Percy is a Deist - Now what's the difference between a deist and an atheist?

Assuming you're backing the Judeo-Christian view of God and his infinite goodness, your answer seems a little bit silly. Yahweh and Christianity both fail by their own definition of "good". Anyone who has any experience with either can see this.As for what constitutes "good" and "bad", I would say that, taking an atheistic / naturalist point of view, anything that is beneficial to your survival and ensures the passing on of your genes is "good", and anything that hinders these things is "bad".No deity needed.In fact, religion only serves to muddy the discussion of right and wrong, seeing as how it's utterly subjective, and also seeing as how the Hebrew war god Yahweh constantly and without fail contradicts his own rules concerning morality.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.

Thank you. True enough. But the point I am trying to make was that for an atheist, morality doesn't require a deity. I'm not sure how it works for deists; I'm not a deist, and I can't speak for everyone. Seeing as how deists tend to be nothing more than atheists in practice but weak theists in philosophy, morals can get pretty subjective, especially when you don't have a magical 2,000-year old book telling you what's okay and what's not. Thanks for asking!The dictionary describes atheism as: ...key word here being "disbelief". The prime indicator of an agnostic would merely be "lack of belief".Atheism can come in two levels. Strong atheism can be interpreted as a distinct disbelief that there is indeed no god, and weak atheism can range from merely a weak version of strong atheism to a harder form of agnosticism. It depends on personal preference, really.

...so you're saying that, as a deist, you believe some form of deity set the laws of the universe into motion without weaving any inherent, objective moral system into it? That morals are subjective? The example you used (A = B, .:. all B = A) to say strong atheism is logically fallacious is in fact not true, and I'll explain why.We are all practical atheists in a sense. I doubt any of you believe in Zeus or Thor or Shiva, or any of the innumerable gods of Hinduism, nor any other ridiculous deity that has been worshiped by war-mongering savages down the line of human evolution. In essence, you can be considered an atheist to those deities. The fact of the matter is that strong atheists just go one step further.In science, it is both practical and logically prudent to disbelieve, or at the very least have a lack of a belief, in things that do not otherwise present themselves as containing merit of belief. You do not simply give a blank check to every single possibility concerning how things work in order to "balance things out" or give things "equal opportunity".In science, hypotheses require evidence before gaining merit; I.E., they go through many rigorous processes before attaining theory status. A prime example of this is creation science vs. evolution. They are not on the same par for obvious reasons.TL;DR version: absence of evidence implies only one thing: that the evidence is not there (or that we just haven't found it yet). Is it practical to believe in things that we have no evidence for? No. And it's not rational either.I'm sure the scientists who proposed the idea of dark matter back when we didn't know about it yet were laughed out of town by every other scientist in the business. Does that make it right? Probably not, because now we know about dark matter. Was it logical at the time to believe in something we have absolutely no evidence for? Yes.Theists are mentally jumping the gun when they employ faith as a reason to believe in something that we otherwise would have no reason to believe in.

Show me one single thing that does not require a scientific approach and I'll concede your point.The main focus of science is determining how the natural world works. Philosophy REQUIRES a rational system of thought, or else you're just another jabbering creationist who has no idea of the nature of the kind of psycho-babble he spews.For example, here's a quote from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy: This should be fairly self-explanatory. Faith explains nothing except that the employer of said faith is an irrationalist and should be treated as such.Believing something that does not show adequate evidence or logical proof will invariable get you nowhere. You're confusing the field of philosophy with religion (faith). Philosophy requires no faith; in fact, philosophy is by and large an impractical field. That's why it's "philosophical".Philosophy means literally "love of wisdom". It deals with the metaphysical. Faith, or adherence to a particular religion, may fall under the category of philosophy, but they are not the same.

