Profiling the atheist

I think you may have introduced some outliers there, Sci. I have to admit that I struggle to follow some of the reasoning for inclusion/exclusion within the ambit of the atheist. It reminds me of my son who, half-teasingly, claims that I am every bit as much of an atheist as he is because I don't believe in a personal God. Yet for me, the term atheism has come to demand the exclusion of the spiritual and/or supernatural. So I go by what I consider to be a general understanding of the term, which is:

• No God/gods of any description, any concept.
  
• No supernatural entities such as angels, devils, souls, ghosts or spirits of any description.
  
• No spiritual dimensions such as heaven, hell, the astral plane or any kind afterlife environment.
  

As for atheists not being materialists, I have yet to meet one who isn't. I do not know of any materialists who seriously believe that a god consciousness may have emerged from the natural world. 

Perhaps the atheists here might like to comment?

Regarding the idea of a theist who is also a materialist this was a discussion among some Christian bloggers who were inclined to accept God as First Emergent. I can try and dig it up if you're interested, but this is approaching 6-7 years ago so they might be gone.

Regarding what an atheist vs skeptic is, and what they assume about reality, I was just spitballing to try and get to a substantive statement. Namely this one:

Non-conscious Matter, in accordance with Laws, gives rise to isolated incidences of Consciousnesses whose boundaries+existence are defined by certain bodies that are their only means of communication+action.

I think that lines up with your definition minus the dimensions of other entities? The reason I wanted to get to a clear position on what the skeptic-atheist would think reality is like is b/c I believe it gives us all something to debate.

It seems to me that for the atheist the belief in God (or gods?) is just too much of an ask, and for the skeptic this extends to anything in that list of yours. 

But it seems to me that if one looks at the assumptions of the bold statement, and then one assumes it informs the demand the skeptic has to exclude a variety of phenomenon/entities from existence....then the skeptic is also asking a lot from someone not immediately amenable to their point of view.


Perhaps the skeptic is the one who asks too much?

Perhaps the skeptic is the one who asks too much?

Interesting that the terms, "materialist", "atheist" and "skeptic" seem to have become interchangeable - at least when it comes to online discussions. I'm perfectly at ease using the terms interchangeably so long as that is understood on both sides. The dictionary definition of sceptic/skeptic is someone who is doubtful and I believe that applies to all of us. I suspect that it is this group of internet atheists who have hijacked the word and, for good measure, the word "materialist" too. Indeed, there seems to be a concerted effort to poach science itself for inclusion in the atheist canon.

Interesting that the terms, "materialist", "atheist" and "skeptic" seem to have become interchangeable - at least when it comes to online discussions. I'm perfectly at ease using the terms interchangeably so long as that is understood on both sides. The dictionary definition of sceptic/skeptic is someone who is doubtful and I believe that applies to all of us. I suspect that it is this group of internet atheists who have hijacked the word and, for good measure, the word "materialist" too. Indeed, there seems to be a concerted effort to poach science itself for inclusion in the atheist canon.

Yeah I've been thinking about this a lot. For example certain Buddhists and Theosophists are "materialist" in that they think matter prevades across dimensions but the highest forms of matter correspond to higher states of consciousness. I guess in the modern terminology they are "panpsychists" or "neutral monists" though not sure they'd use those terms. 

But even a materialist in the modern sense who believes consciousness is emergent from matter (or some kind of physicalist substance) could believe in an afterlife. That emergent consciousness can live on. 

Science seems to require a certain assumed intelligibility to be worthwhile, by which I mean reality has to be able to be understood by creatures on our level of intelligence. So even the materialism that makes Science worthwhile has to be of a certain kind, and this leads to the question of what is a better position to take in light of reality's intelligibility - atheism or theism?

All to say I think the skeptic, and arguably the atheist, ask us to assume a lot about the nature of reality. Perhaps so much so that we should be skeptical of them.

Linda

I would actually agree with almost all of this. I didn't get to every point and I have no intention on replying again, I really need to stop spending so much time on debates that will go nowhere and change nothing. But I didn't want to just not reply at all this time.

It’s almost the opposite of a threshold argument. That is, it refers to events or experiences which are not quantitatively different from ordinary experiences, but rather qualitatively different. Any “threshold” is distinct, obvious, and cannot be reached by incremental means.

