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... what? How did you arrive at that belief? Dragonlord, as you point out yourself, just made his first posting here. He may well have formed his impression of "athists" in the local coffee shop, or at talk.origins, or by reading the comments at Pharyngula.
But let me come right out with the real question. What is the proper label for someone like myself who knows of no evidence for or against the existence of a deity, but chooses to believe that there is no God?
And, btw, calling PZ and Sam Harris "epistemically careful" is not what I would call evidence-based analysis. PZ doesn't do even the most rudimentary fact checking before passing along anti-religion horror stories on his blog - he has fallen for hoax stories about atrocities by Muslims several times in recent months. And PZ is currently in a debate with Jerry Coyne about whether it is even possible for evidence of a deity to exist. PZ says he would remain an atheist in spite of any evidence.
As for Harris, he seems to be currently peddling some kind of scientifically-based approach to ethics.
What do you mean by "chooses to believe"? Maybe, "happens to believe"? A choice is a result of deliberative procedure, and since you are specifically stating that (these salient in the current conversation) explicit reasoning procedures were not the cause of your belief, the belief doesn't seem to qualify as result of a choice.
(See also Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence.)
When did that become the definition of "choice"? Oh dear, we may need to change that axiom in set theory. Just as well, I never really cared for that one anyways. One sock from every pair? As a result of a deliberative procedure? Give me a break.
But perhaps you can suggest a word. Not arbitrary choice, but arbitrary __. What is that word? To be honest, "decision" is the only alternative I can think of, and to my mind to "decide" sounds far more deliberative than to "choose".
I notice you don't suggest a label for my 'theological' position.
On June 14, 2008. (I almost feel like this should be cross-posted to the EY facts thread.)
I very much enjoyed your response. But some streak of masochism forces me to take it semi-seriously and respond.
I have no complaint with Eliezer extending the meaning of "choice" to include the results of deterministic search algorithms. I just object to having the meaning restricted to exclude a response to the request "Choose a number between 1 and 10".
Oh no, don't do that! Then I'd have to defend my assertion, which is clearly untenable.
How would it exclude that?
It would exclude that if someone happened to believe Vladimir_Nesov's dictum that
Most people, when choosing a number between 1 and 10, do not utilize "explicit reasoning procedures", and hence, according to VN, are not making a choice.
It is no big deal; I understand that VN has decided not to insist upon deliberation; but that provides the background to my masochistic impulse.
Oh! That's VN's wording, not EY's - in Cyan's link:
At no point does EY propose "deliberative procedure". I think Cyan was simply assuming that the definitions matched - I know I did.
The whole discussion seems to revolve around semantics. What is the actual problem?
(I considered making my grandparent comment more precise, to indicate that I was not discussing definitions, but the reasons behind the implicit question I posed in it stemming from the words you used. Since the straightforward incorrect interpretation is also straightforwardly void, I didn't. Yet you reply with more of the dictionary stuff.)
The actual question was, what did you mean by "choosing to believe", and what kind of process for arriving at that belief you referred to.
I mean that I examined the evidence and found the evidence inconclusive. Yet, like Pascal, I found that for various practical reasons I would need to make an assumption one way or the other. So I examined the evidence again, judged most characterizations of deities I had so far encountered to be implausible, given the evidence. At this stage, many, but not all, of my practical concerns were taken care of. So, my options, as I saw it, were to call myself an agnostic, or to call myself an atheist. I chose atheist, because it seemed less wimpy to me, and at that stage of my life, my self-image required me to be "bold'.
Now, let me ask you a question. What difference does it make what the process was? Even if the process were completely irrational, I would still be an atheist. An atheist who believes for reasons not all that different from those described by many thoughtful theists. Why are today's atheists so insistent on seeing themselves as universally rational and on seeing theists as universally irrational?
First, I don't think you did anything particularly irrational. Religions' descriptions of God or gods are pretty specific. If you don't see sufficient evidence for the existence of this very specific entity, then it makes sense not to be a believer. You're not a religious believer for perfectly rational reasons. Choosing to call yourself "atheist" instead of "agnostic" is a matter of choosing what to emphasize. "Atheist" makes the point that believing in God is unjustified; "Agnostic" makes the point that God is possible. Both can be true, and it's your own choice what label you prefer.
