Depending what you mean by God I fit that description. Specifically if you allow God to mean an agent that created the visible universe rather than a process, then I have no evidence for or against either hypothesis.
If you are restricting God to mean Judeo-Christian type Gods, then I am an atheist,
Specifically if you allow God to mean an agent that created the visible universe rather than a process, then I have no evidence for or against either hypothesis.
If you are given a hypothesis “X exists” and you have no evidence for that hypothesis, the rational conclusion is to not believe X exists (which is very different from believing “x does not exist”). The fact that you have no evidence against is not particularly relevant; there are an arbitrarily large (if not infinite) number of existential propositions for which you have no evidence against them.
More succinctly, if you have no evidence for or against a particular existential proposition, you are (or should be) an “atheist” with respect to that proposition.
If I’ve made a mistake in my reasoning/epistemology, please correct me. I’d like to make an actual independent post on the issue of not believing versus believing not, but I’m pretty sure I’m a karma point short.
If you are given a hypothesis “X exists” and you have no evidence for that hypothesis, the rational conclusion is to not believe X exists (which is very different from believing “x does not exist”).
How does “not believe” translate into a probability assignment?
Also, the prior is sometimes in favor of existence. There is, at least, a legitimate sense of “evidence” under which I have none for the existence of a person with the initials PQR, but I’m still extremely confident there is such a person.
Also also, precise existential statements must be over domains. The probability I assign to any particular possible finite structure existing in the universe must be at least the probability I assign to the universe being infinite, which is pretty high. Though, of course, I don’t have much reason to care whether Zeus exists 3^^^3 light-years away.
I’d like to make an actual independent post on the issue of not believing versus believing not
How does “not believe” translate into a probability assignment?
I don’t see that it has to. In particular, the theorems that say (roughly) “the right way to think about credence is in terms of probabilities with Bayesian updating” all assume that all your credences are represented by single real numbers; if there’s something necessarily irrational about simply declining to assign a probability to something then I don’t know what.
For instance: consider a statement that you simply don’t understand, and that for all you know might be either nonsense, or sophisticated truth, or sophisticated falsehood. Until you know at least something about what (if anything) it means, whether you assign a probability to it doesn’t make much difference: you can’t act on that probability assignment even once you’ve got it. (There are some possible exceptions; thinking of some is left as an exercise for the reader. I don’t think they make much difference to the overall point.)
For instance: consider a situation in which you (knowingly) lack much information relevant to deciding whether something is true, but you could get that information readily if you needed to. In that case, the right thing to do in most cases where the truth of the proposition matters is to get more information; a mental note saying “I haven’t assigned a probability to this yet” is not a bad way to handle that situation. (In order to be able to assign a probability after further research, perhaps there’d better be such a thing as “the probability you would have assigned if you’d thought about it”. But you needn’t have thought about it yet, and you needn’t have any probability assigned, but you can still say “I haven’t reached an opinion about this yet”.)
There’s a lot to be said for having, at least in principle, probability assignments for everything. It simplifies one’s decision theory, for instance. But I don’t see any compulsion.
In my experience with atheist communities, the difference between “do not believe X exists” and “believe X does not exist” seems to be roughly equivalent to P(“X exists”) = epsilon vs. P(“X exists”) = 0. I can’t speak for what Psychohistorian meant, though.
Beyond the problem of complete acceptance, I have yet to find a definition of God that is not:
Obviously empirically false (e.g. omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and nothing else) or
Incoherent - (e.g. omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and some fourth property that we cannot possibly fathom that supercedes the other thre,
i.e. we literally have no idea what He is)
Most definitions of god involve a lot of hand-waving, to the point at which you don’t actually know what you mean when you say “I believe in God.”
This is the main reason I do not associate atheism with an affirmative belief in non-existence. “I do not believe bleggs exist” is not a reasonable statement unless you can reasonably define bleggs.
