Important distinction
myslsl @ myslsl @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 150Joined 2 yr. ago
myslsl @ myslsl @lemmy.world
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It doesn't. But, "God doesn't exist" is not a claim, it is a counter-claim to the claim "God exists".
I'd agree that at least sometimes it is a counter claim, but I don't agree that counter claims aren't claims themselves. The wording "counter claim" seems to me to indicate that "counter claims" are just claims of a particular type?
"God doesn't exist" is surely a statement right? If I tell you "god doesn't exist" (in response or not to something you've said), this feels like I am claiming the statement "god doesn't exist" is true.
The very concept of a higher power didn't even exist until people started claiming without evidence that it did exist, and it's been many branching games of telephone of that original unproven claim since then that has resulted in basically every major religion.
I absolutely agree with you on this point.
The counter-claim of "God doesn't exist" needs no proof beause it is countering a claim that also has no proof. If and when the original multiple millenium old claim of "God exists" actually has some proof to back it up, then the counter-claim would need to either have actual proof as well to support it, or debunk the "evidence" if possible. But again, the original claim is literally thousands of years old and still has absolute bupkis to prove it, so... I'm not too worried.
I don't think we need proof to reject a claim like "god exists". There's no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.
But, there is to me a difference between rejecting the truth of a claim vs excepting the truth of its denial. So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn't say X too.
My issue here is with what I perceive as bad argumentation, double standards and general ignorance to the field of study where these sorts of questions are applicable on the part of the person I am replying to.
Edit: I want to be clear that I'm not saying you are doing that. I am referring to the other people I have been replying to.
No it doesn't go both ways.
If something exists it should be easy to prove. There should be some form of sign of it.
This is absolutely not true. Things can exist without being accessible to you directly in a manner that makes it easy to prove their existence.
On the other hand it is hard to disprove the existence of anything at all. How do we know there is not some teapot in outer space?
Proving non-existence is not always hard. If we were arguing about the food in your fridge and I were claiming you had food in your fridge when you did not you could easily prove me wrong by just showing me the contents of your fridge.
More importantly, why does the hardness of doing a thing give you special status to make claims without proof? Seems like you are artificially constructing rules here solely because they benefit your position.
We can't. But that is no reason to believe there is one.
The universe is massive. There are teapots here. Why is it not plausible to believe some other alien race would not also construct some kind of teapot? Also, consider the fact that all teapots here on earth are literally teapots in "outerspace" in some sense.
If you are claiming something doesn't exist you should prove it. Why should I take your argument seriously without proof? You see how this goes both ways?
Despite millenia of disproven lies about a non existing almighty being, you still believe this being indeed does exist
There is a whole area in Philosophy called Philosophy of Religion that would really like your disproof of the existence of such a being. They have atheists and theists alike.
Why should the government support someone's bad eating habit when they don't support someone's alcohol habit, or cocaine habit?
I'm not a doctor at all, but for certain addictions, people can die from the withdrawls that occur if they just stop. I'd imagine in those cases rehab and treatment requires supporting the habit via the drug itself or a safer analog in order to keep the individual alive so that they are able to draw down and eventually quit whatever the source of their addiction is.
For example:
Yeah, true. No Euclidean distances implicit to this problem. Oh, wait...
My mans looks like an actual ghoul in this thumbnail. Has anybody checked if he has an actual pulse yet?
Machine learning techniques are often thought of as fancy function approximation tools (i.e. for regression and classification problems). They are tools that receive a set of values and spit out some discrete or possibly continuous prediction value.
One use case is that there are a lot of really hard+important problems within CS that we can't solve efficiently exactly (lookup TSP, SOP, SAT and so on) but that we can solve using heuristics or approximations in reasonable time. Often the accuracy of the heuristic even determines the efficiency of our solution.
Additionally, sometimes we want predictions for other reasons. For example, software that relies on user preference, that predicts home values, that predicts the safety of an engineering plan, that predicts the likelihood that a person has cancer, that predicts the likelihood that an object in a video frame is a human etc.
These tools have legitamite and important use cases it's just that a lot of the hype now is centered around the dumbest possible uses and a bunch of idiots trying to make money regardless of any associated ethical concerns or consequences.
People talk a lot about stackoverflow for figuring out bugs and miscellaneous coding questions but the whole stackexchange project has a lot of other very excellent websites.
These are not mutually exclusive. Believe in yourself.
This cat really has a Milo look to him. Good name choice. Cute cat.
I'm not intending to claim science is a religious belief. Did you read what I said? I don't think this is the gotcha against my actual point that you think it is.
If you have a better term for the types of beliefs I'm talking about feel free to let me know and we can use that instead. Better?
No, that's not what I said, nor is it really implied by anything I said.
