This comes up from time to time, so I felt it merited its own thread. Here in the UK, atheism is typically a mark of nothing more than disbelief in gods. I have few friends who attend church, which is less a reflection of my choice of friends than the demographic of the country I live in. I tend not be exposed to bigotry as a result of denoting myself as such. I go online for that!
I don’t wear a badge or steer the conversation towards the subject, but it’s no secret either. No-one cares. If I wanted to run for public office it would be no barrier; people don’t appear to trust me any less, or assume amorality or a lack of goodwill on my part.
But other countries are different. Atheism is the ‘state religion’ in some, in others it can still be a reason to put you to death (surely one of the densest ideas ever dreamed up). I am interested in experiences, and in how you view ‘the other side’. Over to you.
Liz said:
Well, all that means is that the success of my system isn’t because of the placebo effect – but the placebo effect might be part of the explanation for the results of the various studies that show the benefits of belief in god vs non-belief.
I think that like many thought patterns, atheism (and especially anti-theistic atheism) are habitual, like a pattern characteristic, that can be changed through various techniques – as I did.
(Here I’d like to thank KN for providing the link he did about Doxastic Voluntarism. His breadth of knowledge of terms, sources and authors wrt philosophy always impresses me. Who knew there was actually a term that generally describes my process?)
What one believes, and how they go about “believing”, can be deliberately changed. If theism of some sort provides actual benefits, there’s really little or no reason not to develop a theism one can believe in.
Also, you didn’t answer my questions from above:
(1). Would you please back up your claim that there is “no” evidence for the existence of a god of some sort?
(2). Why would a lack of evidence for a thing prevent you from believing in it?
No, it doesn’t!
If believing in God were an effective placebo, it would work for those who believed it and not for those who didn’t, regardless of whether God had an active ingredient.
In fact, I don’t thing God, per se, does, but God-pills do contain some good stuff, which are also available in non-God pills, but these may not be so readily dispensed.
OK, in that sense, sure – plenty of people have changed their habitual thought patterns from being those of a theist to those of an atheist and vice versa – sometimes with some pain, because changing thought-patterns can be painful.
And I suspect that changing from theist to atheist tends to be more painful than the other way round, although you might disagree. Certainly I’d say that atheism isn’t something one embraces because it offers clear advantages, so it bugs me when people think that atheism is some kind of lazy choice. Whatever.
The only good evidence, I would say, is subjective experience of God, and I think that has good alternative explanations.
I honestly don’t think this question makes sense. Let me turn it round: why would you believe something for which you had no evidence?
You might assume because the assumption had benefits (like assuming the earth is a sphere, or that people are trustworthy, or that your car won’t crash when you drive home – but the word “believe” in the context of “no evidence” doesn’t compute for me.
So, you retract your claim that there is “no” evidence?
(1) Because you want to; and (2) because it benefits you to do so.
Okay, then, let’s use the word “assume”; there is no reason, then, not to assume there is a god if such an assumption will provide you benefit. Correct?
I would find it personally painful to try to assume or believe something that isn’t true.
I went through considerable anxiety as a child coming to grips with the evidence, or lack thereof, for the particular deity that I was raised to worship. It was not a trivial or easy journey.
The most prized character trait in my family was honesty. (If you think about it, an honest person encounters considerable difficulty being bad. If lying is painful, morality tends to take care of itself.)
As for evidence, one only has to look at an abridged list of deities to realize that they cannot all be correctly identified. And when you peel away the layers of obvious nonsense, you are left with something having no attributes.
What I took away from my religious education was the golden rule. It fits my temperament; it causes no trouble for others, It has left my adult children liking me and passing it on to the next generation.
The only thing about the golden rule that requires the suspension of disbelief in its utility. On the surface it sounds like being meek and positioning oneself to be run over. So it requires a bit of faith. Which I’m willing to accept.
How would one know whether or not the proposition “there is a god” isn’t true?
Define God.
EL :but the word “believe” in the context of “no evidence” doesn’t compute for me.
I think that is the essence of faith, to believe something is true without evidence. But that is not what William is doing. His is a belief based on consequences for him. Belief actually creates the evidence.
William, a question, if your belief in a particular sort of God created a worse outcome in the here and now, would William’s Wager still be a good bet in your mind?
He could test that by moving to a country that executes people for blasphemy.
GlenDavidson,
Yes, I think this is a key issue. Whether I would be independent-minded in any situation, or just grew that way, I don’t know, but I value my freedom of thought. I shudder to think how I’d have coped in a feudal society, or one where making the right religious noises mattered. My anti-authoritarian attitude hampers me sightly in my career, since progress tends to be linked to singing the company song and general brown-nosing. But I say what I think, something I characterise as integrity while others see it as plain awkwardness. But to thine own self be true.
