Freedom From Atheism

I don't understand your sentence. Could you elaborate please?

 

any time you say True to even you are also saying False to odd, the complementary position.

 

maybe, but there are some fairly narrow distinctions that need to be made imo

 

Then please.....make them.

 

No, consider person C. He asks himself if he believes odds: "do I have confidence that there is an odd number of leaves?" and answers no. He then asks himself "do I have confidence that there is an even number of leaves?" and still answers no. Clearly, belief in odds is not complementary to belief in evens.

Evens and odds are complements, but this is about the belief in evens and the belief in odds, and as can be seen in the example above, they are not complements. If it were true that belief in odds and belief in evens were complements, you should be able to point out which part of the reasoning in the paragraph above that is incorrect.

This is a counterexample to (what I understand is) your argument that belief in evens is the complement to the beliefs in odds, proving it wrong, unless you can point out a flaw in the construction of the counterexample (rather than its conclusion).

Edit:
So, now we're moving towards the endless spiral again. I predict that we will end up at this point again, because that's where I don't follow you, so could you give a fuller answer to this please?

Why would that not count as disbelief? The question "do I believe it" is very clearly answered no. Disbelief is the logical complement to that, so if "do I believe it" is answered no, the answer to "do I disbelieve it" is by definition yes.

It seems to me you should agree with all premises and therefore the conclusion here. If not, please point out what premise it is that fails.

 

Agnostics don't believe gods exist, and do that without believing they don't. Your premise that disbelief requires holding an opposite belief is untrue.

 

then it reduces to belief and no belief. Forget confidence, its not part of the premise.

You have the object, does not matter what the object of believe or disbelieve is, the object is the same for both therefore factors out, leaving only belief and the compliment of belief. If you disblieve you cannot at the same time believe. and vice versa. (thats why I go straight to boolean, I have to translate your meaning as do you mine, an expression provides immediate understanding, the dictionary version is a merry go round) It appears like we may be in agreement on that pooint but using different terms. The problem is that I cant say for sure because you dont put it in an expression, so I dont know if you agree with me or not.

 

or indeterminate, the responses were at times limited to only belief and disbelief in which case it is true

 

all that could have been simplified to this:
person C.
odds=no
even=no
Clearly, belief in odds is not complementary to belief in evens.

Its not believe in odds and believe in evens, it a single complementary term as I said.
if odds then not evens and if evens then not odds, one term one conclusion.
Its believe in odds OR evens.
ONE or the other but not both.
we know and you agreed that the tree MUST have either odds or evens so you simply cant do that.
you are treating them separately and trying to perform an operation on them when they are a compliment.
You are back to formatting errors.
So I guess we do not agree.

 

And when the coin stands on edge?

And what if you do not believe in a God but also recognize that " no God" can not be proven? Take the simple Easter Bunny example. I do not believe in the Easter Bunny but I also recognze that I cannot prove conclusively that the Easter Bunny does not exist. And alternatively many children do believe in the Easter Bunny and can prove to their own satisfaction that the Bunny Exists and yet they could not prove to an adult that the Bunny exists.

 

During 1958, Bertrand Russell, an English philosopher commented on whether "Atheist" or "Agnostic would be a better term for his religious beliefs about God. He wrote:

"I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely." 1,2

 

yeh so whats the point? He is saying that 'properly' he would be defined as an agnostic. In order to claim agnostic he must claim neither believes nor disbelieve the existence of the 'Christian" God. Not any God, or god. Its somewhat of a trick statement since he well knows that people can worship whats called 'false' gods like money for instance, as that also is a god by definition when the 'circumstances' apply. Actually, I am going to have to think about that as it sounds (*)(*)(*)(*)ed up the more I mull it over, do you have any additional verbiage that went with, like an abstract or just something flippantly said in a speech so I can check the context?

 

agnostic, since they are completely separate of each other you cant be an agnostic and atheist at the same time.

 

This seems to me to be our central problem. The word belief is defined in terms of confidence or active statement about what is true. The fact that you're not using the word with that meaning is the reason why your interpretation seems to differ with mine and Electron's and tecoyah's, all dictionaries I have found, most atheists and I daresay theists too.

Go through the arguments that have been made against you and see how many of them make much more sense with that interpretation.

I seem to agree on most of this, save the factoring out bit. I'm not particularly interested in you copying pages and pages of basic formal logic, but if you can find a rule pertaining to that, that would be useful.

Well, I disagree that it is only one term. The statement above is there to test whether it is one statement or two. The examples show that in a possible situation, they don't always seem to be opposite, so we must conclude they aren't always the same, or we wouldn't be able to think of an existing situation in which they are the same.

This is a test of the statement that belief in odds is the complement to belief in evens, so we can't use that piece of information to solve it (that would be like using the fact that 2+2=5 to prove that 2+2=5).

