“Atheism” is really made up of two distinct components, which one might call “untheism” and “antitheism”.
This distinction is isomorphic to the traditional distinction between negative and positive atheism, respectively. Of course, the Catholics would use “positive atheism” in a slightly different sense, referring to those who believe in God but reject him anyway, so perhaps newer jargon is in order (not that this field of inquiry has any lack of distinctions)
To make the distinction clear, if “weak atheism” aka “negative atheism” is lack of belief in God, and strong atheism is belief in lack of God, then:
Weak Untheism would be having never heard of God, but having already invented such epistemic rules that, faced with the proposition of God / religion, you will fail to accept it.
Strong Untheism would be having never heard of God, but having already developed epistemic rules of sufficient strength that, first faced with the proposition of God / religion, you will pass definite negative judgment on it.
To echo scientists who say that something is “Not Even Wrong” if its untestable and/or non-scientific to the point of being incomprehensible, my position on the whole religion question is one that I tend to call Ignosticism in which I say that religions definitions of God are so self-contradictory that I don’t even know what they mean by God.
Generally, when some asks if I believe in God, I tell them to define it. When they ask me why, I ask them if they believe in Frub. If so, why? If not, why? Without me giving them a definition, how can they possibly give a rational answer.
Well, sure. By the time the Untheists had talked with any theist from our world for a short period of time, they would deduce that “God” could not be cashed out as a consistent model of anything but rather consisted of the conversational rule “Agree with extreme positive statements”.
I have never understood the difference between weak and strong atheism. Either I think God probably exists or that he probably doesn’t, but what’s the difference between lack of belief in a proposition and a belief in its converse? Is it that, say, who thinks that God doesn’t exist with p=0.8 is a weak atheist while with p=1-10^(-9) he would be a strong one? Or is a weak atheist only who has suspended judgement (what’s the difference from an agnostic, then)?
A weak atheist thinks there is no reason to believe God exists. A strong atheist thinks there is reason to believe God does not exist. The practical difference is that the strong atheist defends his position while the weak atheist doesn’t think he needs to.
In a way, it’s the difference between not wanting to eat spinach and thinking spinach should not be eaten. The former position does not require an epistemological defence.
Quick: is there an 85 year old former plumber by the name of Saul Morgan eating a breakfast of steak and eggs in a diner in North Side of Chicago right now? Who knows, right? You certainly don’t have an affirmative belief that there is, but it’s also true that, perhaps up until this moment, you didn’t affirmatively believe that there wasn’t such a man either. Lacking a belief in something is not the same as believing in its converse. To affirmatively believe in the non-existence of every conceivable entity or the falsity of ever proposition would require an infinite number of beliefs.
Beliefs are procedural, you don’t need them all written out explicitly. This allows to hold infinite number of beliefs, each of them equipped with a specific level of certainty. I never before thought about the question of what the value of 385+23 is, but I still have a belief that 385+23=408 and also that 385+23 is not 409.
I reservedly agree. Taken to extremes your position implies logical omniscience—that I already have a belief one way or the other about the truth of the Riemann hypothesis because I know the basic axioms of complex mathematics, for example.
On the other hand, if I have a random number generator about to spit out a number between 1 and 10^12 I do assign an implicit probability 10^-12 to each number in that range, even though I (couldn’t possibly) explicitly list them out.
The way beliefs are “procedural” includes the requirement that you must be able to instantiate them, but permitting this bounded step vastly increases the number of possible beliefs. Beliefs are answers to questions, and epistemic mind is a question-answering engine. Without logical omniscience, the process of computation increases information about statements over time (even without learning new facts from environment). When first confronted with a question of what 385+23 is, the one-second reply is “about 400″, and only then “408”.
As V. Nesov said, not having thought about it isn’t important. I have no evidence about plumbers in Chicago, but if I am presented with the question, I can think for a while and assign some probability to the proposition. I assume population of cca. 1 million, out of which former or present plumbers are, say, 1%, from what the age group select another 1%, the name and surname make another factor… so I am almost sure that there isn’t such a man. Affirmatively, if you want.
Another point is that even if I accept that I hadn’t had an affirmative belief about Saul Morgan before you have presented the question, I find the analogy misleading, because practically all atheists have heard about the hypothesis of God.
Of course you can meet a claim and decide to not care about it. But it seems to me that it’s almost always case of very unimportant questions. I can’t imagine a person who wilfully suspends judgement about eternal damnation and torture in hell, meaning of life, basis for morality and all other important subjects traditionally associated with religion. You can quickly conclude that religion is bogus and then go thinking about something else. But to leave the question genuinely open?
The difference is what would happen if they were to encounter evidence for the existence of a deity. A weak atheist would start to believe no matter how weak the evidence, wheras the strong atheist would only start to believe if the evidence was stronger than his prior evidence against god. And the strong atheist would probably be much more dilligent in trying to defeat arguments for god.
Assuming that “believe” in your usage means “p(God exists)>0.5“ in my usage, and similarly “disbelieve”=”p<0.5”, this would mean that weak atheists are at exact p=0.5, which is a zero measure set. Such people don’t exist.
Seriously, it is difficult to imagine an opinion which can be reversed by literally any evidence against, no matter how weak.
I’m wary of calling any use of this region of vocabulary “traditional”. There might well be some unbroken progress from etymological origin to well-defined current use of those terms, but if there is, it’s lost in a sea of neologism, and arbitrary new definitions of old words, and rampant use or misuse by the completely or partially ignorant.
