I love this blogger.
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/12/how-to-be-an-ally-with-atheists.html
she puts words on the page in funny and informative order. And says stuff that needs to be shouted from the
she puts words on the page in funny and informative order. And says stuff that needs to be shouted from the
When a Christian says "But you are a religion," what they mean is that "you hold to be true a set belief about the nature of reality that cannot be proven or disproven any more than anyone else's." And when an atheist says "No, I'm not, that's wrong" what they inevitably go on to talk about is how they don't have set doctrines or dogmas, nor moral guidelines or specifically determined ethics. The first is talking about "religion," the second about "Religion" and both are absolutely correct--they're just not talking to each other. And where I get crabby about it is that then, when the believers meet CAC, who really does use the "I am not a Religion" to mean "I am superior to religion"--in other words, my belief has greater proof or weight--it becomes this utterly caustic situation that spreads. I get just as pissy about fundy believers who use the "You're a religion too" to mean "You're just like all those other Religions which, unlike mine, are stupid." Same situation. And if all of the non fundies, on both sides, would start waking up and actually listening to and understanding each other (and recognizing the failures of fundies on both sides), and take the steps to acknowledge what the other side needs to hear "I do not think you are bad because you do not believe--I don't agree, but that's ok," as well as "I do not think you are stupid because you believe. I disagree, but that's ok," we'd be a whole lot better off. And it really is a problem with both sides being so isolationist about the whole thing and not trying to understand each other and so resorting to arguments that aren't arguments, they're just more beat-your-head-against-a-wall statements that never connect. Both sides have the responsibility to educate the other side about who they are, and that's where it all needs to start. Atheists aren't to blame for being frustrated, but really, believers aren't either. It's gonna take those kinds of conversations to really get anyone anywhere.
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seriously, it's a problem with the language itself. We don't really have a susinct way of saying "I have thought about these concepts and i have accepted them on thier merits, and am not taking a leap of faith. I do not believe in these concepts, per se, I accept them as the best explanation of the world that i currnetly have, but give me a better explanation and I will accpet that."
with religion (to an athiest, or at least to many of us) we hear religion as a set of beliefs that are taken on faith. there is no proof, and no proof needed or wanted. if you ask an atheist what would change thier mind about their so-called beliefs--they will usually give you an answer. it might be a stupid, pithy sarcastic answer (god showing up and giving me a sandwich, is an example)--but it will be an answer.
ask a religious person the same thing...and most of the time you will hear that nothing will change their mind.
this is why many atheists react badly to the suggestion that atheism is a religion--it's not the lack of dogmas, rituals, instituion--it's the fact that religion implies that you "believe" on faith. when believe is an incredibly bad word for many of the things atheists accept.
I do actually rant at people who ask me if I "believe" in evolution. I tell them that i do NOT believe in evolution. I tell them that i've read the theory, seen it's precepts in action, seen predictions the theory has made be true, and if they choose to go see a doctor, or own a dog they have as well.
same with the idea that there is no god. I don't believe it--I have not had anybody provide the (rather extroidinary) evidence that one actually exists, and everything that i know about science says that there is not one that is needed for the world to work. In many cases, the world works better without the presupposition that there is an invisible person that controls everything. Since a claim like God (or gods or what-have-you) is...really extriodinary--i would need some pretty compelling evidence to throw out a perfectly good worldview.
unfortunately, shorthand for "current worldview" is "beliefs" which have baggage attached that scream out leaps of faith, non-rational ideas, and sloppy words that imply that intelligent design has as much evidence as evolution. after all, if they are both just "beliefs" they are the same thing. and beliefs, generally speaking, can't be wrong--after all, it's all just a difference of opinion, right?
I explained this to my mom once by telling her that "some opinions are wrong." if i had the opinon that the sky was purple with neon, perfectly round polka dots when the sky was (to most people who weren't suffering some sort of neurological disorder) blue--my opinion, however strongly i belived it, would still be wrong.
I don't "believe" in my worldview. the world works. it'll work the same way no matter what i think about it. I have some pretty good explanations about how it's doing that, but really--those explanations are not perfect. My opinions can be wrong. My so-called beliefs can be wrong.
however, when i try to explain all that to someone, for example, on campus asking me if i believe in evolution--i get glassy stares and a repeated "but do you BELIEVE in evolution?" so i say yes. and then i get treated to a long winded exposition on atheism is just as much of a religion because we have beliefs too.
atheists get overly technical and pedantic 'cuase the language is set up wrong. there is only so many ways you can say "I don't accept the concept of your God (or gods. or spirits, or souls) as a good explanation of the world"
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What you have just described as your view is not atheism, by definition. It is a version of agnosticism.
