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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35526 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat atheism with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems. For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong. Which it almost certainly is, in my opinion. But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. These ideas are, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans (at least the latter can be empirically shown true or false; the former is just a category error). But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokeism. Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople". Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but atheism typically gets a free pass. Even the philosophers on here mostly refuse to really call it out as being absurd when the topic comes up.

Does this happen because atheism is largely not viewed as a threat anymore (since its birth of wokeism is already in the past) and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and atheism is vaguely internet-weirdo-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"? Or, to be more charitable, maybe it is because wokeism can fairly easily be criticized on the level of normal scientific investigation, whereas the claims that atheism makes go so far beyond typical constraints of the scientific method that one actually does just quietly make an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation (and people just fail to ever mention such)?

  • -36

On account of you committing to the bit and some posters being supportive of it – though in a welcome twist, fewer than in 2021 on the orange site – I'll treat this copypasta as a sincere criticism of atheism from a Christian perspective.

Hi, a (qualified) atheist here. I have pondered such arguments and have deemed them, although problematic for atheism, insufficiently good to accept religion or really even the agnostic ambiguity about any religion being possibly true. This post by @aaa sums up all of the following nicely so you can skip it.

consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory… just a category error

I am fed up with both sides of this argument for the exact reason you point at: smug, blind faith that their parochial assumptions are universal truths, and that blind spots of the opponent validate their specific assumptions. But it's bold to insinuate that the faithless are the worst offenders here – or more «relativist».

On one hand: yes, absolutely, we are not owed a Universe which is no more complex (in personally consequential ways, even!) than our tools allow us to discern. This unwillingness to see past the edge of the Occam's razor has irritated me to no end in the New Atheism era, and I've written and translated a bunch of stuff on it, and on the relation of metaphysics and religion. (People unfavorably compare my writing to ChatGPT lately; I'll link to some old posts to check if there's been any degradation).

In short: the refusal to entertain non-plainly-materialist metaphysics even as hypotheses does look like either a cognitive deficit – or perhaps rational irrationality, the choice to not ask certain questions so as to not lose your grounding.

But on the other hand. What you are doing here is what I've seen many smart theists attempt to do. You try to turn the objectifying, diagnostic lens that atheists have used on your team back onto them, but you commit a similar category error, so it flops, again; and your rhetorical judo would've been equally stilted had you written it from scratch. If atheists mistake methodology for metaphysics, you mistake metaphysics for theology – moreover, your own brand of theology. Is proving that Occam's Razor cannot dispel non-empirical beliefs equivalent to proving Trinity, transubstantiation, resurrection and propitiation? No, it doesn't follow. Endorsing a particular faith is a much more self-serving sleight of hand than the mistake of atheists; so ceterius paribus it is worse. You can read the convo here for some more arguments. As I've said back then: «At this point I just think theists have a short-circuited higher-agency-detection system». A cognitive deficit, just a different one.

And finally, crudely, for Christians there is the problem of Jews. Jews, like Adam Conover, ruin everything – by being okay; so okay it causes Christians to revise their doctrine now. Jewish wretchedness, homelessness and seeming abandonment of their tribe by God have been underpinnings of Christian rhetorics for millennia (over which your psyches have been shaped by Church-specific pressures). Today, when someone like Randy smugly says that a polity can't have nice things – a functioning society, basically – without God (and this ostensibly proves the truth of his faith), he also says «without Christ». But it seems you can have much nicer things if you assume that Christ is boiling in excrement in Hell. Israeli economy is booming, as is their population, as is their ability to secure their future; while Christians are dying out and secularizing, Jews grow more Orthodox and «trad»; and they'll become tradder yet in your lifetime. Could you give any single compelling reason for an Orthodox Jew to convert? If not, why would you expect anyone else to be swayed by your denomination specifically?

And curiously, this tradness is not really dependent on wacky metaphysics. Adorno in «The Authoritarian Personality» has said that one reason Jews and Judaism are so hated by the oppressors is their freedom from superficial delusion: «Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth». I suppose this is a bit too flattering, but it is at the very least possible for them. It is not quite possible for you. Orthopraxic religions are only tangentially connected to metaphysics; yours is pretty wholly metaphysical, it's a matter of belief. And this focus on impractical beliefs, frankly, is a much bigger cause to suspect mental illness. In you and me both.

…In the end it's an issue of constitutional difference, I think: brains of theists are literally wired so as to tolerate implausibility of religion, while my brain is wired to tolerate _senselessness_of the observable world_».

I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat atheism with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems.

Congrats to your search and replace skills.

What you said is true, atheism per se is not questioned here.

Is it because theists gave up.

No more philosophical proofs of God's existence, no more evidence that Bible is literal word of God, no more irrefutable arguments that Jesus indeed rose from the dead.

What today counts for evangelism are purest materialist arguments - either collective "Society needs to believe in something" "Christianity is better than wokeism" "Lower orders need religion to keep them in check" or individual "Just go to church, bro, it is nice place with nice art and music, good place to make friends and pick up girls".

In short, the noughties are gone.

Want to bring them back? Want to RETRVN to christian-atheist debates of the golden age of the internets?

Just start it. Make effortpost about existence of God, about cosmological argument, about irreducible complexity of life, about intelligent design. When godless infidels start objecting, demolish them with facts, logic and reason.

This isn't true, not online at least. The current trend is presuppositional apologetics, supposedly started by Sye Ten Bruggenate. The theists are trying, but the ones I've seen are fairly bad at debating in good faith.

How many people here think death is followed by eternal dreamless sleep? I'm an atheist, but I don't believe in eternal dreamless sleep, so that makes me sort of a "soft atheist."

Scientific materialist black pill of the day:

Sleep is not like death, sleep is death. When you fall asleep, your consciousness ceases to be and you are gone.

Someone else identical to you wakes up in the morning in your body - for the next day.

Good night.

Relevant SMBC

Anyway, my consciousness ceases and I am gone after any neural impulse alters a synaptic connection in my brain. Sweet dreams, everyone.

Thanks. First I was afraid of teleportation, now I'm afraid of falling asleep!

No biggie. You just need to materialism more and adopt a pattern-based theory of identity.

There's still some brain activity during sleep, even if it's dreamless, consequently death is not like dreamless sleep. It's more like what it was like before you were born.To be honest death of others bothers me a lot more than death of myself.

I feel like I've stumbled into a thread where many other people have decided to do a simple substitution of atheism and theism and this feels like a trap but I'll go ahead and say it. Atheism is almost certainly true, there is some outside chance that it is not in some way that we are entirely unable to interrogate because of our limited perspective but on balance there is no sound epistemic ground through which to arrive at the religions we actually have access to as anything but unsubtantiatable claims by other people who themselves have no no epistemic grounds to comment. The simplest way to put it is that there is no reason to privilege any individual religion over any other and they all conflict, trying to pick is a farce.

This post, in itself, might have just merited a warning, or not even that. It's borderline. It's not really good faith to just take someone else's post, reverse the polarities, and repost it as bait, without even a hint that that's what you're doing. It would be much more ingenuous to link to the post in question and then post your rebuttal, even if it does come in the form of pointedly reversing the sides.

Doing it the way you did it, it looks like you're just fuming about the original post and wanted to see how cleverly you could gotcha people.

But fine, you can bring a reverse argument to the table if presented civilly, albeit somewhat disingenuously.

However, you've then gone on to argue with people throughout this thread is a condescending and belligerent manner. The queue is filled with reports on your posts. No one post is terrible, but most of them are obnoxious and unnecessarily antagonistic.

And this is something you have been warned about repeatedly.

At this point, it's clear that this is just how you want to argue with people and you don't care if you're told that it's not appreciated.

Your last ban was for 2 days, so this time you can take a week off.

Atheism/Agnosticism is a priori Wokeism. Just as belief in God is a priori Christianity or Islam. Ergo, there is no Wokeism without the coordinated popularity of the New Atheist movement just as the New Atheist movement itself wouldn't have been possible without popular culture's increased secularization (going back to the mid-60s) and the collective shift in epistemological standards resulting after the invention of the internet (and the events of 9/11).

Wokeism has the exact size and shape of any religious movement. How Christianity subsumed Paganism is how Wokeism is subsuming Christianity. If the Woke are fire-and-brimstone Bible thumpers then the New Good Person is the reasonable type who yes, goes to church on Easter, and yes, believes Christ died on the cross for her sins but really can't be bothered to convert anyone and truly finds Evangelicals to be mostly aggressive and distasteful, despite their fundamental agreements about Black Lives Mattering, (Gay) Love Being (Hetero) Love, and the Future Being Female.

New Atheism's function was to remove the metaphysical ground from underneath the critical mass, that it would invariably lead to the creation of new ground -- as a rule, something as filled with holes as the old ground -- was guaranteed, as these are meant to be useful paths for a governing body to traverse its people towards its desired ends, nothing more. Science would then stand in for God and anything that can't be made to be traced thusly would be called a heresy (i.e. unscientific).

I think your attempt to re-trace the philosophical and metaphysical implications of the New-Atheism-to-Wokeism transition and being confused as to why we're seemingly uncritical of a movement accused of birthing our outgroup is getting tripped up by missing an important element: libertarianism. I realize I shouldn't be speaking for the others, but many "New Atheists" were probably animated by the same basic impulse: don't coerce us.

The atheism wars of the 2000's were animated by this very same impulse--it's what that whole culture war was about, and funny enough, it's also what our current culture war is about. 2000's atheism was about fighting back against stifling normative cultural programming from Christians, and the current moment is about fighting back against ungrounded ideals being programmed into the mechanisms of society. So yes, we treat atheism with "kid gloves" because we are godless liberals who didn't go woke.

Again, as someone who could have been one of those cringy Reddit atheists, I like to think I can get along well with religious people, but at the same time, I'm not particularly interested in acting as if some ancient Jewish guy magically came back to life after being left for dead in the Israeli desert just to accomodate them, nor am I particularly interested in being told I'm going to Hell after I die just because I don't really feel God in my bones. No, I guess this isn't grounded in any coherent idea of metaphysics or whatever, but I don't care about that aspect most of the time; it's based in practical reality.

I think the atheism-libertarianism connection is moreso that - or at least this is how it has always looked to me - in the United States, particularly in the years after the Christian Right ascendancy in the Republican Party (and this certainly was still going on during the Bush II years, W. wore his religion on the sleeve in a way that Trump certainly didn't), "libertarianism" often was basically just code for being right-wing but not being religious. This also explains why online libertarianism seems to be less of a presence on forums than now; post-Trump and with the general reduction of the power of religion in American society, it's more possible than previously to just be a secular conservative, like through being a nationalist or "anti-woke" or so on.

I’m skeptical of the ‘new atheism birthed woke’ idea, tbh, and I say that as someone who doesn’t like either very much- new atheists are still around being new atheists, and they’re often stridently anti-woke. No one really pays attention to them(which I suspect is why the motte is so uninterested in criticizing atheists), but Dawkins is still out there making 13 year old Redditor arguments.

The impression I got is that somewhere around 2012 there was a massive schism within the New Atheism community, from which the daughter community Atheism Plus was born. Atheism Plus, spearheaded by people such as PZ Myers and Richard Carrier, added several social-justice causes to New Atheism, and indeed largely shared interests, priorities, and rhetorics with the modern social justice movement. Eventually most of its members lost interest for the atheist aspect and sort of faded into general-purpose SJ. After the schism, people who still considered themselves New Atheists, such as Harris and Dawkins, were pretty much anti-SJ by default -- if they hadn't, they would have moved into the A+.

A good summary, but my impression as a New Atheist-ish type was that A+ was a consequence of a wider trend, from about 2008, to elevate economics over social policy issues, and for feminism to regain some of its early 90s prescriptivism rather than later 90s/00s "Girls just wanna have fun" feminism.

As someone who does think that the "New Atheism" community played a pretty outsized role in shaping what basically makes up modern progressive culture, I would almost certainly say that the Atheism part of it is largely irrelevant. It's more of a coincidence than anything else, it could have happened in pretty much any other online community (I do think social media plays a role in this) that leaned left.

I don't think irrelevant at all, if anything I feel like the denial of any higher source of truth or morality is pretty damn central to wokism. Hence the emphasis on "lived experience", and statements like "no bad tactics, only bad targets".

Harvard was founded as a Calvinist Seminary, do you know what you get when you take Calvinism and delete the concept of Divine Grace? You get something uncannily similar to the modern progressive "victimhood" memeplex. I don't think that is a coincidence.