This distinction is isomorphic to the traditional distinction between negative and positive atheism, respectively. Of course, the Catholics would use “positive atheism” in a slightly different sense, referring to those who believe in God but reject him anyway, so perhaps newer jargon is in order (not that this field of inquiry has any lack of distinctions)
To make the distinction clear, if “weak atheism” aka “negative atheism” is lack of belief in God, and strong atheism is belief in lack of God, then:
Weak Untheism would be having never heard of God, but having already invented such epistemic rules that, faced with the proposition of God / religion, you will fail to accept it.
Strong Untheism would be having never heard of God, but having already developed epistemic rules of sufficient strength that, first faced with the proposition of God / religion, you will pass definite negative judgment on it.
To echo scientists who say that something is “Not Even Wrong” if its untestable and/or non-scientific to the point of being incomprehensible, my position on the whole religion question is one that I tend to call Ignosticism in which I say that religions definitions of God are so self-contradictory that I don’t even know what they mean by God.
Generally, when some asks if I believe in God, I tell them to define it. When they ask me why, I ask them if they believe in Frub. If so, why? If not, why? Without me giving them a definition, how can they possibly give a rational answer.
Well, sure. By the time the Untheists had talked with any theist from our world for a short period of time, they would deduce that “God” could not be cashed out as a consistent model of anything but rather consisted of the conversational rule “Agree with extreme positive statements”.
I have never understood the difference between weak and strong atheism. Either I think God probably exists or that he probably doesn’t, but what’s the difference between lack of belief in a proposition and a belief in its converse? Is it that, say, who thinks that God doesn’t exist with p=0.8 is a weak atheist while with p=1-10^(-9) he would be a strong one? Or is a weak atheist only who has suspended judgement (what’s the difference from an agnostic, then)?
A hypothesis: the people who coined the terminology didn’t have this concept that you have, of probability theory as normative reasoning.
A weak atheist thinks there is no reason to believe God exists. A strong atheist thinks there is reason to believe God does not exist. The practical difference is that the strong atheist defends his position while the weak atheist doesn’t think he needs to.
In a way, it’s the difference between not wanting to eat spinach and thinking spinach should not be eaten. The former position does not require an epistemological defence.
Liking spinach (or a spinach-free society) is a statement about one’s values. Belief in God is a statement about external world.
Wouldn’t it be nice if that were the way it actually worked.
OK. Belief in God should be a statement about external world.
Quick: is there an 85 year old former plumber by the name of Saul Morgan eating a breakfast of steak and eggs in a diner in North Side of Chicago right now? Who knows, right? You certainly don’t have an affirmative belief that there is, but it’s also true that, perhaps up until this moment, you didn’t affirmatively believe that there wasn’t such a man either. Lacking a belief in something is not the same as believing in its converse. To affirmatively believe in the non-existence of every conceivable entity or the falsity of ever proposition would require an infinite number of beliefs.
Beliefs are procedural, you don’t need them all written out explicitly. This allows to hold infinite number of beliefs, each of them equipped with a specific level of certainty. I never before thought about the question of what the value of 385+23 is, but I still have a belief that 385+23=408 and also that 385+23 is not 409.
I reservedly agree. Taken to extremes your position implies logical omniscience—that I already have a belief one way or the other about the truth of the Riemann hypothesis because I know the basic axioms of complex mathematics, for example.
On the other hand, if I have a random number generator about to spit out a number between 1 and 10^12 I do assign an implicit probability 10^-12 to each number in that range, even though I (couldn’t possibly) explicitly list them out.
The way beliefs are “procedural” includes the requirement that you must be able to instantiate them, but permitting this bounded step vastly increases the number of possible beliefs. Beliefs are answers to questions, and epistemic mind is a question-answering engine. Without logical omniscience, the process of computation increases information about statements over time (even without learning new facts from environment). When first confronted with a question of what 385+23 is, the one-second reply is “about 400″, and only then “408”.
I believe that would still be a contentious position in epistemology, but I agree.
As V. Nesov said, not having thought about it isn’t important. I have no evidence about plumbers in Chicago, but if I am presented with the question, I can think for a while and assign some probability to the proposition. I assume population of cca. 1 million, out of which former or present plumbers are, say, 1%, from what the age group select another 1%, the name and surname make another factor… so I am almost sure that there isn’t such a man. Affirmatively, if you want.
Another point is that even if I accept that I hadn’t had an affirmative belief about Saul Morgan before you have presented the question, I find the analogy misleading, because practically all atheists have heard about the hypothesis of God.
Of course you can meet a claim and decide to not care about it. But it seems to me that it’s almost always case of very unimportant questions. I can’t imagine a person who wilfully suspends judgement about eternal damnation and torture in hell, meaning of life, basis for morality and all other important subjects traditionally associated with religion. You can quickly conclude that religion is bogus and then go thinking about something else. But to leave the question genuinely open?
The difference is what would happen if they were to encounter evidence for the existence of a deity. A weak atheist would start to believe no matter how weak the evidence, wheras the strong atheist would only start to believe if the evidence was stronger than his prior evidence against god. And the strong atheist would probably be much more dilligent in trying to defeat arguments for god.
But then it won’t be God, it’ll be the specific thing which this is evidence of. “God” is a word gone wrong.
Assuming that “believe” in your usage means “p(God exists)>0.5“ in my usage, and similarly “disbelieve”=”p<0.5”, this would mean that weak atheists are at exact p=0.5, which is a zero measure set. Such people don’t exist.
Seriously, it is difficult to imagine an opinion which can be reversed by literally any evidence against, no matter how weak.
I’m wary of calling any use of this region of vocabulary “traditional”. There might well be some unbroken progress from etymological origin to well-defined current use of those terms, but if there is, it’s lost in a sea of neologism, and arbitrary new definitions of old words, and rampant use or misuse by the completely or partially ignorant.