There is the generic, sort of abstract agnosticism, which holds that you cannot know (which is not what you just described)...but there is also the more pragmatic agnosticism which holds that human knowledge is restricted to the human experience, and that perception of the world can and should only stem from what can explain the world from the experiences of man. Everything in your above statement is a statement of agnosticism--how you form your opinions, how you hold them, your ability to change them based on new experience.
OED, just for assistance:
atheism
/aythi-iz’m/
• noun the belief that God does not exist.
ag⋅nos⋅tic
/ægˈnɒstɪk/
• noun a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
• noun a person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study.
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And just as a secondary point--just because you've only met the "eyes glaze over" type, there are believers who will give you very similar lines as you give when asked about their faith. Hell, there are saints in the Catholic church who wrote that one cannot have faith without first having doubt, and then having experience, (and were sainted in full acknowledgment of those writings).
I am curious to know what scientific principles/explanations you have that work better without a universal power. While I've certainly never come across any that require a universal power to exist (given that you can't have functional scientific testing beyond the scope of human experience, it would be bizzare if there was ever a scientific principle that dealt with that realm), I've never found any that make more sense without one. Hell, even Einstein believed firmly in a divinity (and wrote about his belief), and he's not exactly the sort to have held fast to something his math worked against (hell, he threw out ages old, well established science without even blinking an eye when the math didn't work). There is, always, the awkward corruption of Occam's Razor (all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best--which was, for the record, one of the older proofs of God before it got claimed by early scientists as a good rule of thumb), but that line is so desperately dependent on how you phrase the question that it's really not a good standard to work from in the big picture. But I really, really am curious.
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'cuase then you'd have to say i was agnostic about, say, Zeus, or Russels Giant Teapot and the Flying Spagetti Monster. or Unicorns. or that I was agonstic about the possibility of humans suddenly developing shapeshifting abilities. I will hesitate to point out that the dictionary was probably written by...well. someone who identifies as christian. Because I'm not jsut someone who doesn't belive in the judeao/christian/islamic God. i also don't believe in the hindu gods, the greek gods, the roman gods, the norse gods, the celtic gods, the native american gods, the japanese pantheon, the chinese gods, the old aztec gods...ect. i think that ALL of those have an equal chance of being correct. which is to say, i find them all the same level of silly. So, if you wish you can call me agnostic--but it's a pretty meaningless label, since it's running into zeno's paradox territory. I mean...if i'm 99.99% sure there is no god of any sort, do you still count me as an agonostic?
I mean, i'm open to the idea that i can be wrong. i'm not delusional. I'm not irrational. I'd just be really really really really surprised. As would, i suspect, a lot of people of many different faiths.
as far as the idea that the world works better without the guiding hand of the supernatural...
if i do an experiment, i need to know that the world works in a rational, orderly and above all, consistant way. if there is a supernatural force acting on the world--what possible use is science? what can possibly be learned in any meaningful way if there is a guiding, supernatural, unknowable force that has whims and can change the outcome in unpredictable irrational ways?
it changes a bit when you say that the supernatural force doesn't actually change anything--but then....why have one? if the supernatural force doesn't actually do anything...why have one? Why believe in something that doesn't interact with the world in any way that cannot be explained by natural phenomenon? What is the purpose in believing in something that doen't do anything?
and if it DOES do things--then why haven't we seen it? why does the world act as if there is nothing guiding it? why add in an ivisible, untestable varible to the experiment? the only purpose to add in something you cannot control or test for into scientific experimentation is to invalidate the experiment. which...i hope goes without saying does have a detrimental effect on science.
I mean--the reason women doesn't get enough medical and scientific data collected on them is because we've got a more unstable hormonal cycle that has a greater range of varibility. and it's hard to account for all that variablilty. if we had to add in an infinate, unknowable varible...it'd be impossible.
Now, this is the sort of thing that gets athiests into trouble with religious types--athieism seems essential to science. but that's false, obviously 'cuase there are scientists that are perfectly happy in thier faiths.
but they don't, if they are good at it, let their god into the lab unless they are testing for him/her/it. and those tests tend to be either unsuccessful, invalidated by a confirmation bias or unreplicatable.
