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Atheism is significantly driven by the rejection of religion.
The existence of a god can be discussed and indeed we do not know. However religions are backward ideologies that should really be relegated to the history books.
> And we know for a fact that there will be no other humans in the universe; You know that for a fact, really? With billions and billions of planets in the universe, you know that for a fact? That's a pretty rich position for someone claiming he's an agnostic, "someone who doesn't know". > like when you have scientists—Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss among them—claiming we have solved the problem of the origin of…
There might exist a being that defies everything we know about physical reality! But not other humans anywhere or anywhen. That's just highly improbable, not purely speculative and outside the bounds of what we understand to be reality, so I reject it as impossible.
eyeroll
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding from theology classes a long, long time ago is as follows: - Atheist: Believes there is no God. - Agnostic: Doesn't know/isn't sure/doesn't care if there is a God. - Anti-theist: Is against the mere idea that there is a God. That may have changed in the intervening decades, and with the rise of the internet, the term "atheist" seems to have changed in popular culture, often to suit a particular perso…
Absolutely not. Atheism is about belief, agnosticism is about knowledge. They are complementary. You can be atheist/agnostic, theist/agnostic, atheist/gnostic, theist/gnostic. It's a matrix. Also there are two flavors of atheism: those that believe there is no god (a minority in my opinion, and that position requires a burden of proof). And there are atheists who simply reject the claim that there is a god. They say…
OK, he's obviously a brilliant guy, but I find his argument about atheism pretty weak... or rather, I should say that it only makes sense at a pretty abstract level. And that, IMO, is basically the same level of abstraction where one can make a compelling argument that science rests on (a form of) faith just like religion does (but possibly not the same form). Anyway, "belief" in the supernatural makes, as far as I c…
Well our current flavour of Science is effectively materialist and it starts effectively with the assumption that 'the universe is made up of a bunch of laws' as we try to discover them. It postulates a priori a specific metaphysical position that immediately negates anything else ... so it's going to be impossible to test what has been ruled out as an assumption.
The first order problem that materialism brings us is the inherent nihilism in the 'we are just a random bag of particles problem' - i.e. taken to it's extreme, not only is there no 'supernatural' - there is effectively not even 'intelligence' or 'life' or possibly 'consciousness'. Just the appearance of those things.
So logic, reason and science, i.e. tools which we 'the observers' developed to facilitate our understanding of ourselves, has come to negate our very existence? Or is it more likely we are caught up in our own bad thinking?
It's funny that we ignore the biggest problem staring us the mirror: 'what are we' / 'what is life' - in lieu of somewhat more tangible things like 'Dark Matter' as we stare off into space, because the 'what are we' problem does not fit well into our materialist equations. In fact, speculation about 'life' may undermine just a little bit the very premise of science, in a much worse way than string theory (assuming it ends up really being actually wrong) ever will.
The headline is a little click-baitey, and Gleisers comments I don't think are much more insightful than a decent HN comment ... but I think the underlying problem is the straight jacket that materialism has imposed upon many of our best thinkers.
The argument he presents is essentially that of someone at an intellectual dead-end, as materialism seems to be on this issue.
Emergence [1] and Bio-Centrism [2] may offer us some hints at how to rethink our perspectives to accommodate for the very nature of life itself, the expression of which I think is what inspires our spiritual inquisition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence [2] http://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-consciou...
I hate the clickbait title. I hate how it will be misunderstood. I hate that the subtleties in his statement will be ignored. And to the people who care about this, his claim about atheism is pedantic. "I do not believe aliens abducted my dad." Sorry, but that's a perfectly rational thing to say, in all but the most academic of circles. In every-day life, I don't need to be so cautious as to say, "I have no evidence…
One is a statement of belief. The other one is not. In the context of a discussion on belief systems, it's the difference between night and day.
And he's correct: atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method, since it posits something that cannot be proven or disproven using existing scientific method.
> it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic. Surprising for someone with his background to not understand the difference between atheism and agnosticism, and obviously not understanding that these two are not mutually exclusive. > "I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” That's absolutely not what atheism is. Atheism is a single position…
> I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some e…
It isn't about there being literally proof of no god, it is about how we act in our daily setting.
The classic counter is Russell's teapot. You can't prove to me that there is not a teapot, undetectable by our current tooling (tiny, invisible, etc...), orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars.
That said, if I were to ask you "does this thing exist", you'd say "no". Sure, there is technically a chance, in the way we can't prove gravity won't suddenly stop working tomorrow, but there is no evidence for it, and no reason to act like it is there.
An atheist is not saying that there absolutely is no god, but rather "there is no reason to believe in a god, given what we currently know", which remains a different position from "I, personally, don't know" which is the argument of an agnostic.
It is true that, colloquially, we compress "there is no reason to believe that this is true" and "this is false" to the same thing, because realistically we can almost never say the second absolutely with anything outside the deep theoretical, and we fundamentally behave the same way given both.
> it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic. Surprising for someone with his background to not understand the difference between atheism and agnosticism, and obviously not understanding that these two are not mutually exclusive. > "I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” That's absolutely not what atheism is. Atheism is a single position…
My understanding from theology classes a long, long time ago is as follows: - Atheist: Believes there is no God. - Agnostic: Doesn't know/isn't sure/doesn't care if there is a God. - Anti-theist: Is against the mere idea that there is a God. That may have changed in the intervening decades, and with the rise of the internet, the term "atheist" seems to have changed in popular culture, often to suit a particular perso…
It's completely consistent with the scientific method.
> The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence This is a common trope, but it's wrong in many cases. The absence of evidence for leprechauns/unicorns/bigfoot/etc. is in fact evidence of absence of these things. Likewise, the absence of evidence for gods is in fact evidence of absence of at least certain kinds of gods. In particular, it is evidence of the absence of gods that interact with the universe in certai…
> This is a common trope, but it's wrong in many cases.
When you're dealing with something of low intelligence or awareness, heuristically absence of evidence can be approximated as evidence of absence, if you've made so thorough a set of observations that the probability of absence can be estimated to be very high.
However, that heuristic fails when you're dealing with something with intelligence and awareness, as that thing can choose to behave differently when you're observing it vs. when you're not. Doubly so when you're dealing with something that may not even be bound by the laws that bind your observations.