“Any agent with supernatural powers who is responsible for the creation of the universe and/or mankind, who is ontologically superior to mankind” seems like a fairly catch-all definition of God (as opposed to god(s), which could be somewhat different). Admittedly, there’s some hand-waving in “ontologically superior,” but I think this definition is pretty effective. Admittedly I know little about Eastern religion, so I may be missing something big. I’m not attached to that definition at all and would love to see a better one if someone has one.
I feel fairly comfortable describing myself as an atheist without having a catch-all definition of God. What I mean when I describe myself as an atheist is that I believe in the non-existence of God according to the (differing) definitions used by 95%+ of people who claim to believe in God. In a discussion with an individual theist, if they ask me what I mean when I say God doesn’t exist, I can ask them what they believe about God and then tell them why I believe that God doesn’t exist.
In the rare case of a theist who believes in a God who created the universe and has had no further involvement, I will explain to them why I think that the God they believe in is a meaningless concept and not something to which the word belief can be usefully attached.
Basically. If you had a god that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good/benevolent, and has absolutely no other characteristics governing his behaviour, you’d expect to live in a much, much nicer world than you actually do.
Most of the responses to this problem postulate that god has some other set of goals in addition to these four, i.e. he wants to reward the faithful, or he wants to ensure free will, or something like that. These responses generally succeed only by making the concept of god so muddy that you don’t know what you believe in, i.e. He’s all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, except for whenever he’s not. More explicit point here.
I think there are multiple obstacles in doing that.
This society may very well disagree on what God means in an irreconcilable manner
People not integrated into our society will use the definition from their last society and no one will know something is off
Any agreement will not cover all current uses of the word “God” or “gods”
As it is, “God” is a loose word and simply means what it means. If you need a specific definition I think it is simply best to define the term before using it. All of this comes back to the original point by simply stating that there is no definition that can be used with complete acceptance. I really see no problem with that as long as we know this is the case.
Rather than argue with you, I am inclined to agree, but I’m not sure what to do next. When I read a statement such as, “This isn’t groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false.” I’m not sure how to interpret it. Do you (I mean, should I) read it and assign some kind of “fuzzy” meaning?
The “theistic” in that sense is probably a wider definition intentionally. If someone came forward and said, “Well, what about this? This is not technically theism; it is X,” my hunch is the community will say, “Well, we reject that, too.”
Specifically if you allow God to mean an agent that created the visible universe rather than a process, then I have no evidence for or against either hypothesis.
You have no evidence that you understand. Claiming that you literally have no evidence is too strong an assertion, it sounds to imply that even a Bayesian superintelligence couldn’t come to a different conclusion given all the evidence you experienced, starting from the reconstruction of your true prior.
My problem is I am not sure at all what would count as evidence in this case.
The problem comes from assuming that there are different rules before the start of the universe. If the rules are different, then the all the evidence I have collected about the world at the moment may not apply. E.g. we could be simulated on hardware in an invisible universe with completely different rules.
Yes, you are confused, but don’t expect the territory to be blank where the confusion lies in your mind. Work on understanding of the question, or of where that question came from, until you come up with a problem that actually gets resolved, even if with a negative answer.
For most factual questions this is true, I suspect we might come up against self-referential paradoxes in the discussions about how to gain knowledge about the first cause of our existence.
In several forms and ways, I’ve been told that using agnostic instead of atheist because “you can’t be absolutely certain of anything” is wrong because its overly pedantic. Your comment is pedantic in exactly the same way: of course whpearson means that he has no evidence for or against either hypothesis that he understands. When an athiest claims that there is no evidence that Gods exists, he means there is no evidence that he understands. I.e., ‘to the extent of his knowledge’. I think what you’re really trying to say is that you think there is evidence that there is no God? Why not say this outright? I think this is one of the ways people try to avoid getting in a confrontation about specific facts. Maybe you’re just not interested in discussing this because you’ve ‘seen it all before’. So you’d like to assert your point of view from some philosophically safe position without actually engaging in an argument about the real issue: is there evidence for the non-existence of God?
