than the notion of God (which many atheists accept as a possibility, but one with no evidence) and the claim that God is true.
It is the latter that all atheists reject.

 

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If you consider the brain output phenomena called a dream, dreams occur all the time, yet I could never prove I had a particular dream, to someone who wishes to deny its existence.

I cannot make the dream appear outside my mind, in a beaker, so the doubter can witness it with his sensory systems. I may not even be able to recreate that same dream, with the recreation of an event, an aspect of the scientific method. Yet, anyone who has had a dream knows this exists. Only an irrational scientist or one with an agenda would set the wrong experimental conditions.

If God was inside, like many religions suggest (inner man) the place you will find God is from inside the mind, and not outside dancing in the forests. When someone has a born again experience, what changes is the heart and mind. This happens from the inside, not outside. If the face looks different the glow is from the inside.

Atheism can't be rational or based on good science, since it lacks the common sense of know where to look for God. Atheism tries to look for the polar bear at the equator and concluded it does not exist. Not the sharpest tool in the shed. This is because atheism is not exactly rational.

 

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Indeed.

But what is your concern with this? Epistemic autonomy?

What is pertinent here is how the theists are explaining these experiences (such as what cause and effect relationships they assume to be in place) and whether they are using them in the sense of "... and this way, I know that church x is the right one, and all others are false."

For a particular person, this may in fact be an accurate description of what went of for them, but it is not necessarily a description that others could somehow use to come to the same result.

Indeed, I was generalizing.

I think it is a crucial point, though.

It's simply a matter of definitions: atheists lack belief in God, or believe that there is no God, or something in that range. As such, they act accordingly: they act as if there is no God. Thus, they cannot come to God.

Theists are doing so, at least as far as their intentions are concerned.

??
No such suggestion was made.
A person whose intention is to find out the truth about God is not a true atheist anymore.

As far as definitions go, nothing happens without God's will, and so everything is feedback from God, so to speak.

In that case, you are advocating that in order to find out the truth about God, the only valid approach would be to have epistemic autonomy.

We've discussed this before, noting how problematic the notion of epistemic autonmy is.

I'm not suggesting a "correct approach," just pointing out some dead ends.

For the purposes of discussion, one addresses the strongest version of the point the other party made.
Technically, this could be called strawmaning, but this way, the discussion goes a lot faster as one is thinking at least one step in advance, addressing predictable issues.

 

Has it been 24/7/365? 60/60/24/7/365?

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Not at all, and I don't quite understand how you came to that conclusion.


This:

given this:

means that you do not have a genuine concern for the matter of whether God exists and what one's personal relationship to God should be ("genuine" according to the aforementioned James' criteria).

But it is not vital to you, nor to many others.

So the question is how come self-declared atheists are interested in this matter, if they don't have anything personal at stake in it, no genuine concern.


I'll base my reasoning on the premises:
1. Only if a person has a genuine concern for the matter ("genuine" according to the aforementioned James' criteria), will they be able to meaningfully investigate said matter.
2. There are fields of knowledge and experience which are closed off to the philosopher, but open to those who have a genuine concern. This is true from matters like cooking, to God.

 

For the time being, definitions is all we have at our disposal. In all things.

What exactly do you think that "evidence of God" would look like? How would you recognize "evidence of God"? Surely you must have some idea what to look out for, otherwise you could not anticipate "evidence of God."
A bearded old man in the sky? A strange glitch in how atoms form bonds? A prayer answered? A burning bush?

If the Universe is controlled, then so are our attempts to find out whether it is controlled or not, so we can never prove it one way or another.

Why are people who claim to be atheists, interested in finding out whether God exists or not?
What do they have at stake?

 

If you agree, we can move on.

I really don't think that there are too many practicing theists (and by practicing I mean those who are essentially 'living' their religion instead of merely 'identifying' with it) who don't consider some sort of perceived feedback from God to be a critical component of their faith. In other words, one typically needs to be getting 'results', and it is obvious what one will ultimately attribute the getting of these results to.

That really doesn't follow at all, and is my primary point of contention. You need to provide an actual argument for why an atheist can't possibly find God without acting as if there already is one, because you haven't yet presented one. In fact I've never actually encountered a single argument made by anyone that demonstrates that this is in fact the case.

The only arguments that I generally ever hear essentially boil down to this: that an atheist cannot embrace the reality of a conception of God that they don't believe actually exists. This is of course generally true of everyone, regardless of their particular philosophical persuasion. In other words, it says little of use about atheism in particular.

The fundamental problem here is that you basically need to demonstrate that a particular conception of God is an actual reality before you can legitimately say anything about whether or not an atheist can gain real knowledge of it. Further, the are certain conceptions of God that if actually real, would put some atheists in a better position to be able to recognize than most theists.