The original comment said: "Atheism isn’t a religion. It’s the lack of a religion."
My reply was: "If you distinguish between agnosticism and atheism then this is false. If you’re an atheist in the sense of effectively replacing religious ideology/beliefs with scientific ones, then this is also more or less false."
For the second point: This has nothing to do with worship. This is about religious beliefs. For example, believing that the universe came into being by some mysterious god in the sky is a religious belief. Believing there is a man in Montana who willed all of us into existence is a religious belief. Believing some force of nature that we can analyze scientifically is also a religious belief. There's no worship required for this and I am not claiming atheists worship science or scientific beliefs. My actual point here is that atheists can and do often have religious beliefs, whether they actually realize it and are willing to admit it or not.
For my first point: There's no implication of worshiping scientific beliefs here either. My point is that agnosticism and atheism are two different things. One explicitly does not commit to a set of religious beliefs, one explicitly denies the existence of deities. These are not the same thing and claiming atheism is simply the lack of religion is at best an oversimplification and at worst stupidly wrong.
It's voluntary because people choose to believe it.
You are arguing this: "It's a choice (i.e. voluntary) because it's a choice." This is circular reasoning.
What we're arguing about is called doxastic voluntarism. My whole point here is that there isn't some single consensus on this topic. There are arguments for and against doxastic voluntarism.
I don't care about your personal beliefs regarding this topic. I'm pointing out the fact that "A chooses to believe B, therefore ..." is a form of argument that doesn't guarantee its conclusions if the premise "A chooses to believe B" isn't true. For this kind of argument to work you need to address whether or not "A chooses to believe B" really is true beyond just begging the question.
Well i thought you were trying to argue that theyre believing objective things as to why they dont have a choice. But now youre saying it doesnt matter if its objectively true or not. So why else do you think they dont have a choice?
You can pretend like my point has suddenly changed here but it hasn't. If you go back and read what I've said, you'll notice all I've really claimed here to you is that:
- Whether or not beliefs are choices is debatable.
- People can have beliefs about the objectivity of a thing whether or not it really is objectively true.
With point 2, I'm not sure what you're so hung up about? It's not my fault you misread my original statement where I used the word objective (correctly in fact) and that you responded to your (incorrect) reading of that like it was some awesome gotcha against my point when it wasn't.
Concerning point 1, whether or not something is objectively true isn't exactly relevant to whether people get to pick and choose their beliefs.
Notice, I'm also not claiming people don't get to choose their beliefs in point 1 either. I'm saying it's debatable. There's no truth claim here from me about whether beliefs are chosen or not. What I'm saying is "OMG BUT THEY CHOSE THAT BELIEF", isn't being supported here when it should be.
If you're actually curious about the issue I'm pointing out rather than just feeling like you've won this discussion, the issue is to do with whether we accept doxastic voluntarism.
Please understand, I sincerely don't care which side you personally pick on the issue of doxastic voluntarism. I care about the fact that arguments along the lines of "Person A chose to believe B, therefore ...." are bad because they don't actually guarantee the truth of their premises when they should.
The actual content of a persons beliefs and whether they chose those beliefs aren't the same thing champ.
It's not my fault you can't argue your point any further. There's no need to reply to me to confirm it.
If I say god doesn't exist to you I feel like I'm making a true or false factual claim to YOU rather than to a bunch of old dead people or some greater historical/cultural context. The history of the word/definition might be relevant for deciding what the word means, but the claim is aimed at YOU. The actual truth status of the claim (even if we call it a counter-claim) that I might be making is either true or false (assuming we subscribe to bivalence like that) regardless of the history or culture that lead us to the discussion.
It seems like a silly double standard for only one side to have a burden to prove their claim, but the other gets to claim the negation is true with no burden of proof.
For example, if you say "2+2 is 4" and my response is "NO IT IS NOT. IT IS 3! I REFUSE TO PROVE IT THOUGH", not only will I be wrong in a classical arithmetic sense but I have presented no argument for why you ought to believe my new counter claim to your original claim. It would make no sense to believe me without more info in such a case.
The fact that you can look up tax code is not really a problem for my hypothetical example. It is not particularly hard to come up with hypotheticals where you just can't easily obtain the answer. We could rephrase the context, perhaps we are stranded on a desert island? We could rephrase the question, perhaps it is about what some obscure historical figure had in their pockets on the day they died?
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue for or against the existence of god. My issue is that there should be a burden of proof for the CLAIMS "god exists" and "god does not exist" if somebody is claiming either is true. I don't think there's any kind of burden for believing some random claim without proof, but I think it's silly to commit to the negation of a claim without proof unless you have a reason to believe the negation. You can always just not commit and say you don't know in such a case, rather than believing the claim or its negation.