Also, the odds of losing your money are much higher if you enter the casino than they are of making any money; this idea is right on the money (no pun intended). Ridiculous! If everyone who entered a casino had a better chance of making money than they did losing it the casinos would not exist. I agree with this, in the sense that everyone who looks for answers about life in a church is going to come out with less than what they went in with (as well as less money!). The rest of your arguments also fall under the ridiculous category. Nothing you said, however thought provoking, has convinced me that any of the sensational claims of religion hold any water or that the atheist has the burden of proof. I have also become suspicious that you are not really agnostic but are actually a practicing believer of some religion in “sheep’s clothing”, if you will pardon the pun. Coffee Ghost, I salute you!

Also, I would like to ask about these phenomena you are referring to. Religion claims to have all these powers but cannot back them up with any proof. For example, you hear about people being healed from sickness but you never hear about someone’s severed head or arm being reattached. Why is it that religious claims are always something that can be attributed to something else (i.e. the placebo effect, or modern medicine)? I would argue that there are no such phenomena to be disproven, because the claims are false to begin with.

I have found that in general, though not always, the people with the firmest beliefs are the ones who know the least about these beliefs. For example the person who goes to church regularly but has never sat down and studied the bible for themselves.

As far as Pascal’s Wager goes, I think your statement that, “even if accenting to the “wrong” religion does have negative payoff, the probability of positive benefits coming from ascribing to any religion is higher than in atheism” is laughable. This statement alone makes me question your agnosticism.

Since becoming an atheist I feel as if the chains and burden of religion have been released and I am free. I have never felt better in my entire life! It was only when attending churches that I felt incomplete or enslaved by ideas that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I don’t see how you are going to stumble onto the prize winning bunch by following a series of ridiculous ideas. If anything you are eliminating your chances of winning the prize by limiting your ideas to those compatible with medieval times.

If you read something and you are convinced of its truth then doesn’t it become your own opinion?

“I apologize for my verbosity…etc.”

When writing it is more important to be understood than it is to use a bunch of advanced vocabulary in an attempt to prove your intelligence. You are obviously intelligent, but try making the goal of your writing to be as clear as possible. I think Coffee Ghost is excellent at this.

Anyhoo…I disagree with your assertion that the atheist is the one making the sensational claims. As an atheist myself I do not claim that there is no God, it is my belief that no one can know that for sure, no one. However, I am sure that the sensational claims of organized religion are false. If by saying that my claim of not believing their sensational claims is in and of itself a sensational claim, then I guess in the words of Jeffery Lebowski, “That’s just like your opinion, man…”

I think in general we can call any claim extravagant that asks you to believe it based on faith. Also, just because a bad or wrong idea has become a custom doesn’t mean the burden of proof falls upon those who don’t accept that custom. Especially when science is eroding the truths found in those customs on a daily basis. Whenever science proves that something in a religion isn’t true, the believers tend to rationalize or ignore that part of their text. I think this is the point; science is dismantling these religions one piece at a time. It has shown to be accurate enough that a person of reasonable intelligence, who hasn’t been brainwashed from childhood in the truth of a certain religion, can understand, from reasonable evidence, that these religious claims are manmade.

PS, thanks for letting me vent on a slightly irrelevant topic.

An Atheist Response
1) With regard to the issue of proving and disproving God, you propose that the burden of proof is on any sensationalist claim to provide evidence for that claim. But atheism is the sensationalistic claim. The more fundamental question is: on what basis can we call claims extravagant? If we are judging on cultural background—and many other proposed bases would simply presuppose their own conclusion as to the proper basis—the burden of proof is not always on those making positive ontological claims (i.e. that an object exists), but can be on those making negative ontological claims (i.e. that an object does not exist). The burden of proof is on Bishop Berkeley to show that objects don’t really exist, etc. This is because it has become so entrenched in tradition that there are material things outside of our perceptual sensations. From a purely pragmatic point of view, this position has worked for us for the large part of history; the burden is on those who wish to challenge that custom. Indeed, this is the norm in scientific practice—a theory is proposed and, if it works, is kept until it is challenged, at which point it is the prerogative of the challenger to provide strong evidence in support of rejecting to the previously established dogma. “In the absence of alternative hypotheses that can explain the phenomena in at least as satisfactory a way as the prevailing theory, scientists hesitate to abandon the prevailing theory (Lambert & Brittan, 1992, p. 57). The main point here is that the atheist is, on a historical scale, making the sensationalist claim, and not the theist.

You’re argument rests, to an extent, on cultural relativism (a position that I am fine with, and is, on a purely factual level, almost necessary for the social sciences). But you are already rejecting the culturally established norm of religion. This is not to say that you cannot provide evidence for the rejection of a supernatural entity (I will get to that in another post). Rather, I am just trying to point out incoherence in your argument that the burden is on theists to prove God.

In an ideal world, all cultural norms and establishments would be put to the test. This is not an ideal world. Heuristic devices must be employed—that is necessitated by selection pressures. The burden is almost always on those who wish to challenge or transform those norms and devices.

