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.
Since you asked I tell you what I think.
Jesus was incarnated once, It began at the creation and reached a zenith at the cross and will last till the end of time.
Think of the cross as a collapse of the Logos wave function.
The wave existed before the collapse but it was a mystery that was finally and fully manifested at that point. There is is a sense that the OT appearances of the Word and the Angel of Yahweh were pre-incarnate events but only in the sense that the wave function has not collapsed yet.
As usual John describes this time before the “fullness of time” best
quote:
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.
(Joh 1:9-10)
end quote:
Also you need to keep in mind that from a timeless God’s point of view the universe is static there is no before or after.
peace
Reciprocating Bill:
FMM:
There is a symmetry here, in that I can’t shake the conviction that all Christians know, at some level, that what they are espousing is nonsensical, ridiculous and false.
On the contrary, if they knew that, they would be experiencing cognitive dissonance, and they would be distressed by it. I see no distress. I see comfortable complacency.
Well there you go. That is what it feels like to have mutually contradictory worldviews
That is why conversations like this are a waste of time we truly live in different worlds There is some overlap from time to time but not when we talk about God stuff.
The only way to coexist as far as I can tell is to move on to another topic.
I really don’t understand the obsession with the Bible and all things Christian that comes from folks on your side. Apparently certain folks just can’t let it lay
peace
Were it that simple, there wouldn’t be so much effort put into apologetics.
At some level it seems that there’s at least some unease about these matters among a significant portion. Of course I don’t think even those trying to bolster their faith necessarily “know” at some level that it’s nonsense, but full complacency doesn’t seem the case for many either, at least.
Glen Davidson
True. If completely complacent, no motivation to argue.
Theology — the fine art of making up stuff.
I would guess that for most Christians put effort into apologetics because they are commanded to give an answer if asked.
quote:
but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense (απολογιαν) to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,
(1Pe 3:15)
end quote:
That doesn’t explain why the nonbeliever feels compelled to keep asking though.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Then it should be a simple matter for you to define exactly what you mean by “god” and provide objective, empirical evidence that such an entity exists. What observations and measurements can I make to identify an extant god?
This is really the bottom line. If all you have is bafflegab, admit it. That would be intellectually honest. To continue to claim that this thing exists without providing any evidence is not.
I would be very interested in your response to The Outsider Test For Faith: “Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating.”
fifthmonarchyman,
As I noted earlier, it’s because you and your coreligionists keep voting.
And it should be a simple matter for you to see just how foolish you sound. Alas!
And I would be very interested in how this test applies to you. Or are atheists magically immune from such objective and empirical methods of testing?
fifth,
So the reason God showed his butt to Moses was because the rest of him hadn’t incarnated yet?
What a ridiculous, disorganized and evidence-free mess your beliefs are, fifth.
Cheshire cat.
Congratulations! You just scored a 9.0 on the keiths scale.
You forgot to make it personal.
Sorry Bill, but nothing beats the keiths way!
fifth,
I’m still waiting for coherent answers to these questions:
fifth,
1. Where was the physical Jesus hanging out during all of the time from creation to his ‘birth’?
2. Was the body living the entire time, or did God only animate it when he wanted to moon someone or otherwise muck around with his creation?
3. If looking at the face of God was fatal (Exodus 33:20), and God’s body was really Jesus’s body, then why didn’t the disciples all die from the sight of Jesus’s face?
4. If Jesus already had a body, why did the Holy Spirit bother to impregnate Mary?
5. How did the Holy Spirit — a spiritual being — impregnate Mary? You’ve told us that it is “logically impossible” for a spiritual being to interact with the physical.
6. If incarnation is required before physical interactions can take place, as you claim, then it must have been Jesus, not the Holy Spirit, who impregnated Mary. So Jesus impregnated Mary to produce Jesus the Fetus. Setting aside the incest, would you care to explain how that worked?
7. Did Jesus’s body — the one he used to moon Moses — somehow get shrunk and implanted into Mary?
8. Why haven’t you asked these questions yourself? Why are you so gullible?
Quite so.
