"Is there really no evidence or simply that there are some who seek to deny the existence of evidence because it is inconvenient? "
Evidence of what? Inconvenient how and to who?
You understand that religion can't have evidence because then it wouldn't be religion, right?

"The disagreement is over what constitutes evidence or how that evidence is obtained."
One might not believe in aliens because there is no evidence. That's not the issue with religion.
Religion is arbitrary and self contradictory.
As such you KNOW there's nothing there. No evidence is required. It's SELF-evident.

"The point of the agnostic is that they do not claim that the matter is closed without convincing evidence either way. "

An atheist does not claim the matter closed since it is impossible to prove non-existence of a nothing, one can only point out flaws in positive statements.


"Is there really no evidence or simply that there are some who seek to deny the existence of evidence because it is inconvenient?"

Opinions of others are not a valid basis for an individuals rational conclusions about the existence of anything. Only observation of objective reality with reason and logic can one understand what exists.

"So what do you say to this physicist who states "Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. Atheism is a belief in non-belief. So you categorically deny something you have no evidence against.""
I would say, "you're fired."

"Further "Science can give answers to certain questions, up to a point. This has been known for a very long time in philosophy, it's called the problem of the first cause: we get stuck.""
There is no problem of the first cause. There simply is no first cause. Remember, if you've got a contradiction you resolve it. You don't proceed ahead and just accept it as "a problem."

"I'm also wondering where you get the notion that "the idea of the supernatural violates the law of identity"."
By knowing the proper definitions of words and concepts.

Rejecting arbitrary "hypotheses" is not a matter of "convenience" and does not require proof. The burden of proof is on he who makes the assertion, including an assertion of "possibility". "Anything" is not "potential evidence". He who has an "open mind" quickly has it filled with trash. We have active minds, open to rational ideas, not "open" to "anything". Rejecting arbitrary assertions of faith as cognitively not worthy of consideration is not "predisposed to reject potential evidence".

Atheism is non-belief in the supernatural. It is not non-belief in "anything" or a "claim to believe in nothing", which would be intellectual nihilism. It does not mean "you are willing to do nothing new or with an unknown outcome".

Knowing what you know and how versus what you don't is objectivity, not "humility". Agnosticism means accepting the possibility of the arbitrary, not "still willing to listen and test out new ideas." Rejecting theism is not unwillingness to learn. One can only learn about what there is evidence for. A "willingness" to take theism seriously in not the standard of knowledge.

The confusion of knowledge with omniscience is common among theists. One Blarman once claimed on this forum that we don't know reality because we didn't know he was going to have an accident. He rejected the response that "One doesn't have to know everything to know something".

One does not learn by arbitrarily "positing something as yet unknown, then test to see if it is true". Knowledge grows based on evidence, not arbitrary imagination.

Explicitly rejecting contradictory notions of gods because they are contradictory is not a "belief in a different religion", and rejection of the arbitrary is not "agnostic".

On this same page:

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/comm...

Faith and feelings are not forms of evidence. There is no scientific debate about that.

There is a plague of mathematical rationalism in some realms of physics, which is not good, but there is no requirement for direct sensory perception of every phenomenon of science -- which is the terrible philosophy of Positivism. The Positivists influenced by Hume and Kant said there is no such thing as an electron, only "ammeter readings", Mach said that there are no atoms, etc.

Theoretical entities such as electromagnetic waves, atoms, and subatomic particles are known by inference through their effects we can observe and measure. They are not "supernatural". All concepts (in a hierarchy of abstractions) are ultimately based on sense perception, but we cannot directly perceive every kind of entity that exists. Such abstract concepts of theoretical entities not directly perceived are not supernaturalism.

Atheism is not inconsistent with the scientific method. The scientific method rejects the arbitrary. It does not require "evidence against the arbitrary" in order to reject it as worthless. Atheism is a rejection of the arbitrariness of theistic belief, not a belief in anything. The person quoted in the article was making pronouncements from bad philosophy, not physics. Physics is not "stuck" in ignoring irrelevant theological "problems".

That is true of the common theistic notions of various gods, but any arbitrary assertion is logically rejected as cognitively worthless for argument at all and dismissed out of hand. You don't have to identify specific contradictions before rejecting the arbitrary. https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

Basing an argument on premises of "if I met him as I was dying" is not rational; the arbitrary is outside the realm of logical consideration at all. We deal with phenomena as we discover them, whatever they are. Rational thought does not start with arbitrary fantasies about what we will or wish to discover.