It might be in my view of what Wokism actually is. To me, I think it's a way to make a better world in a way that doesn't threaten, and maybe enhances status/class based advantages. There's nothing inherent in that, I think, that goes against belief in a higher deity.

For what it's worth, Calvinism is one of those religious beliefs I do have a serious problem with, in the same light as I look at Wokism TBH. And the truth is, I don't see any reason why much of the memeplex couldn't come from a liberal Calvinist community.

Many mothers who aren't particularly nice people end up greatly disliking their children when they turn out to be, surprise, not very nice people either. They just realize something about the fruit of their labor after the deed has already been done.

I think it's just an age thing. Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet. I think it's just hard to enforce that level of blindness in the age of the internet.

There do seem to be a few people in my life that never grew out of their atheism phase, but they seem generally uncurious.

Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists. I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.

To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.

  • -14

Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists.

Yea, you're way off. I haven't done a poll or anything, but the general sense I get is atheism is overwhelmingly popular among people who consider themselves "rationalists". The exceptions are notable and eye-catching.

I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist.

Atheism-vs-theism is a set of beliefs (of varying confidences) about the way the world is actually is. A "good rationalist" would update their beliefs on the evidence to which they have access and try to minimize the influence of their personality categorization.

How many religious people constantly question whether there is a God? It seems like either way, people come to a conclusion and follow it. Also, the religious person typically only learns about one religion, a tiny fraction of all the different religious beliefs that people have held since humans existed.

Rationalists are almost all atheists, because the evidence for God is so incredibly weak, especially compared to the magnitude of the hypothesis (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, etc.). And it lacks explanatory or predictve power (video if you prefer that format).

To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.

I'm going to suggest that you don't understand atheists (or at least, atheist rationalists) very well. You have already skewed the discussion by asking "what if there is no god", which presumes we have any prior reason to think there is a god. "God" does not actually answer any questions we might have about the universe--it is the believer who can use it as an answer for any question, without investigating further. Hence, for example, Lord Kelvin's assertion that many mysteries of life, which we have since explained with science, are completely unexplainable by science.

Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience.

Atheism does not entail being unaware that religion exists or of what it is, though.

There do seem to be a few people in my life that never grew out of their atheism phase, but they seem generally uncurious.

I always thought the opposite. It's very hard for me to understand the mindset of someone studying the history of religions and coming out of it believing a specific one happens to be true. Even more so when the conclusion is that the one religion you happened to be born into is the only one that also happens to be true. Thousands of religions and you are born in the only true one, how lucky!

I can understand people coming to the conclusion that some sort of abstract philosophical god exists, in some sense (think of it as "the priniciple of order in the universe" or something like that). But usually that's not what usually happens, usually it's just part of a motte and bailey strategy:

  1. you can't prove or disprove any metaphisical theory

  2. therefore believing in the logos is just as rational as not believing in it

  3. actually believing in the logos is better than not believing in it (motte)

  4. which is why you should believe the doctrine of the roman catholic church as it existed between the council of trent and the second vatican council (bailey)

I think it's just an age thing. Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience.

You seem to entirely discount the existence of many older atheists who used to be religious.

To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.

Many were religious, asked that question, and this led to them becoming atheists.

It's kind of amusing seeing this kind of argument dunking on atheists as just angry teenagers who never grew up. There's a certain kind of religious belligerent who is the mirror image of the condescending atheist sneering at sky fairies.

You seem to entirely discount the existence of many older atheists who used to be religious.

I'm sorry but this "entirely discount" irritated me more than it probably should have. No I am not "entirely" anything. I'm pointing out a perceived inverse correlation between age and adherence to atheism, oh and wouldn't you know, since we all love polls here so much, that is reflected in polling: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/age-distribution/

Obviously these people exist. I still have all of their books, and used fawn over their youtube videos and post their takes on my various social media accounts. I still celebrate Christopher Hitchens birthday and mourn him on his death day, and still consider him one of the most influential people in my life outside of my own family.

It's kind of amusing seeing this kind of argument dunking on atheists as just angry teenagers who never grew up.

Especially given the types of responses I've gotten, I agree.

I'm pointing out a perceived inverse correlation between age and adherence to atheism, oh and wouldn't you know, since we all love polls here so much, that is reflected in polling: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/age-distribution/

Yes, there's an inverse correlation between age and religiosity. You're implicitly pushing the idea that people become more religious over time. But the poll you quote is a snapshot of a particular moment in time. I submit to evidence more polling from the same organization that suggests that since the early 2000s, Americans in general are becoming less religious, and at quite a steady rate [1].

The alternative hypothesis is that ever since there was widespread penetration of Internet access, young people could easily research better explanations than "God did it". And that younger generations are less religious than ever and will stay so over their lifetime, because that's the best explanation for the available evidence.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/11/Detailed-tables-for-upload-11.11.19.pdf

Especially given the types of responses I've gotten, I agree.

Most of the responses you've gotten seem more thoughtful than your OP.

@fuckduck9000 already brought the receipts regarding just how wildly miscalibrated your estimate of how many rationalists are atheists (to wit: the vast majority) so I’m not going to rehash that. I’m merely going to offer what I think is a plausible explanation for how you came to such a wildly inaccurate perception.

Many people here will be familiar with the classic essay The Asshole Filter. TLDR: a feminist complains that all men are assholes, but the actual problem is that she has made it so impossible for non-asshole men to approach her that the only remaining men who are willing to transgress against her stated wishes and approach her are, well, assholes. So her perception of the “asshole level” of the average man is wildly skewed due to a bubble that she herself is reinforcing, causing her to be blind to all the non-assholes with whom she is failing to interact, or who are avoiding interacting with her.

Similarly, if you’re a devoutly-religious person in rationalist spaces, most of us just basically don’t touch the subject with you. We understand that it’s a very important part of your life, that you do not wish to have your faith shaken, and that overall it’s just not a conversation worth having with you. Many of us recognize, on an intellectual level at least, the value that religion brings to the lives of its participants, and for my part at least I’m happy for you that it has enriched your life. We don’t actually accept any of the claims of your religion, and religion in general pretty much bounces off a lot of us - for reasons that could be aesthetic, empirical, practical, etc. - but we don’t begrudge you your faith. The only people who are willing to actively challenge your faith and engage antagonistically with it are those who either 1. have a much bigger problem with religion than the average rationalist does, or 2. lacks the social graces or sophistication to understand why that’s not generally an argument worth having, which means that the quality of discourse you’re likely to have with those people is unlikely to be very good.

I don’t think you’re intentionally projecting that asshole filter, but I also don’t think you understand the modal atheist very well at all, let alone the modal rationalist, given how inaccurate your naïve estimate of how many of them are atheists was.

We understand that it’s a very important part of your life, that you do not wish to have your faith shaken, and that overall it’s just not a conversation worth having with you.

I like your posts but this is pretty weak and it really cuts both ways. An uncharitable mirror-statement: "We understand that you atheists don't want your self-serving delusions shaken because it's important to maintaining your hedonistic lifestyle and you probably couldn't handle it, so we theists just don't bring it up."

The more charitable view is that theists/non-theists just hold to different, very defensible axioms and that unless you want to debate those axioms there's no point in having a discussion. And frankly there is probably an incredibly massive amount of self-serving rationalization going on on both sides because we're all human beings.

They demurely posit their invisible god

This is redundant; the necessary being cannot be corporeal because what is corporeal can be corrupted, and what is not corporeal cannot be visible.

who isn't really associated with any particular religion

That's a feature, not a bug; everyone, not just people who have encountered a particular religious tradition, can know God.

who doesn't really do anything

In classical theism, God not only does things, but everything that exists at any moment exists only at that moment insofar as God makes it exist, so this is wildly inaccurate.

seemingly motivated more by a desire to at least be treated as Serious People rather than any urge to actually prove that anything in particular exists

The arguments you're talking about were developed throughout the history of philosophy by people who had no particular motivation to appear any way in internet debates thousands of years later.

I like your posts but this is pretty weak and it really cuts both ways. An uncharitable mirror-statement: "We understand that you atheists don't want your self-serving delusions shaken because it's important to maintaining your hedonistic lifestyle and you probably couldn't handle it, so we theists just don't bring it up."

Uh, no, I don't think so.

The most defensible position is far closer to the atheist's than the theist's. That's been demonstrated repeatedly. Between the two, it's the religious who have a strong motivation to continue believing what they do and suffer much worse if they allow good-faith debate. The atheism-theism war of the 2000s and early '10s could never be resolved, of course, but the religious made far more claims about material reality that were proven false.

The religious have never stopped trying to prove how the atheist's position is logically false. The new tactic is presuppositional apologetics, from what I understand, but even that is a decade old and the atheists have consistently demonstrated how these arguments are also wrong or not as strong as the theist wants.

The new tactic is presuppositional apologetics

The new tactic where exactly? I have no idea what presuppositional apologetics is; probably a more fruitful tactic is real engagement with the history of philosophy and with the arguments that have been proposed by the best thinkers in it. Cosmological arguments for example are absolutely treated as worthy of serious engagement by even atheist philosophers of religion.

Online is where I see it, but I know that there are some irl debates between "famous" people. The basic idea, from what I understand, is that logics, rationality, etc. have to assume God in the first place, but then atheists go on to use the former to reject the latter. This isn't new, not exactly, it grew in popularity in the early 2010s.

An uncharitable mirror-statement: "We understand that you atheists don't want your self-serving delusions shaken because it's important to maintaining your hedonistic lifestyle and you probably couldn't handle it, so we theists just don't bring it up."

The major difference between your statement and mine is that I didn’t say anything negative about your religion at all, unless you think saying something is false, but useful and beneficial to those who believe it has an identical valence to saying something is a “self-serving delusion” and that it is only useful to maintain “a hedonistic lifestyle”. Sure, I think it’s fair to infer that I believe that the truth claims of, at least, Christianity will be harder to take seriously once subjected to high-quality atheist arguments, but in no sense to I mean to imply that any of us atheists would just CRUSH you with FACTS and LOGIC if we deigned to bother arguing with you. It’s more that we have a stable equilibrium here as it regards religion which most of us, both the theists and the non-theists seem to derive significant benefit from, and neither party seems strongly incentivized to threaten that equilibrium.

Also, I can’t speak for a lot of people here, but I’m personally not living a particularly “hedonistic” life at all; I barely drink, I don’t use drugs, I haven’t hooked up with anyone outside of the context of a monogamous relationship in years, and I strongly desire to marry and have children in the very near future. All of this is eminently possible and reasonable without taking pretty much any of Catholicism’s truth claims seriously; contrary to popular belief, pre-Christian peoples all over the world were practicing monogamy and relatively “non-hedonistic” lifestyles long before Christ showed up, so I dispute that there’s any significant observable inverse relationship between “Christian-style theism” and “hedonism”.

Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet.

I'm an atheist, and I wouldn't say I'm "ignorant" of anything. I've been highly interested in religion and mythology since middle school, and I've done a lot of reading in this area. I've never really stopped reading about religion. I've read the Bible as well as religious and secular Bible commentaries, the Quran and several biographies of Muhammed, studied Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism in college, read pagan apologia like Sallust's On the Gods and the World and what remains of Julian the Apostate's Against the Galileans, and recently I've been reading through some important Vaishnavite Hindu texts, like the Srimad Bhagavatam. I've attended services everywhere from Eastern Orthodox churches to Hare Krishna temples.

I'm not convinced of the metaphysical truth claims of any revealed religion I've investigated, and I'm not compelled by watered down forms of religion like deism or "spiritual but not religious."

I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.

I'm very curious. I've constantly investigated religious texts and rituals around the world. I like to think I have an open mind.

The most I can say is that the concepts of metis and signalling have given me grounds to believe that religion could have some place in society to make large social groups function well. But other than that pragmatic argument, I don't think I've been convinced by any particular religious claim.

What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?

What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?

I'd say that if you diligently investigate the merit of classical philosophical theism then you should arrive at a place where you consider it philosophically formidable and worthy of respect if not actually true. The best introduction to this tradition that doesn't require you spending an inordinate amount of time reading Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas is probably Edward Feser, who has a couple books that distill a lot of the classical argumentation into a more approachable format.

Just wanted to let you know that I ordered "The Last Superstition" off of this recommendation and it just got here today. Thank you!

Cool, would love to hear what you think of it!

I'd say that if you diligently investigate the merit of classical philosophical theism then you should arrive at a place where you consider it philosophically formidable and worthy of respect if not actually true.

