The “consensus” view among atheists seems to be that atheism is reasonable and that religious beliefs are not.
So why are atheists angry at God?
We can become incensed by objects and creatures both animate and inanimate. We can even, in a limited sense, be bothered by the fanciful characters in books and dreams. But creatures like unicorns that don’t exist ”that we truly believe not to exist” tend not to raise our ire. We certainly don’t blame the one-horned creatures for our problems.
The one social group that takes exception to this rule is atheists. They claim to believe that God does not exist and yet, according to empirical studies, tend to be the people most angry at him.
I’m trying to remember the last time I got angry at something which did not exist. It’s been a while since I last played World of Warcraft, but that might be a candidate.
But atheists angry at God? That’s absurd. Assertions that there are empirical studies to that effect? Simply ludicrous. By definition, atheism is a lack of belief in God or gods. It is simply a matter of logical impossibility that atheists should be angry at God.
I offer you the empty set of presuppositions.
Consider that to be shared.
Which are the assumptions (presuppositions)?
God is truth.
That has to be an assumption. Who can possibly know this? God could as easily be a pathological liar.
God, if he exists could reveal stuff to me if he wanted to.
Sure looks like another assumption, a bundle of them. Assumes that God has “stuff” that he can reveal. Assumes that God gives a dam about anything. And that he gives a dam about you. And that he actually revealed his stuff to you.
Therefore if God exists knowelege is possible
“Therefore”? Given that God does not necessarily exist (a topic that is beyond the scope of the present discussion), the possibility of knowledge is another argument entirely, independent of the existence of any God
Pedant,
.
You don’t think that thousands of angels dancing on the head of a pin are enough to cause it to fall to the earth and give the impression of something non-believers choose to call ‘gravity’ rather than admitting to the obvious truth of the matter?
Yes, the proposition that it’s currently raining in Tierra Del Fuego might be false and still be consistent with everything I know.
Propositions can be consistent and could both be false, both be true, or one could be true and the other false.
I know consistent propositions are true the same way I know anything else–JTB. And I know they are consistent just in case I believe they’re consistent, I’m justified in believing they’re consistent, and they in fact ARE consistent.
PS: I really am not going to repeat this. If you feel the need to hear it again, you’ll have to direct your (same) question to somebody else.
Well, OK, maybe in that case, the theists have a point….
No. Should it?
Did your forget to read the “Myth of Certainty” post by keiths?
walto, I knew you’d eventually come around to my way of thinking!
KN, I’m coming for you next!
😉
Indeed. Call it a world-view. Something you deny having, while admitting to having one. Not an enviable position, for a philosopher.
Did you recently change your mind about whether or not you have a world-view? If not, perhaps right now might be a good time to revisit the question.
In addition to your politics, what other views do you have that are not neatly separable from your philosophy?
How?
Yeah fifth, why can’t you be more like keiths, who first believed in the existence of God and only later started asking questions.
So it’s in your woldview it is both logically and epistemologicaly possible that truth does not exist. If truth does not exist then knowelege is impossible
Cool I completely understand, It seems like we are both repeating ourselves a lot.
That is what happens when you have radically incompatible worldviews.There is just no common ground with which to argue.
I look forward to more interesting conversations in the future.
peace
Does that mean you have nothing? 😉
Seriously, I understand how this is frustrating to you. You think your presuppositions are self evidently true and sufficient for knowelege you can’t see how any one would not consider them to be perfectly valid.
That is exactly how I feel when you challenge me to provide evidence of the truth of mine.
We just see the world from different perspectives. I start with God and you start with you. There is no way to get from here to there
peace
ok, but just in case you’ve never heard of The Bible Code, “the bible is true” is actually encoded in the text of the bible itself. It’s self-authenticating!
“Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is true” is not found encoded anywhere in the text of the bible, so it is necessarily false.
I could know it if God revealed it to me
If he is a liar he is not God. It is impossible for the Christian God to Lie.
This has all been covered. I suggest you go back over the thread
peace
Of course you know I never said such a thing.
I said if God exists then truth exists because God is truth.
That is an entirely different kettle of fish
peace.
