Atheism is a belief (Why Atheists don't believe part 2)

Riverrat, there is a profound difference between believing that God does not exist, and not believing that God does exist. The first is something that a person can actively engage in, whereas the second is something that's just not there in a person's list of activities. When I describe myself as an atheist, I have the second possibility in mind. I think of myself as someone without a belief in God, not as someone actively believing there is no god.The word 'atheism' is a bit troublesome in that it ends in 'ism', which usually points to a body of thought about something, complete with tenets and dogmas and all that. When something ends in 'ism', most frequently you'll find it has a shoal of followers. But atheism, despite the word, is a noted exception to the rule.Atheism has no tenets, no dogmas, and no followers. Atheism lacks all those things. In fact, 'lacking' is the defining feature of atheism: the only thing atheists have in common is a lack of belief in a god or gods. I disagree. When I close my eyes and try to imagine seeing the colour red, I experience redness without any real light coming into play. So I think that redness is a purely subjective conscious experience that takes place in our brain. Seeing light of a certain wavelength is one thing, experiencing redness is another.

---

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Of course an atheist doesn't believe in nothing at all. I can have all sorts of beliefs about many things. But my being an atheist has nothing to do with my other beliefs. It simply denotes that there is one thing I don't believe in: gods.Being an atheist doesn't automatically make one a 'something-else-ist'. I have no need for a replacement for the gods I don't believe in. When you describe the process of seeing red, going from the outside in, once you get beyond the retina, 'wavelength' is no longer a part of the description. Whatever it is that's 'burnt' into my brain, it can't be a wavelength. At most, it's a pattern of neural firings which gets burnt into the visual cortex.Besides looking at something red and imagining seeing red, there is a third way to experience redness: when I press on my eyeballs, I get the sensation of seeing light flashes, some of them red. No memories of 'burnt-in' wavelengths are involved, nor any real light. My retinal cells fire because they are agitated by the pressure.The only way the brain can interpret the signals coming from these cells is by experiencing them as light flashes, because that's how the brain is wired: "if signals are coming from the retinal cells, light must be involved." The brain is fooled, because it doesn't know that it's not light that causes the signals, but pressure.For some people, there is even a fourth way of experiencing redness. Synesthetes are people who have their senses mixed up, so that for instance they hear colours and see tastes. They might eat a banana and experience red. It makes me wonder about the wavelength of a banana."Point being": the experience of redness is not necessarily linked to a certain wavelength of light.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

---

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

If by 'God-centric' you mean centred around the Christian god, then the answer is no. As an atheist, I don't believe in any god or gods. Usually though, the question of my atheism pops up in conversations with Christians, so to them my atheism is a denial of the existence of their God.On a more general note, atheism is simply an answer to the question of whether someone believes in a god or not. But the answer is only given when the question is asked. I don't go around thinking all day that I am an atheist. My life is not organized around a system that's called atheism. The only time I consider myself an atheist is when someone asks me whether I believe in a god. That's what I meant by saying that atheism isn't a regular 'ism'. When I say I'm an atheist, I'm not saying that I believe in nothing at all. The term doesn't mean that. The word for it would be 'acredist' or something like that. I won't deny that I do believe in certain things. For instance, I believe that human beings must define their own morals, as individuals and as a society. It's just the supernatural I don't believe in. Atheism is just part of that.

---

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Hold on Mike. I thought you prided yourself in your skills in logic. You should know you can't just take a statement, invert part of it and expect to end up with a correct new statement. There are rules to be observed. What you did is something like taking the statement "There isn't any mammal that breathes underwater" and turning it into "There's isn't any mammal that doesn't breathe underwater", expecting the second statement to be as true as the first one.And there's another problem with your statement: although there may or may not be verifiable evidence of the existence of something, logically, there cannot be any verifiable evidence of the non-existence of something. So the fact that there is no evidence of the non-existence of God doesn't say anything meaningful about whether or not God exists. The lack of evidence could only ever mean anything if there could possibly be such evidence.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

---

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Maybe when it happens in a Danish film. Otherwise, you'll have to be a bit more explicit if you want to convince me. What kind of professor is it you're talking about? Couldn't a professor in a Christian college ask exactly the same, but with other motives?You'll have to provide some context and an explanation of how "prove God exists" leads to the conclusion of dogma.

---

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

If that were true, a secular college would never get to teaching the important stuff. They'd only be busy telling their students the reasons why God doesn't exist, then the reasons why Loki doesn't exist, then Shiva, then Allah, then... You get the picture?Fortunately, that's not the case. What really happens in a secular college is that they teach their students the current - or perhaps a slightly outdated - state of knowledge that comes out of scientific research. Because it hasn't changed in two millenia, not even in the face of what people have found out about the world in the same period.The secular world view, insofar as it's informed by science, is subject to that same science's capability of self-correction. This mechanism of self-correction is a guarantee that science will not be stifled by dogma. The moment science adopts a dogmatic view of things, it stops being science.

---

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Omni, I am slightly puzzled why you're saying this to me. I think I'll take it as a sign of agreement, but please let me know if I misunderstand you.

I'm beginning to wonder if we are using one and the same definition of the word 'dogma'.A dogma is not inherently false. It's just a position taken on something without question. It might be true, or it might not.If I say "The earth orbits the sun, and there's nothing anybody can say to convince me otherwise", then that is expressing a dogmatic view. The fact that the earth actually does orbit the sun doesn't change the dogmatic character of that view.Ohnhai's preparedness to alter his or her viewpoint in the face of new evidence is antithesis to a dogmatic stance.

---

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

I get the picture (I'm sorry if that phrase ticked you off). I think I agree with all of what you said there (in message 260), except the bit about theory being like religion. It seems we are using the same definition of dogma after all. Phew.

I'm sorry, I don't know what got into me. How could I ever have doubted you?