To take your bale of hay example, if a baler produces the smaller rectangular bales, then it is impossible for that baler to produce the large circular bales weighing 500 kg. And nobody would regard it as ordinary were that large circular bale to weigh 499 kg instead.

Either I don't know what you're saying or you're still saying what I think you were saying or we were actally saying the same thing all along. Using the levitation example from your all or none link, there's really no reason it would have to be full levitation, you could get evidence for levitation by recording any sort of weight difference on a scale or generated force or whatever so long as it could lead to levitation if only its magnitude was greater. Saying that it's not evidence until it's full levitation would be a threshold argument.

There are, of course, many examples of all-or-none events under empiricism. Your description of ending up with a black eye, etc. despite a complete lack of physical assailants would be an example of one of these events/experiences.

That's nice of you to say but Is it really?

I avoided getting any sort of treatment because I didn't know how I could possibly explain the injuries in a way that wouldn't get me locked up somewhere. It's not like the injuries themselves would act as any sort of evidence of anything paranormal. So does it really count as all or nothing evidence? I'd say no. Certainly not to anyone but me.

And even then could it not be argued that, even though all the injuries just happened to be in the exact same places that the attacks happened, they still had nothing to do with what happened in the projection? To me cuts and burns were always the best evidence of that stuff, but bruises, bleeding noses? Even the black eye? How would you say for sure that those things were really caused by what they appeared to be caused by? Even though that was far from an isolated event, for the longest time I could never 100% decide that it had to be directly connected to the projections, that it was some form of kinetic energy transfer that I didn't understand, or something else. It didn't matter how many times it happened or under what conditions. The doubt was always there that somehow, someway it could be something normal and psychosomatic. Because hey, we know bruises an welts can be caused by stress, we know that the brain can't tell the difference between a real and imagined event very well, We know that people can hallucinate and seemingly lose control of their own mind.... so why can't it be that? Why couldn't it just be that I imagined something so hard that it caused psychosomatic injuries, including cuts and burns, with a dash of hallucination to really push it over the edge? How do I know for sure that it's not that each and every single time? I don't, I can't, it's not even possible, at some level the decision always comes down to faith and desire.

This problem wasn't so bad for shared dreams/projections or poltergeisting because you can verify those with the other person and/or in the physical world but even with those I had similar doubts and tried to come up with similar alternatives. Even after I started being able to induce them semi at will the instability still gave me a lot of doubts. For this reason I have focused everything on getting those sort of slam dunk style, showmanship levels of abilities because if I'm having those doubts and poking those holes, imagine how an actual skeptic is going to react when I try to do a demo. Especially if simple stage fright is all it would take to make me fail. People seem to be really good at remembering the amorphous nature of empiricism when it comes to arguing against things they don't want to exist.

I am pretty much certain that I could be levitating, glowing, holding a crackling ball of energy, and a skeptic would find some way to argue that it's all a trick. Or at least that it's not psi related because of some edge possibility they can point at.

These days I call this "Semantic Hell" where something that should be an all or nothing then gets more and more precisely redefined until it's no longer the original thing you were looking at.

It's like taking the red ball in the box example, two sides, one thinks there will be a ball and one that doesn't. They open the box, the for side goes "That's a red ball, hypothesis confirmed." the other side goes "oh now wait a minute we need to make sure it's really a red ball... hmmm see  this ridge in the middle here? Do balls have ridges? I don't think so. Oh and you never specified what shade of red, can't really call it a red ball if we don't have a proper definition of red can we?" and then they define it as a "Coloured object with ball-like characteristics" and state that the red ball proponents are declaring premature victory. They aren't technically wrong in doing so, but at what point do you argue that further precision is just irrational?

And note that that wasn’t an example of “cannot now believe anything that can’t be replicated and validated by science”. It was an example of “the state of what I think has been replicated and validated by science”. But it wasn’t an example of what I believe. If I only believed what could be replicated and validated by science, I wouldn’t be here suggesting experiments which could be performed in order to demonstrate anomalous results, or performing my own personal experiments.

I didn't know you were doing your on experiments, that's really cool, keep it up.

Why? Nobody’s claiming that dogmatic people aren’t present in any and all ideological groups. The level of dogmatism among non-believers may be lower, in general, than among believers. But that doesn’t mean there are no dogmatic atheists. So that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some atheists which the list would apply to. But so what? 

