are you an atheist?

I'm not sure I follow the goal post thing. Evan are you saying that spiritual beliefs/practices that fall outside of a narrow range (defined by who, exactly?) of orthodox norms are invalid and suspect because of their idiosyncrasies? Because that is essentially the basis for religious fundam3nt@lism, and it denies decades of alternative traditions, many of which are folk traditions and cultures created and maintained by people that were oppressed (including systematically hunted down) for that very reason.

Who sets these goal posts? If you say the Vatican or otherwise members at the top of the social-religious hierarchy, then what gives them the authority? As an atheist, the authority of such divinely-organized hierarchies should be especially under suspicion.

It just seems pretty clear to me that people work backwards with their personal god definition. Howard Wettstein for instance seems to be going to great lengths to reshape the idea of god (for himself) that doesn't contradict with his naturalist conclusions.

Scientific consensus especially and the current set of morals shaped by culture are the closest thing to an agreed basis we have. Everyone's personal idea of theology and god seems to be unique and varies from person to person.

Wettstein reshapes the idea of god

From what? What is this primary idea of God that he is reshaping? Who is the authority on this idea of God?

I'm 100% down with spirituality being everyone's individual personal experience, but to say that someone is reshaping it implies that there is an official definition, and if you are an atheist I don't see how you could accept that.

The primary idea is the majority interpretation in his particular faith- and it wouldn't be splitting hairs to say that "god is a supernatural being" as a decided feature that he has reshaped to fit.

an official feature

just an addendum to my earlier posts: we have logical trouble describing thermodynamically open or "irreversible" systems--but it's also not surprising (imo) that logical systems that seem up to at least addressing this task (gotthard gunther, perhaps c.s. peirce) have certain non-superficial similarities to some strains of medieval theology (eriugena, cusa).

imo thinking as hard as youse all do about this stuff puts youse far more beyond most ppl's comprehension that exists a divide in assumptions between ppl who simply do/don't believe in a god without thinking about it

To each his own. Some of us feel compelled to sort this stuff out in more detail.

I've searched a number of translations of the Pentateuch and have come up with 0 results for "supernatural".

tbf, the Pentateuch does describe god making the sun stand still in the sky, among other acts of god, and by most commonly accepted standards of what is natural, this does not qualify. The word itself need not appear for the concept to be manifest.

Yes, if you take it 100% literally. Of course, there are many different ways to interpret it.

For example, the rabbi that they interviewed in that revive link has read the books and doesn't seem to think so.

It's either a natural entity, a supernatural entity, or product of imagination. Which one is widely accepted definition of god? The popular definition is that god is an entity that somehow exists outside of space and time- that's supernatural.

blah blah ryan post blah blah blah ryan post blah blah

:(

ignore the unchill vibes imo

don't ignore them, take my offhand superiority and smugness to heart

imma be reductive and annoying coz i'm tired and have had some wine but i was talking to a wiccan who believed in a lot of the tenants of that religion (focussing on the superiority of the 'natural organic' state etc) and joined that religion because of it (which mystifies me because it seems self-evidentially an act of external validation when you already had your answers) and when she suggested that there's nothing supernatural about her religion and that nature is 'magic' i got flustered because 'magic' is definitionally supernatural.

so when Evan talks about "moving goalposts" that's what I think of.

I am currently reading Schneider and Sagan's Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, which is a really fascinating and decidedly anti-creationist account of life (they even take issue with the "4th law" self-organizing principle suggested by Stuart Kauffman) among many other things. But the following passage is especially interesting since it brushes up against some knotty aporias in accounts about the origin of life--the radically incommensurable domains of religion and science which nevertheless seem caught in a permanent relation of tension (perhaps it's a version of that "actual/possible" aporia i mentioned upthread).

I've left out a few citations. sorry for any inevitable typos in what follows.

Before complexity and self-organization became catchwords, the Nobel laureate Jacques Monod contrasted chance with necessity, and wrote of the near impossibility of life's origins, which he likened to "chance caught on the wing." However unlikely, life only had to arise once. Moreover, if it had not, and it had not developed to the point where we could marvel at its complexity, the mystery of us marveling at it would not exist. As historian and philosopher of science Iris Fry points out, notions of self-organization have eased the theoretical difficulties somewhat. The belief in a naturalistic origin for life does not depend on discovering the specific biochemical route leading from nonlife to life. Even Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, an origins-of-life researcher with harsh words for those he perceives to be of a mystical bent, makes the mistake of thinking that discovering a biochemical path from nonlife to life will lay to rest creationist claims: "until such time," he has recently said, "as biologists can demonstrate an entirely material origin of life, the divine will remain a contender." But a belief in an unseen God controlling phenomena, based on faith, slips epistemologically about and is in no way beholden to evidence. If we wish to believe him, for example, God could have arranged the preliving components in such a way that they might tend naturally, under the influences of energy flow, to arrange into recursive polypeptide-nucleotide machines. Indeed, although in his letters Darwin privately revels in the possibility of life arising from some little warm pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, in public he is more circumspect, coming off more as a modern creationist in his estimation that there is "grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed [by the Creator] into a few forms or into one." At bottom the belief in a naturalistic origin of life may also be faith--but it is faith deeply tied to empiricism, to a search for answer in a climate of the willingness to be wrong, in short to the "organized skepticism" of the scientific method. No single scientific fact or discovery can prove or disprove God, and the facts surrounding the mystery of life's origin are no exception.

that epistemological slipperiness they talk about is, i think, in line with the "moving goalposts" thing.