I minored in philosophy with a focus on classical philosophy. Granted, I've always found ethics more interesting than metaphysics, but I am at least familiar with Plato and Aristotle's metaphysics. Certainly, I think there's a lot to respect in both of their philosophies, though I think I'm more impressed with their ability to find the right questions to ask, rather than their ability to arrive at the correct answers.

I'll admit that Aquinas is a gap in my studies, since he's quite a bit later than I'm usually interested in when it comes to philosophy. What little I have seen of Thomism has generally impressed me, though it hasn't really swayed me much. Catholicism does have a lot of smart people in its stable, but so do other religions. Buddhist Abhidharma literature and the works of Nāgārjuna are also philosophically formidable, and I still don't believe in reincarnation and Nirvana in an "orthodox" Buddhist fashion.

I might check out Edward Feser. If you had to pick one book of his that you think I would benefit most from, which would you recommend?

I'd skip on Feser entirely and just read Logic and Theism by Sobel, which was written 15 years before Feser, presents the scholastic arguments in a modern, formalized way, and refutes Feser arguments, as well as approaching other types of arguments for and against theism.

That book is not recommended enough given how thorough it is.

Re. Feser:

"The Last Superstition" is a polemic against New Atheism that, while technically correct about how laughably ignorant many New Atheist arguments were of philosophy, isn't going to convince the unconvinced simply due to how angry it is.

"Scholastic Metaphysics" looks very good. I'm ashamed to say I've owned a copy for two years and have yet to start it. He is good at making tricky, subtle philosophical concepts accessable even to a dumb ox like yours truly, though.

You could also check out his blog archives for a taste. Many posts are topical and/or polemical so look for ones where he addresses particular concept.

Probably Five Proofs for the Existence of God. I thought that one was fantastic and pretty easily digestible. It also doesn't aim too high, it's not trying to make you a Catholic, just a theist.

Since you have more experience with the classics than I realized, let me say - I have been reading through a series called A History of Ancient Philosophy by Giovanni Reale. It's translated from Italian in a way that leaves it a little difficult to get through at times, but if you can manage, it's a major hidden gem that connects and unifies the strands of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the Neoplatonists into a profoundly satisfying narrative centered around Plato's discovery of supersensible being as the fulcrum of classical thought. Very long but very strongly recommended if you have an appetite for that sort of thing, some of the best philosophical work I've ever seen.

Have you read any of Feser's other stuff? I've been really curious about Aristotle's Revenge.

Not that one, no, but I mean to pick it up at some point.

Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists.

We do have surveys. The five most common belief systems on that question in /r/themotte were, in order:

  • Atheist (humanist) 27.8 %

  • Agnostic 23 %

  • Other atheist 13.6 %

  • Atheist (antitheist) 12.7 %

  • Catholic 4.8 %

The remaining 20% are mostly theists of various faiths, they'd have trouble putting the same name on the ballot, so challenging even the third runner-up atheist subgroup would be a tall order.

Yeah I definitely believe I could be wrong. It seems like an extreme level of cognitive dissonance to me to constantly be posting about HBD and asking tough questions and wanting to kill sacred cows and all of that, but then just be absolutely unwilling to explore religion.

just be absolutely unwilling to explore religion

?

I thought that casual assertions of faith around here were accepted. Those who are faithful explore religion and plainly state that in comments and are not attacked by local atheists.

The theists making arguments in this thread seem to consider "What observations of reality indicate that your beliefs are true?" some sort of crazy question that shouldn't bear any weight as to whether their beliefs are true.

Well, we might reasonably think that the relevant question should be "What evidence indicates that your beliefs are true?" - the prickliness you're experiencing is a suspicion that saying "observations of reality" rather than a more generic term like "evidence" might amount to smuggling in an assumption about the validity or non-validity of certain forms of evidence with the effect of arbitrarily ruling out valid arguments.

There are plenty of theistic arguments from the history of philosophy that are interesting and worth thinking about. They cannot really said to be narrowly observational in nature; that's not to say they don't depend on certain observations, but the observation they rely on will be something like "There exists at least one contingent being," and the essential content of the argument is deriving what logically follows from the existence of such a contingent being based on an analysis of contingency, necessity, and causation, embodied in metaphysical principles like the principle of sufficient reason, ultimately aiming to establish that contingent being implies necessary being.

So in a strictly precise sense, the theist would respond to your question with: any observation at all indicates that my beliefs are true, because any observation is an observation of a contingent thing, and (the theist argues) the existence of any contingent thing ultimately entails the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality that explains the being of the observed contingent thing, and the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality is what theists are trying to establish.

The exact chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion is not something I've set out here, both because I'm just trying to explain how the argument works to clarify the basic sort of claim that is being made, and because my philosophy is a bit rusty so I probably couldn't explain it here remotely as well as an academic work on the subject. I recognize that tends to kill discussion because who wants to be told to go get a book on something, but oh well.

We ask for observations of reality because that's what the question amounts to: how should our behavior change if the god of Thomas' five proofs exists? If the only difference between a universe with a god and the universe without one is that the former is more consistent with some metaphysical approach, why should I care?

It's similar to discussing consciousness: if you can't tell if someone is conscious or a p-zombie, why does it matter?

In the classical schema, the knowledge of God is presented as the apex of theoretical contemplation, which does not need any external justification but is itself the foundational good of human life. From Aristotle's Protrepticus:

To seek from all knowledge a result other than itself, and to demand that knowledge must be useful, is the act of one completely ignorant of the distance that from the start separates things good from things necessary; they stand at opposite extremes. For of the things without which life is impossible those that are loved for the sake of something else must be called necessities and contributing causes, but those that are loved for themselves even if nothing follows must be called goods in the strict sense. This is not desirable for the sake of that, and that for the sake of something else, and so ad infinitum; there is a stop somewhere. It is completely ridiculous, therefore, to demand from everything some benefit other than the thing itself, and to ask "What then is the gain to us?" and "What is the use?" For in truth, as we maintain, he who asks this is in no way like one who knows the noble and good, or who distinguishes causes from accompanying conditions.

One would see the supreme truth of what we are saying, if someone carried us in thought to the islands of the blest. There there would be need of nothing, no profit from anything; there remain only thought and contemplation, which even now we describe as the free life. If this be true, would not any of us be rightly ashamed if when the chance was given us to live in the islands of the blest, he were by his own fault unable to do so? Not to be despised, therefore, is the reward that knowledge brings to men, nor slight the good that comes from it. For as, according to the wise among the poets, we receive the gifts of justice in Hades, so (it seems) we gain those of wisdom in the islands of the blest.

It is nowise strange, then, if wisdom does not show itself useful or advantageous; we call it not advantageous but good, it should be chosen not for the sake of anything else, but for itself. For as we travel to Olympia for the sake of the spectacle itself, even if nothing were to follow from it (for the spectacle itself is worth more than much wealth), and as we view the Dionysia not in order to gain anything from the actors (indeed we spend money on them), and as there are many other spectacles we should prefer to much wealth, so too the contemplation of the universe is to be honoured above all the things that are thought useful. For surely it cannot be right that we should take great pains to go to see men imitating women and slaves, or fighting and running, just for the sake of the spectacle, and not think it right to view without payment the nature and reality of things.

Ironically given your point it is Religions that generally don't like it when you gore their (sometimes literal) sacred cows, so in my experience curious contrarians are much more likely to be atheist if only because when they started to ask tough questions about the religions they were probably raised in, the answers were things like "God moves in mysterious ways" and "Have faith" and the like. Not very satifying to the curious who want to know why.

And perhaps relevantly, the only religion present in even single digit numbers is the one that literally-and-not-just-figuratively invented apologetics and thus is most likely to be able to provide an actual answer(that is at least not facially stupid) to gored sacred cows.

Don’t beat yourself up, you just tried to apply a valid argument to the wrong group. Turns out the data shows that the scepticism involved in rationalism is rarely able to support also being a theist.

As far as HBD, wokism, feminism, most of the stuff we argue about is concerned, I consider these matters largely settled to my satisfaction, my arguing is more fine-tuning, as a hobby and public service than 'exploring' or 'seeking an answer'. So it is with the god question, I searched until I had an answer, then I moved on. I'm always open for business, but I don't go door-to-door.

Is...is this a troll? It pattern matches way too well to what an atheist might say about Christians if you replaced the term in your post. Like, down to the actual words and sentences.

No this is definitely not a troll. I actually sortof hate the (blatantly inverted) myth that religious people can't be scientists, but I think it illustrates my point really well, so here goes:

You can have a devout Catholic particle physicist, astronomer, biologist, etc. These things are completely compatible with each other. Consider the breadth of experience that a devout Catholic astronomer has. They are able to tap into both the beauty of the universe, as well as integrate this into a broader (in my opinion richer) understanding about how humans and our morality fit into that universe. They get the "stars are cool" side of things, but they also get the divine "this is bigger than me" philosophical side of things.

To a devout Atheist, only part of this is available. You certainly get the "stars are cool" part, but you have to remain intentionally ignorant of the rest of the human experience.

Another example could be: I am a musician, and because of my understanding of music, I hear a drastically different thing when listening to it than somebody who isn't. Things which are "clever" in music just aren't apparent to a person who doesn't understand what is happening. Because I am willing to explore the idea that music is more than just patterned noise, my experience is richer. It's why the listening experience is richer for a musician than it is for a non-musician.

The same is true for cooking, painting, sculpting, etc. If you're a chef, you get to tap into a better understanding of what another chef is making for you and why it is interesting.

An atheist sees thousands of years of human history, art, and philosophy and (to stay in my metaphor) they just see the patterned noise that a non-musician hears when listening to music. It's pretty colors on a canvas, but that's kindof it.

A Catholic visiting Saint Peters Basilica sees something more than an atheist.

But the Catholic misses out on nothing.

The Atheist retort to this is, of course: but what if its all fake? Okay that's a fine question, but that starts driving into a question that I think causes the snake to sort of eat its own tail: what's real? Is the love I feel for my wife and children "real"? etc. etc. (this is a well trodden discussion that I don't think I need to remap)

I disagree with your point, but have to admit this is a well written and thought provoking way of promoting religion. I’d say it only holds water for the major/standard religions, but still.

How would you feel about a religion that hasn’t led to major art, or at least that wouldn’t give understanding. Something like shamanism or animism?

But the Catholic misses out on nothing.

Actually, the Catholic misses out on an awful lot. An accomplished buddhist monk who visited the Basilica would doubtless experience something more than a purely materialist perspective - and all of those doors would be closed to the papist. A practicing Christian hermeticist would see entire extra layers of meaning and teaching contained within the art as well, to say nothing of an orthodox Christian.

Your argument only really works if Catholicism is the One True Faith, but when you take into account the diversity of religious experiences and perspectives that can be found in the world it falls apart. From my personal perspective, your faith keeps you intentionally ignorant of vast swathes of human experience in much the same way that you claim atheism does.

Maybe the Buddhist seems more (although I don’t think so), but the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Jew, and the Catholic certainly see more than the atheist.

I recently spent some time in Abu Dhabi, and visited The White Mosque there. Because of my willingness to explore or accept the validity of the divine, I see more there than an Atheist would.

I am Catholic, and won’t lie about my biases. To the general point about the necessary ignorance of Atheists, however, the specific religion is irrelevant. Somebody elsewhere made a comparison to a nationalist visiting a national monument and feeling differently than a globalist. I think that approaches the same point I’m making

I am Catholic, and won’t lie about my biases. To the general point about the necessary ignorance of Atheists, however, the specific religion is irrelevant.

Actually, it is relevant. In this case you made the claim that the Catholic misses out on nothing, but that's absolutely not true. The Catholic misses out on multiple different interpretations of the same root phenomena - he has no appreciation for the ways that the eternal Dao reveals and unfolds itself in the construction of the Basilica, no understanding of how it serves as an expression of Krishna's glory, nor does he understand how it is a reflection of the sublime beauty of Melek Taûs. You haven't made an argument against atheism, you've made an argument against all religions. My own spirituality views Catholicism as a partial revelation, a single perspective that, while valuable, does not contain the entirety of the truth. To me, your own understanding of the beauty of the basilica is just as flawed and limited as that of the atheist in your original argument, and I simply do not accept Baruch Spinoza (whose work was actually banned by the Catholic church for 'atheism' among other things) necessarily had a lesser capacity for the appreciation of beauty than Fred Phelps. Again, your argument is only valid if the other person already accepts that Catholicism is true - it might be convincing to people who are already papists, but that's not going to actually convert or win anyone over. As a weapon of persuasion, it isn't going to reach anybody who you haven't already won over, because it relies on them accepting your premises already.