Let’s be fair. fifth clearly laid out the rules. keiths chose to not agree to the rules and decided to try to play some other game. fifth, to his credit, has stuck by his guns.
Take that from a disinterested objective observer!
Mung,
Thanks Mung,
That is exactly what I was going for.
Hearing that someone got it almost makes it worth it.
Now can we please move on to something more interesting we have wasted enough time.
peace
PS I really need to get back to coding
Good luck. I’ve kept an eye out for anything even remotely attempting to answer the question you put to keiths. I must need to go back and read again as well.
walto appears to accept the JTB definition of knowledge, but I can’t say that I recall him offering a non-theistic alternative. But to be honest, this thread has gone on for ages. Some of the others KN mentions aren’t even contenders.
ok, so now here’s something I believe to be true. Now I’ll go back and question my beliefs, like keiths, before he become a skeptic, lol.
Unlike keiths, you’re an admin. If you don’t agree with the rules you really ought to step down or keep silent. That’s what an intellectually honest person would do.
No doubt you have absolute reams of empirical objective evidence to support the claims you’ve made about fifth. No matter, the rules clearly say:
Patrick:
Now will Patrick exhibit the intellectual honestly he demands of others and send his own post to Guano? Probably not. The rules, after all, are meant to be broken!
The spirit of Lizzie rings true!
I can hear it now.
Patrick: “CATEGORY ERROR!”
Nope – just some unsupported assertion that Abraham looked forward to a the messianic era – nothing whatsoever about Jesus, his death or resurrection….0/1
Nope – again just more vague, non-specific spiritual encouragement….0/2
Nope – nothing to suggest Noah et al knew a thing about Jesus, his death or his resurrection just more assertions that the OT makes reference to Jesus…0/3
Have you thought about being a medium, Fifth? The willingness to interpret the vaguest of references and offer them up as specific facts are desirable qualities for the spiritualist set.
“I’m getting a ‘J’…anyone in the room know a ‘J’?”
Don’t ask me, ask Noah.
Well, I have to say the entire subject of what we can know and how we can know are quite interesting to me. If I’d been opposite you I would at least have tried to say something along those lines just to indicate an honest willingness to subject my own beliefs to criticism. Makes me doubt the extent to which keiths is a “true skeptic.”
What I found at least mildly interesting is that none of the trained philosophers here seemed to have any confidence in whatever exposure they had to the subject of epistemology in their education. It’s not my field!
peace
I should ask Noah how you know what you believe? Noah is a more reliable source of knowledge about how you know what you believe than you are? Granted, from what I have observed, that’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
I’m sure we can all agree on that! But isn’t that already what we all do?
The two are mutually exclusive? How so?
Why not just come out and say what you mean? We should live our lives as if the here and the now were all that matter and as if there was nothing to look forward to after this. Isn’t that what you mean?
You would never die for what you believe and yet Christians have in fact done so from the beginning. And this makes you uncomfortable. So what?
I was responding to this:
If the Bible is not true knowledge is impossible according to my worldview. I would hope that that much is clear by now. As far as I know if truth exists the Bible is true that is my presupposition.
I was just pointing out that if you are right that the Bible is true, then truth exists–but that that happens to be the case with any book, even works of fiction.
Why would I give ANY alternative–theistic or non-theistic–if I accept that definition?
Excellent! But why not? And what are yours?
And yet you all continuously ask him what it is about his presuppositions that makes knowledge possible, without saying what makes knowledge possible given your presuppositions, or even saying what your presuppositions are.
I sense some disparity here.
I do not need presuppositions.
A mathematician would say that they are vacuously true. There aren’t any presuppositions, so there isn’t anything whose truth can be questioned.
What others might think about it is not of any particular concern to me.
I don’t think I have made such a challenge.
How do you distinguish between “God revealed it to me” and “I had indigestion”?
Mung, to OMagain:
Mung,
You’re afraid even to admit what you believe, much less to die for it.
fifth,
I think this is very interesting. You can’t defend your beliefs, and Mung is afraid even to admit to his. Heck of a job, guys.
KN:
KN,
You’ve fallen for fifth’s spin. If you read his comments more carefully, you’ll see that he has come to recognize the need to defend his presupposition, despite the fact that he started out by declaring it “non-negotiable”.
