Quote:
Originally Posted by bas_I_am
Using your example of an infant, it doesn't apply... has the infant considered the God concept? No... but you have... do you believe or do you not believe? Two states... you are in one or the other. Now that I think about it... the infant does not believe in God.
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The infant example most certainly does apply in that it starkly highlights the differences being discussed. You are right that the infant "does not believe in God". And that statement is far different from saying that the infant "believes there is no God". The infant holds no active beliefs on the subject at all since, as you pointed out, it has no knowledge of the concept.
Where you get off track is in assuming that simply because an adult is
aware of the concept of "God", these clear differences no longer apply. Using myself as an example, I "do not believe in God". I've simply discarded the concept as statistically unlikely to the point of irrelevance based on the history of human knowledge as I understand it, and a complete lack of anything that could be considered scientific evidence to support it. Nothing in my reasoning requires an active "belief" on my part in the common, practical sense of the word. So to say that I "believe there is no God" is simply inaccurate, just as it is in the case of the infant example. I don't actively "believe there is no God" any more than I actively "believe there is no Easter Bunny", and yet I
don't believe in either.
Now if I went beyond simply reaching a conclusion of unlikelihood based on history, statistics and evidence and started insisting that "I know for a fact that there is no God", then that would require belief on my part, and it would be accurate to say that "I believe there is no God". The leap from "exceedingly unlikely" to "definitive assertion" in this case is not based on any factual knowledge, so it inherently requires belief to make it.
In the words of Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that.