Even the most genuine of intentions to gain knowledge of the existence of something that doesn't actually exist will fail. I am not saying here that God doesn't exist, only that it can't be demonstrated that theists are indeed gaining actual knowledge of something that actually exists. This is true even if God does indeed exist as there's no guarantee that God is not something quite different from what theists think it is. In fact that's a distinct possibility.

One is always operating autonomously in this respect anyway. Always. Even the choice to submit to another is a choice to embrace the validity of a new source of knowledge that you have made.

 

Bigfoot, as a proposed actually existing entity, without any further embellishments, can only be rejected in the sense of rejecting the claim of actual existence. But what if we were to describe Bigfoot as a friendly misunderstood guy who loves people, and is hurt by rejection? Suddenly rejecting the proposition that Bigfoot definitely exists seems like a rejection of the personal qualities that we've assigned to him, because that's how people work. But in reality, a rejection of the proposition is still merely only a rejection of the proposition.

 

The over-simplified answer is that the theist who only sees these two options does so because in their mind God is a 100% real external life form, so the only option is rejection. For this type of theist to comprehend other options would force them to rearrange their values (which in effect challenges their identity).

 

Wow, no wonder you are a Theist. I mean, really, the polar bear analogy? The fact is the we have already reached Mt.Olympus, the sky and the heavens - and no God there. SO now, of course, he is inside us or beyond time. You can rest assured that once we get to know and understand that, he will move to another dimension. A bit to shy for being the ultimate supreme being, won't you say?

The polar bear analogy is inadequate. Deism will always we open, just like the bear will be at the poles. But, see, we live at the equaltor, so for us, the bear is as good as being non-existent. If God was just the initiator of the Big bang and nothing more, for us, even if he may exist, he in effect is similiar to non-existent.

 

I am sure some people feel that way, but logically, I see no reason to think that way.

 

Sure. But this doesn't atumatically mean that they have attributed the cause-effect relationships correctly.

The results mindset is one based on seeking evidence - and seeking evidence of God is a mistake.

Because this is what it means to be atheist.
:shrug:

But you seem to be conflating the atheist in abstracto and an actual John Doe who identifies himself as an atheist.

Actual people are rarely, possibly never, pure atheists - ie. people who would be atheists 60/60/24/7/365.

I maintain that the actual problem with atheist vs. theist discussion and debate is actually one that has very little or nothing to do with theism as such, but everything with interpersonal politics and powerplay.

Wrapping that powerplay into terms where one party is per default portrayed as the stupid or lesser one is simply a tool, an external expression of the powerplay.

Those terms can be anything - from theism, atheism, racism, any kind of eugenics, ageism, aristocratism to one person despising another for not liking Paris Hilton etc. etc.

Once we either consciously remove the desire to powerplay, or engage in the powerplay consciously, it all looks quite different.

There are at least two counterarguments to this:

One, what you say is our popular Western way of looking at this, based on the assumption that we are our bodies, our senses, our thoughts and our emotions.
In some other cultures, a person's thoughts are considered as external to them as chairs, trees and other people. Our way of looking at things is not a universal given.

The other is that even from a Western perspective, we have to acknowledge that we were not raised and do not live in a vacuum. Much if not all of what we consider to be our "autonomous thoughts" we have actually picked up from other people. We can neither claim that "our thoughts" are actually ours, nor that we have autonomy.

 

I'm not really sure that this particular thread of discussion is heading anywhere useful anymore, so I'm just going to skip over it.

In that thread you are focusing on empirical investigation, which is not what is being discussed here. So I don't see the relevance. Or are you really actually saying that even the sort of epistemology that is typically prescribed by religion can not present those who have embraced it with anything that might constitute 'evidence'? You can't be, otherwise you've essentially parted ways with every brand of theism that I can think of. If that is so, what are we discussing?

Actually, the problem arises because theists tend to force a very specific definition of what an atheist actually is upon others. Even you are doing it to me right now.

I have always said that I am atheistic with respect to certain conceptions of God, and somewhat more agnostic with respect to others (usually the more purely philosophical conceptions). But given that you have been discussing atheism in terms of being a 'rejection' of God, you seem to be working with one of the definitions of God that I am atheistic in regard to. So in this context I am indeed an atheist. The problem is that the sorts of distinctions that I am hinting at seem to be beyond your willingness to explore, so instead you simply seek to contextualize my stance based upon your own limited view.

You'll find, wynn, that if you keep doing it I am going to stop being diplomatic at some point.

I think you seem to focus on that aspect of it as a result of your own experiences. I don't deny that it is part of it on occasion, but I'm actually much more interested in a genuine exploration of philosophical issues.

I have some thoughts on all that, but I wont get into it any further here. Suffice it to say that I believe that while we are certainly influenced (perhaps even mostly influenced) by external factors, we can still have a reasonable measure of control over our own actions.