Some, like einstein, saw thier god in the experiments, in the perfect beauty of the natural world. he's like teri.
Now. here is where Teri and I differ in terms of semantics. Teri offers that there IS a Universal Power--and that it is, for all intents and purposes,The God of Physics. Her "god" set the laws of the universe in motion, and then left. there is no point to worshipping it, it doesn't care. believe in it or not, physics doesn't care. She holds the same views as I do as an atheist--but she calls herself a Deist. I skip the middle man and just call that force physics, and don't ascribe any athromophic qualities to the fundemental laws of the universe, like "not caring". Teri shares this sort of faith with thomas jefferson, einstien, and a lot of really smart people who, for some reason or another found it hard to let go of faith.
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'Cause, see, we know now that Newton was wrong. His science works for us, here and now, on our planet, but utterly fails in the bigger picture. And once we got a good look at the (slightly) bigger picture, we could tell that Newton's math was incorrect, and that it only worked for what he had experienced, and that a different explanation was required overall, one that worked both out there and down here. And yet Newton's physics gave us most of the great early breakthroughs in human technology and development--in fact, Newtonian physics is still used in most engineering, even though it's ultimately incorrect. So what would the point of science be in a world where there is more than you can test for? Well, because ultimately, all those steps out to that limit still have value, still improve our lives. They don't negate the big picture, and there's still a point to them--there's just more that on one level may, in fact, invalidate them overall (but not invalidate their function in the now). And heading towards that infinite limit is what they strive for.
I'm not sure I understand why you think atheism/agnosticism is in any way limited to a Christian god...there's nothing about either points of view that would limit them in that way.
But more to the point--you're playing the "I'm pretty sure but it's not a belief which makes me more rational" game, which is why Agnosticism got triggered. That 1% of doubt you have? Most religious have that too. And you really do not have any more evidence for your point of view than anyone else has for theirs, no matter how much you feel that a lack of evidence for them means evidence for you. So if you're going to run with this whole "but it's not a belief, because it could change" thing, you're going to run into trouble when other people can't figure out how that's any different from them (because for most, it's not).
As for why haven't we seen it...well, can you really say we haven't? With all of the terribly methodical and overly organized things that exist in the universe, all of the consistent math and the underlying structure, what makes the idea that this all simply is any more logical than it all is because it's supposed to be that way? Not that I necessarily buy into that myself, but it's a valid point. Certainly, it could all simply be...but it could be more, and the only reason that idea could be rejected is, again, Occam's Razor, which is a theory of knowing originally set forth as a proof of the existence of God, and has no more rational validity than anything else, because the simpler solution to any situation is totally dependent upon the way in which the situation was originally posed.
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Putting aside all discussions of whether or not you "believe" there is no god, what I am terribly comfortable in saying is that you do believe that until there is concrete/definitive evidence of something, there's no validity to it.
And that, while I think it would still fall under the term agnostic as far as the English language is concerned, is a belief that you need to recognize as having underlying assumptions, assumptions that do, in fact, rely on faith (not faith in god, obviously, but faith none-the-less). While it may be a more adaptable kind of faith than you have experienced in a lot of other people, it is still a form of faith. In order to believe that evidence is required for validation, you first have to believe that evidence is possible. You have to believe that function holds some sort of primacy (that is, that things must somehow function within our perceived existence--which is, interestingly enough, one of the primary innovations of the Hebrew Bible to religious thought overall--but that's another long tangent). That the ability of the world to be understood somehow relates to functioning in that world (the lines "if i do an experiment, i need to know that the world works in a rational, orderly and above all, consistant way. if there is a supernatural force acting on the world--what possible use is science? what can possibly be learned in any meaningful way if there is a guiding, supernatural, unknowable force that has whims and can change the outcome in unpredictable irrational ways?" are particularly significant to this. Even just in the most basic sense, you don't have to understand physics to understand chemistry, and you don't have to understand chemistry to understand biology. Biologists make significant contributions to our daily lives, and yet very few of them could give you the true, deep down details of how life on this planet works. A physicist could give you a ridiculous amount more, but even they don't have the full picture, and they know it. In fact, in the really high end stuff worked on these days, unpredictability and paradox seem to reign supreme--take Schroedinger's cat, for example, or any other theory dealing with the functioning of light. The "I have to be able to control it in order for what I do to have meaning" is only sort of true--it's true if the goal is to know everything, absolutely, but not remotely true if the goal is, to say, something like curing cancer).
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