Yazata said:
I think that Wynn was just suggesting that if some of the atheists are going to speak with such seeming assurance about "God", "reality" and "existence", some kind of underlying theory that justifies that assurance is implied.
Is a theory enough, or is evidence also required? And if evidence is required, where does that leave the theists with their underlying theory?
Is a theory enough? Well, people are initially going to need to mean roughly the same things when they use the same terms. That seems to have been what Wynn was getting at in this thread. If we are going to proceed to talk about evidence, then we will need to agree on what kind of questions we are asking, have some idea about what kind of evidence is even relevant to the truth or falsity of the propositions in question, and so on.
Regarding the theists, sure, the same considerations apply to them too. Perhaps even more so. That's why I led off my reply to Wynn's original post (it was post #2 in this thread) with saying that my initial questions upon hearing theist pronouncements about "God" is to wonder what the word 'God' means when they say it, whether anything in reality corresponds to that usage of the word, how human beings could ever know the answer to that, and so on.
Yazata said:
The thing is, our atheists have been insisting that atheism is simply the absence of belief in God. They insist that atheism doesn't imply any other views in addition to that.
JamesR said:
If that was true, then shouldn't atheists just say "I don't personally believe in God" and leave it at that? Even then, that minimalist view would still be kind of meaningless to other people, unless these atheists provided some additional account of what the word 'God' means to them.
But typically, atheists can't just leave it there.
And going on the attack means that the atheists have to come out from under their protective 'I just personally lack belief' rock and express some additional new ideas about what theists believe, about what kind of beliefs are best for people to hold, about why that is, and so on.
I don't think that anybody who makes propositional statements about anything other than their own subjective states, and expects those statements to be persuasive to other people, can turn around and claim immunity from having to explain, justify and defend their views. If somebody tries that, they lose the opportunity to convince people who don't already agree with them.
That's the thing, both theists and atheists often seem to me to be playing very similar games.
It's nice that both atheists and theists have their own subjective beliefs or absence of beliefs about 'God'. But the mere fact that a person possesses subjective feelings about something doesn't make their opinions about what other people believe and about what those people should believe persuasive to anyone but themselves.
You're right. Atheists do hold such views, in the same way that theists do. But views on these things do not automatically follow from atheism. In fact, some of them may be logically prior to atheism.
There's apparently a subjective component - the atheist's personal lack of belief and the theist's personal faith. And then there's what appears to be a more objective component as well - their views, statements and arguments about what other people believe and about what they should believe. Virtually all the battling back and forth between theists and atheists concerns the additional intersubjective content. Absent that, both of them would just possess their own respective opinions, smile, and remain silent and unconcerned about what other people may or may not believe.