 

I explain why you cant do that in a binary "truth" condition and you demand (*)(*)(*)(*)ing answers to a binary condition using some unknown form of bastardized trinary reasoning, and round and round you go illegally flip flopping from one characterization to the other mix matching and dragging me with you. STOP already. In the binary condition it can either be odd or even NOT (*)(*)(*)(*)ing both it can therefore be first order evaluated using ONLY odd, or ONLY even because we know odd and even is a compliment. You cannot have both in the same condition at the same time. Hence for odds you can either believe its true in which evens are false or you can believe odds are false in hich case evens are true. NO OTHER CHOICES! Every proposition is either true or false.

last time

binary
for object = belief
even = T (it goes without saying) odds = F
for object = disbelief
even = F (it goes without saying) odds = T

for object evens
belief = T (therefore it goes without saying) disbelief = F
(meaning you believe evens is true)

trinary
for object = belief
odds unknown,
evens unknown
TRUTH indeterminate

for object evens
belief may be true or false
for object odds
belief may be true or false
TRUTH indeterminate


If you want to run around claiming

odd=no therefore even=yes AND even=no therefore odd=yes
or stated in its compliment:
odd=no therefore even=!no AND even=no therefore odd=!no

likewise the same thing with believe (under a binary evaluation):

I believe odd=no therefore I believe even=yes
AND (using that logic at the same time)
I believe even=no therefore I believe odd=yes

for your
odd=no
even=no
therefore: odd=no AND even=yes AND even=no AND odd=yes
nonsense is what it equals

which is the resultant equivalency of what you are trying to claim is a rational statement so be my guest, because I dont give a damn any more because it is clear I cannot help you sort this out, no we did not make progress we went around in the same circle for the 7th time.

 

You're right, I'm not particularly interested in going around that circle, and I don't want to give the impression that that is where I was trying to lead the conversation. I think I was being quite clear on where I believe the central disagreement between the two of us to be. The progress I was promising was kind of assuming that we'd go on talking about the central questions.

So I will leave out the stuff we've already been through for now (although it itches in me to leave some questions unanswered ). The real question lies in the definition of belief. The logic that we both refer to rely directly on the definition, so sorting that out should be a step forward.

The question is how to label the belief state of someone like person C. You say his belief in odds is undetermined (correct me if I'm wrong). I say he does not have a belief in odds. Let us consult the definitions.

I list here the first few definitions I find through google.
"accept that (something) is true" (Google)
"to have confidence in the truth" (Dictionary.com)
to accept or regard (something) as true (Merriam-Webster)

Person C considers these definitions to see if his answers are "undetermined" or "no". Does he accept that odds is true? It seems to me he does not. It is true that if asked what the number of leaves was, he would have to say something along the lines of "undetermined", but that wasn't the question, the question was "do you accept odds as true?", and at that point, "no" seems to me to be the correct answer (the second and third definition follow pretty much the same line of argument).

It seems to me while the truth about the number of leaves is undetermined, but whether he accepts odds to be true with no additional information seems very determined. That is not a statement about what reality looks like, it's a statement about whether person C accepts it and that is what belief is all about.

 

same circle, sorry I'm not biting.

 

You can read all the Bertrand Russell you want and all you will find is intelligence way beyond your comprehension.

- - - Updated - - -

So you can't actually dispute the logic! And of course your need to believe in a binary world is false but necessary or your whole false logical system crumbles.

 

Well, I don't know how you resolve what I brought up this time. It seems to me you don't use the word believe to mean what everyone else uses the word to mean. If you use the dictionary definition, it is quite possible to not have confidence in any of the individual choices (odds or evens) even if you are sure that it has to be one of them. This should resolve all of your problems.

Even if you don't accept this resolution, you should know that most other people do. Even if you think yours is more correct, you would have to use the dictionary definition if you really want to understand for instance the argument that atheism isn't a belief, or that outlawing polygamy isn't done in order to respect atheism.

 

Here we disagree. Theists believe in gods, atheists do not, Do agnostics believe in gods? No; they're atheists whether they think of themselves that way or not. I'm in the agnostic/atheist camp, there's no contradiction.

 

Do agnostics disbelieve in God? NO they are theists whether they think of themselves that way or not.

You dont see how ridiculous your version is that defies rational definition?

 

and carter didnt make pills.
claiming confidence poisons your argument, 'confidence' does not meant truth, it means 'faith', exactly the same as those evil religious people. Nothing like jumping from the frying pan to the fire then telling me I am wrong. If there is anything this discourse has proven its not my lack of understanding. I proved every argument I made to academic standards of satisfaction. Those who simply destroy and obliterate proper grammar to support their agenda notwithstanding.

 

Well, there we go, this seems to be the issue.

I have shown you what the word belief means, and the conclusions I have presented follow from that definition. The definition is consistent with me, Electron, tecoyah as well as all dictionaries I have found, all atheists and theists other than you, to the best of my knowledge. With this definition, my arguments work (feel free to check it).

In any "academic standard" the first step is always to agree on terms. It is allowed to use other definitions if carefully declared, but one has to understand that that definition might not correspond to other uses of the word, like my arguments or the arguments from atheists which you sometimes allude to. Using another definition than the one used to construct the arguments (mine/Electron's/tecoyah's on the forum, as well as the ones in American law or arguments about "lack of belief") is pretty much the same as arguing that dogs don't have tails because you've silently decided that the word "dog" mean car.

You're right, confidence does not mean truth, but belief (and to some extent faith) means confidence (to be fair, I think "accept as true" is a more accurate wording, but it's harder to make unambiguous sentences with it). I also wouldn't want to attack your understanding, disagreement on terms is understandable and expected, and you have provided many sturdy ideas with the basis you had.

 

Do agnostics disbelieve in gods? YES. They do not believe in gods, making them agnostics a sub set of atheists.

Game, set, match.

 

Gnosticism is a matter of knowledge, not belief. You may believe or not believe in something you don't actually have knowledge of. This means an agnostic theist or agnostic theist. Agnostic is not the lighter version of atheist.

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