No you do not undertake my point, or are willfully misinterpreting it.

he has no appreciation for the ways that the eternal Dao reveals and unfolds itself in the construction of the Basilica, no understanding of how it serves as an expression of Krishna's glory, nor does he understand how it is a reflection of the sublime beauty of Melek Taûs.

Yes he does. Yes I do, and that is my point.

No, he actually doesn't, and I do not believe you do either - how can you claim to be a Catholic while simultaneously appreciating the Dao? Daoism makes a series of claims about the universe that are fundamentally incompatible with Catholicism... which means that if you can appreciate the divinity of the Dao without being a Daoist, then nothing stops an atheist from doing the same to your Catholic understanding of the divine. There are real and serious differences between Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Hinduism and Yezidism - they paint very different pictures of the nature of the underlying reality. The Buddhist draws different lessons from the Basilica than the Daoist who draws different lessons again from the Catholic, and while they are all religions, "the divine" means incredibly different things within each of them, and if you want to put them all into a generic category then you cannot actually keep atheism or pantheism from joining that category as well (see Spinoza once again).

If I've continued to misunderstand your point, please explain it to me in simpler terms.

More comments

The same is true for cooking, painting, sculpting, etc. If you're a chef, you get to tap into a better understanding of what another chef is making for you and why it is interesting.

If it's fake though, your better understanding is at best just noise. If you think you are psychic and can see auras, you will think you have more to say about people's words and truthfulness and the multi colored auras may even add beauty to their speech. But if you have a brain tumour then none of that information is true. If you call the FBI and tell them you know Bob Smith is going to kill someone, whether you have true or fake information is critical.

The same for an astronomer, if you think the reason for some phenomena is God and it is not, then you are further away from the actual truth.

You are correct that the Catholic has additional context and information, but that is only a good thing if they are actually correct. If not it may well be actively harmful. If it was only taken within the aesthetic context than that isn't really a problem. But I would argue that history shows that people are really very bad at keeping their beliefs in that sphere.

If Catholicism is wrong that gay sex is sinful and instead Gay God thinks it is the most virtuous act and gets you into Heaven, then that additional information being taught may have doomed hundreds of thousands of people to Hell. Whether your additional information is accurate or not is basically the whole point, if you are going to try to teach and pressure people into following it.

Catholics can certainly be scientists however no question, the ones that are generally focus on the fact that God created a universe that He wants to be explored with reason. So while God might be the ultimate cause of a super nova, the proximate cause was running out of hydrogen or whatever. Whether the sense of wonder of Godly creation outweighs the materialistic sense of wonder about a vast universe of chaos and beauty does not seem to be proven though.

No this is definitely not a troll. I actually sortof hate the (blatantly inverted) myth that religious people can't be scientists, but I think it illustrates my point really well, so here goes:

Yeah, but no one is actually arguing that? Not here, anyways. I'll argue that religious people engage in some level of compartmentalization when it comes to science, but not that they couldn't do it.

You can have a devout Catholic particle physicist, astronomer, biologist, etc. These things are completely compatible with each other. Consider the breadth of experience that a devout Catholic astronomer has. They are able to tap into both the beauty of the universe, as well as integrate this into a broader (in my opinion richer) understanding about how humans and our morality fit into that universe. They get the "stars are cool" side of things, but they also get the divine "this is bigger than me" philosophical side of things.

You can do all those things even without religion. You can have a sense of "this is beautiful" or "this is cool". People can, for example, experience many of the same feelings about nations instead of religion, where they get some awe or wonder from tying things to their people as opposed to God.

What you're saying just doesn't happen, and I know that because I've personally had the kind of moments where I felt many of the same things you described while also being an atheist.

But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd

The simplest explanation is that this forum is full of atheists.

I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted and the whole thing ended with godless heathenry effectively being adopted into the Overton Window of acceptable opinions by the early-2010s, in exchange for them shutting the fuck up about it. But I'm an agnostic atheist myself, so hardly a neutral observer.

Regardless, if you or anyone else wants to take off the kid-gloves and rehash the existential arguments people were mired in 15 years ago, I'll probably be there to respond. I'm one of the few people left who still has some leftover interest in the topic.

I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted

I don't think this is true unless you mean on the level of popular discourse. As a theoretical matter, I don't think New Atheist argumentation was ever particularly respected in, say, the world of academic philosophy, which is dominated by atheists, so it's not a question of bias. And the need to respond to New Atheism prompted a re-engagement with classical philosophy among religious thinkers - see people like Edward Feser - that made their position much more theoretically defensible and less vulnerable to New Atheist arguments.

If you mean as a popular matter, then sure, I could see people thinking (incorrectly) that that whole episode sort of settled all these questions, because the sophisticated religious response to their claims turned out to be rather less of a popular phenomenon than the original claims were.

because the sophisticated religious response to their claims turned out to be rather less of a popular phenomenon than the original claims were.

Because, in large part, it couldn't be, being sophisticated philosophical claims and all.

I should amend my statement, as it's no doubt true that there were plenty of bad arguments made by atheists back in the day. I was more getting at that the core thesis they presented (something akin to "the existence of deities has not been demonstrated and therefore I don't believe") stood its ground as a viable position.

OP seems to see things differently.

I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat atheism with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems.

Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but atheism typically gets a free pass

I think this is highly debatable, at least from what I have observed here and on reddit, especially when atheists criticize Christianity. I think the problem atheism has always had, is its adherents not being taken as serious people...you're supposed to outgrow it, or not be so open about it, especially as an adult. You can be openly Christian, but being openly atheist is maybe interpreted as pretentious or smug or something for teens/edgy people online.

But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists.

What in the heck are you even saying here?

To the rest of your post, atheism is correct in the sense that if there's not sufficient compelling evidence then people should default to a position of not knowing instead of just blindly believing things on faith. This jives pretty well with the rationalist movement that this forum is a descendent of.

Atheism used to be pretty blue-coded back in the Bush days when proto-Wokeists teamed up with principled atheists to lambast the evangelical hegemony of the early 2000s USA. The movement splintered when the principled atheists like Dawkins essentially said "actually our critiques apply to ALL religions, like Islam too", which caused consternation with the proto-Wokeists since Muslims are blue-coded. This caused the Atheism+ to be born to try to explicitly pivot the movement towards social justice and woke causes, but the inconsistencies were big enough that the movement collapsed almost immediately. Atheism as a political movement has effectively no power today, even though the rates of irreligiosity continue to increase.

Implying atheism gave rise to wokeism is nonsense. The two were aligned a few decades ago, but they have very separate origins, goals, motivations, etc. which is why they split.

If any group is given the kid glove treatment on this forum, it's religious people themselves. I've seen a lot of people here argue junk like "wokeism is just the lack of religion" (it's not) or try to promote a revival of religiosity by cherrypicking parts of religion that present it as an almost godless political philosophy for conservatism while ignoring the superstitious parts like, say, the whole origin story, the concept of eternal salvation, etc.

If any group is given the kid glove treatment on this forum, it's religious people themselves.

FYI, the post you're responding to is a troll. There was a recent post in one of the weekly threads which basically said what you said, and used the same verbiage as this post. OP is copying their wording to make a troll post.

Got a link to that post?

Yeah, here you go.

If any group is given the kid glove treatment on this forum, it's religious people themselves.

Agreed. If anything the opposite of OP's claim is true. This forum has assertions of faith not challenged or dunked on. The non-religious majority is not motivated or fighty about this one matter.

If any group is given the kid glove treatment on this forum, it's religious people themselves.

I think so too.

What in the heck are you even saying here?

I've explained it in a few comments downthread. Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard. And basic metaphysics/philosophy of science.

atheism is correct in the sense that if there's not sufficient compelling evidence then people should default to a position of not knowing instead of just blindly believing things on faith

That would more accurately be described as a type of agnosticism. A particular type, in fact.

Implying atheism gave rise to wokeism is nonsense. The two were aligned a few decades ago, but they have very separate origins, goals, motivations, etc. which is why they split.

The claim is that wokeism was only able to rise so quickly and so broadly was due to the effects of atheism on the masses, not that they had the same origins/goals/motivations.

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The claim is that wokeism was only able to rise so quickly and so broadly was due to the effects of atheism on the masses, not that they had the same origins/goals/motivations.

Yeah that's wrong. At least in my mind.

I think it rose quickly and broadly because it provides a high-dose method of being on the "right side of history" while minimizing actual cost for yourself and the people around you.

Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard. And basic metaphysics/philosophy of science.

Oh yeah? Does Girard explain what hard determinism is, since you aren't capable?

I think you are relying on references, name drops and vague gestures at metaphysics/philosophy of science to elide your incomplete understanding, knowing that inserting the word basic in there will make people who consider themselves smart cautious about challenging you. But no, we have managed to have plenty of intelligent discussions prior to your arrival, and that is because people explain the terms and concepts they bring up. Prior to our last exchange I would consider this the arrogance of youth or like @Ben___Garrison says, you hung out with too many philosophy students, but I keep seeing you do this. You never explain yourself, even when you claim to it's just "go read Foucault" or "this forum needs more Girard."

But you don't get to declare prerequisites to engage in discussion with you. If you can't explain anything you are talking about then I have no reason to believe you know what you are talking about. And after our last exchange I have good reason to believe that you don't.

The thing is, I bet a lot of people on this forum have been in your shoes, pretending to know more about a topic than they do, because it can be embarrassing to admit you don't have complete knowledge when you are arguing. But it's a binary decision - either you can maintain your ego on a forum full of strangers, or you can set it aside to learn and have interesting discussions. It's one or the other. Step one is explaining concepts you bring up or admitting your knowledge is insufficient to explain the concepts you mention in your own words.

we have managed to have plenty of intelligent discussions prior to your arrival

I've been around these parts since the old old old old old place. You remember those days?

You never explain yourself, even when you claim to it's just "go read Foucault"

Aaand, you've shown that you haven't read my comments. I said that this was the response I got from the academic wokies.

"this forum needs more Girard."

This was just a general observation. My actual response to the particular concern was to point to other comments that I had made explicitly explaining myself. Which of course you didn't read.

Prior to our last exchange

Oh my, I'm super excited to back through the comment history and see what other comments of mine you didn't bother to read.

either you can maintain your ego on a forum full of strangers, or you can set it aside to learn and have interesting discussions. It's one or the other. Step one is reading the things that other people write.

EDIT: Oh, I see it now. You linked to it, too. ROFL. Apparently, you didn't read my reply there. You just swooped in to say literally nothing at all. At the very least, you didn't respond to me again explaining the very basics. Because of course you didn't. You just wanted to act like you didn't understand. ROFL.

  • -13

Lol yes it was indeed "the academic wokies" who said "go read Foucault". Was it the academic wokies who said "this forum needs more Girard."? Well no, no it wasn't. I wonder what I could have been saying? I wonder how I would say it if I didn't know it was the academic wokies who deflected if you even tried poking at their philosophical underpinnings? Differently I imagine.

This entire thread from beginning to end is fucking dozens of posts asking you to explain what the fuck you are talking about, and you deflecting your ass off. Is that in plain enough English for you? Well then how about returning the God damned favour for once?

PS, the first link in my post is to our previous exchange, no need to go through your comment history, just "reading the things that other people write."

Yeah, I still can't find anything of any value in this comment. The first paragraph is nearly unintelligible. The second paragraph, well, would you like me to hold your hand on the way to the various comments where I did explain what Girard meant? I will admit, I was unprepared for quite so many people seeming to honestly have no idea at all about the entire enterprises of science and metaphysics.

  • -14

Lol what? Did you have a stroke? You seemed to have mostly pieced it together before you made that oopsie about reading posts, and now it has become unintelligible? You were so eager to break it down and laugh at it before, but now you can't find anything of any value in my post?

Talk about synchronicity, I swear this same thing happened to me before in another recent thread, the person I was talking to understood what I was saying enough to reply until I clearly explained the issue I had with their argument and then I suddenly became inscrutable. Maybe I'm transcending reality and concepts break down in my presence? If I recall correctly, we were discussing something called hard determinism, I can't remember who my interlocutor was though.

Lol what? Did you have a stroke?

Don't post like this please.

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Do you have something actual to say? This is just sneering. There's literally nothing here.

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That would more accurately be described as a type of agnosticism. A particular type, in fact.

There's already a designation between implicit and explicit atheism and similarly between strong and weak agnosticism (unknowable versus unknown, respectively). The line between weak agnosticism and implicit atheism is blurry to non-existent.

I've explained it in a few comments downthread. Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard. And basic metaphysics/philosophy of science.