Depending what you mean by God I fit that description. Specifically if you allow God to mean an agent that created the visible universe rather than a process, then I have no evidence for or against either hypothesis.
If you are restricting God to mean Judeo-Christian type Gods, then I am an atheist,
If you are given a hypothesis “X exists” and you have no evidence for that hypothesis, the rational conclusion is to not believe X exists (which is very different from believing “x does not exist”). The fact that you have no evidence against is not particularly relevant; there are an arbitrarily large (if not infinite) number of existential propositions for which you have no evidence against them.
More succinctly, if you have no evidence for or against a particular existential proposition, you are (or should be) an “atheist” with respect to that proposition.
If I’ve made a mistake in my reasoning/epistemology, please correct me. I’d like to make an actual independent post on the issue of not believing versus believing not, but I’m pretty sure I’m a karma point short.
How does “not believe” translate into a probability assignment?
Also, the prior is sometimes in favor of existence. There is, at least, a legitimate sense of “evidence” under which I have none for the existence of a person with the initials PQR, but I’m still extremely confident there is such a person.
Also also, precise existential statements must be over domains. The probability I assign to any particular possible finite structure existing in the universe must be at least the probability I assign to the universe being infinite, which is pretty high. Though, of course, I don’t have much reason to care whether Zeus exists 3^^^3 light-years away.
Please do!
I don’t see that it has to. In particular, the theorems that say (roughly) “the right way to think about credence is in terms of probabilities with Bayesian updating” all assume that all your credences are represented by single real numbers; if there’s something necessarily irrational about simply declining to assign a probability to something then I don’t know what.
For instance: consider a statement that you simply don’t understand, and that for all you know might be either nonsense, or sophisticated truth, or sophisticated falsehood. Until you know at least something about what (if anything) it means, whether you assign a probability to it doesn’t make much difference: you can’t act on that probability assignment even once you’ve got it. (There are some possible exceptions; thinking of some is left as an exercise for the reader. I don’t think they make much difference to the overall point.)
For instance: consider a situation in which you (knowingly) lack much information relevant to deciding whether something is true, but you could get that information readily if you needed to. In that case, the right thing to do in most cases where the truth of the proposition matters is to get more information; a mental note saying “I haven’t assigned a probability to this yet” is not a bad way to handle that situation. (In order to be able to assign a probability after further research, perhaps there’d better be such a thing as “the probability you would have assigned if you’d thought about it”. But you needn’t have thought about it yet, and you needn’t have any probability assigned, but you can still say “I haven’t reached an opinion about this yet”.)
There’s a lot to be said for having, at least in principle, probability assignments for everything. It simplifies one’s decision theory, for instance. But I don’t see any compulsion.
In my experience with atheist communities, the difference between “do not believe X exists” and “believe X does not exist” seems to be roughly equivalent to P(“X exists”) = epsilon vs. P(“X exists”) = 0. I can’t speak for what Psychohistorian meant, though.
In terms of God, I am just reusing the word. If it means something more specific to you we can use yours. :)
We need some social agreement on what the word God means in order to have any sort of sensible discussions about our beliefs in it or otherwise.
Beyond the problem of complete acceptance, I have yet to find a definition of God that is not:
Obviously empirically false (e.g. omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and nothing else) or
Incoherent - (e.g. omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and some fourth property that we cannot possibly fathom that supercedes the other thre, i.e. we literally have no idea what He is)
Most definitions of god involve a lot of hand-waving, to the point at which you don’t actually know what you mean when you say “I believe in God.”
This is the main reason I do not associate atheism with an affirmative belief in non-existence. “I do not believe bleggs exist” is not a reasonable statement unless you can reasonably define bleggs.
“Any agent with supernatural powers who is responsible for the creation of the universe and/or mankind, who is ontologically superior to mankind” seems like a fairly catch-all definition of God (as opposed to god(s), which could be somewhat different). Admittedly, there’s some hand-waving in “ontologically superior,” but I think this definition is pretty effective. Admittedly I know little about Eastern religion, so I may be missing something big. I’m not attached to that definition at all and would love to see a better one if someone has one.