As for why atheists call themselves rational -- some of it may be pride, but some of it is justified. "Converts" to atheism, in particular, often deliberately decided to discard things they believed that made no sense. They not only developed doubts about theology, but they decided to take their own doubts seriously, to believe their own brains. It's a rare case when people have to make a pure choice between thought and non-thought.
I remember asking myself, "Yes, this is what my brain says, this is what the evidence says, this is what my conscience says -- but who am I to believe my own thoughts?" When you say, "Yes, dammit, I believe my own thoughts, I'll bet on thought, I'll bet on my own capacity to reason, because it's all I've got," it's a determination that sticks with you, and follows you into other topics.
Which is about as crazy as believing that God is likely. The not-0%-impossible point applies to God in about the same sense as to Santa Claus. If you want to specifically make the point that Santa Claus is possible, something is still seriously wrong with you, even if you stopped making the mistake of believing that Santa Claus is most certainly real.
As SarahC intimated above, it's very unlikely that a specific deity exists. But when you suggest that the probability of God is so unlikely as to make one crazy to entertain the possibility, I wonder what your definition of 'God' is.
Over the course of writing and revising this comment, I'm recalling that the context of God here on LessWrong is almost always that of an anthropomorphic, personal, intervening, laying-out-rules-you-better-not-break god. But consider how flexible the meaning can be from one context to another. In which case, could Perplexed comment on what sort of God he is choosing not believe in without sufficient evidence? With all this discussion of what atheism means, it might also be helpful to pin down if we mean different things by 'God'.
The question is "What sort of God do I disbelieve in?" with it understood that I have already admitted that my disbelief is not based on sufficient evidence.
My answer is that I do not believe in any being with supernatural powers, including beings who control computers in which I am being simulated. Such powers would be supernatural from my viewpoint, if not from their own. I don't believe such entities exist. That is reasonable. I believe that such entities do not exist. That is less reasonable. I plead guilty to this departure from ideal rationality.
Incidentally, a philosophy blog that I sometimes read is currently half-seriously asking the "What is a god, anyways?" question.
If you know that a certain belief is unreasonable, and in what direction it is unreasonable, how do you still believe it? (I mean that both in the sense of "Why would you?" and of "How can you?".) Is that not an instance of belief in self-deception?
The deliberative procedure doesn't have to be a good or reasonable deliberative procedure. (And yes, the axiom of choice is badly named.)
Perhaps "prefer" and "preference" would get across your believed lack of deliberation.
Perhaps he noticed that someone else answered, and had no quibble.
Look at the parent comment.
Strong atheist.
Compared to typical justifications offered for God-belief? I'm not grading them on the same curve I use for Less Wrong users. And Dawkins, Dennett, and Dillahunty would pass even by that standard.
I did. I still fail to see why you think someone who can't even spell "atheist" was talking about the "four horsemen".
So why am I not an example of the kind of atheist that Dragonlord is talking about? Or is a "strong atheist" not a kind of atheist (as a "blue moon" is not a kind of moon)?
Incidentally, it is amusing that we have atheists squabbling over definitions on a thread which started with a Jack Chick quote that got voted up into double digits. :)
Please tell me what, if anything, you disagree with in my statement to Dragonlord. If you have a specific point of disagreement concerning either my definition of agnostic or my claim that you can't refute atheism by definition, I want to know. If you do not, I can't understand what we're arguing about.
I believe (without proof) that there is no God. I strongly dislike it when people like Dragonlord are dismissed when they argue that people like me also are, in a sense, people of faith. When I read that kind of dismissal, it certainly feels like I am being defined out of atheism.
As I understand it, Dragonlord was not trying to refute atheism by making a definition. What he said was in no way a refutation of my brand of atheism, nor yours. It was merely a charge that an atheist who considers himself by definition epistemically superior to a theist is something of a hypocrite. As it happens, I agree.
