If we know so little how do you know that they are imagined?
IOW what criteria are you using to designate them as imagination?
Who come first the theist or the atheist
- Thread starter arauca
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IOW what criteria are you using to designate them as imagination?
elte
Valued Senior Member
The evidence indicates that there is no being that acts according to what the beliefs say God should do except maybe start the universe. I don't see any divine activity in the universe.
Ugh, how many times do I have to say it before people will stop sticking their heads in the sand and start listening. All humans are born atheists, they are incapable of believing in gods. Given that fact and the fact that humans easily predate theism, the only logical conclusion we can come to regarding the topic of this thread is that atheism predates theism.
It really is that simple.
It really is that simple.
What evidence do you want ? Even if God would come to your house , I doubt you would believe .
The Jews in Jesus time asked him " show as the father the we will believe "
2000 year have passed and here comes the same question from you .
Curious , What do you want?
elte
Valued Senior Member
Something that can be shown as coming from God without any contrary evidence or even alternate explanation, even if it is supported by reason alone. Religions' failure over time has justifiably raised the burden of proof to a very high point.
The more you despise people, the less they will listen to you.
It really is that simple.
So IOW you are only willing to concede god's (non-imaginary) existence at the point of your personal revelation (never mind whatever personal revelation there may be by others in the said field) ?
Is there something wrong with such a conditional concession?
Is there something wrong if I suspend all knoweldge, confirmed and practically useful, developed over many centuries because it conflicts with my belief in the pink unicorn? Would you be willing to let me make a conditional concession for my belief in the spagetti monster?
One of the usual concepts about God is that everything is coming from God.
Given this understanding, it is not possible that some things would come from God, and others would not.
So trying to show that x is from God, but y isn't, is misguided from the onset.
Surely you are aware that vastly different functions and qualities are considered to be true about God, than about a pink unicorn or a spaghetti monster.
@wynn --
Perhaps, but I find that I can't help but despise the willingly ignorant. And the more I have to repeat things the more bitchy I tend to get, though I've been keeping it fairly well in check on Sciforums so that people here haven't really had to deal with it.
If you lot want to remain ignorant then fine, go right on ahead and do so. Just please don't make me repeat myself over and over again because you're too busy ignoring the facts in order to preserve your flawed worldview. Do that and I'll have much less of a reason to bitch at people.
Not quite, actually.
Perhaps, but I find that I can't help but despise the willingly ignorant. And the more I have to repeat things the more bitchy I tend to get, though I've been keeping it fairly well in check on Sciforums so that people here haven't really had to deal with it.
If you lot want to remain ignorant then fine, go right on ahead and do so. Just please don't make me repeat myself over and over again because you're too busy ignoring the facts in order to preserve your flawed worldview. Do that and I'll have much less of a reason to bitch at people.
Not quite, actually.
Yes and thats because the idea of god is much older than either of those two. The same way be know more about the earth than about jupiter. Also, the idea of god is much more expansive. Like the way we know much less about nutrinos than about EMRs.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
What does being incapable of believing in gods have to do with beliefs that gods don't exist, that belief in gods is irrational and not supported by credible evidence, or that religion is socially harmful and intellectually obscurantist?
Many self-avowed 'atheists' attach a great deal of additional content to the word that isn't suggested by simple lack of belief.
That introduces another one of those 'semantic' points that Sciforums hates so much. Namely, what's 'theism'?
I'm inclined to think that any belief in invisible conscious and willful personal agencies is 'theist' in some basic sense. So I don't draw any grand distinction between animism and polytheism and monotheism, nor do I reserve the word 'theism' only for the last. How many invisible personal agencies somebody believes in or whether they believe that the agencies are immanent in or transcendent of nature, may just be elaborations on the more basic invisible-wills theme.
Seen that way, I'd speculate that this kind of belief might be very old. It might even predate the emergence of anatomically modern humans. My guess is that perhaps it's been there in some form for as long as humans have been human, that it's something that the basic forms of human cognition predispose us towards.
