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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)?
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.
@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.
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.
This is redundant; the necessary being cannot be corporeal because what is corporeal can be corrupted, and what is not corporeal cannot be visible.
That's a feature, not a bug; everyone, not just people who have encountered a particular religious tradition, can know God.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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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”.
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