I would argue atheism deserves a much rougher evaluations due to one of it's core values typically being rationality. Yes I'm sure someone will try to use the dictionary defense that atheism only really means that they don't believe in a god, but out in the real world people recognize that it goes beyond that for pretty much every if not every atheist. Therefore, given the usual rationality claim, there should be zero dogmatism in atheism. Sure that might be an unrealistic expectation, but quite frankly if someone's going to tell me their beliefs are based on rationality and evidence, as atheists have, then I expect them to be consistent. this is less of a logical argument and more of my own principles and standards and can probably be ignored.

It’s not such a new thing. Atheism has been around for millennia, and mass or organized religion for centuries (with the separation of religion and rule).

Yeah, atheism has been around, mass atheism on the other hand not so much. Certainly not in the way it is today which I would argue is different than the "doubters" of old. Atheism has grown beyond the literal meaning of not believing in a god to a whole host of extras, generally including rationalism and the like, creating spinoffs like Humanism and Atheism+ that are still ultimately tied to the same core. It's a belief system all it's own now.
The other issue is that dogmatism is different based on the ideology, for example, muslims blow themselves up because martydom is considered serving allah, while bhuddists light themselves on fire or let themselves get shot because of pacifism. Yes, overly simplified examples for sure, but still valid. Atheism dogma has the potential to be far, far worse than anything that's come before it due to the adherence to rationality. Not only that, it may not be dogma that does it but moderates. Logic is in the eye of the logician and in the quest to solve certain problems in the world the math may end up showing rational solutions that would only seem horrific to people who think life has meaning or value or anything.

For example, if people are just going to blink out and there was no point to anything, what's wrong with killing off all the poor people to improve the economy? What's the problem with creating a genetically engineered caste system if people are already just biological robots? Sounds outlandish but the Japanese murder of mental patients in the attackers quest to save the government money is a concept that's not being vilified as readily as you'd think. People crunching the numbers in various comments sections found out that, even after all the legal and jail fees, he still saved the state money. There has been Increasing support for euthanizing the disabled and elderly for being drains on society.  Bill Gate's infamous "Death Panel" comments come to mind. increasing amount of people making "rational" arguments for suicide. These aren't things coming from religion anymore, a lot of this is steeped in atheism, certainly atheism has been used to justify how it's "Not really that bad".

Other issues I have are that the rationality of atheism seems to hamper creativity, seemingly because rationality dictates empiricism and it seems people have a harder time seeing or imagining beyond what the data shows and I have concerns that too much of that might cause progress to go down increasingly narrow paths due to the peripheries having "little to no" evidence for their existence. Not because there isn't something there but due to a combination of social pressure to be rational and lack of physical resources to even do the research largely caused by social pressure.

But like I said, it's way too early for me to really say what I think might happen, I do think it's important to keep in mind that what is considered dogmatic is largely only what is on the fringes of the ideology. And what's on the fringes is determined by what's in the center. Right now things are mostly okay, but I don't deal in the black and whites, I deal in how things change and how they get coloured by people.

And do you think this is a reflection of your own self rather than just a charge you level against others?:


I think everyone is implicitly acknowledging they could be wrong, at least to some degree, in debates/dialectics.

I'm not sure why anyone has to explicitly state this in every conversation?

Don't try to guess about me.
Considering how upset they become when skeptics question their beliefs, I'd say admitting they could be wrong amounts to nothing greater than lip service. Perhaps the level of upsetness is directly proportional to how important it is to keep the faith. I do recall ipsofacto being the only member ever to verbally admit out loud to possibly being wrong. Yes, It would be refreshing if members actually did state such. But I doubt that will ever happen. Too much is at stake for them. This could be said of any member of any forum sympathetic to psi I've ever participated in.  So Sci, be the second member to admit your psi beliefs could be as vacuous as the space between the stars. I extend this request to all psi proponents.

Don't try to guess about me.
Considering how upset they become when skeptics question their beliefs, I'd say admitting they could be wrong amounts to nothing greater than lip service. Perhaps the level of upsetness is directly proportional to how important it is to keep the faith. I do recall ipsofacto being the only member ever to verbally admit out loud to possibly being wrong. Yes, It would be refreshing if members actually did state such. But I doubt that will ever happen. Too much is at stake for them. This could be said of any member of any forum sympathetic to psi I've ever participated in.  So Sci, be the second member to admit your psi beliefs could be as vacuous as the space between the stars. I extend this request to all psi proponents.

