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"Suppose, for a moment, that I were deaf, and had been so
from birth. Had heard no sound, ever, was not even capable of
decoding vibrations through my body. And suppose someone came to
me with the story of a man called Beethoven. I would have to
accept the existence of Beethoven (unless I were of the extreme
cast of mind that refuses to accept as truth anything I had not
personally tested myself) and I could read of his life, see
pictures of him and of his home, and the strange artifacts with
which he surrounded himself. But what he did, the work to which he
gave his life, would be completely physically unprovable to me. I
could see reams of paper covered with incomprehensible symbols. I
could see films of people waving their arms about, blowing into
things, scraping strings fastened to wooden boxes with sticks,
just as people see other people making signs across their bodies,
standing up and sitting down and singing and kneeling in silence,
but it would make no sense to me. Being me (assuming I still was
me, which hardly seems likely given such a catastrophic lack) I
would, I think, be inclined to take the existence of 'music' on
faith; but I could certainly understand such a person deciding
that there was no such thing, that it was all a vast game of
'let's pretend' whose rationale completely escaped me. Especially
if there were many people like me who could not experience the
thing directly. And this is how I think of God." --
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smallship1,
2010-12-23
(no subject)
(no subject)
Not to mention that Beethoven would be a peer to another man, even a deaf man. God is supposed to be peerless, and as such there IS no body of work from god, no writing, no "pictures of him and his home." Only heresay.
I went to the link, and read the essay this quote comes from. She starts off on a hideous misunderstanding of the athiest position, which is understandable since many atheists don't get it right either; she says athisims is "... a mindset which only acknowledges the existence of things which can be physically proved."
The word she (and others, including many atheists) should be using is "empirical" and that is not the same as "physical."
She says "... in order to persuade that mindset to acknowledge the possibility of the unprovable thing, one would first have to prove it. The circle is closed and can never be opened."
Um, no. the circle is always open, never closed. Thousands of things have been proven to exist via empirical study, that were considered impossible. The Higgs Boson, quite recently. What does need to be considered is not the existence of a thing but the possibility of its existence. And if there is a possibility, we go looking for it. And if we find it, we consider that to be proof-- of its existence, at least, barring further study. And there is always further study.
What we are up against, between non believers and believers is this thing called belief. I have a real hard time believing in things-- even things I really, really, wish I could believe in. I need proof before I can accept that something exists. And once you have proof, you no longer have belief-- you have knowledge.
Do gods exist? We have no proof. When I say I don't believe in god(s) that's exactly what I mean.
As your essayist points out, most atheists have a problem with religion that is alongside their problem with baseless belief. But I think she covered that one with a little bit more understanding.
(no subject)
In the use of the word "belief/believe" is a very interesting bit of modern epistemology. It is used for about three things.
When used to discuss supposed supernatural entities, it's paired with the preposition "in", to mean something quite different from how the word is otherwise used.
Without that "in" in there, we use "believe" to mean "I have at least some modest reason to think so", as in "Can you get to Chinatown on the Orange Line?" "Yes, I believe so, but check a map." That doesn't mean "I TAKE IT AS A MATTER OF CERTAINTY THAT YES YOU CAN", it means "I think so, but allow as that I could be wrong." It's, in fact, a form of hedging, of stressing the provisionally factual nature of the proposition, and inviting correction. This is precisely not what anybody means when they talk about a belief in a god, or "in" anything else.
With the "in", there's two meanings. The obvious one is the one that theists and atheists so often think they're debating: the assertion that one is certain of the existence of some supernatural entity. The less obvious one is that one is loyal to, approving of, a proponent of, or values someone or something else. If I say I believe in you, that doesn't mean I'm asserting something about your existence, it means I think well of your capabilities. If someone says they believe in capitalism, they probably aren't saying they think capitalism exists, but that they think it is a swell idea.
This three part distinction is important for two reasons:
1) It demonstrates how when "belief" and "believe" are used to discuss religious propositions, they mean something completely exceptional to how the words are usually meant. In fact, the "belief in" the existence of a supernatural entity is epistemologically unique: it describes a kind of knowing that we do not use for anything else.
2) While logical-minded atheists and scholarly theists might go at it hammers and tongs over the actual existence of gods, and reliably use "belief in" in the middle sense above, in wider practice, when people speak of "believing in" god, the move freely and fluently between the middle and last senses of "believe in". They are using it ambiguously, and used to it being used that way. Which is why when a believer hears someone say "I don't believe in god" they often hear that to mean "I think god is a sucky idea." (Which is not to say that there aren't plenty of atheists who think that, and might say so. But that the ones who either don't think that or are being more polite than to say that, when they use the term "believe in" that way, that's how it gets heard.) Which explains some of the hostility that sentence can get.
(no subject)
I've always assumed that "I don't believe in Gods" is understood to mean "I do not think gods exist at all," which is how I mean it. Mostly, people will attack me along the lines of "You can't prove God doesn't exist!" when I say "believe." which leads me to think that's how they mean it too.
Thanks for the note about pronouns :)
(no subject)
Huh. Valuable comment; thanks -- it explains some things about those sorts of conversations that always seemed kind of "off" to me.
This also explains why I get more upset when people say they don't believe in $(political principle I consider important) than when they say they don't believe in my God. I hear the latter as "I don't believe he exists," a valid position, because I'm so used to having that conversation ... but I hear the first as "I don't believe $(principle) is a good thing" because debating the existence of the political idea in question seldom seems to make sense.