This identifies a keey element of the problem. People are different.
I have thought for some time that differences in approach to religion and politics is caused more by differences in temperament than by differences in reasoning.
I think people seek out memes that fit their inclinations. And I could agree that it is possible to be an atheist in the same way as being a believer. My experience is that the majority of churchgoers and the majority of atheists are not true believers. I think a lot of people in both camps border on apathetic. All the noise is made by people whose personalities lead them to proselytize.
Right. That’s what I mean by my phrase “normative model”. But I think William is conflating it with what I call a “predictive model”. The latter predict new data without affecting that data on account of existing. The former makes certain new data more likely, independent of its own existence.
Never completely independently, but it’s part of scientific methodology to minimise observer effects. Whereas for a normative model, you want to maximise them.
No, because my wager weights the value of the bet in accordance with here and now outcomes, not potential after-death outcomes. IOW, I cover only the after-death outcomes that are reconcilable with here-and-now benefits. I consider any actual after-life rewards a bonus. There’s no reason in my system to bet on that which produces crappy results in the here and now.
So this is what I wonder: if one is not free to choose how they come to beliefs, and thus what they believe, or at least what they assume – even if such assumptions are harmless and are shown at least potentially to produce benefit, in what sense does one have “freedom of thought”?
It seems to me that “freedom of thought” would better apply to one who can assume whatever they wish to assume, and act as if such assumptions were true in order to test out those models, rather than to one who cannot assume that which there is no evidence for. It seem to me that the latter is not “free of thought” but rather have their scope of available models and assumptions constrained.
There seems to me to be a lot of scope for measurement error in that system, William 🙂
It seems like you are now stepping outside your framework and asking whether some proposition is actually true or false. Why not just assume that not being completely free to choose one’s assumptions/beliefs is compatible with “freedom of thought”. Why is it not turtles all the way up?
Rhetorical question:
Why do so many threads here veer from their subjects and turn into discussions of William’s quirky “system” of “beliefs”?
Well, quirky is interesting 🙂 And William is willing to discuss his beliefs. An OP might be nice, though!
Rhetorical answer:
I have a theory about that.
William J. Murray,
I was being somewhat casual in my usage of the term. I avoid describing myself as a ‘freethinker’, to which your response seems an already-thought-out riposte. By ‘freedom of thought’, I mean that I do not feel constrained to go along with what everyone around me thinks. But I don’t feel free to think, for example, that the sun goes round the earth. ‘Independence’ might have been better.
Yanking the thread by the scruff of its neck back towards the atheist-as-pariah, this is astonishing. All the countries are Islamic, though we could wipe the smirk off our faces by noting a not-too-recent episode where similar horrors were perpetrated by Christians. I find the rationale bizarre. Not believing X is a matter for death? Hasten the end so that God can mete out his judgement?
I can’t resist the derail-bait in the comments though. A Pastor Writes: we all condemn this, but by what objective basis can atheists say it’s wrong? Now where have I heard that before? The irony being, one Objective-Moralist can cheerfully tell another Objective-Moralist their actions are wrong. They can dispute what ‘it’ wants. But an atheist? There’s no ‘it’!
That’s why I despise religious people. I mean, I love a few of ’em individually, and I can tolerate a few more, but as groups they’re filthy immoral and dangerous. They raise amongst themselves the worst rather than the best. Even the “nice” one — like the pastor in the comments you mention — who can grudgingly condemn his fellow Abrahamists for murdering atheists in the name of god, still can’t resist the religious temptation to get in a stab against the atheists whom he thinks are lesser humans.
How long has it been since there was a prominent religious man who did more good than harm? Martin Luther King Jr? Nelson Mandela?
Where are their best people today?
Even worse, the condemned man appears to be mentally ill.
I have quite a few religious people among my friends and family — though only two of them are evangelical Protestants, and both of those are fairly liberal on social issues. The others include various sorts of liberal Protestants, a Jesuit, and two rabbis. Both of my parents attend synagogue; my father is a deist and my mother is a pantheist. And I also have many friends who are atheists, and a few people in my family. At present I’m deeply embroiled in a complex conversation on-line between two friends, one of whom is atheist who rejected the misogyny, racism, and cruelty of the Southern Baptism with which she was raised, and another who is a professor of religious studies and an advocate of process theology. It’s . . . . interesting. To say the least.
The main problem, as I see it, is that if you want to argue that ethics must be grounded in theism (theistic metaphysics), then you’ve got basically two options: divine command theory and natural law theory. But both theories are so riddled with holes that neither can serve as the “obvious” foundation that is required. And so the non-theistic ‘grounds’ — whether deontological, utilitarian, or virtue-ethics — are perfectly viable intellectual options.