If no one appealed to their religious beliefs as “reasons” why same-sex couples should not be permitted to enjoy the legal benefits of marriage, or why women should sometimes be forced to bear a child against their wills, or why climate change is not the civilization-level threat that climatologists say it is, or why evolutionary theory should not be taught as the only serious scientific theory of speciation and adaptation in public schools — then it wouldn’t matter at all to any of the rest of us what odd beliefs any Christian or other theist happened to have.
Religion is harmless; religion + politics is dangerous.
(I might make that my Carthago delenda est.)
For some apologetics, maybe. But a lot of it, like presuppositionalism, appeals to those trying to shore up something that lacks a good basis, and usually not to those wanting to evaluate the matter sans bias.
Glen Davidson
Sadly, politics is religion.
Mung,
Atheists simply lack belief in gods. There is no claim, hence no burden of proof.
If that were true, then democracy is impossible.
That’s not to say that it isn’t true, but it is a reason why one might not want it to be true.
Reciprocating Bill,
Many years ago, some wag — I can’t remember who — posed this question: If Christians really believed that God existed and was watching them, would they ever masturbate?
Few people would be willing to masturbate in front of their mothers, yet Christians seem to have no trouble masturbating in front of their Heavenly Father.
Unless She likes to watch . . .
KN,
Well, if they got her gender wrong, maybe they got the puritanical sexuality wrong too.
I think St. Teresa could have been persuaded to ‘perform’ for God:
Heh, I hope you were sitting inside your cardboard pyramid when you wrote this, or the razor’s won’t sharpen!
keiths,
Like the old joke about the priest who gets to Heaven and can finally read the divinely inspired bible as it was revealed. “Celebrate? Not celibate?”
Kantian Naturalist,
Honestly KN, it is hard to see how you consider yourself a ‘philosopher’ when you say such ridiculous things. Perhaps you’ve never heard of a papal conclave? Not ‘democratic’ enough for your socialist ideology?
Gregory
p.s. after reading some of the long-winded text by Mitchell Heisman, he also appears to have been a man who “might seem to know a lot of things”. Sadly he got so many of those things wrong and didn’t know it.
Patrick is technically right — bare atheism is the absence of a belief, or the refusal to make or endorse an assertion, so there’s nothing there to test.
However, metaphysical naturalism is certainly not immune to objective and empirical methods of testing. How well it fares by those lights depends on how broadly or narrowly construed it is.
Kantian Naturalist,
Patrick is technically correct.
He demands that others subject themselves to a test to which he himself is exempt. How convenient.
Atheism can’t be tested. Atheists are magically immune from such objective and empirical methods of testing. But it’s the theists who fail at intellectual honesty.
Mung,
Prove that Ahura Mazda doesn’t exist.
Funny how the people not claiming to bend spoons with their minds aren’t called upon to show that mental spoon bending cannot occur (WJM possibly excepted).
Glen Davidson
People making a positive claim of the existence of something need to provide evidence. I do no need to provide evidence of the nonexistence of UFOs, ghosts, ESP, spoon bending, or any of the hundreds of well known gods.
Mung,
John Loftus, who developed The Outsider Test For Faith, addressed this exact complaint:
“Is this a double standard, one for religious faiths and another one for atheists? No! Religious people have the double standard. Why do they evaluate other religious faiths with a level of skepticism that they do not apply to their own culturally inherited one?”
Theists are the people making the claim. They bear the burden of proof. Thus far in history, none have met that burden.
Mung,
Oh dear. Have you been hanging out with JoeG?
Although it is true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, atheists would say that they are entitled to deny that God exists until such time as evidence presents itself. That’s why they insist that the burden of proof is on theists, not on atheists.
I have three reservations about that position.
The first is that the absence of evidence based on objective and empirical testing doesn’t actually support atheism — it supports agnosticism. I think that most of the people who call themselves atheists would be in a much stronger argumentative position if they called themselves agnostics. Even better would be “apatheist agnostics”: an “apatheist” is someone who doesn’t care whether God exists. Apatheist agnostics don’t know and don’t care.
The second is that God of classical theism is not the sort of being for which there could be objective, measurable evidence. The arguments are all a priori, which means that they need to be dealt with at the level of pure reasoning, not at the level of observation. (As my debates with Erik a few months ago demonstrated, whether or not those arguments succeed depends on whether one takes the principle of sufficient reason as an ontological doctrine or as a methodological precept.)
