Ask an atheist

[ciphergoth]

In a discussion about religion in wildeabandon's journal, meihua writes: "this seems to have turned into me interrogating you. [...] Is there anything you'd like to challenge me on, instead?"

I think it's only fair enough to open up my own beliefs to the challenges of others, since I'm always keen to respond when theists invite me to give my perspective on some aspect of their beliefs as wildeabandon has in a series of recent posts. So, is there anything you'd like me to respond to?

Rules:

• You don't have to read this thread. This post is an invitation, not a challenge; if you don't like to read me talking about this then feel free to skip this.
• Be honest. Please don't advance arguments you don't personally buy, unless you're also an atheist and you want to discuss how best to counter it.
• If you come to change your mind about the validity of an argument, think about how you can generalise the lesson learned so as not to misassess similar arguments in future.
• Don't just match the politeness of what you reply to, but try to exceed it - see Postel's Law. Otherwise it is very easy to end up with a thread where each contributor thinks they are merely matching the snark level of the other, and yet the thread starts with the very slightest suggestion of rudeness and finishes with "please choke on a bucket of cocks".

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Certainty is relative. An individual belief may move in one direction or another on the scale of certainty, but it doesn't really do anything useful to try and move the entire scale; the scale is measured by its end points. In other words, there have to be some things of which I am most confident. Into that category goes my opinion of beliefs which appear to make no sense, where I have gone to great lengths to find out what the arguments in favour are and been astonished by their poverty, and where it's very easy to see how they could come to be widely believed while lacking all real merit.

The second question is a smidgeon away from "how do you decide what you think?", because obviously you can't turn your critical lens on everything at once and so you have to have some way of settling on what really needs it. The answer is (1) I try not to decide what I think, but to find myself persuaded of things - deciding what to think doesn't seem to have a role for evidence and such. (2) in order to describe how that process works, I would pretty much have to describe my entire brain, which I think will exceed LJ's comment limit.

[some-fox.livejournal.com]

Nice answers both. I think broadly speaking the only disagreements we have are the areas on which it isn't possible to be certain and the areas which it is important to be critical of.

Because I'm focused on human being and relating I'm in an area where there is very little actual certainty but a lot of people believing that they have it. I think that partly explains our differing takes on things - I focus on an area where a lot of people are certain and shouldn't be (and the history of psychology imagining that it has 'truths' is a scary one), whereas perhaps you focus on areas where there is more cause for certainty.

Now to read all the other comments... thanks again for doing this :-)

[jhg.livejournal.com]

For myself I was mightily impressed with Bayesian probability and, as such, feel that the sphere of facts about which it is possible to be certain (let alone those of which I *am* certain) are very, very small.

(Where, here, certainty means you have no doubt at all and you assign 100% credence to the fact under consideration).

So, while I would, for all practical purposes, consider myself a (functional) atheist - I am not 100% certain of it. I admit my own fallibility - and I believe I am right to do so (and the self-contradiction implicit in this sentence falls away in the Bayesian model making a rather pleasing symmetry to this post, even if I do say so myself) - and keep back a *little* bit of credence on the whole God question.

I'm not sure that there is anything at all about which I consider it possible to be 100% certain... perhaps the basic 'building blocks' of Aristotelian logic (so-called because he formalised & popularised it) - but then I consider that what that logic is examining is not of human construction.

Mind you, as I review that last paragraph I become less and less certain of even those!!!

[plumsbitch.livejournal.com]

ooh! thankyou jhg, for this comment, which is is something I chime hugely with but is expressed from a different angle/in different (and usefully so) language to the way I usually express it.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

Oh wow - thank you!

I have found that it is very useful to study the arguments of others, and indeed the method of argument and enquiry, since it gives you the *tools* to examine and express your own beliefs.