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Ed Huntress

On Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:27:35 -0500, wrote:

On Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:39:41 -0800, George Plimpton
wrote:

On 12/18/2011 11:43 AM, Mitchell Holman wrote:
Gunner wrote in
:

On Sun, 18 Dec 2011 10:39:28 +0000, Les
wrote:

Atheists are not responsible for Christianity.

Atheism, just another faith based religious belief.

Prove it.

See my excellent elaboration on the difference between strong atheists
(anti-theists) and weak atheists (just atheists.) Strong atheists claim
there is no god - they claim to know. That's faith, pure and simple.
Weak atheists say they don't believe there is a god. That's not faith -
that's a consideration of evidence, or the lack thereof.

Anti-theists are every bit as much dependent on faith as theists. They
claim to know something they cannot know.

And many "theists" as you call them BELIEVE there is a God - which is
every bit as reasonable as the "belief" of the "weak atheist" that
there they don't believe there is a god.

Clare, let's try this again. A "weak" atheist, sometimes called a
"scientific" atheist -- one who doesn't believe because he does not
accept the evidence presented for, and necessary for belief -- does
not "believe there is no god." He simply does not believe there IS a
god, based on the evidence he's seen.

Gunner may not get the distinction. He shows no evidence of doing so,
at least, clinging to his mistaken idea that all atheists "believe"
there is no god, in an act of "faith." He compounds his mistake by
using a folklore definition of "agnostic," apparently not knowing
where the term comes from or what it means.

Don't fall into that trap. This is not rocket science. "Weak" atheists
don't believe for the same reason they don't believe in the Tooth
Fairy. They don't claim to have absolute proof that the Tooth Fairy
doesn't exist. They just see no reason to believe that the Fairy
*does* exist, and therefore don't believe.

They may be influenced by the evidence that parents pretend and stand
in for the Tooth Fairy. g That's not a mathematical proof, but it's
experience that can weigh on the decision.

Theists do not have belief that's comparable in any way to that of
"weak" atheists. Their belief can be compared to that of "strong"
atheists, also known as anti-theists.

The whole argument is fraught with logical errors, but they can be
picked apart without a lot of effort. Gunner is quite right that it is
possible to prove a negative. The idea that you can't prove a negative
is folk logic and it's disproven every day. The most famous example is
the mathematical proof that you can't square a circle. People tried to
find a solution to constructing a square with the same area as a
circle for 2,000 years, and then a mathematician proved in 1882 that
it's impossible to do so, because of the nature of transcendental
numbers (pi, in this case). He proved the negative. The entire logical
basis of of modus tollens (denying the consequent) is proof of
negatives.

But that doesn't mean that all negatives can be proven, or that lack
of a logical proof of a negative is evidence of the positive. For
example, the Tooth Fairy. g There is a particular problem regarding
proof of god's existence because the believers keep changing the
definition of god, or they change the basis of evidence. There is no
firm proposition to disprove, so there is no firm contrapositive.
Depending on what they present as "evidence," there may be no firm
contrapositive.

--
Ed Huntress

The "weak atheist" is generally a reasonable person - and generally a
decent human being. The "strong atheists" tend, from my experience -
this group and discussion included, to be an unreasonable, crass, and
"ignorant" sub-species.

Start with fact that everyone is born
an atheist, no believing in any god, and
stays that way for at least a few years.
Even more, if they are lucky..........

The consensus of psychologists is that humans have an innate religiosity.

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