Ummmmm I have entire disclaimers I put up about how I could be wrong and how I don't expect anyone to believe me and such and I even go through and provide alternative explanations for experiences such as what I did with fls. But I guess you have never seen it.

Don't try to guess about me.
Considering how upset they become when skeptics question their beliefs, I'd say admitting they could be wrong amounts to nothing greater than lip service.

I feel a great disturbance in the force....somewhere a pot is remarking on the blackness of a kettle...
 
Were you the one who said the neuroscientist Raymond Tallis was a damned fool' b/c he's not a materialist?

The one who ran off to JREF and begged people to help you against Maanelli b/c you - in your own words - have no ability to understand studies involving mathematics, who you claimed - behind his back - was a woo monger of the worst kind?

Didn't you say I lacked the metaphorical "testosterone "to handle physicalism?

Seems like you get upset when people question your materialist-atheist faith, even in this post you can sense the hostility...seems like the OP has got your number good lol.

Perhaps the level of upsetness is directly proportional to how important it is to keep the faith. I do recall ipsofacto being the only member ever to verbally admit out loud to possibly being wrong. Yes, It would be refreshing if members actually did state such. But I doubt that will ever happen. Too much is at stake for them. This could be said of any member of any forum sympathetic to psi I've ever participated in.  So Sci, be the second member to admit your psi beliefs could be as vacuous as the space between the stars. I extend this request to all psi proponents.

 
It seems much is at stake for you as well, given the years you've come posting variations of this silly "HULK SAY PROPONENTS WEAK" diatribe with little else to show for it.

But sure, there might not be any Psi effects, nor any God. 

Now - can you admit that skeptics base their own faith not out of any real claim to rationality, but b/c they believe - without evidence - the world will be better when everyone is materialist/physicalist?

Anyway, moving on from Steve001's silliness back to discussion of substance:

Going to go back to the bold statement I mentioned previously:

Non-conscious Matter, in accordance with Laws, gives rise to isolated incidences of Consciousnesses whose boundaries+existence are defined by certain bodies that are their only means of communication+action.

I think this sums up the skeptic-atheist metaphysical position nicely? I don't think it's a strawman?

I wanted to try and include Kamarling's mention that there are no Heaven and Hells, but not sure the materialist has much ground for there not being extra-dimensional locations or locations distant from us on greater than 3d dimenstional axes. Rather it seems they'd contend that existence being over when the body dies is the reasoning for doubting Heaven and Hell exist.

My problem with the bold is the more you examine its pieces the more it leaves questions, in that every piece is in dispute. Some aspects of it - such the question of Laws of Nature - even suggest theism if affirmed and leave room open for paranormal phenomenon if rejected as not being physical enough.

The first of course would be how you get consciousness from non-conscious matter, something that is in ongoing dispute in academia. When one your New Atheist horsemen - especially the one w/ the PhD in neuroscience - says it makes no sense you're already asking a lot:

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.

Of course the Matter that is supposedly responsible for the Something from Nothing miracle of producing consciousness is ill-defined, as noted by Chomsky in Language and Problems of Knowledge:

There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body. If we have such a theory in some domain, we seek to assimilate it to the core notions of physics, perhaps modifying these notions as we carry out this enterprise.

This ill-definition of matter seems to only be set to get worse, if Space and Time are said by physicists to be emergent. (I'm not convinced that Emergent Space/Time makes sense, but physicalists are by definition committed to physics.)

Then there's the part about Laws of Nature. This would seem to be the best thing going for skeptics in their defense of Physicalism, but I actually see this as one of the greatest weaknesses for the following reasons:

1) Of what substance are the Laws? Why don't they change from moment to moment? Physicalism is usually presented as a Monism - there is a single substance that has no mental aspects (as noted this has it's own problems). But the Laws would have to be Eternal, and somehow impinge on Matter without being material...which then makes Physicalism a Dualism of two different categories of substance that magically interact. And even then it's not clear why the Laws don't change.

