[extropy-chat] Atheists launch inquisition...

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:04 PM 11/28/2004 -0800, Mike misses the point yet again:

>  it is now proven that
>atheism is based upon a belief in an impossible proof, ergo it is a
>religion.

Rubbish. Keep reading what Gennady posted by Kai E. Nielsen, and try to 
address the hard parts:

<Someone trying to give empirical anchorage to talk of God might give the
following hypothetical case. (It is, however, important in considering the
case to keep in mind that things even remotely like what is described do not
happen.) If thousands of people were standing out under the starry skies and
all saw-the thing went on before their very eyes-a set of stars rearrange
themselves to spell out "God," they would indeed rightly be utterly
astonished and think that they had gone mad. Even if they could somehow
assure themselves that this was not in some way a form of mass
hallucination-how they could do this is not evident-such an experience would
not constitute evidence for the existence of God, for they still would be
without a clue as to what could be meant by speaking of an infinite
individual transcendent to the world. Such an observation (the stars so
rearranging themselves), no matter how well confirmed, would not ostensively
fix the reference range of "God." Talk of such an infinite individual is
utterly incomprehensible and has every appearance of being incoherent. No
one knows what he is talking about in speaking of such a transcendent
reality. All they would know is that something very strange indeed had
happened. The doubt arises whether believers, or indeed anyone else in terms
acceptable to believers, can give an intelligible account of the concept of
God or of what belief in God comes to once God is de-anthropomorphized.

...Instead of saying that an atheist is someone who believes that it
is false or probably false that there is a God, a more adequate
characterization of atheism consists in the more complex claim that to be an
atheist is to be someone who rejects belief in God for the following reasons
(which reason is stressed depends on how God is being conceived): for an
anthropomorphic God, the atheist rejects belief in God because it is false
or probably false that there is a God; for a nonanthropomorphic God (the God
of Luther and Calvin, Aquinas, and Maimonides), he rejects belief in God
because the concept of such a God is either meaningless, unintelligible,
contradictory, incomprehensible, or incoherent; for the God portrayed by
some modern or contemporary theologians or philosophers, he rejects belief
in God because the concept of God in question is such that it merely masks
an atheistic substance-e.g., "God" is just another name for love, or "God"
is simply a symbolic term for moral ideals [or, one might add, for some 
hacker game-designer one equally contingent universe down].>

Damien Broderick