Fair enough, though I'd say you should really provide a better explanation in the first post next time. For whatever reason, the philosophy nerds and especially the metaphysics people seem to think everyone has a very high baseline knowledge of philosophers on this forum. Some might, but I've always found metaphysics to be both highly esoteric and quite useless in the few brief forays I did on the subject.

That would more accurately be described as a type of agnosticism. A particular type, in fact.

Agnosticism (i.e. confidence in belief) is on a separate axis from atheism (i.e. direction of belief). The vast majority of atheists will be agnostic. Most religious people will be gnostic. There are some gnostic atheists but they're mostly just strawmen.

I don't think we're necessarily disagreeing here. To reiterate, I'm saying that everyone should default to being (agnostic) atheists until they've been given sufficiently compelling evidence to believe otherwise.

The claim is that wokeism was only able to rise so quickly and so broadly was due to the effects of atheism on the masses

This sounds like a "wokeism is just the lack of religion" argument that I mentioned up above. Your only articulation on this point in the top post was "Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses". I don't really follow. I'm assuming you're talking about cultural relativism here? Modern wokeism really isn't relativistic; it's morally absolutist about its causes so I really don't know what you're getting at.

Modern wokeism really isn't relativistic; it's morally absolutist about its causes so I really don't know what you're getting at.

I spoke a little about this here.

Agnosticism (i.e. confidence in belief) is on a separate axis from atheism (i.e. direction of belief). The vast majority of atheists will be agnostic. Most religious people will be gnostic. There are some gnostic atheists but they're mostly just strawmen.

I've never understood this way of discussing (a)theism. What's wrong with just using probabilities like we do with every other belief? What does the confidence-direction distinction add to the epistemology/discussion?

The concept of agnostic vs gnostic arose as a necessary defense against theists who'd retort "how are you so sure that God doesn't exist???" and try to pin the burden of evidence on the other side. Sarcastic atheists would respond with something like "how are you so sure that we weren't created by a magical Flying Spaghetti Monster?". More charitable atheists would explain the agnostic vs gnostic split.

The atheist making this argument does assign some probability to god existing (maybe its 0, maybe its 49%, whatever). Like, they have to make decisions, which means they have a probability they implicitly endorse.

As far as I can tell, making that agnostic vs gnostic split is literally just playing word games to allow the agnostic/atheist to avoid having to justify their beliefs. More explicitly, the conversation would be

Theist: Why do you think the probability of God existing is so low?

Agnostic: I don't think there's a lot of evidence, so we have to revert to our priors.

Theist: So why is your prior so low that you don't go to church, tithe, read the bible, and get into internet debates with theists?

Agnostic: uhhhh.... < I guess I'll invent some verbal sophistication to avoid this in the future >

Like, I don't believe in God, but I really don't see how this distinction is anything more than word games made to win an argument. I'm interested in being proven wrong on this point.

You call it a "necessary defense", but there are plenty of other defenses for why a theists' conception of God is unlikely

  • Over time religious people have moved the goal posts as science has repeatedly falsified whatever claims they made, so existing theology is very p-hacked.

  • The existence of many contradictory religions (many predating your own) suggests religion is something humans are ~99% likely to invent regardless of its truthfulness, so the fact that a bunch of people believe your religion (and claim miracles for it, etc) is actually remarkably weak evidence in favor of it

  • Your religion is extremely self-contradictory, which makes it likely that large swathes of it are false

  • Virtually no one in your religion acts like your religion is true.

  • etc

And like, my point is not to prove any of those is uncontroversially true - my point is that plenty of other defenses exist - they're just more annoying to make.

Those other defenses you listed are well and good, but they don't specifically address the concern of "Why are you so sure that God doesn't exist" (bolding added this time). Those other defenses cast doubt on the likelihood of God, but none are 100% knockout blows. There's always still some chance, however small, that God (or even just some god) does exist. That's why debates on the confidence of belief are important, because a theist interpreting an atheists claims as being gnostic are almost always strawmen.

Theist: So why is your prior so low that you don't go to church, tithe, read the bible, and get into internet debates with theists?

This is a different question. Again, it's a question of "likelihood that God exists" as opposed to "when does evidence become so unconvincing that that you discount something"?

I think probabilities just don't map very well onto how humans think. Nate Silver was mocked for his predictions (despite the fact that even if something is 99% likely to happen, it can still not materialize in the 1% of cases). People seem to treat 80% probability to occur as "basically guaranteed".

Strong and weak belief is better, imo.

I think probabilities just don't map very well onto how humans think

Sure, I agree with that. But I don't see how teasing apart confidence from direction improves on the situation, other than to let atheists/agnostics "win" internet debates

I think it's less confusing, actually. People don't accurately use probabilities (unless they're Nate Silver), so it makes sense to just avoid the numbers altogether. Strong vs. weak captures an important threshold (namely, would someone bet money on what they say being true?)

They sure get mad when high chance things don't happen in games. Mordheim and XCom both seem to have a fine pseudo random roll generator and shots miss even at high percentage chances. Much salt is spilled in any discussion of the games.

I feel like most people's gut is much closer to Fire Emblems' system which has does two random rolls and averages them which results in a huge reduction in lower probability things occuring (a 90 to hit misses about 2% of the time)

Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard.

I doubt anything anywhere can be improved by more Girard. Or any 20th-century-or-later French philosophers.

I was a bit surprised, too, when I first started checking him out. I have likewise been very disappointed by most other 20th-century-or-later French philosophers. Check out this series for a good introduction.

I'm more than happy to shit all over atheism any time, anywhere. I cut my teeth in internet debates against atheists in the late 90's/early 2000's. That said, in my experience it only seems to come up as a topic in two contexts in discussions here: 1) atheism plus and other ways in which the modern atheism movement has been taken over by and also enabled wokism 2) the inability of atheism to provide solid moral grounding, fill the God-shaped hole in people, unite society under a common culture, etc. And in both those instances I think atheism sees plenty of criticism here.

What I don't see is a lot of genuine self-reflection by the atheists here on the possibility that atheism itself might actually be factually wrong, as opposed to them making arguments that it is just leading to bad outcomes for society. But that's about par for the course in my experience with debating them in real life or online.

What I don't see is a lot of genuine self-reflection by the atheists here on the possibility that atheism itself might actually be factually wrong, as opposed to them making arguments that it is just leading to bad outcomes for society. But that's about par for the course in my experience with debating them in real life or online.

I am an atheist. Atheism being wrong doesn't mean any of the currently existing religions are right. If any of them pull off something straight out of 1 Kings 18, I'll convert in an instant. If you're not trying to convert me to one of the existing religions and atheism is factually wrong, what is the factually right worldview?

So you say, but if Christianity is right then according to Luke 16 you wouldn't convert even after seeing an outright miracle.

The interpretation of Luke 16 is considerably more nuanced than that- after all, Catholicism claims multiple mass conversion events following public miracles, and every Christian denomination claims at least one.

Philosophical classical theism along the lines articulated initially by the high metaphysical philosophers of ancient Greece would be the main alternative. Christianity is a synthesis of the scriptural tradition and this philosophy, but the philosophy itself is not inherently connected with any particular religion. In fact it was developed initially in opposition to the prevailing pagan religious mentality as a more pure and theoretically coherent conception of what we might call an absolute, unconditioned reality than the gods portrayed in the Homeric myths. This tradition developed arguments for the existence of said absolute, unconditioned reality that are much stronger (taken on their own terms) than many people are aware of or give credit for. In particular, refined versions of the cosmological argument - as opposed to popular apologetics versions - are very strong.

I say "taken on their own terms" because they require a fairly robust conception of the metaphysical enterprise to get off the ground - that is, the idea that metaphysical concepts describe real features of the real world. This ability of metaphysics to grasp real features of the world is what enables the inference from effect to cause even in the case of inferring a supersensible and transcendent cause for a sensible and physical effect. In contrast, if one believes that metaphysical concepts have to do with the way we think but not the way things are - so that causation is a question of how we organize and conceptualize phenomena rather than a real mind-independent relation between beings as such - then we cannot use causation to infer the real existence of something beyond what we could possibly experience.

I am still a novice in these matters but I suspect that this kind of meta-philosophical controversy is why theism remains controversial today in philosophy. In other words it's not coincidental, or due to anything like social pressure or force, that the whole philosophical world was theistic until relatively recently. Within a "realist" metaphysical framework of the kind that the ancient Greek philosophers are the chief examples, theism more or less tends to be the natural conclusion, and that framework is what is called into question today.

That's not to say that there aren't still controversies over the validity of theistic arguments even within that framework. The technical issues in the arguments are complicated and difficult. However this shift may explain, from a historical perspective related to the general philosophical atmosphere, the differences in the baseline perception of plausibility of theism and atheism.

Could you link a primer to this sort of theory? Very curious. I’ve read about Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” and the platonic idea of the good but haven’t seen the full theories laid out from the beginning.

I can try, sure. I'm not too familiar with online resources because I've mostly learned about it through my attempt to engage deeply with the history of philosophy, which I strongly recommend to everyone here; if I had a "thesis" of which I hoped to persuade readers, it would be this. There is much more than a lifetime's worth of rich content in the great authors, and much of it is little known today.

I know of one person on reddit who was particularly interested in classical theism and wrote a series of posts on one of Aquinas's cosmological arguments here.

My entry to this way of thinking was by reading some books by Edward Feser, who has a blog here that is generally interesting. While he writes from a particular (i.e. Thomistic and Catholic) perspective, a lot of his concern is to defend general principles of classical Western metaphysics against modern or contemporary philosophical paradigms, so reading him gives a decent overview of the Hellenic philosophical mentality from which all of this springs. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide and Five Proofs for the Existence of God are great; the first will provide a systematic overview of the building-block concepts like act/potency, form/matter, essence/existence, etc. and culminates in an argument for theism; the latter is, as the title indicates, all about natural theology.

For those whose interest goes beyond the beginner level, I would recommend just digging into the history of philosophical thought on metaphysics and theology. Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy is a great resource, as is Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy. Both are quite long, but that's what it takes to do the subject matter justice.

Thanks!

Why not try to make things more concrete?

Bostrom's Simulation Argument is persuasive because it operates off principles we can easily understand.

  1. There's plenty of resources in this universe to conduct computer simulations of whole planets and civilizations, let alone universes with more generous physics

  2. It seems very reasonable that highly advanced civilizations would conduct many simulations of their ancestors for fun or research purposes

  3. Therefore, most existences of pre-singularitarian civilization should be simulated unless

3a. Nearly all pre-singularitarian civilizations get exterminated for some reason

3b. Nearly all post-singularitarian civilizations refrain from simulations

Now this is basically theism with a cherry on top. It really doesn't matter if we're dealing with the server owner or a divine being, they're one and the same from our perspective.

I really dislike the First Mover argument since it just pushes back the problem of what comes first. If the universe needs a cause, why doesn't God? Far better an eternal universe, perhaps operating on a cyclic pattern. Eternity needs no justification or cause. We might be many layers down in a series of simulations inside an eternal universe.

I really dislike the First Mover argument since it just pushes back the problem of what comes first. If the universe needs a cause, why doesn't God?

But the arguments explain why the universe needs a cause and God doesn't, so this doesn't seem like a fruitful objection. In particular the basic structure of many cosmological arguments is an inference from contingency to necessity, and the existence of something contingent and actual implies an external reason why it is actual as opposed to not (i.e. a cause), whereas the existence of something necessary does not.

What it sounds like you're saying with more words than necessary is to quote Nietzsche, Christianity is Platonism for the people. In other words Christianity merged Jewish monotheism/apocalypticism with platonic idealism and there's good reason to think it's not too much more complicated than that.

So you can try to get a bunch of atheists to take idealism more seriously, but if that's your goal I would put it more straightforwardly because then they can actually do their own research on idealism with the various sources that are out there. I don't think too many will find it convincing but you may get some converts.

The comment you are replying to was just a sketch of the thread that has served as the key polar opposite to atheism in philosophy. One can believe this without believing in any particular religion, so the question of theism or atheism should not turn on whether any particular religion is true.

Whether particular religions that attempt to build upon this foundation have added enough to make them philosophically interesting in their own right is another matter that I didn't mean to comment on.

I am not writing this to dismiss what you've just written or try to denigrate you, but my eyes have glazed over by the middle of the first paragraph. Can you explain what metaphysics are to someone who has studied only physics? If you asked me to give an example of metaphysics I would've replied with the principle of least action, but that's not what you meant, did you?