2) Disagreement in religions is often cited as evidence for the fundamental incoherence of religious beliefs and thus for the existence of God(s). However, disagreement may only indicate a flaw of knowledge, nothing ontologically relevant. In other words, there is a fundamental ambiguity as to whether disagreement indicates the inexistence of the object of which we are disagreeing about, or if it indicates the flawed nature of our knowledge of that object, or simply experiential difference that is largely unrelated to the object. If you say the rock is gray, and I say that it is bright pink (why is pink always such an important color for arguments?), does that indicate that the rock doesn’t really have a color? Or, rather, does it simply mean that one of us is wrong.

Now, of course the question of falsification comes up—i.e. that we can in principle falsify the claims about the rock, but not about God. Now, there are two points to be made here. First, let us just take for granted that disagreement is some indication that God does not exist. We are already assuming, by this very argument, that God is, and has been, falsified. I will talk about falsification in a different post, however.

Second, in what sense are our claims about the rock falsifiable? One might say that we can just go up to the rock. But what would this achieve? We will still hold our contrary beliefs. Or perhaps we can ask even more people. But, we couldn’t trust inter-subjectivity with two disagreeing people, how can we be assured that even more people will be satisfactory? This is not to reject inter-subjectivity in confirmation, but I am questioning just what principle grants such inter-subjective confirmation its validity. (I am not sure I agree with what I am saying, but you have to provide an argument as to why it is unsound reasoning.) In other words, the only way we could legitimate inter-subjective confirmation is to actually be able to check what each person is seeing. But this is impossible. Moreover, in just what sense can we say that the rock is pink or gray? This is the issue of Wilfred Sellars’ pink ice cubes—are the atoms of the pink ice cube, or the molecules, themselves pink? Not really. Which is the proper level of description to apply to our judgments? Perhaps the rock is spray-painted pink, but would otherwise be gray. Is it really gray, or is it really pink? Is it both? Well, all clever connotations aside, this is a logical impossibility. So, we are faced with several paths. We could reject the question of the color of the rock because it is unfalsifiable. But the question is perfectly meaningful. We could simply say that the question is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable, in just the way that the question of God is unscientific. But still, it is not a meaningless claim—and it still is a valid ontological question. Or, we could say that the rock simply does not exist, because there is disagreement as to its characteristics. None of these paths seem plausible to me. I think the best thing to say is that invoking disagreement as any sort of justification (no matter how implicit or explicit) for citing the disagreement of something is questionable.

3) I believe that you are begging the question (i.e. taking as a premise what you mean to conclude) that the scientific method of “self-correction” is more valid than religious claims to knowledge. You are already presuming that the matters with which we are dealing should be subject to self-correction, that this is appropriate and desirable. But couldn’t one claim that religious “knowledge” is not subject to the criteria of self-correction, for they ascent to an absolute truth that cannot be modified?

4) I also find your point about Pascal’s Wager, and I do not mean to be too harsh here, flawed. First of all, even if ascenting to the “wrong” religion does have negative payoff, the probability of positive benefits coming from ascribing to any religion is higher than in atheism. This is because we are at least entering the arena, increasing the chances that we may just stumble onto the prize-winning bunch. The probability of gaining money is, under normal circumstances, much higher if you enter the casino than if you remain outside it. Of course, you may very well lose a great deal of money. But you still have the initial possibility of acquiring money, which you have not had outside of the casino.

Second, you are conflating the psychological attitudes of religious fervor with religion itself. That is, you are claiming that the practical consequences of religion are already quite negative as a result of wars, deaths, crusades, etc. And you are claiming that these negative consequences are directly related to religion. However, the argument needs to be made, or must be made much more explicitly, as to the inseparability of the uses made of religion, and religious ideology itself.

5) You statement of “uncomfortable truths” begs the question by assuming them as “truths.” They may be uncomfortable hypotheses, but this does not beg them to be acknowledged as truths. If we do away with the premise that they are truths, science is just as aimed toward comfort (at least according to pragmatists) as is religion. Science seeks to eliminate “uncomfortable ‘truths’” and in fact does so, partly, by explaining them away as, some may put it, causally determined in some sort or another.

6) “Death comes soon, we must use our lives preciously.” Whence comes the intrinsic value of life? I agree that the denial of God does not mean nihilism, but simply asserting this does not constitute a very convincing argument. If you are a hardcore materialist (everything is physical), or even a behaviorist, the kind of humanist talk about the value of human life is meaningless. How do lives have value? Culturally? Intrinsically?

I think I mentioned in another note to you that much of what you say is, of course, not necessarily new to those who’ve taken the time to think and to study; but you put it as well as anyone I’ve ever come across — and lightyears ahead of how most atheists could express themselves.

As a spokesman for unbelief, you have two rare qualities that make your argument so convincing; clarity of presentation in your knowledge and an enviable ability to conceal your frustration with the sheer abdication of intelligence that is theism.

All power to your elbow, Al. Best wishes. Neil in France.