As a substitute for reason religion does not make people "better". There are elements of common-sense morality absorbed into some religious societies and thought of as part of "religion", and which are better than the murderers, but they aren't specific to religious origins in supernaturalism and faith. Religion does not make the finiteness of knowledge "easier"; the arbitrary corrupts knowledge and the method of attaining it.

There's no such thing as Objectivist who are not atheists. The mysticism of theism, whether in metaphysics or ethics or both, is incompatible with Objectivism. Ignoring the trappings is better, but is at the level of argument over competing rituals between sects, which is secondary.

Ayn Rand was more indifferent than hostile to religion as a crude form of philosophy because religion is so intellectually weak. She was mostly indifferent to it rather than hostile culturally except where religion and religionists, such as a Pope or a Buckley, became obnoxious and intrusive in promoting their destruction, especially in attacks on sex and abortion, and their attempts to defend capitalism against collectivism on religious grounds, which is impossible and only obliterates correct concepts for proper understanding.

Most theism we encounter asserts contradictory notions of god related to some theology, which is why it is typically rejected in the form "does not exist". Yet it seems that many do not understand the explicit logic of rejecting contradictions or the arbitrary, even while sensing that something is wrong with both, at least implicitly. The lack of understanding leaves them susceptible to "agnosticism".

The concept "agnosticism" as a supposedly middle way doesn't make much sense. Someone saying he is "agnostic" because he doesn't know for lack of evidence and therefore doesn't believe is a-theist, without belief in theism, i.e., atheist, as you described. On the other hand, someone who knows he has no evidence but grants a "possibility" and takes the arbitrary claims seriously is not being rational.

You're right that a great deal of harm has been done promoting agnosticism as a logically coherent notion, let alone a 'third way'. But "strong" versus "weak" atheism generally means (as I have heard it used) rejecting contradictory notions of god as impossible versus rejecting believe in the arbitrary, not agnosticism.

"Strong" versus "weak" is still not a good terminology because rejecting the arbitrary is just as epistemologically "strong" as rejecting contradictions. Taking the arbitrary cognitively worthless seriously already is a contradiction of reason, willing to entertain anything whatsoever on emotional grounds in the name of an "open mind". When a distinction in such "strong" versus "weak" is attempted, it opens the door to confusions over agnosticism. We either think in terms of non-contradictory identification (logic) or we don't.

Atheism means rejection of belief in the supernatural because there is no evidence for it, usually with no coherent statement of what it is supposed to mean at all. A-theism is a rejection of theism, not a belief in anything. It is not what Blarman calls a "bias" or "prejudice", and is not a rejection of any kind of knowledge -- knowledge requires reason and therefore rejects assertions of faith out of hand.

If an assertion is specific enough to be contradictory in addition to arbitrary, which is commonly the case in theism, then you can say it can't be because contradictions don't exist, but if it is vague enough to avoid overtly contradicting itself, then you still reject it as a cognitively worthless utterance for which there is no evidence, i.e., as if it had never been said, and that is all that is required to reject theism. The arbitrary has no cognitive worth, with no claim on your serious attention.

Those are the fundamental "two sides", one of which (rationality) is right, that you refer to.

The same is true of arbitrary assertions of "possibility". A statement that something is "possible" requires evidence. Blarman's imaginary "hypotheses" are not grounds for taking his assertions seriously. Rational thought, let alone science, does not run around conjuring arbitrary fantasies in search of evidence. That is why the claim of Creationism to be part of "science" is roundly rejected and ignored by serious thinkers.

The article has nothing to do with physics and is not a rational argument for "agnosticism". It is simply bad philosophy. (Plato, of which the Socratic dialogues are part, is full of mysticism.) The only rational meaning of "science does not kill god" is that science does not engage in the cognitively worthless at all, including theism -- there is nothing coherent to refute or take seriously. Science doesn't "kill" or do anything else with it.

All this has been explained on this forum previously and Blarman continues to ignore it, still insisting that his theism be taken seriously, while denouncing rational rejection as "bias" and "prejudice". Reason and faith are opposites. Reason rejecting faith is not a "bias".

Well then...I believe you are an outlier...