It is the study of being as such, as distinct from the special sciences which study being under some aspect, as we might say roughly and imprecisely that modern physical science studies being as corporeal and quantitative (philosophical physics like Aristotle's studies being as corporeal but not quantitative, heh).

So metaphysics is about rising above particular kinds and concepts of being to the most general analysis of being. And there we get to questions like: we know there's at least one sort of being (the corporeal kind), is that it, or is there a kind of being that is incorporeal or supersensible? That question is the main theme of Plato's corpus.

And it studies categories applicable to being in general (not just one kind of being), like causation, or contingency and necessity. So there you will get questions like whether the existence of contingent beings ipso facto implies the existence of a necessary being, and what attributes a necessary being must have in virtue of its necessity. Or whether a chain of causes implies a first element in it and what we can say about such an element based on the properties it must have in order to be the first element in such a chain.

This may (or may not, like I said I'm still learning) help to explain why the validity of metaphysics as a discipline that grasps being as it is is so critical for classical theistic arguments. If all of these concepts - causation, contingency, necessity etc. - are just a matter of how we think about the stuff that appears to us, we can't use it to draw conclusions that go beyond what appears to us, because it's basically just a schema for organizing all of that (this is why Kantianism threw such a major wrench in philosophy). But if it's grasping being as it is, then we can.

I'd guess the lack of interest in metaphysics, then, is due to the wholehearted embrace of empiricism by rationalists. Most of us are mainly concerned with empirical claims, and this is pretty much a settled matter in this universe of discourse. There are no guardrails, of course, but maybe a lack of interest.

Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".

This is a very strange thing to say, because whatever else "wokeism" might be, it's not relativist. Wokeism has a very strong, dogmatic view of the world, and judges everyone and everything by its exacting standards. There's a reason people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are cancelled by woke puritans - they judge these complicated men by modern, woke standards and find them wanting.

I mean, as much as the stereotype is that wokeism treats Islam with kiddie gloves, or is happy to excuse anti-woke practices if they come from a minority culture or religious group, I actually think that's only a practical constraint for coalition building. If the woke have their way, then the only permissible forms of Islam will be those that have been reformed from the inside to be woke-friendly, and every indigenous culture will be turned into a hollow shell of their former selves that woke totally-not-colonialist propaganda forces them to be.

I think this can only be said to be due to the incoherence of wokeism and the impossibility of pinning such people down to making defensible claims rather than argument-by-protest. All I can offer is my own experience trying to determine if there was any substantive 'there there'. Goes all the way back to grad school, from the time before wokeness had taken over. I was starting to see the beginnings of something happening in the space and couldn't quite understand what was underpinning it. I had previously had the experience of looking at subjects like the Supreme Court's docket and SIGINT through the prism of popular reporting, wondering how any of it could make any sense at all, then digging in and learning that there was at least some level of coherence underlying the whole shebang, even if I didn't agree with all of it. So I thought maybe I'd do the same here, and I took use of our University's ability to audit courses. I wanted to go straight to the horse's mouth.

Whelp, best I could tell, there was very little there there. Maybe a little, but not nearly enough to support the whole edifice. Regardless, one thing that was very clear from my experiences was that they were utterly committed to the idea of relativism if you even tried poking at their philosophical underpinnings. It seemed like nearly a reflex to just deflect having to worry about it. Like, just go read Foucault if you want to know more about why relativism, but relativism means we don't have to give objective reasons for our moral positions, and oh by the way, you're a bigot if you disagree with our moral positions. They hide the contradictions just well enough and the masses are now just blinded enough to noticing broken philosophical underpinnings that they can mostly skate along without accounting for it.

It's a strategic relativism. They use relativist arguments to "deconstruct" and undermine opposing views and "structures". Relativism is a weapon, and you use weapons against the enemy, not yourself.

I don't doubt there are parts of academic "wokeism" that are relativist, but to the extent that those ideas have trickled down to the Tumblr and Twitter masses, I think they lose a lot of of their relativist character. Ask the average Twitter user with pronouns in their bio what Foucault thought, and you'll get a blank stare. Ask them what "stand-point epistemology" is, and it's probably the same. But you could probably get them to go on a thousand mini-rants about "micro-aggressions", and what media is "problematic", and who from history was good and bad in absolute terms.

I don't disagree at all. I would be curious to see where the current balance lies if we actually just asked them, "Is there an objective morality?" We might be so far along that we'll get blank stares to that, too.

To the extent woke people purport to disagree with objective morality, I think it's a combination of two things:

  1. They interpret the phrase "objective morality" to mean western/Christian morality.

  2. They interpret "objective morality" as supporting the idea that the powerful should be able to impose their morality on the oppressed.

So even though they do believe in "an" objective morality, they associate the phrase "objective morality" with views they disagree with and therefore claim to not believe in it.

If I'm being flippant, I'd say that my observations of the internet wars were that both sides had major problems, but probably the biggest area that atheists felt like they were constantly getting crushed on was the argument from morality. They tried lots of things to try to fix this. Ultimately, I think they were so unsuccessful that they just did everything they could to bury the topic and ridicule anyone who even thought about morality as a thing.

...directly leading to exactly the phenomenon that you describe.

This is like reading a dispatch from a completely different timeline. Are you talking about atheists like Sam Harris, who literally wrote an entire book, The Moral Landscape, explicating a sophisticated defense of his non-theistic conception of morality? You can say, as I’m sure you would, that this book was a colossal failure and that its arguments are bad, but it is just verifiably false that atheists attempted to “bury questions of morality”. It’s also especially incoherent to then try and link the New Atheists to “the woke” - whom you fail to identify” - when the vast majority of “woke” people I knew during the height of the atheism wars either hated the New Atheists, or, far more often, had no interest in atheism whatsoever and formed their worldview in a way that was totally orthogonal to questions about the existence of God(s).

Most atheists are perfectly capable of co-existing with and tolerating religious believers.

There need be no culture war w/atheists and theists insofar as both parties are content to allow the other to exist and hold their beliefs in peace.

There's a branch of atheism that is more 'evangelical' in that they actively try to convince believers that their god(s) is/are false and do not exist. This branch currently has almost zero power, authority, or influence.

And then there's the branch of atheist who are actually left-leaning anti-theists who are trying to remove religious influence as a competing cultural movement so they can impose the progressive orthodoxy more completely. But they're defined more by their political beliefs than their (non)religious ones.

TheMotte talks about them a lot, usually in the context of their attacks on the religious right (see: Masterpiece Cake Shop) so the atheism aspect usually takes a backseat.

Because the atheists are right. /thread.

It took me longer than I'd like to realize this wasn't a copy of @Goodguy's post, and I still can't tell how sincere it is. So I guess I'm left resorting to honest engagement.

I think the analogy falls apart when you pick examples. Atheist shoes aren't exactly the central claim. Sure, '00s atheism built up a bunch of weird cruft, universalized arguments, etc. But Goodguy wasn't attacking the cruft. He was clumsily mocking the big, central point of doctrine that Christians agree on. That allows dodging your version by saying "yeah, that whole shoes thing is weird, isn't it?" Or, in my case, "what? shoes?"

Likewise, you're off base with "acknowledging the history" of atheism -> progressive politics. I assume the social-justice framing is intentional, but it's also absent from last week's post. There's also a gap in the causal chain, since a lot of old-school atheists got really uncomfortable about "atheism+" or "New Atheism", and those are the steps that really defined the transition. I could also argue that this confuses correlation and causation if 2010s atheism was really just a corpse piloted by SJWs.

You might have missed the line about mistaking methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That's pretty darn close to the central claim of most atheists, especially the ones 'round the internets who would be most apt for not-kid-gloves treatment.

a lot of old-school atheists got really uncomfortable about "atheism+" or "New Atheism", and those are the steps that really defined the transition. I could also argue that this confuses correlation and causation if 2010s atheism was really just a corpse piloted by SJWs.

But that's kind of the whole point. They created the corpse! They knew what they were doing when they killed it. But like any social fad, they shrugged it off, thinking that nothing could possibly go wrong. Only after they saw the fruits of their labor did they start feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing. Let's put it this way, I've seen arguments that Christianity is to blame for wokeness, and some of those arguments are actually not all that bad. But if you look at, like, a random Protestant 'barely believer' church that is now headed toward wokeness, you probably wouldn't say that they caused the rise of wokeness. You certainly wouldn't use that in particular to claim that Christianity in general caused the rise of wokeness. But you might say something like, "Look at these churches who have basically abandoned any real faith, are honestly basically agnostic already, don't even really believe in any sort of real morality. Those choices have left a corpse of a church which was just too vulnerable to 'woke mind virus'." In a sense, those choices caused wokeness to rise up in those churches rather than in others. In the same sense, that's what a lot of the 2010s atheism did to large portions of the masses.

I didn't miss that line, but I can't follow it.

The central claim of Christians is that Jesus is LORD, therefore his teachings and code of behavior ought to be privileged. When that code conflicts with material concerns, religion takes precedence. The central claim of atheism is that the Christians (or other theists) are wrong, therefore their teachings, and Jesus' teachings, are not worthy of privilege. It does not construct its own code.

Goodguy asked why the Motte doesn't pounce on this whenever someone makes decisions based on those teachings. By analogy, you could ask why the Motte doesn't pounce on us every time we make decisions...not based on those teachings? But there's a trivial answer to that one, because atheism just says to fall back on material reasoning, which allows actual evidence. If you want to know why a Western Internet forum is willing to tolerate the classical-liberal concept of evidence, I'll wave vaguely in the direction of the sidebar and mutter something about Descartes.

The central claim of atheism is that the Christians (or other theists) are wrong

I mean, this is a part of it. They generally have significantly more at the core. It takes about two questions of asking "why is that" to get to it. (Hint, they're usually appealing to methodological constraints, which they're sneakily confusing for a metaphysical theory.)

Goodguy asked why the Motte doesn't pounce on this whenever someone makes decisions based on those teachings.

Actually, he didn't. Not a word about making decisions. Just about Christians being Christians in general.

You keep citing a difference between "methodological" and "metaphysical." I get that atheists tend to attack Christianity on methodological grounds, like citing the "absence of evidence." I also understand that this doesn't disprove the spiritual claims of afterlife, souls, et cetera. But Christianity does make material claims, too! I don't see the problem with atheists using Christianity's failure to deliver on such claims as evidence--not proof!--against the unfalsifiable spiritual claims.

What are the two questions you have in mind? If I'm understanding your dichotomy right, I think I can probably give answers that don't run afoul.

As for Goodguy--you are correct, and he didn't make it about decisions. I think it would have been a better argument if he had.

Atheism says nothing intrinsically about moral systems. It clashes with Christianity on account of superstitions.

The argument you're making sounds to me like this:

Atheism attacks religion on grounds of superstition --> Declining religion means religious morality also declines through collateral damage --> People go looking for a new form of morality, and some decide on cultural relativism --> cultural relativism (sort of) gives birth to Critical Theory (proto wokism) --> proto wokism evolves into the modern monstrosity that wokism is today.

That's a long and strained chain of causality. Why not attack any of the links before getting to atheism? It seems like you have an axe to grind specifically against atheism, but since it's difficult to attack atheism directly you instead equate it to relativism and wokism, which it emphatically is not.

I didn't say they were one in the same. I more directly attacked the inherent absurdity in atheism. It's just a bonus that the atheism movement very likely set up the conditions for the very thing OP was complaining about to spread so quickly and so widely.

You might have missed the line about mistaking methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory.

What does this mean?

But that's kind of the whole point. They created the corpse! They knew what they were doing when they killed it.

Why would it matter? The truth value of a statement or belief stands independent of whatever it may engender.

Science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality. Rather than building an actual metaphysical theory, they just declare that their constraints handwave the whole problem away.

Why would it matter? The truth value of a statement or belief stands independent of whatever it may engender.

To be as flippant as the commenter two posts up in this thread, because the atheists are wrong. /thread

It's only bonus badness that their wrongness led to one of the very things the OP was complaining about.

It boils down to the fact that it is incoherent to assert that only what is empirically verifiable can count as knowledge. To demonstrate this, simply attempt to apply the proposition's criterion to itself.

Aaaaand here we have one in the wild, folks. This is like maybe five comments away from someone saying this is a weak/straw man.

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Listen man, see Entelecheia's comment. Then go back to rippin' your bong all you want.

More comments

Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality? How could you tell from the inside? You say thats what they do, but you haven't made that argument.

Are you sure that in a world with magick, science could not quantify the heat of a fireball and trace where the energy came from? and in a world with djinn, science could not measure how many wishes they can give and when?