Well yeah, my issues with religion as an atheist come down to the probability factor that "your" god is the right god.

that "magic" vs supernatural thing is funny since it would seem she maintains private definitions for both. Hard to really talk about something with someone when they've freed themselves from any commitment to even minimal coherence and consistency. That's in keeping with darraghmac's good point above that most people are not especially interested in being intellectually rigorous about this. But that's an unfortunate tendency when religious belief is quarantined in private or subjective experience.

Moving goalposts happens on the science side as well. Seems all too easy to ignore that science pretty much evolved out of soothsayers, magicians, alchemists, astrologists, mystics, etc., and that for a time magic was considered science. Many of the big names in science were intensely religious, and many of them seriously researched supernatural phenomenon in addition to discovering the foundations of modern science.

If it is within the realm of the atheist to ignore all of this and posit that modern science is an ahistorical phenomenon then why can't the religious do the same with their subject?

strawmanning there

well both would be wrong to do that, of course. it was perhaps inevitable that religion would be backed into the corner of private experience but I think that bargain is no longer a good one.

Anyway that's why I argue for a more epistemologically humble religious stance, one derived in essence from the tradition of negative theology (ie, one that doesn't so much forgo transcendental pronouncements but radically circumscribes them).

To be more precise in addressing Adam's point, I don't think it's a given that atheists ignore the huge significance of religious thought in how ideas evolved. We have hit a point in certain culture where they butt up against each other, and one wins out and one doesn't, but that's not the whole story. It's not about denying the importance of religion, but appreciating that there was a point where the religious aspect just isn't as necessary as it was at one point.

I consider myself a spiritual person - but I can't define that spirituality in any religion.

And that skepticism isn't so much about spirituality as it is about specific religions, and the questioning that any specific religion somehow got it right.

again i'd argue that for many adherents of any given faith - not for all, obviously - the experience of being "right" as opposed to other faith groups is not really a constitutive part of their sense of their own faith

in other words sure there are dogmatists everywhere but to characterize a religion as dogmatic is to paint a partial picture of religion

It isn't, certainly, but you can't blame an atheist for thinking about that.

it's not about blame but i'm likely to mock anybody who creates a severely reductive picture of something just so's they can oppose it

my fundamental ish is with certain types of proselytizing atheism, because i don't think it's fighting an important battle and because if it were, the tools it uses to fight are fundamentally self-defeating

Well sure but that creates a severely reductive picture of atheists. I don't have a problem with someone being religious (aside from the obvious) but I can't follow them there because I can't get my head around the massive improbability.

Personal religion is not an entirely important battle, but there's an argument that it can expand into, say, a Hobby Lobby lawsuit.

feel like there are loads of aspects of eg fundamental physics that most people would be unable to get their heads around ;)

imo douchebag politics can be fought - and usually is - at the level of douchebag politics without trying to deny the douchebags' asserted ideological framework

Thanks for answers btw, mostly reminded me to remember how I generally feel abt this, happened to be p frustrated at the time

Moving goalposts happens on the science side as well. Seems all too easy to ignore that science pretty much evolved out of soothsayers, magicians, alchemists, astrologists, mystics, etc., and that for a time magic was considered science.

Exactly. It evolved. It evolved because it has the properties that you keep trying to take away from it in the tired attempt to brand it as "just like religion" in so many (negative) ways: Lack of dogma or agenda. Doubt, skepticism. Ability to change (fundamentally...not just shoehorning it into the original notion) based on new information. Goal of removing human bias/incompetence from obscuring objective truth. Fallibility. Testability. Predictability. Repeatability. Arriving at conclusions from facts and evidence rather than vice versa. It is a meritocracy for ideas. The bad ones (soothsayers, magicians, etc) fall by the wayside, replaced by ones that as best as we can figure more accurately describe/explain/predict reality (chemists, biologists, etc)

There's a difference to me between science reevaluating through testing and consensus vs. mentally rationalize the word god to not contradict those new scientific findings or cultural fluctuations.

Goal of removing human bias/incompetence from obscuring objective truth.

Good luck w that LOL

Arriving at conclusions from facts and evidence rather than vice versa.

this is a bit of a caricature of the scientific method, one that sees science as somehow exempt from the difficulties of the hermeneutic circle. to think we start from the bare "facts and evidence" and move from there to theoretical explanations is to deny the circular relationship between them, that what counts as "facts and evidence" is often pre-determined theoretically.

this is not to say that science doesn't develop/evolve. but there's really no standard to say it's developing in the teleological way you are describing ("removing bias from objective truth"). teleology, of course, being a concept science often rejects. for that reason the notion of "objective truth" may be shot through with bias as a very condition for existing at all, even a culturally conditioned object--some may even argue that objective truth may be defined most comprehensively through less accuracy!

shorter version: the distinction between "belief" and "truth" is not so easily maintained.

xp just had a scanners.gif moment with that one. haven't given my atheism much thought after i developed it when I was a kid, but these are some interesting arguments. not that they'll change my mind or anything, but i really didn't appreciate there's probably more ways of looking at it.

To pretend that people never work backwards in science is hilarious btw.

Science at least has a basis of findings to turn to when challenged. The popular religions seem to lean on anthropomorphism as support for the human spirit rationale.

Oops I meant to type anthropocentrism.

religion's problem, as far as i can see, is that its retreat into fundamentalism is a retreat into a logic of materialism (or "immanence") that is set by a rational/scientific modernity. it's playing by the rules of the other side. but religion remains open to pressures that aren't immanent--that can't, as the quote above suggests, be proved or disproved scientifically--but they are there, i think, principally in how some non-fundamentalist theologies have redefined the concept of the transcendental. just as science smuggles in transcendental premises that it has to seek out and eliminate (only to produce more of them in the process) so does religion have to confront the faulty "worldy" or immanent presumptions it borrows in order to communicate at all.