That is, if one thinks that ethics is objective at all, and if so, to what degree and in what ways.
They say democracy is the worst form of government, except for the alternatives.
Law is the worst form of ethics, except for the alternatives.
Lots of atoms and molecules jiggling in all kinds of directions, creating central tendencies.
That seems terribly problematic! If moral rightness simply consists in what is legal, then there could never be — by definition — an unjust law, and replacing an unjust law with a less-unjust law could never count as moral progress.
So whatever “law is the worst form of ethics” means, it had better not mean that “moral rightness just is whatever the law at any given time says that it is”.
I used the term ethics rather than morality.
I think ethical and moral systems have no value or standing without common support. Perhaps not consensus, but something close. “Consent of the governed” in a representative government is about as good as it gets, so far.
Each person arrives at his or her standards, and they hash it out. It doesn’t really matter how each person arrives at his personal standards.
It might work in the UK, but it doesn’t seem so effective in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Atheists are not bad people, however their conscience has no reason to fear punishment for their sins, so their propensity to sin is higher.
CC :Atheists are not bad people, however their conscience has no reason to fear punishment for their sins, so their propensity to sin is higher.
Since theists have more ways to sin and there are many more of them to sin, it seems uncontroversial that most of the sinning is done by theists, not atheists.
I’m not sure what tradition you are in, but many Christians believe that God doesn’t punish them for their sins. Jesus has already paid for that with His blood. These Christians could (in theory) sin as much as they want with no fear of punishment.
Absolute nonsense, totally without justification either in logic or real-world evidence.
And not just more total, but far more “per capita” crimes and moral transgressions are from the theists. In more religious nations, and in more religious religions/states of large nations (like the USA) the Abrahamists have higher rates of violent crime, child abuse, divorce, teen pregnancy, and other ills.
It’s true that in some cases the religious views don’t directly cause the crimes. But they certainly don’t help.
coldcoffee,
Christian pollster George Barna disagrees with you. See my earlier comment.
AthiestsXtians are not bad people, however,their conscience has no reason to fear punishment for their sinsthey believe that they have an invisible friend who will forgive them almost any imaginable sin if they just say the right set of magic words, so their propensity to sin is higher.coldcoffee,
This might carry more weight if you outlined what constituted ‘sinful’ behaviour, and if you had some empirical evidence that transgressions were higher among the non-believers than among believers in an otherwise equivalent social group.
You might expect your asserted result, but I don’t see any evidence for it.
The set of sins for both atheist and theist is the same. Not recognizing sin as sin does not mean sin doesn’t exist so the number of ways a person can sin whether he is atheist or theist remains the same.
Those who have sinned but truly repented will not sin again. It is not fear of punishment; it is their conscience which will not allow them to sin.
I fail to see why my contention is not logical. All are sinners. Theist can control their propensity to sin because their belief in God and their conscience will shield them against sin.
As for evidence, what research are you talking about? If research is based on response from those who claim to be theist, it can’t be right because all those who claim to be theist are not necessarily theist. You need corroboration from their friends and church to consider them as true theist.
No theist believes he has license to sin. If it were true, there will be no atheist – they all will become theist !
Theist believe their sin – which was not willful , because of their weak soul – will be forgiven if they repent sincerely. Those who repent and are forgiven will not sin again because their conscience will not allow them to sin
Incorrect. I have known theists of various brands to give themselves permission to lie on behalf of their religion, reasoning that if their lies end up “bringing people to christ/Islam” – then they were worth it.
Prove it.
And what is that set of sins?
Complete list of sins
Obviously no one will ever follow the list in entirety so,
There are only 7 deadly sins . they are:
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride.
Meanings of above sins
As for research, the question is will respondents accept that they have sinned and how many will be truthful? Even correcting for social desirability bias,I don’t think you will get a truthful result.
Pl see my reply to Allen
coldcoffee,
Heh heh. Ignorance of The Law is no defence!
So you don’t actually have anything to back up your claim. Check.
One wonders on what basis you erected the claim in the first place then, since you obviously don’t have any.
coldcoffee,
“Complete List of sins”
Phew. That’s 667! People have been nothing if not thorough.
You boil it down to those 7? No mention of killing people, lying, stealing, raping, cruelty?
So you know what the answer is, and if it isn’t what you thought it was going to be, people were dishonest? Your worldview is tied up in a nice bow. Is bigotry sinful?
coldcoffee,
#11 on the Big List: arguing! 😀
Obviously, not all theists believe that.
ColdCoffee, should we aspire to be like god?