WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...

[Deckard]

Originally Posted by Strangelet

I don't think scientists are as honest as their methods, which is the problem.

All people are fallible, that's true. But then once we accept that truth, we still have a marked distinction to acknowledge. When we get into comparing scientists with dogmatists (or rather, those choosing the scientific method versus those choosing the dogmatic one), I'm happy enough that one represents a group of people mostly striving for knowledge in a significantly more honest way than the other. And that's really the difference and why I tend to champion the scientific method (or more loosely, science) rather than scientists, per se. After all, the greatest minds in history have not gone unaffected by stubbornness or pride or simply become too personally attached to an early belief (Einstein, Hoyle). We're all susceptible to dogma to some degree, be it our own or someone else's - but the absolute necessity of dogma in organised religion means there's a definite distinction to be acknowledged, and a red light flashing, right off the bat.

Originally Posted by Strangelet

Being human, and not a computer, they have to dress the probability that something is axiomatically true with subjective descriptors. Unless a theorem is derived symbolically, scientists claiming we "know" its true is converting a numeric probability into an analog english word that expresses the level of that probability. Repeated experiments do nothing more than push the probability to 1, but as the truth value converges to 1 it never reaches the value, unless its proven outside of experiential inference.

But I'm happy with that. I'm happy with an analog word expressing a level of probability I take it as read that the truth value never reaches 1, and that what we call certainty is an abstract idea(l), like the perfect circle. (No doubt believers would jump in at this point and attribute this level of certainty and perfection to 'God' in some aesthetically-pleasing but highly nebulous way!) But the point is, even with the restrictions on attaining absolute knowledge (and the semantic restrictions used to convey it), if religious people could even get to the stage of saying something like "maybe Jesus was born to a virgin" it would be an improvement. Even moreso, "Jesus probably wasn't born to a virgin", or "Jesus almost certainly wasn't born to a virgin", all of which are more intellectually honest than "Jesus was" or "Jesus almost certainly was". With that in mind, I don't feel that the statements at the two extremes ("Jesus was born to a virgin" / "Jesus was not born to a virgin") should be viewed as equally wrong. I think a quest for honesty spurs us to recognise that while both statements of certainty are ultimately illusory, we can still attribute a much greater likelihood to the latter than the former.

Probably a good point at which to quote Robert Anton Wilson:

[Model Agnosticism] consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. [Polish semanticist Alfred] Korzybski suggested dozens of reforms in our speech and our writings, most of which I try to follow. One of them is if people said 'maybe' more often, the world would suddenly become stark, staring sane. Can you see Jerry Falwell saying: "Maybe God hates gay people. Maybe Jesus is the son of God.' Every muezzin in Islam resounding at night in booming voices: 'There is no God except maybe Allah. And maybe Mohammed is his prophet. Think about how sane the world would become after a while.

(the last one made me )

In that sense of course it comes down to believing something too willingly and uncritically - the Bible, the Qu'ran, an authority figure, etc. So this is an issue of credulity as well as intellectual honesty. But then religions cater for emotional and social needs so profound that their intellectual shortcomings almost become besides the point - it becomes easy to believe an obvious untruth, and once you've invested so much personal identity into it, difficult to unbelieve it.

Wilson's central tenet, about us being "agnostic about everything", ties in with your point about knowledge being illusory ("because knowledge is no more than just asserted, static belief") which is true but I find myself still coming back to the methodical difference in how we set about forming those beliefs, and the belief that not all beliefs are equal (he says, disappearing up his own backside!)

Originally Posted by Strangelet

Hmmm. Not really what I was thinking. I think being religious has more to do with being authoritarian, dogmatic, unquestioning, hyper-filtering reality, intellectually inert, not only asserting grand simplistic truths, but being completely unwilling to ever question them. None of these things imply a particular set of dogmas, a particular authority, a mystical set of truths to never question.

I'm not sure I agree that people witness those characteristics and define it as being religious tbh, but it's possible I'm missing your point.

Originally Posted by Strangelet

So I just don't think its fair for atheists to pin these qualities on only those who believe in God, whole sale.

In my experience, those qualities are normally attributed to people who go further into their claims than those offered by, say, pantheism. What's more, I sense there's an unspoken acceptance that they are attributed in a progressive, scaling way. For instance, taking two theistic extremes, deism and fundamentalist Islam are blatantly uneasy bedfellows, and in light of that, clumsily talking about religion (or even 'belief in God') is woefully inadequate. But that's only because the current theist-atheist debate is often coarse and the setting rarely conducive to making such distinctions. However, certain prominent (and no so prominent) atheists have certainly made such distinctions, on numerous occasions.

Originally Posted by Strangelet

I mean before Richard Dawkins came around, it used to be very respectable to be agnostic, or even deist.

I hear what you're saying. And of course before Dawkins came around, it used to be very unrespectable to be an atheist. It still is, of course, especially in the US, but he has clawed back a little respect, though I don't happen to agree with the method (or the wisdom of the whole 'coming out' campaign, which seems little more than a silly "Oh look, we've got Daniel Radcliffe and Brad Pitt as members, and I've got some new friends" type movement).

On the matter of agnosticism though, Dawkins has repeatedly acknowledged he is 'technically' an agnostic on the question of God's existence, but that he's agnostic about it in the same way as he's agnostic about fairies at the bottom of his garden, and to all intents and purposes it makes sense to round up both hypotheses to "I don't believe". I think he is largely right in what he says about the redundancy of agnosticism, HOWEVER my only two caveats to that being (1) that he needs to define what he means by 'God' (are we talking the falsifiable hypotheses of an intervening God?) and (2) that we need a shared understanding of the words 'atheism' and 'agnosticism' if we're going to choose one over the other.

On the last point, I'm inclined to take the position of George H Smith who insisted it's not only sufficient but necessary to define an atheist as "a person who does not believe in the existence of God" rather than as one who believes God does not exist. (Smith: "Since an atheist need make no claims about God, it is up to the believer to prove her case"). In other words, the 'a' points to being without something, in this case, without theism, without belief in God, similar to how the prefix is used in other 'lacking' words (apolitical/asexual)

Unfortunately, I think the more people like Dawkins (who I still admire a great deal) cultivate a group identity of atheism, the more he risks atheism being unthinkingly dismissed as 'just another kind of religion' or more confusingly, 'faith position' - with the positive belief that 'God does not exist'. Which of course is one of the two definitions that appear in most dictionaries, but is essentially a biased definition because it implies a universe with a god-shaped hole in it. Kind of like, Atheism [noun] = a belief that God (who exists) doesn't exist. It's always interesting to me that self-described atheists, in my experience, almost always choose the looser definition to describe themselves (lacking belief in God) whereas theists and agnostics more often choose to define atheism as a positive belief (certainty that God does not exist). I sometimes wonder if we could agree on the semantics, we might come closer to agreeing on the philosophy.

Originally Posted by Strangelet

I don't personally believe in God, I just don't like people telling me I'm a fool for asking the question, which is what a geneticist did at a party a while back. He was angrily shutting down the possibility of anything remotely non random existing in cosmology and when I brought things like kurzweil's singularitarianism, or gardner's biocosm theories, which is not exactly the fucking bible, mind you, he was literally twitching with rage. I left the encounter thinking: I'm really sorry for you because you're going to let nothing awe inspiring ever happen to you.

He just sounds like an insecure dick!