And are you sure that in a world with a God, science could not see Him? Perhaps Hubble would see His face in the sky or microscopes would indeed see angels dancing on the head of a pin?

Can we not prove God because He is unprovable or because He does not exist? What evidence (scientific or "other") would sway you?

Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality?

Yes? If only what is scientifically demonstrable is knowable, then we have no way of knowing that science is a valid source of knowledge, because a scientific demonstration of the validity of scientific knowledge would be circular.

That means we can't be sure that they ARE actual constraints of reality. Not that we can be sure they are not. Those are not the same thing.

It means that if we have any knowledge of anything, then we can be sure those are not the actual constraints of reality. Either our item of knowledge K is not scientifically verifiable, in which case the point is proved, or it is scientifically verifiable, in which case in order to count as knowledge, the scientific method must be known to be reliable, which cannot happen by scientific verification.

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Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality?

I'm sure that the irrational confidence in the converse is irrational.

  • -12

Given how incredibly low-effort and standoffish nearly every one of your comments in this thread have been, why should any of us engage more charitably with you? Do you believe that you’re presenting the best possible face for your position right now, given that - as you correctly identified - your position is a minority one in this space? Or did you just want to use this whole thread to indulge your smug and petty side, since you seem to perceive that this is the way many people here treat your beliefs, and you want to have a “two can play at that game” kind of lark?

I mean, I'm mostly gathering comparative data, and I can now include the way you've responded here as part of that data set.

  • -12

But you haven't made any arguments it is irrational? You are assuming it is. Is it irrational to focus on the measurable and observable?

It MIGHT be but i think you have to make that argument.

There's a difference between "focusing on" and "mistaking it for a metaphysical theory".

More comments

I'm still not clear what you mean when you say that people are claiming science's constraints are constraints on reality. Do you mean something the thermodynamic laws? The evidence supports them fairly strongly from what I can tell.

The assumptions science makes can be wrong, but they're often intended to bring us as close to reality as possible (though in some cases, simplifying reality makes for easier work).

To be as flippant as the commenter two posts up in this thread, because the atheists are wrong.

I again don't follow. You argued in the OP that atheists are not criticized for leading people to a place where "wokism" was able to thrive. I am asking why you think it makes any difference in the first place. The religion arguments of the late 2000s and early 2010s were carried out on the atheism side by people who were not part of an organized movement. It was an informal group which was united by its rejection of religion, not by its affirmation of any particular creed or organization. There was no Church of Atheism because the people within were too disunited to ever go for it.

I'm still not clear what you mean when you say that people are claiming science's constraints are constraints on reality.

They simply handwave away the possibility of any form of being/existence that is not squarely within the purview of one specific tool: science. That tool has significant methodological constraints, like observability, repeatability, testability, etc. There are others, and they can be presented in a variety of ways.

There was no Church of Atheism

I mean, I'm left asking, "Who cares," in return? Like, does the diversity of Christianity and the fact that there are a bunch of disparate groups somehow change things?

They simply handwave away the possibility of any form of being/existence that is not squarely within the purview of one specific tool: science.

What exactly do you mean by "science"? Is it the bunch of institutions and traditions known as "science"? In this case there are obviously things beyond its purview and you won't find many (any?) people who'd deny it here. This could explain the lack of mockery you find so puzzling.

Or do you use "science" more generally to mean pursuit of understanding through the examination of experience and use of reason to build models with explanatory and predictive power? In this case, what would atheists need to do so you'd get off their back about handwaving the possibility? Do they need to write long soulful posts about how they can never know the eldritch truth beyond the limits of their experience? The problem is that seems super irrelevant and a waste of time. Why would you expect people who don't see any reason to believe in your religion to pay tribute to it?

Sure, maybe a guy who had an ecstatic vision of Jesus and the angels really got into contact with the incomprehensible Divine and he knows the good stuff, but what does this have to do with me? If I got directly blasted with the holy light, I'd likely join him as a fellow devout co-religionist. But I haven't, so best I can do is conclude that people can be very strongly affected by trippy hallucinations.

Your hypothetical God created a universe in which salvation is conditioned on faith in him, following some precepts, performing rituals, whatever. Then he put people in this world made it look really mechanistic and explainable by reason from the inside, creating strong incentives for using reason as a primary tool of understanding what's going on. He didn't elaborate and left. Very chad of him, but what am I supposed to do about any of this?

Maybe instead of trying to restart obsolete flamewars on Internet forums, you could use the direct line to God you seem to have access to, and humbly ask Him to be less cruel to those less fortunate than you, those who are trapped in this vast soulless machine? Tell him to grant us eyes and deliver us from our beastly idiocy.

Nah, basic engagement with metaphysics would probably be sufficient.

They simply handwave away the possibility of any form of being/existence that is not squarely within the purview of one specific tool: science.

That's how belief works, right? As far as I can tell, even the religious cannot actually prove that the gods of others don't exist, they take it on faith. Facts about the supernatural or morality seem unobservable, as far as I can tell. Though maybe I'm engaging in the same thing right now.

It sounds like your problem is with materialism, not atheism, because science is fairly broad and accepting of materialist explanations for anything. Existing paradigms can and will be changed as new materialism-based evidence comes in.

I mean, I'm left asking, "Who cares," in return? Like, does the diversity of Christianity and the fact that there are a bunch of disparate groups somehow change things?

I don't see how the inversion does anything for you. In this scenario, people would be blaming Christianity at large for...something that only a portion of its variants did?

When atheists attacked religion, they were going after (for the most part) beliefs that are central to those faiths. It doesn't matter if you are a progressive American church or a conservative Ghana church, the belief in the existence of God is the same.

But you're not doing the same. You're not arguing against atheism's core belief (the idea that there is no god), you're arguing that they were wrong because they enabled a worldview you see as wrong. Or, if you want to say you want to see more criticism, then you should reframe your question to be about that, because then we could have a discussion about the role of New Atheism in facilitating the spread of social progressivism.

Christianity and atheism have truth values that stand independent of whatever they engendered. In a world where, for example, Islam was destroyed online by a diverse set of Christians, only to be replaced by something worse, I would argue that attacking Christianity's truth value would be wrong.

I think mistaking methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory is pretty darn near to the core belief for most atheists.

More comments

Athiesm isn't derided because no opposing viewpoint is offered.

New Athiesm only happened because almost no believed in their religion anymore... How many were ready to go to war in the middle east to defend the besmirched honour of American empire after 9/11? Now how many were advocating crusade against the Saracen to spread the literal word of god before 9/11?

We know what true conviction based religious belief looks like... it looks like the Crusades, or the Mormons fleeing into the desert, or Jihadists taking the fight to the infidels.

And that doesn't exist in America... even the Mormons abandon core theological convictions the second the US state wants them gone (their prophet was murdered in the same house as his wailing wives... and they axed polygamy to appease the government that persecuted them).

New aethiest issued a challenge that religious conviction was the font of all the worlds problems, and instead of retorting that lack of faith was the font of all evil and we needed a moral, political, and possiblity military crusade to drive that unbelief out...

All the alleged "Christians" in America just folded and basically agreed Chrisitianity was a failed predecessor of progressivism.... and just begged that in private they be allowed to privately imagine Jesus as a proto hippy

A true Christian is a martyr. Much more like Padre Pio than a crusader. Crusades were an empire western civ thing and the merger with Christianity. OG Christianity was a slaves religion.

There's a pretty big trend in the ratsphere toward a friendly relationship with a certain brand of older-style atheism, partly descending from LessWrong's links to the pre-A+ online atheism movement, so to some extent that's fair.

On the other hand, I just literally yesterday wrote up a post in part about how a book's atheism was shallow, absurd, crude, and uninteresting. A lot of it's just that this doesn't come up much.

I have nothing but respect for your posts. That's a great read. Thanks!

But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists.

Atheism is the belief that there is no god. As far as I can tell "methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory" is incoherent and atheism doesn't imply that shoes are atheists. I guess this is trying to make fun of an obnoxious troll post, but it's not any better.

"methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory"

This is actually a beautiful line from Rene Girard, skewering such poor reasoning.

atheism doesn't imply that shoes are atheists

Boy did you miss the meme wars.

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all metaphysical theories can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.

In the sense Hitchens was using the term, "religions" don't provide a partition of the possibility space, whereas in the standard sense, metaphysical theories do.

However, Hitchens's reasoning is a non-sequitur fallacy, and it's not obvious to me how to fix it with a plausuble missing premise. Merely a priori arguments for religions being false do not persuade me, since our a priori intuitions about matters of fact are not a reliable source of evidence.

I mean, if you assume that operationalizes as a low initial credence in any metaphysical theory, until reasons to believe it over other metaphysical theories are offered, I don't actually think "all metaphysical theories are 'wrong'" is a bad starting point.

While I'm not in the logical positivist camp, I understand why their rejection of metaphysical speculation was so strong. I think there are problems with Wittgenstein's "on that which I cannot speak, I must remain silent", but the basic impulse to see language as a bad tool for metaphysical speculation makes perfect sense to me. So many religions already acknowledge how bad a tool language is for this job, whether it is Taoism's "the Tao that can be described is not the true Tao", or the apophatic theology of some early Christian Church fathers.

The problem as I see it is, either language is a tool appropriate for metaphysical speculation or it is not. If it is not a proper tool for metaphysical speculation, then you're better off becoming a mystic if you want to understand the ineffable true nature of reality, or just giving up on ever truly understanding how reality works at its deepest level. If it is a proper tool for metaphysical speculation, then it's completely fair game to reject particular metaphysical theories based on a variety of criteria.

if you assume that operationalizes as a low initial credence in any metaphysical theory, until reasons to believe it over other metaphysical theories are offered

I don't think that assumption holds for the pithy Hitchens quote. I'm pretty confident we're supposed to interpret it in a different way. In any event, I agree with a lot of what you have to say.

I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat atheism with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems.

Okay, interesting. I honestly can't recall the last time atheism came up here, though, sometimes, prominent atheists are discussed.

For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong.

HBD does have a lot of purchase here, but it's not like there's no pushback.

But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. These ideas are, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans (at least the latter can be empirically shown true or false; the former is just a category error).

I do not understand anything said here.

But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokeism. Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".

Well, let me be the first to acknowledge that for you because that's empirically true. So much of contemporary wokesim can be found in atheism+, which came out of new atheism. It's notable that only one semi-prominent new atheist, PZ Myers, went full woke as far as I can tell. The rest of the "four horsemen" have either died, faded into obscurity, or gone off in their own strange direction, but none have gone woke.

Does this happen because atheism is largely not viewed as a threat anymore (since its birth of wokeism is already in the past) and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and atheism is vaguely internet-weirdo-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"?

The tone and assumptions you make in this post are strange to me. It's like you expect to see members of this forum deride and criticize atheism... why? Why not assume that a majority of mottizens were "new atheists"? That's what I would bet on, personally. The people here are most likely new atheists who got off the train at atheism+ or well before. Maybe we have some Christians that were new atheists at the time. Are you aware of the history of this forum?

Atheism as a topic just feels completely irrelevant. It doesn't seem to be correlated with being woke or not, either (see: all of these liberal churches becoming woke). Atheism might have been the initial vector of wokeness, but only because it was the weakest organization to take over. It seems to have consumed pretty much everything else since then.

The tone and assumptions you make in this post are strange to me. It's like you expect to see members of this forum deride and criticize atheism... why?

I thought it was pretty strange to see those expectations going in another direction, but it seemed to be considered not strange at all; just a regular, serious question. I wonder what you make of that asymmetry.

I don't really see a huge asymmetry. I missed that comment, but I'm surprised it inspired you to make this parodical comment. To me, the assumptions in that post are just as strange and out-of-nowhere as the reversed ones in your post are.

Opinion noted and data updated. Thanks!

If anyone else is a little confused, this is a callback of this post from the Sunday thread: https://www.themotte.org/post/409/smallscale-question-sunday-for-march-12/75569?context=8#context

Anyways, I think most atheists, if pressed, will say that they're technically agnostic. Which is the position that doesn't actually require much backup, being the effective null hypothesis.

How do you figure that atheism is as absurd as wokeism? (I don't actually think that being woke is absurd, but that's a comment for a different thread)

I think the atheist/agnostic distinction (outside of models where an explicitly unknowable god has meaning) is special pleading. Denying the existence of god, unicorns, Santa, Russel's teapot and Sagan's dragon are all in the same category of statement. But only one of them is so frequently met with "well, technically, you're only saying they probably don't exist".

