Seth wrote:PordFrefect wrote:Welcome to Ladies and Gentlemen to Seth's Quibbles.
I think it is obvious that what MrJonno meant was that the default position regarding the existence of any claimed x, absent evidence, is one of nonbelief. This is an easy concept to grasp.
As to the rest of your tripe, operating under the principle I mentioned above is in no way faith-based. I have no faith that x does not exist. I withhold belief in the existence of x pending evidence. To believe in the existence of x in the absence of evidence would be faith.
No you don't, you're just equivocating because you know I'm right. You don't "withhold belief" you have a positive and well known active disbelief and indeed disrespect of even the potential existence of God. So do all Atheists.
Yes I do. I disbelieve in God in the same sense that I disbelieve in teapots orbiting the sun which cannot be detected. The teapot may be there, but as there is no evidence for its existence there is no cause for me to believe in it. I do not deny the possibility that it may exist.
This "pending evidence" argument is so much bullshit that Atheists use to try to escape being labeled as religious zealots, but the facts are clear. Yes, believing in the existence of X in the absence of evidence is faith, but so is believing in the NON-existence of X in the absence of evidence of non-existence...and, I'd like to point out, plenty of evidence (though not scientific evidence) in the form of personal testimony by individuals who claim personal experience with X. That you disbelieve the evidence they provide does not in and of itself prove that their experiences are false or misinterpreted.
Asserting that disbelief in the existence of X constitutes an act of faith does not make it so. To reiterate - faith is the belief in something absent evidence not the disbelief in something absent evidence. This is a clear distinction that you should be capable of grasping.
Faith = belief in the existence of x without evidence for x
Faith != disbelief in the existence x without evidence for x
You'll notice I used the term 'nonbelief' and the phrase 'withhold belief' rather than disbelief. This is not because I think to disbelieve in something is an act of faith. That is to say to often nitpicking twats interpret 'disbelief' as being synonymous with 'denial' then go on to make a red herring balloon argument about how denial on the grounds of lack of evidence is faith.
Disbelief is synonymous with denial. It's an active decision to deny the claims made by theists because they do not present what you consider to be credible evidence of their claims. You have examined their claims and actively rejected them and actively rejected the claim that God exists. This is not "nonbelief" because nonbelief is the absence of ANY belief about X, positive or negative, and that can only occur in complete ignorance of X.
Your attempts at sophistry are noted. Now you've compounded two issues - what it means to disbelieve and what constitutes evidence. However, disbelief is defined as
the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true not the denial of that something. The inability or refusal to accept something as true absent evidence is clearly not denial. It's simply evidence based thinking - what scientists and rational minded people do. I disbelief in faeries in the same way that I disbelieve in God (RD dealt with this fairly well in his book 'TGD' - the practical agnostic etc.). You're attempting to introduce a red herring in the form of 'disbelief is itself a belief'.
As to what constitutes evidence, some people believe that visions - or what may more properly be called hallucinations - are evidence of God. Naturally if we start with a hypothesis and apply alleged facts we will inevitably distort or select facts to fit the hypothesis rather than the hypothesis to fit the facts. This is Bayesianism at work. In this, I once again applaud your sophisticated sophistry, you've compound two issues once again: Evidence vs. Proof. Proof is binary - it is either true or false. There is no proof outside of mathematics and logic and we are not discussing proof, rather you are but I am not. Here, once again, you've attempted to conflate two or more types of evidence. Scientific evidence (this the sort we are talking about. The sort required to support the God hypothesis) is obtained through objective tests and experimentation. It is not the sort obtained through personal experience or subjective tests of faith.
You cannot honestly claim to have "nonbelief" or the absence of belief about X because you have obviously examined the evidence provided by the claimants and have rejected that evidence as insufficient to satisfy your personal metric for truth. In other words, you have formed a belief. But you formed that belief, which is an active disbelief in X, based only on the claims made by others and in the absence of any investigation to the standard that you set for the proponents of X of your own as to the truth of YOUR belief that X does not exist.
Nonsense built on your foundation of sophistry. If you wish to say I believe in anything, you may honestly say that given two hypotheses I believe in the one which the weight of evidence supports. You may also say I follow standards of evidence and the scientific method in such matters as the claimed existence of something, whatever it may be. This may qualify as 'belief' in these standards and methods. However, encapsulated in what I just wrote, is the preclusion of your claim that I begin with the hypothesis that X does not exist. As I stated earlier, hypotheses are altered to fit evidence not evidence to fit hypotheses. I apply a uniform standard of evidence, I do not alter it or make special allowances or alterations to fit the subject, in such cases. You've made yet another false assertion: I deny the existence of X, therefore I deny any evidence for the existence of X. There is no special standard set for the 'proponents of X'. This is a flimsy assertion on your part.
Try to pettifog and obfuscate your way out of the truth all you like, but you and I both know that your claim of "withholding belief" is just so much evasive bilge. You firmly and with conviction believe that God does not exist and you are devoted in that belief and you practice it as a matter of both faith and as a matter of conscience and ethics, so you are practicing religion every bit as much as the theists are, in spite of your denials.
Which is fine, because there's nothing wrong with holding beliefs, having faith or practicing religion. It's not like you're fucking little children or anything.
A bland attempt to evoke an emotional response rather than a rational one and an attempt lacking any substance whatsoever to respond to other than its tenor. Do try harder in the future will you?
But don't try to mount your high horse and think you're morally, ethically or intellectually superior to any other religious believer, because you're not. You have no more evidence to support your proposition than they have to support theirs, and in fact you have rather a lot less. They claim personal experience, you claim nothing at all but skepticism. In the evidence competition, they win and you lose.
Indeed? I challenge you to provide this body of evidence so we may examine it and be enlightened. I'll be waiting. (It may help to do some independent research on what actually constitutes evidence in an investigation such as this one).