For example, fifth wrote:
Of course, since he’s willing to test his “presuppositions” this way, they’re aren’t really presuppositions — they’re tentative hypotheses.
Despite his denials, fifth has spent much of this thread making (poor) arguments in favor of his beliefs, as walto has been pointing out.
Yes.
Where did I say I would never die for what I believe? You invented that.
Where did I say it makes me uncomfortable? You invented that.
Where did I say it mattered? You invented that.
No, rather my point was that people like you use the idea of “heaven” to get people who are suffering to put up with that suffering as they will ultimately be rewarded. And you are part of that.
You own that. Your religion revels in suffering.
http://www.alternet.org/belief/mother-theresas-masochism-does-religion-demand-suffering-keep-people-passive
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2008/05/mother-teresa/
When your *religion* believes that suffering brings you closer to god…
What is this thing about dying for what you believe? ISIS lunatics do it every day. Is that a virtue? For the record I put myself in harm’s way in Vietnam. I am not brave nor particularly patriotic, but I did have options. I resent scum like mung asserting against evidence that nonbelievers will not risk their lives for others. Please go crawl under a rock.
Mung won’t even put Mung’s belief on the line, never mind Mung’s life.
Don’t know if anyone else will find this amusing, but when I was in basic training my dog tags said “None” for religion. When I was assigned to Vietnam I was given new tags that changed None to No Preference. The military apparently doesn’t like admitting that killing people really kills them. They would prefer something more like a videogame metaphor in which death is reversed by the reset button.
fifthmonarchyman,
No one is suggesting that starting position. You are trying to start with the explicit assumption that Christianity is true.
If you want to claim that Christianity is true, you have the burden of proof. You must define your terms clearly and provide objective, empirical evidence to support them. You are refusing to do so. Instead, you want your religious beliefs to have a privileged status in the discussion. That is a blatant attempt to avoid your burden of proof.
If you want to start by providing operational definitions and objective, empirical evidence that support your claims about Christianity, please do so. There is no discussion to be had if your starting point is that the truth of Christianity is unquestionable.
The status of Christianity is not proven or not adequately supported. That’s not the same as saying it is false.
Some religious claims — the flood, for example — are false by any scientific standard. Some Christian claims are highly implausible. Again, not false. But implausible claims require good evidence. It’s not a good reason to believe things because they make you less afraid of dying.
we’ve been through this perhaps you should go back over the thread
here are the highlights
quote:
We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
(1Jn 4:6)
and
But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie–just as it has taught you, abide in him.
(1Jn 2:27)
end quote
Peace
How do you know you don’t need presuppositions? IOW how do you know stuff in your worldview?
peace
If you reject mine as silly and inadequate and not presuppositions at all it would be polite to show me your presuppositions so I could see what you think they are supposed to look like .
To the “objective observer” your inability or unwillingness to do so despite repeated requests gives the impression that yours are worse than mine.
peace
No they are presuppositions. You can test presupposition by hypothetically stepping out of the worldview and comparing them to other presuppositions.
The same way you can test axioms by comparing them to other axioms in mathematics. Think of comparing Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry and looking for the best system to use when building a house.
What you can’t do is use theorems and proofs to test axioms. You can’t abandon non-Euclidean geometry midstream because you don’t like the area answer it gave for a particular circle.
This is all pretty elementary stuff
peace
I seem to be managing pretty well without them.
Ridiculous. I’ve told you my presuppositions about 50 times on this thread. As indicated, I’m not repeating them AGAIN.
What’s the downside?
My response was not directed to you. We are good
I just don’t find your presuppositions to be very appealing
Given your presuppositions it is both logically and epistemologically possible that truth does not exist. Therefore you assume that Christianity is false from the outset.
Also I don’t see how your presuppositions can yield actual knowelege as apposed to just possible knowelege.
When it comes down to it we just see the world differently. I can live with that
peace
Given your worldview how do you know that “managing pretty well without something” means that it is not necessary?
peace
I’m not sure that question even makes sense. “Managing pretty well” is simply a personal judgment.
It’s a personal judgement you make before you evaluate any evidence
IOW
a presupposition
peace