The third is that, whereas atheism is a mere negative claim that cannot be supported or refuted with evidence, naturalism is a positive claim that can be supported or refuted with evidence. You’d be in better shape, argumentatively, by trying to show that naturalists are in the same epistemological boat as theists — in both cases we’re trying to justify a metaphysical account based on more-or-less shared epistemic principles. Atheism isn’t a positive metaphysics, but a mere denial of one, whereas naturalism is a positive metaphysics.
(One could be an atheist without being a naturalist if one were a genuine skeptic about all metaphysics.)
KN,
In the same sense that we deny the existence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It isn’t a categorical denial, but we see no reason to believe in either. The burden of proof is definitely on the EasterBunnyists, not on the abunnyists.
Are you agnostic about the existence of the Easter Bunny, or do you believe, like me, that he doesn’t exist? (A provisional belief subject to revision if persuasive evidence should arise, of course.)
I am about as certain as I can be that the Abrahamic revelations are fiction. that part is easy. Beyond that, I am agnostic about any claim — theist or atheist — about why there is something rather than nothing.
Kantian Naturalist,
As I discussed in a previous post here, atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal to each other, not points on the same line. If you lack belief in gods, you are by definition an atheist. You might be either an agnostic atheist or a gnostic atheist, but you are an atheist.
Kantian Naturalist,
How is that different from the sort of being that doesn’t actually exist?
I don’t know what classical theism, but the western, Abrahamic tradition is that God is an historical figure who did things that were seen by numerous humans. Some of those thing should have left massive amounts of physical evidence.
There are numerous stories of direct encounters with this historical God. I’m not aware of any of them written down in the first person, so I see no point of accusing anyone of lying. Most of them seem to be based on a rather loose standard of cause and effect. I prayed for victory and won, therefore God.
Michael Denton envisions a deistic god that puts things in motion with inevitable results. Evolution for him really is an unrolling. Oddly enough, jerry Coyne seems to believe that everything is determined, same as Denton, minus God.
If one accepts the principle of sufficient reason, it is pretty clear that there must be at least one necessary being. As such, it’s existence is known to us a priori, not based on objective, measurable evidence.
But I do not think it is possible for us to know what the necessary being. To do that, we would need some way of determining what properties it has and doesn’t have. And doing that involves something that is physically impossible for beings that exist in space and time: taking a measurement outside of the boundaries of the universe.
So while reasoning entitles us to affirm a priori that there is at least one necessary being, I do not believe that either reason or evidence can entitle us to assert that the necessary being is (or is not) the God of philosophers, the God of Scripture, the universe (if the universe is eternal), or the multiverse (if the universe is not eternal).
Since the existence (or nonexistence) of God is not only unknown but also fundamentally unknowable, I consider my position to be strong agnosticism with regards to the epistemology of theism.
On the other hand, what I have called my pantheism is how I express my feelings of awe, wonder, and gratitude towards the universe as I experience it; it is not an assertion as to what is the case.
As I’m using the term, “classical theism” is the position that we can know a priori that the necessary being is wholly immaterial, conscious & self-conscious, possessed of both intellect & will, and the ultimate source of both reality & goodness.
That’s quite different from the God who appears in the Hebrew Bible, Gospels, and Quran.
Reconciling those two conceptions — one descending from the myths of the ancient Israelites, the other descending form the critique of myth in classical Greece — has been the chief occupation of Western theologians for the past two millennia.
Sounds like a job for the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Professional Thinking Persons.
He used to be real but now he’s moved on to being imaginary.
Kantian Naturalist,
Accepting, ad arguendo, the existence of a necessary entity, that does not justify applying strong agnosticism to the concept of a god specifically. The necessary entity could be a multidimensional, non-sentient kumquat for all anyone could know. Yet, you don’t declare your strong agnosticism toward that speculation.
The only reason people give gods special treatment is because of the culture in which we live.
And you’re still an atheist if you lack belief. Agnosticism and atheism are not points on a line.
Actually, he didn’t. He did a bit of handwaving and you bought into it.
The assertion is that there is an atheist double standard. His response is that theists have a double standard. Tu qouque fallacy.
Mung’s conversion to JoeG is almost complete.
Or he’s evolving to take advantage of JoeG’s vacant evolutionary niche.