Anyways, I think most atheists, if pressed, will say that they're technically agnostic.

So, why don't we ridicule the remaining atheists more?

  • -13

I dunno, what do you want to make fun of them for? What about atheism do you find risible?

There was a fedora-wearing Reddit atheist stereotype back in the 2010's, but that's mostly fallen by the wayside as atheism became a default position.

For example, the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. Or that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople". Or perhaps other things, I'm not sure how general the OP was, but I don't think we're allowed to hypothesize that they just want to bash the outgroup generally for the lulz. We probably want to keep it to the motte.

For example, the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory

My metaphysical theory is that it is unproductive to subscribe to (any other, esp. adversarially wrought) metaphysical theories that are untestable given my methodological constraints. The difference is subtle but I consider it pretty important.

implying that shoes are atheists

Is this some in-joke I am not privy to? I don't understand in what sense shoes can be modelled to hold beliefs, so the statement is a category error.

Or that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".

That's an interesting theory and all, but that does not have any bearing on the correctness of atheism (any more than the horrors of global thermonuclear war should make you doubt the correctness of atomic theory). If you are concerned with instrumentality of beliefs regardless of their correctness, we are home to a great contingent of post-rationalists who I'm sure are receptive to arguments about which false beliefs are most conducive to human flourishing.

My metaphysical theory is that it is unproductive to subscribe to (any other, esp. adversarially wrought) metaphysical theories that are untestable given my methodological constraints.

How did you test that metaphysical theory?

Is this some in-joke I am not privy to?

Ohhh, shoes were all the rage. You do better than to fall into that hole, but it's mostly a funny dig.

that does not have any bearing on the correctness of atheism

I didn't say that it does. It's just a bonus that atheism likely enabled the very thing that OP was decrying.

How did you test that metaphysical theory?

I didn't. Metaphysical theories are those that can't be tested, right? It's really more like a religion, and I did the same thing that people did for their choice of religion since written history began, which is a mixture of copying that which people around me believed and siding with the camp whose prophets work the most impressive miracles.

Ok, try Agnosticism now.

The claim that "I don't have full knowledge of the origins of the universe and its current metaphysics, but I see enough reason to not believe any of the explanations of any of the major belief systems regarding either of things" is extremely strong against most apologist theological jibber jabber.

This is independent of the analysis as to what programming is the best for a population if you want to optimize for variables such as long-term survivability, social cohesion, "meaning", etc. Just a statement about the truth value of the origins of the universe and its metaphysics. The mistake Atheists make is failing to acknowledge this and dumbly asserting that ---- Religion != Literally True, therefore Reglion (based cultural programming) = bad software----

I wouldn't even say the above is bad reasoning. Your disbelief in the truth comes at a great cost an overwhelming majority of the time. This cost might not be bourne by an individual in a lifetime, but it will inevitably arrive, randomness will eventually produce a version of you that is ceteris paribus but with access to the truth.

Agnosticism is for the most part an attempt to plead neutrality and evade involvement in a culture war. It is functionally the same as atheism in terms of revealed preference (less likely to be involved in a community, less likely to be married/have children, etc), and would only be tolerated in a secular society.

From a POLITICAL point of view, maybe. But as an intellectual model of reality, it is a valid model as any, in fact, one that I hold myself. That's where I was pointing at.

The problem with Agnosticism isn't so much the position itself as it is the Agnostics, who don't seem to realize the full implications of the position they're taking. Pleading ignorance of the metaphysical is one thing (or, to take it a step further, pleading man's incapability of anything but ignorance), but Agnostics themselves rarely ever act as though they are ignorant; most true Agnostics are simply irreligious and wouldn't define themselves as anything. Self-described Agnostics are usually relatively intellectually active. And while this doesn't prevent them from being able to analyze what programming is best for a population if you want to optimize for certain variables, it does prevent them from offering an opinion on what variable we should be optimizing for. If we drill down far enough, all of our positions are based on certain fundamental assumptions. But the Agnostic, by definition, is unable to make any of these fundamental assumptions precisely because they are mere assumptions and not observations. And since every assumption is as equally likely to be true as any other, the Agnostic has no reason to prefer one over another.

This all seems kind of academic until you think of something like the Taliban government in Afghanistan. This government is attempting to enforce a strict reading of Islam at the expense of economic, social, and cultural development, and has accordingly drawn the opprobrium of nearly everyone outside of Afghanistan and of a large number of people within it. But the Agnostic has no basis upon which to criticize. The Taliban are acting upon a set of fundamental assumptions about the world, and these assumptions are equally as valid as any other set of assumptions. Most self-described Agnostics wouldn't go so far as admit this, however. They would continue to criticize the Taliban, or take any other position they wished to take, but simply state that they do have a set of fundamental assumptions, just that those assumptions don't rely on the existence of God. They may even sweeten the deal by explaining that their assumptions don't foreclose the possibility of God's existence and even share a lot in common with those of major religions. The problem is that unless the existence of God is necessary to these basic assumptions then the person is effectively an Atheist. What's the contention here supposed to be? "God may or may not exist, but if he does, his relevance is somewhere below Vanilla Ice's 2005 album Platinum Underground and the 14 day extended forecast"? How does an irrelevant God work, theologically speaking? It's certainly a strange theological position to take. So, no I can't really argue apologetics with Agnostics. But I can't take them seriously either.

Your point seems confused to me…. Just because agnostics don’t have a belief in a higher power doesn’t mean they can’t have morals and object to certain actions.

My understanding is that you’re saying you need God or “fundamental assumptions” to have a moral code, but I can’t tell exactly. Could you clarify?

So, even if we don't ridicule the agnostics, why don't we ridicule the atheists more?

  • -11

What's the difference? Both atheists and agnostics take, practically, an atheist understanding of and orientation towards everything.

I mean, so do a surprising number of liberal Christians, depending on the meaning of "practically" and "everything". Maybe if you tried to pin them down on some particular thing that you thought worthy of removing the kid gloves, you could get a different response, but I think we can here, as well.

I think you are proposing a ridiculous question.

Who is this "we" and what is this "ridicule"? For the vast conversation space where ridicule is a viable and effective strategy, the difference between Atheism and Agnosticism is far too technical, the pragmatic prescriptions of both being the same doesn't help either. And in a space where the technicalities matter, ridicule doesn't work.

What do you want done exactly? If you are proposing that Atheism is just as ridiculous as Wokism, then I'll register that I don't actually agree and probably a large chunk of the Motte doesn't agree either, hence the lack of ridicule towards Atheists, the type that you see towards wokes.

If you are proposing that Atheism is just as ridiculous as Wokism, then I'll register that I don't actually agree and probably a large chunk of the Motte doesn't agree either

Why not? And why did you immediately retreat to agnosticism instead of robustly defend it in the first place?

  • -10

But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. These ideas are, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans (at least the latter can be empirically shown true or false; the former is just a category error).

whereas the claims that atheism makes go so far beyond typical constraints of the scientific method that one actually does just quietly make an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation (and people just fail to ever mention such)?

I think this is the crux of it. Though I admit I don't quite understand what you're saying here. What are the specific claims that you believe that atheism makes, and what do shoes have to do with it?

I think the first one is straightforward: they confuse methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That is, science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality. Rather than building an actual metaphysical theory, they just declare that their constraints handwave the whole problem away.

What shoes got to do wit it.

they confuse methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That is, science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality.

Sorry, this just seems to be restating the part I quoted before, just in more words. Could you please be specific about what specific methodological constraints and specific metaphysical theories and specific assumptions and specific constraints on method versus reality are being involved here?

What shoes got to do wit it.

Sorry, the post in that link was more muddled and confusing than enlightening. It seems to write about "shoe atheism" as if the reader already understands what that refers to, which is specifically the thing I don't understand. Who's saying or implying that shoes are atheists, and what does this have to do with the above statements about metaphysics versus methodology?

specific methodological constraints

For example, science takes as constraints certain assumptions on observability, repeatability, testability, etc. There are different ways of formulating these assumptions, but they are constraints on what types of things the method can speak to.

Metaphysics, uh, kind of is? The core error is that we can just do away with any metaphysical questions, we can just boldly declare that the only one true possible metaphysical theory, must just be exactly the things that are within the constraints of this one particular tool. Now, this proposition can and has been argued for/against, but it's messy. Of course, beliefs of Christians have been argued for/against, and they're messy, too. It's better to not worry about those details; we have ridiculing to do on the internet!

the post in that link

Read the specific comment I linked to. I know it's long, but it very completely describes the problem long before it even uses the word "shoe".

For example, science takes as constraints certain assumptions on observability, repeatability, testability, etc. There are different ways of formulating these assumptions, but they are constraints on what types of things the method can speak to.

Metaphysics, uh, kind of is? The core error is that we can just do away with any metaphysical questions, we can just boldly declare that the only one true possible metaphysical theory, must just be exactly the things that are within the constraints of this one particular tool.

Thank you, there's a lot more meat on this bone now. I think this "core error" - "that we can just do away with any metaphysical questions, we can just boldly declare that the only one true possible metaphysical theory" can't be ascribed to atheists (or theists) to a meaningful extent, though. I don't see atheists saying we can do away with such questions and that there's only one true possible metaphysical theory.

Read the specific comment I linked to. I know it's long, but it very completely describes the problem long before it even uses the word "shoe".

I did read that specific comment, and it was that specific comment to which I was referring. It's highly muddled and goes all over the place, and, again, it doesn't answer the actual question I had, which was about what this whole deal about "implying shoes are atheists" is all about. My best guess is that it has to do with some sort of claim that people are declaring that shoes are atheists, but this seems like a largely random statement that has little relation to what actual atheists say. I mean, I'd guess that somewhere someone ran into an atheist who said that, but that's not very interesting when we're talking about atheism or atheists in general.

From what I've gathered, I think the answer to your original question is that people here generally try not to engage with weakmen (try being the operative word), and the stuff you're describing are so much weakmen as to border on strawman territory.

I had the same problem as you until I read the question that the comment was responding to. It reads:

I've seen the idea of "shoe atheism" brought up a lot: the idea that "shoes are atheist because they don't believe in god". I understand why this analogy is generally unhelpful, but I don't see what's wrong with it. It appears to be vacuously true: rocks are atheists because they don't believe in god, they don't believe in god because they are incapable of belief, and they are incapable of belief because they are non-conscious actors.

I've seen the term ridiculed quite a bit, and while I've never personally used this analogy, is there anything actually wrong with it? Why does something need to have the capacity for belief in order to lack belief on subject X?

The comments generally argue that atheism isn't merely the lack of belief in God but the active disbelief in God. Atheist apologetics often likes to deny the fact that atheism is a distinct belief system like any other by insisting that it is a sort of default position. Hence, the term is defined negatively, not by belief but by lack thereof, and therefore, since inanimate objects are incapable of belief, inanimate objects are atheists. The commenter here argues that this argument is disingenuous since virtually everyone making it actively believes God doesn't exist, and isn't merely staking a default position based on ignorance.

As Torquemada would put it: Those heretics pretend to be pagans!

I mean, I'm not sure what I can say besides that I disagree? That I lived through the internet wars? That the OP attached to the comment I linked mentioned how shoe atheist was brought up "a lot", because it was a pretty massive thing that was seen all the time?

If anything, one could say that you don't see people say such things anymore, mostly because atheists don't get pressed on their beliefs anymore. They mostly don't have to explicitly say much of anything.

OK, so there's your answer to your question then: the people here likely didn't live through whatever internet wars you did and as such, their perception of atheists is different from yours. Specifically, when they read your stuff about "they confuse methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory," they perceive this as a strawman - a weakman at best - not worth engaging with, and as such they don't engage with it by, e.g. pushing back on it.

I mean, people still do that, tho. They just don't have to say it anymore. Do we use kid gloves on Christians because Christians aren't often in the forums saying that they believe in the resurrection? I mean, it's been at least as long since I've actually seen that.

More comments

I think the first one is straightforward: they confuse methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That is, science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality.

Ok, this may be a bit easier to follow. Are you alluding to conflations of absence of (scientific) evidence with evidence of absence?

Not really. It's more that science is built with assumptions that make it only relevant for certain types of evidence, certain types of objects, certain types of physical theories, etc. Within those constraints, the tool is extremely useful. The problem is that many people casually mistake those constraints on a particular tool as being the same thing as a complete theory of everything.

Could you try explaining without going meta? You're talking about assumptions, evidence, and objects, but there's no actual object level example for idiots like me.

Ok, um, what do you think counts as "science"?

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