I don't really know that for a fact, of course. It's speculation. But everything that we say about paleolithic humans is going to include a great deal of speculation.
I sense that there are deep and interesting questions here, unexamined issues.
You raise a lot of points, maybe it would help to pare them down. I will try to do the same:
- Post #2 advances a claim that theism precedes atheism, based on linguistic assumptions alone.
- The Apology refutes this. Post #2 falls.
- Other posts claim that religion arises from Divine causes, that the earliest human conceptualizations were therefore theistic.
- The Enuma Elish epic refutes this, demonstrating a creation myth to explain phenomena for which they had no science. Furthermore, the Mother-creator is a savage beast. Those posts fall.
- Other posts attach the rise of theism to the primordial recognition of a loving, personal God
- The Enuman Elish epic and the hymns of ancient Egypt refute this, demonstrating pantheistic animism in its earliest incarnations in recorded history. By contrasting the two traditions, the cause for the object being venerated is solely dependent on the seasonal flooding conditions of each locale. Thus the Egyptian hymns are bright and optimistic, whereas the Mesopotamian legacy is one of horror. The personal loving God scenario falls.
- Other posts claim theism came first, citing the Book of Genesis
- The fifth English word of Genesis is Gods, not God. Thus the Elohist clan, which preceded the Yahwists, were polytheists, not theists. Those posts fall as well.
This of course is the quintessential answer, invoking common sense and common meanings of words.
You don't even have to go down all the backroads and hash it to death like I've been doing.
Understandably, the mind that refuses your fundamental premise is the same mind that repeatedly ignores all the piles of evidence left behind on the switchbacks.
But if you cite Boas, and you only want to take the notions you prefer for granted, you should at least acknowledge, in the text I cited, that he attributes superstition and animism to the origination of religion.
Thus, your posts, claiming theism comes first, are refuted by the authority you cite, Boas, who, as you attested, was an acclaimed cultural anthropologist who developed his notions studying primitive cultures which still existed in his lifetime.
Therefore your posts fall.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
"Starting the universe" doesn't qualify. The definition of "universe" is "everything that exists." If God exists, then he is part of the universe. He cannot have created himself. The theists dance around that one and say, "Well he has his own much larger supernatural universe in which he can do these things."
Sure okay dude. Then where did that one come from?
Jung disagrees. He teaches that belief in the supernatural is a collection of archetypes which, restated in modern terminology, are instinctive beliefs pre-programmed into our synapses like other instincts such as feeding a baby or running away from a large animal with both eyes in front of its face. Since supernaturalism does not appear to be a survival trait (in fact today religion threatens the survival of our entire species) it's not clear why it was passed down. But Homo sapiens has gone through a couple of genetic bottlenecks and it could just be an unfortunate coincidence.
Footnote: Although Jung is widely taught and his model of human psychology has been found useful in disciplines as divergent as literary analysis and project management, there are still people who object to it. One of them will surely add his post to this thread shortly.
@Yazata --
Nothing, but what does that list have to do with whether or not someone is an atheist? Oh that's right, nothing.
And they're free to do so if they want to, but that doesn't change the fact that a person who lacks a belief in one or more gods(or who can't believe and thus lacks belief by default) is still an atheist by definition. You may not like it, but that's reality.
And there's a good reason why we dislike pointless semantics like that, the only reason to bring them up is to obfuscate the topic under discussion and make seeing the issues impossible. It also tends to close down communication completely as those advancing semantic arguments invariably follow them with their own personal definitions which they then refuse to budge even an inch from(see Wynn's thread about religious violence for many wonderful examples of this behavior).
So, rather than engage in pointless semantics that waste everyone's time and won't add anything meaningful to the debate(or what's left of it) I will instead go to the dictionary and choose the definition in there that best fits the topic we're discussing. The best fitting definition in this case would be the broadest definition, that of "belief in at least one deity".