I feel fairly comfortable describing myself as an atheist without having a catch-all definition of God. What I mean when I describe myself as an atheist is that I believe in the non-existence of God according to the (differing) definitions used by 95%+ of people who claim to believe in God. In a discussion with an individual theist, if they ask me what I mean when I say God doesn’t exist, I can ask them what they believe about God and then tell them why I believe that God doesn’t exist.
In the rare case of a theist who believes in a God who created the universe and has had no further involvement, I will explain to them why I think that the God they believe in is a meaningless concept and not something to which the word belief can be usefully attached.
Just to make sure I’m up to date, is the evidence against (1) largely (roughly) that there is evil?
Basically. If you had a god that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good/benevolent, and has absolutely no other characteristics governing his behaviour, you’d expect to live in a much, much nicer world than you actually do.
Most of the responses to this problem postulate that god has some other set of goals in addition to these four, i.e. he wants to reward the faithful, or he wants to ensure free will, or something like that. These responses generally succeed only by making the concept of god so muddy that you don’t know what you believe in, i.e. He’s all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, except for whenever he’s not. More explicit point here.
I think there are multiple obstacles in doing that.
This society may very well disagree on what God means in an irreconcilable manner
People not integrated into our society will use the definition from their last society and no one will know something is off
Any agreement will not cover all current uses of the word “God” or “gods”
As it is, “God” is a loose word and simply means what it means. If you need a specific definition I think it is simply best to define the term before using it. All of this comes back to the original point by simply stating that there is no definition that can be used with complete acceptance. I really see no problem with that as long as we know this is the case.
Rather than argue with you, I am inclined to agree, but I’m not sure what to do next. When I read a statement such as, “This isn’t groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false.” I’m not sure how to interpret it. Do you (I mean, should I) read it and assign some kind of “fuzzy” meaning?
The “theistic” in that sense is probably a wider definition intentionally. If someone came forward and said, “Well, what about this? This is not technically theism; it is X,” my hunch is the community will say, “Well, we reject that, too.”
So, yeah, fuzzy.
You have no evidence that you understand. Claiming that you literally have no evidence is too strong an assertion, it sounds to imply that even a Bayesian superintelligence couldn’t come to a different conclusion given all the evidence you experienced, starting from the reconstruction of your true prior.
My problem is I am not sure at all what would count as evidence in this case.
The problem comes from assuming that there are different rules before the start of the universe. If the rules are different, then the all the evidence I have collected about the world at the moment may not apply. E.g. we could be simulated on hardware in an invisible universe with completely different rules.
Yes, you are confused, but don’t expect the territory to be blank where the confusion lies in your mind. Work on understanding of the question, or of where that question came from, until you come up with a problem that actually gets resolved, even if with a negative answer.
I wouldn’t say I was confused, simply unresolved.
Why should all questions be resoluble?
Generally, the policy of “presumed resolvable, though perhaps not with current methods” seems to have the best results in such cases.
Sorry didn’t see this for a while.
For most factual questions this is true, I suspect we might come up against self-referential paradoxes in the discussions about how to gain knowledge about the first cause of our existence.
In several forms and ways, I’ve been told that using agnostic instead of atheist because “you can’t be absolutely certain of anything” is wrong because its overly pedantic. Your comment is pedantic in exactly the same way: of course whpearson means that he has no evidence for or against either hypothesis that he understands. When an athiest claims that there is no evidence that Gods exists, he means there is no evidence that he understands. I.e., ‘to the extent of his knowledge’. I think what you’re really trying to say is that you think there is evidence that there is no God? Why not say this outright? I think this is one of the ways people try to avoid getting in a confrontation about specific facts. Maybe you’re just not interested in discussing this because you’ve ‘seen it all before’. So you’d like to assert your point of view from some philosophically safe position without actually engaging in an argument about the real issue: is there evidence for the non-existence of God?