:>) Jan

"Atheism is an attempt to make a theory as to the non-existence of something, a god, for which there is absolutely no evidence."

Is there really no evidence or simply that there are some who seek to deny the existence of evidence because it is inconvenient? There is a huge difference. The point of the agnostic is that they do not claim that the matter is closed without convincing evidence either way. Thus his point about atheism being a non-starter: it is a hypothesis which can not be proven.

"If one is to be rational, one must have some objective evidence for any belief that something might exist."

I completely agree. The disagreement is over what constitutes evidence or how that evidence is obtained. The open mind - the agnostic - is willing to consider anything as potential evidence and is not predisposed to reject potential evidence.

Great observations. I don't personally use the first one or know anyone who does, but I agree with the premise.

Atheism is an attempt to make a theory as to the non-existence of something, a god, for which there is absolutely no evidence. Agnosticism is the belief in the possible existence of something for which there is absolutely no evidence. If one is to be rational, one must have some objective evidence for any belief that something might exist. Then the possibility can be tested by searching for more evidence and if found may or may not point to the original belief that the thing existed or may discount the original belief.
An atheist is one who has no belief in the existence of a god, period. There is no opinion on the existence of a god since there is no evidence for a god. Evidence first then argument for that evidence and still end in a scientific belief "that' such and such exists and not a religious belief 'in' something not to be questioned.
Great harm has been done by the idea that there are various degrees of weak or strong atheistic beliefs from which one can believe that agnosticism is anything other than an irrational position to try to hold logically in one mind.

We have a problem with the word “believe” that makes it difficult to discuss this subject:
- I ‘believe’ I like pistachio ice cream better than any other type. (trivial preference)
- I ‘believe’ in Odin. (non-falsifiable religious statement)
- I ‘believe’ in evolution. (falsifiable scientific opinion)
The most common use case is, obviously the first one. We routinely use the word “believe: in everyday conversation, to indicate a trivial or transient preference. Unfortunately, when we begin to discuss philosophy and enduring world views, we also use this word…but I think that people actually mean “somewhere on the spectrum between trivial and cosmic” when they are speaking philosophically. This can lead to arguments that sound philosophical but which really have a large semantic component.

Jan

Fascinating.

"I would say that the concept of an unknowable fact (which is what supernatural belief is) is foreign to science."

I agree that claiming that something is "unknowable" is a non-starter. That being said, sometimes one must be open to other methods of testing in order to confirm the hypothesis. That commonly becomes the point of contention between deists and atheists: which methods are "acceptable" for use in the scientific method.

I would say that the concept of an unknowable fact (which is what supernatural belief is) is foreign to science. A scientist will readily admit limits to what is known, but will maintain that unexplainable effects should lead to a knowable cause that can be observed or measured. The supernatural falls outside of the envelope of science until evidence leads to a recognition of its reality.

Ironically, some elements of what is called science have supernatural elements: things can are posited but unobserved and unmeasured, but still believed to exist. Dark matter and dark energy are among those essentially supernatural elements, as no evidence has been presented to support the existence of these mathematical constructs.

I like your descriptions. Thanks!

Well said!

"atheism is non-belief in belief."

That statement doesn't make any sense to me. Belief has to be in something specific - it isn't generic and random. To disclaim all belief, one would first have to know all beliefs and disavow them all. I can totally understand people picking a specific belief and saying I don't believe that. What I can't comprehend is people attempting to claim they don't believe anything. That's a pretty wide net to cast because it encompasses literally everything.

"to claim to know that you don't know is still a form of knowledge."

Eh, it's more an acknowledgement of humility where one admits there is still much out there one does not know but is willing to learn. I think that's what separates Socrates as an agnostic rather than an atheist. An agnostic is still willing to listen and test out new ideas.

"What these dudes really mean is that because we don't know everything (God's alleged omniscience), therefore we don't know anything."

I'm not sure if you worded this the way you intended, because this is a fallacy of the inverse. One doesn't have to know everything to know something. In fact, that is the entire point of belief in the first place: you posit something as yet unknown, then test to see if it is true. The thing is that the test itself is underlain by the belief. If you claim to believe in nothing, you are willing to do nothing new or with an unknown outcome. As pointed out by the subject of the article, that's an entirely anti-scientific approach because the scientific method depends upon looking at the unknown in new and uncertain ways.