Of course, no matter how you slice it, no matter which definition you want to choose(from the dictionary, of course, as personal definitions are virtually always useless or worse), humans predate theism. Since all humans are born atheists we can then conclude that atheism predates theism. In fact, such a conclusion is logically the only valid one we can come to given what the facts are.
See, the problem with your definition is that it really doesn't mean anything because it's too inclusive. According to how you define theism we could easily show that most(if not all) species of mammal as well as many species of birds would be considered theists as they all engage in agency detection and all of them respond to false positives(assuming an agent when there is none). So, according to you, all pet dogs and cats are theists. Should we "respect" their freedom of religion then? LOL!
See, this is the problem with designing your own definitions and then basing your arguments on those personal definitions.
True, it would be quite old. Billions of years old, in fact. However there would still be organisms who didn't/don't possess agency detection software(anything without a nervous system of some kind) who would, thus, be unable to believe in a deity, who predate even your definition of theism. And since your definition can't be limited just to humans, we must also take those organisms into account. And since we must do that we must still conclude that atheism predates theism.
Of course, that's all only relevant if we grant your definition of theism, which I haven't because it's effectively useless.
Perhaps, but unless these issues can magically make infants believe in god as well as completely rewrite history, the outcome of this debate will remain the same.
Nothing, but what does that list have to do with whether or not someone is an atheist? Oh that's right, nothing.
And they're free to do so if they want to, but that doesn't change the fact that a person who lacks a belief in one or more gods(or who can't believe and thus lacks belief by default) is still an atheist by definition. You may not like it, but that's reality.
And there's a good reason why we dislike pointless semantics like that, the only reason to bring them up is to obfuscate the topic under discussion and make seeing the issues impossible. It also tends to close down communication completely as those advancing semantic arguments invariably follow them with their own personal definitions which they then refuse to budge even an inch from(see Wynn's thread about religious violence for many wonderful examples of this behavior).
So, rather than engage in pointless semantics that waste everyone's time and won't add anything meaningful to the debate(or what's left of it) I will instead go to the dictionary and choose the definition in there that best fits the topic we're discussing. The best fitting definition in this case would be the broadest definition, that of "belief in at least one deity".
Of course, no matter how you slice it, no matter which definition you want to choose(from the dictionary, of course, as personal definitions are virtually always useless or worse), humans predate theism. Since all humans are born atheists we can then conclude that atheism predates theism. In fact, such a conclusion is logically the only valid one we can come to given what the facts are.
See, the problem with your definition is that it really doesn't mean anything because it's too inclusive. According to how you define theism we could easily show that most(if not all) species of mammal as well as many species of birds would be considered theists as they all engage in agency detection and all of them respond to false positives(assuming an agent when there is none). So, according to you, all pet dogs and cats are theists. Should we "respect" their freedom of religion then? LOL!
See, this is the problem with designing your own definitions and then basing your arguments on those personal definitions.
True, it would be quite old. Billions of years old, in fact. However there would still be organisms who didn't/don't possess agency detection software(anything without a nervous system of some kind) who would, thus, be unable to believe in a deity, who predate even your definition of theism. And since your definition can't be limited just to humans, we must also take those organisms into account. And since we must do that we must still conclude that atheism predates theism.
Of course, that's all only relevant if we grant your definition of theism, which I haven't because it's effectively useless.
Perhaps, but unless these issues can magically make infants believe in god as well as completely rewrite history, the outcome of this debate will remain the same.
Please forgive me Fraggle but I would like to hark back to an old post of mine on this subject, I have highlighted relevant sections:
If people socially evolved into religious groups then it kind of follows that religious propensity would feedback into the genotype of individuals pressure-selected within these groups, over the generations?
So I would suggest that "supernaturalism" or a propensity to be susceptible to religious epiqhany is quite likely to have been a survival trait, and therefore lightly peppered through our genes. "Thank God" we have brains to realise we don't have anyone to thank! (*necessarily)
I have to agree that I don't see religion as being a prerequisite for the continued success of the species . . .