 

It's pretty simple. It's only a 'rejection' the way you're looking at rejection if it's also the way an atheist is looking at rejection. Otherwise it's not.

 

It's not "evidence" according to usual empiricist notions of evidence; according to usual empiricist notions of evidence, following a prescribed epistemology (in areas other than the Western kind of science) is necessarily considered circular (and thus invalid).

Note that theists sometimes point at "everything" - the Sun, chairs, tables, people etc. etc. and say that all this is evidence of God. Of course, the regular Western empiricist considers this to be no real evidence, but merely circular reasoning.

Theists coming from a Western background who still have an empiricist mindset and seek evidence of God, sometimes selectively point at this or that, considering it to be "evidence of God." But such theists are making a mistake.

We are discussing the desire for epistemic autonomy. It generally seems like something very desirable. People who turn to theism sometimes have it too.

Rabbi Kushner has it, otherwise he couldn't conclude that God is "good, but powerless". (Rabbi Kushner's desire for epistemic autonomy drove him to override all traditional notions of God and made an abominal conclusion seem appealing to him.)

The theist and atheist stances are incommensurable. They conceptualize some crucial terms differently.

I, too, could easily say the problem is that the sorts of distinctions that I am hinting at seem to be beyond your willingness to explore, so instead you simply seek to contextualize my stance based upon your own limited view.
But I won't say that, as I understand too well the incommensurability of the theist and atheist stances.

That, I won't say, either.

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Do you notice how there is a powerplay underneath this very discussion?

Actually, considering the role of powerplay in human interactions goes hand in hand with considering preaching and discourse about theistic topics in general.
It is, after all, via conversation with others (either dialogues, group discussions, or by reading books) that we communicate on this topic and develop our understanding of it.

There are epistemological issues that arise in a situation of preaching, and those issues are relevant for how people go about "getting to know God."

For example, if the person preaching to you contempts you, then it doesn't matter how valid their reasoning may be (perhaps they are just reciting a script), their contempt will affect the way you reason about what they tell you (you might reject his arguments, for example; but you would have accepted them if they came from a kinder person).

Or, another example, what tends to happen in a preaching situation is that the listener develops faith in the preacher, not in what the preacher is preaching. And this is a legitimate epistemological concern.

In some theisms, one of the first things you'd hear is that that which you call your mind, is God's energy, it's not really you; so you can't really employ your mind to find independent proof of God.

 

Sure.

An atheist doesn't see his atheism as a "rejection of God" - because he is an atheist.

A theist sees atheism as a "rejection of God" - because he is a theist.


Now what? Who shall bow to whom?

 

Why can't both bow in respect and understanding of the other's position?

Or maybe they have to first agree what it means to "reject" and what is meant by "God"?

 

I don't believe that there is a theist anywhere who wont point to collection of ideas, or a series of philosophical arguments, or some scripture, or some experiences, or any number of other things is this category, to account for their faith.

Give me an example of theist who isn't making such 'mistakes', as you call them.

Except that I'm not trying to dictate to you what your own philosophical position actually is, nor am I limited by only one conception of what God is.

Again, I'm actually more interested in the subject of the discussion. People are people, so those elements will often be in play (if not always) to some extent, so you just need to get past it.

Well, I don't feel contempt for you. I'm sure you know that. I actually like you. I know that's not what you were probing for, but I just wanted to say it anyway.

What I am feeling is the same slight amount of irritation I feel when theists are preaching around here, because although you're not preaching as such, you are pushing precisely the same sort of rigid characterization of the atheist position.

And if one accepts this, then, well, one accepts this. It's part of the epistemology.

 

It's not about that wynn.

We've chatted privately on a few occasions. As such we've developed a relationship of sorts. But what if at some point I had said "I'm sorry, but I just don't want to have anything to do with you". Now, I would never actually say that, because in spite of the fact that we bump heads around here on occasion, you're alright in my book. But imagine if I had said something like that. That would be a rejection of sorts, would it not?

Now, are you able to trust that I am being honest when I tell you that my philosophical stance with respect to the proposed existence of God is fundamentally different from that? If you can believe that I am being honest, then you are able to understand the difference between the way a theist typically characterizes the atheist stance, and what the atheist stance typically actually is.

 

That doesn't lead them anywhere, does it?

The thing is that abstract (semi)philosophical discussions like these are possible in forums and other avenues designed for such purpose (such as college debate clubs), but not in ordinary life.
In ordinary life, practical considerations about how to interact with other people take over.
This is an indicator that abstract (semi)philosophical discussions may be dealing with options for which we don't really have a genuine concern (again, "genuine" according to James' typology).

They have incommensurable stances; such an agreement cannot take place.