I find your "you can't refute atheism by definition" to be both ambiguous and ironic. Clearly, what you mean to argue is that it is impossible to refute a position (such as atheism) by making a definition. But, it can also be read as the exact opposite: "By definition, you can't refute atheism." And it certainly appears to me, as well as to most theists, that this is exactly what far too many atheists are doing these days.
I have been an atheist longer than most posters here have been alive. At the time I began calling myself an atheist, the definition was that an atheist is someone who believes that there is no God. A theist believes there is a God. An agnostic is unsure or unwilling to commit. But, as a result of jibes like Dragonlord's, our brave modern-day atheists have redefined the term to include almost everyone formerly called agnostics. They are so frightened of being soiled by that word "faith" that they deny having any beliefs at all regarding the existence of a deity.
That is what I am arguing about.
You're not being defined out - other people are being defined in. But you're correct: I don't actually address Dragonlord's point (which I assume regards the matter of the burden of proof) in any fashion by nitpicking the definition of "agnostic" and "atheism". I am writing a new reply.
Ok. We cool now.
By "without proof" do you mean that you don't have 100% evidence or by without proof you mean that you are believing this even though you don't have evidence for the claim? If the first, there's no problem as long as your probability estimate for some form of deity isn't 0. If the second then whether or not you are an atheist there's a serious gap in your rationality.
Incidentally, it might help in this discussion to taboo the word the atheist.
I would prefer to taboo the word 'evidence'.
If you want to taboo 'atheist', please provide your translation of what Dragonlord said to begin this discussion.
What does that leave us with, precisely, on a rationalist website?
Reasons for belief. JoshuaZ used the phrase "100% evidence", which strikes me as meaningless. He also asked whether I believed something with no evidence. That strikes me as an absurd question. Evidence is always present - the evidence might easily be inadequate, and conceivably could be balanced. But "don't have evidence"?
I think that if he tries to ask his questions using different words, he will find that he already knows the answers and that my previous responses provide the answers.
There are multiple interpretations I have of what Dragonlord meant. The statement wasn't very clear. Here are three translations:
In the first, Dragonlord was defining "atheist" as someone who is 100% certain that there is no god and then meant something something like "A 100% claim that there is no God is just as irrational as someone who claims to believe in God." And then he implicitly defined the term "agnostic" as anyone assigning a probability to God's existence that isn't 0 or 1.
In the second, Dragonlord was defining atheist as someone who assigns a very low probability to God's existence. He then meant something like: "Anyone who makes a strong claim about the probability of God's existence has insufficient evidence either way and so is using "faith" to push their probability estimate in a direction unjustified by evidence." And then he implicitly identified agnostic as people with a middling probability.
In the third, Dragonlord identified atheism the same way as in the second but then meant something like "I am uncomfortable with people making strong claims about this question, so I am going to declare that everyone making strong claims about this question are being irrational in the same way." And then he identified agnostics as people who aren't making him uncomfortable with strong claims about the existence of a deity.
Ah! Very good. Thank you. That exercise was more productive than I expected.
My original interpretation (and the interpretation I still hold) was that he was saying either the first or the second. And, based on that interpretation, I felt that Dragonlord's statement was reasonable and perhaps even defensible. And I felt that the downvoting was unfair. I realize that RobinZ also thought the downvoting was unfair, but I thought that RobinZ's defense of Dragonlord ("The poor guy just doesn't understand the definitions", in effect) was worse than useless, because it didn't respond to what Dragonlord was actually trying to say.
And I thank you for making clear what he apparently really was saying. And even if Dragonlord actually meant your third version, he should still have received a substantive response rather than a lecture on the modern usage of the word "atheist" among atheists.
Well, part of the response about how people use the word atheist might be something like simply clarifying that people aren't making an 100% claim when they identify as atheists. That's quite relevant if he meant the first interpretation. I'm not so sure that anything discussed is that relevant to interpretation 2.
The etymology fairly strongly suggests that a-theism is a lack of belief in theism, and a-gnosticism is a lack of belief in gnosticism.
Actually, the etymology of agnosticism is rejection of gnosis, which is rather broader than the gnostics. We know that because Huxley said so when he coined the word in 1869. That's also exactly the meaning RobinZ gave.