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Mar. 27th, 2006 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentia...[A]mong those celebrating the prominence of these two Darwinians [Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett] on both sides of the Atlantic is an unexpected constituency - the American creationist/intelligent-design lobby. Huh? Dawkins, in particular, has become their top pin-up.
How so? William Dembski (one of the leading lights of the US intelligent-design lobby) put it like this in an email to Dawkins: "I know that you personally don't believe in God, but I want to thank you for being such a wonderful foil for theism and for intelligent design more generally. In fact, I regularly tell my colleagues that you and your work are one of God's greatest gifts to the intelligent-design movement. So please, keep at it!"
... Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: "Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level." The nub of Ruse's argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: "If Darwinism equals atheism then it can't be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool."
Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins (Thanks tosupergee for the link)
Say it with me, now: atheism is not a religion. There is no doctrine, no scripture, no church, no congregation, no priesthood, no tradition, no temple, no ritual, no prayerbook, no dietary restriction, no almsgiving, or any other religious trapping, associated with atheism.
Disbelief in God is not a religious belief. This assertion presumes that "belief in God" is normal and standard, such that disbelief thereof requires maintenance of faith and positive reinforcement. No, "God" is an assertion made by most religions, the burden of proof for which rests on those who promote religion. Not subscribing to someone else's assertion is not an act of faith.
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Date: 2006-03-28 07:13 pm (UTC)I do not believe that this conception of "strong atheism" exists in practice.
Atheists are not dreaming up gods in which to disbelieve. There are only so many possible variations on the theme of "omnipotent and omniscient supernatural being." For someone to say, "I cannot believe in any omnipotent, omniscient supernatural being, no matter what claims you make about it," is *not* the same as making an assertion of belief.
No, the burden of proof for any assertion rests with the people who make that assertion, regardless as to whether it is the assertion of existence, or non-existence of a something.
So, no matter what wild claims i make, you're burdened with disproving them?
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 07:17 pm (UTC)It does, I have met many people who espouse it.
So, no matter what wild claims i make, you're burdened with disproving them?
No, I said that *you* are burdened with proving them, no matter what that assertion is. As I said before, strong atheism steps out of the realm of just declining to assent/assert a concept, it is the positive assertion of a concept, the concept that no god(s) exist(s).
reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-28 07:51 pm (UTC)And their assertion is that they can't imagine an omnipotent supernatural being in which they could believe?
No, I said that *you* are burdened with proving them, no matter what that assertion is.
Unless your statement is to express doubt towards someone else's statement. If i state that i doubt that Catholicism is true, it remains the Catholic church's burden to prove to me that its teaching is true. Otherwise, i could make any wild claim i like, and if you express doubt, i could demand you have the burden of proving your statement.
Re: reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-28 08:09 pm (UTC)No, their assertion is that no supernatural deity, no matter how conceptualized, exists. It is not doubt, it is certainty.
Unless your statement is to express doubt towards someone else's statement.
That's simply not the case with strong atheism. It's not just doubt about someone else's statement, it's making a statement of their own.
Re: reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-29 04:01 pm (UTC)People have believed in and talked about supernatural beings for thousands of years. It's one of the few cultural universals there are. But as far as anthropologists can tell, people have always been able to grasp that ancestor spirits and ghosts and zombies and dieities have a different sort of existence. The also appears to be a cultural universal.
So the ideas of supernatural existence, and the various sorts of supernatural beings that people talk about, have been talked about for a long time. And there have always been people who doubted their existence.
So modern-day atheists are not doing anything new. They are not imagining or constructing or proposing ideas and then forming a belief about them. They are expressing firm doubts about beings which other people have described, things which have long been a cultural fixture.
I know you want to believe that disbelief in God is just the flip side of a coin from belief in God, but that's not how it cashes out, philosophically, intellectually, or rationally. It's not "the same except for the minor detail of adding the word not in there." It does not take faith to disbelieve in something that you can't see, hear, smell, taste, or feel (in ANY sense of the word), something which so far as you can tell exists only in the minds of someone else.
Re: reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-29 06:02 pm (UTC)It is. You're missing that I'm not talking about all atheism here. I am not talking about those who doubt. I'm not talking about those who simply lack belief or are suspending belief until proof or sufficiently compelling evidence is found or feel that no compelling evidence has been found. There are plenty of atheists who only do this, but not the ones that I am talking about
Strong atheists are making an assertion about reality. They are claiming that there is no supernatural element to reality. It's like saying that there is positively no Greenland. They are not just doubting the assertion that God exists, or declining to embrace that assertion themselves, they are actively making an assertion about the nature of reality. Since they are making an assertion about the nature of reality, it is on them to demonstrate it.
If I assert that there are no such thing as space aliens, it is on me to substantiate it. It is something quite different from me saying that I find no reason to believe that aliens exist. The latter is just doubt, just lack of belief, the former is itself a belief that is held.
Re: reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-29 08:07 pm (UTC)No it's not, because as you said, you cannot provide proof of a negative. There is already the absense of obvious space aliens, and that's enough in itself to back up your statement. Unless, of course, space aliens show up tomorrow. It's up to those who say there ARE space aliens to provide some sort of proof, and that's where the burden of proof stays.
Re: reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-29 08:12 pm (UTC)Re: reposted with clarification
Date: 2006-03-30 03:50 am (UTC)I didn't say that, I said that it is very difficult to prove a negative. It is possible, but the less specific the assertion, the more difficult it is. I can disprove the existence of a god who will manifest physically and unavoidably perceptibly before me at my very calling by calling and observing that no god appears. I have just disproved the existence of such a god. My criteria was very specific, so it was actually fairly easy. The less specific my criteria is, the more difficult the task becomes. Thus, the assertion that no supernatural being at all exists becomes very difficult to prove, difficult enough to be essentially impossible. It's like a calculus limit equation.
But you seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that a statement can reflect less than perfect knowledge.
Not at all. But that does not change the fact that there are others who are. There is a reason that there are so few strong atheists, it is fairly unsupportable intellectually and would really require that kind of perfect knowledge, or faith.
I personally feel no need to prove the existence of God. I see the evidence all around and within, I have my experiences, and find them sufficiently compelling to believe. Could I be wrong? perhaps, I do not have perfect knowledge .. but I do not need it, compelling reason is sufficient.
But that does not change the fact that there are people out there who make an assertion, and make it in such a way, that would require perfect knowledge. You have never met one, and that is not so surprizing. I think that is why you kept shifting the discussion to the kind of atheist that you have met, but the kind of which I was not speaking.