2) That the universe obeys Laws that we can discover suggests it is Intelligible to us - this would underpin the most reasonable skeptic position - Methodological Naturalism. But as Feser notes, this very Intelligibility can be used as an argument for Theism:

For once it is conceded that the world is at least in itself completely intelligible, it is hard to see how this could be so unless the most fundamental level of reality is something absolutely necessary – something that is not a mixture of potentiality and actuality but rather pure actuality (as the Aristotelian would say), something which is in no way whatsoever composite but absolutely metaphysically simple (as the Neo-Platonist would say), something which is not a compound of essence and existence but rather subsistent being itself (as the Thomist would say).  However one elaborates on the nature of this ultimate reality, it is not going to be identifiable with any “fundamental laws of nature” (which are contingent, and the operation of which involves the transition from potentiality to actuality within a universe of things that are in various ways composite).  One might still at this point dispute whether the ultimate reality is best described in terms of the theology of classical theism or instead in terms of some pantheistic theology.  But one will definitely be in the realm of theology – rational theology, natural theology – rather than empirical science.

If one wants to maintain a defensible atheist position, then...One has to claim with a straight face that the world is intelligible down to the level of the fundamental laws, but beyond that point suddenly “stops making sense”...For one has to say, not that the world has some ultimate explanation that is non-theistic, but rather that it has no ultimate explanation at all.  And in that case one can hardly claim to have provided a more “rational” account of the world than theism does.  To paraphrase what Copleston said to Russell, if you refuse to play the explanatory game, then naturally you cannot lose it.  But by the same token, it is ludicrous to claim that you’ve won it.

3) If there's Matter and Laws, and somehow the Laws can interact with Matter...that still doesn't completely explain things. As Stephen Talbott notes in Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen? :

The conviction that laws somehow give us a full accounting of events seems often to be based on the idea that they govern the world's substance or matter from outside, "making" things happen. If this is the case, however, then we must provide some way for matter to recognize and then obey these external laws. But, plainly, whatever supports this capacity for recognition and obedience cannot itself be the mere obedience. Anything capable of obeying wholly external laws is not only its obedience but also its capability, and this capability remains unexplained by the laws.

If, with so many scientists today, we construe laws as rules, we can put the matter this way: much more than rule-following is required of anything able to follow rules; conversely, no set of rules can by themselves explain the presence or functioning of that which is capable of following them.

It is, in other words, impossible to imagine matter that does not have some character of its own. To begin with, it must exist. But if it exists, it must do so in some particular manner, according to its own way of being. Even if we were to say, absurdly, that its only character is to obey external laws, this "law of obedience" itself could not be just another one of the external laws being obeyed. Something will be "going on" that could not be understood as obedience to law, and this something would be an essential expression of what matter was. To apprehend the world we would need to understand this expressive character in its own right, and we could never gain such an understanding solely through a consideration of external laws.

So we can hardly find coherence in the rather dualistic notion that physical laws reside, ghost-like, in some detached, abstract realm from which they impinge upon matter. But if, contrary to our initial assumption, we take laws to be in one way or another bound up with the world's substance — if we take them to be at least in part an expression of this substance — then the difficulty in the conventional view of law becomes even more intense. Surely it makes no sense to say that the world's material phenomena are the result — the wholly explained result — of matter obeying laws which it is itself busy expressing. In whatever manner we prefer to understand the material expression of the laws, this expression cannot be a matter of obedience to the laws being expressed! If whatever is there as the substance of the world at least in part determines the laws, then the laws cannot be said to determine what is there.

Now that we've seen the problem with laws let's consider the alternative for Materialism/Physicalism, as the materialist Meillassoux does, and say there are no Laws of Nature. This actually seems to be the True Materialist position, as it removes any observance of something not Physical. There is Matter, and it exists in a state of Hyper Chaos - indeterminism but with no expectation given by Probabalistic Laws. Matter than can do anything logically possible.

But then there are no Laws, only regularities that exist because of Luck, and the fact my iPhone works is based on the same regularities that might power my lucky rabbit's foot or make telepathy work - Regularity that is underpinned by nothing at all b/c the Universe is just Absurd.

There are other issues to be found, but will try and get to those later. For now suffice to say IMO that if one is, for rational reasons, a theist of some sort as well as an immaterialist of some sort, then one can reasonably be convinced by a volume of anecdotes along with NDE/Psi research.

I'd even say skeptics, in trying to win the metaphysical game, have actually weakened themselves on their real goal - the political front...but that's an argument for another day...

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Podcast have an interesting segment on crafting a naturalistic metaphysic this week with guest philosopher Devin Bray. 

https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/697

The conversation begins at just past the hour mark