Not sure I completely understand. Elaborate? Religious faith ignores blatant contradictions in reality. Philosophy usually doesn't.If it does, then it's a dead philosophy with no practical applications. Yes, I agree that the existence of god(s) is, for all intents and purposes, unknowable, in the same exact way that I consider the existence of an invisible four-eyed jellyfish raping my face as we speak unknowable.Both are unlikely and have no supporting evidence, as well as providing no practical applications to the real world. Why believe something if it changes nothing in your outlook? It's wasted energy.

I fail to see why you consider the description of my god of choice as "ridiculing". How do you know I'm not serious?As you can see, "silly" and "ridiculous" are subjective. What is silly to you may be 100% serious to another person. That's why we employ objective reasoning. My jellfish god example was most definitely not a strawman. Can you honestly say beyond a reasonable doubt that truly nobody believes in such a thing, or something equally as "ridiculous" (as you so candidly referred to it as; you might actually be putting down someone else's beliefs--oh no!)?For all you know, I could have faith in the existence of such a silly vision jellyfish. It has roughly the same probability and the exact same amount of objective evidence for existing as the Christian God, or any other god for that matter. Just replace "Yahweh did that" with "____ did that", or "___ caused that". Nor does it mean that my rapist jellyfish doesn't exist, which you for some reason refuse to place on the same level of practical standing with any other deity. No, I do not agree with it, basically because it's a loaded question. The atheist standpoint is not fallacious and I've already explained why.You said yourself that deists employ faith in the unproven; anything that requires any degree of unproven faith does not merit belief, be it in the realm of philosophy or science.You can have faith, but applying it to practical reality when nothing exists to validate it is silly. Oops, did I just use a subjective term? How can you have evidence of creation without evidence of a creator? Doesn't the term "creation" imply a "creator"? Not at all. The most rational atheist position would be that the existence of god(s) is, for all intents and purposes, unknowable, and is not supported by any known evidence or objective criteria, which in turn makes it unlikely and an impractical thing to believe in.Humor me--in practice, how does the deist position differ from the atheist position? To my understanding, not at all. The only difference is that the deist likes to keep an air of open-mindedness that is essentially shared by the atheist, just not as loudly and publicly.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.

Hay RAZD. From this response, I'm getting the feeling that you purposely skipped over the meaning of my post to declare false victory.The whole point of the above response was to show you that what you believe to be silly and ridiculous may not be silly and ridiculous to another person. This is solely because the probability and likelihood of the concepts we're discussing (deities) are, on the part of theists and deists, based on nothing more than subjectivity. Instead of looking objectively at whether or not you actually have sufficient reasoning to believe in such a thing, you make a mental leap and assume that since the existence of god(s) is essentially unknowable, to do anything but believe in one (or at least the possibility of one) is fallacious reasoning (which, as I've shown before, is not).It's okay to keep an open mind about things. To do otherwise is to display a fundamentalist, even fanatical point of view. But to assume that god(s) must exist based on the mere possibility that one might ignores reason.Silly or not, my jellyfish example still applies. Do I or do I not have just as much sufficient reasoning to believe in such a deity as I do to believe in any other given deity? My argument was nothing more than reductio ad absurdum, an attempt to show you that your argument is unacceptable even by its own standards. If you employ the logic used in your reasoning for believing in a deity that one has no reason to believe in, then said reasoning can readily stretch to any other deity imaginable. Hence the jellyfish. Oddly enough, this response seems eerily like the death cry of many Creationists concerning the body of scientific evidence supporting evolution. Are you honestly purporting that my world view causes me to hold a biased eye to the possibility of a god(s)?I can't speak for everyone here, but the correct assumption would be that since my world view rests on logic, it would be safe to assume that everything else that follows is indeed logical. However, there can be exceptions to the case, as this is only a general rule of thumb (the same can be said about arguments from authority; look at what the person has said, not who is saying it). Therefore logic and reasoning should always take precedence over any other view bias that may arise.This is not to rule out probability when other evidence is considered. Which brings us back to square one: I have no reason to believe in such a deity. Do you? No.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.