Are most believers really atheists?

[Dr. Sunstoned]

I am an atheist, and I am in general alignment with Mark Twain's thoughts on death.

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

[IWMP]

I am an atheist, and I am in general alignment with Mark Twain's thoughts on death.

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

fair enough.

[Kishkumen]

Are most atheists really believers?

According to Jordan Peterson and a number of Christian apologists, yes. Of course, I did mention that in my first post.

There is nothing quite so rude as telling someone they believe the opposite of what they claim to believe.

[Gadianton]

There is no hell. It is a heresy. Putting that aside, why should any other Gods outside of heretical Christianity have a hell? How many do?

Muslims? I have been personally informed of impending hell by a Muslim so there's that. The two big theistic traditions with advanced theology believe in hell. I don't think they can be outliers.

Either way, I think the ranked voting exercise could prove that I'm wrong, that fellow believers really do see other believers as more likely correct over atheism. I'm merely speculating that atheism will win. Kind of like kids fighting over the toy and the parent steps in to take the toy away, "if you're going to fight about it then nobody can have it." In this case, the toy is the most powerful being in the universe and at your disposal through prayer. I think a lot of people would rather there be no toy, then a toy that is bound to cause problems.

I bring up hell as the most convenient example of why a person would choose "no God" over the other guy's God. Hell isn't the only problem, the other guy's heaven or exposition of the world through God might also be utterly repulsive to you. Think DCP and Calvinism. Would DCP choose Calvinism over atheism? Someone ought to ask him.

An interesting way to prove I'm wrong but not make the case for God would be if the ranked voting came up as something pretty close to random. New agey beliefs really are taking hold of people, even deeply ingrained EV's are picking up new age vibes and beliefs. It's possible that people in general no longer "know what they believe," meaning, they have their own general, new age interpretation of their traditional religion. An EV who believes in crystals or QAnon or drones may not be able to explain the Athanasius Creed or think that it's important. It may be that the value-neutral option, which is what I'm trying to get to, isn't atheism, but pantheism. And these two can get really confused. Was Carl Sagan an atheist or a pantheist?

Can pantheists be said to believe in God? If enough people say "yes," then we'll need a different word for deity that isn't compatible with pantheism. Well, I think William Lane Craig is right that God per se, is personal. Muslims and later Christians both picked up Aristotle's prime mover for their theoretical underpinning of God. But was Aristotle anything close to a Christian or Muslim? I think an atheist could believe in a prime mover. But could an atheist believe in a personal prime mover? I think not. How about a person who believes in cosmic energy, is that personal? It may or may not be, depending on the believer.

If I'm right and William Lane Craig is right that God must be personal, then the reason why the value neutral option is atheism is due to the zero-sum element of life that can't be escaped if God is personal. People aren't going to vote for the God helping the other guy at their expense. If everyone is praying for an "A" but the class is graded on the curve, then those other prayers better not count. The only other option I see for a personal God is one who isn't consulted for favors, or at least, a persons outlook is so steeped in relativism it doesn't matter what anyone gets including themselves.

But for traditional believers whose God is clearly tribal, the obvious incentive would be to vote your own God first, and no God second, which would make "no God" win in IRV.

[drumdude]

According to Jordan Peterson and a number of Christian apologists, yes. Of course, I did mention that in my first post.

There is nothing quite so rude as telling someone they believe the opposite of what they claim to believe.

10000 percent!

[Kishkumen]

Muslims? I have been personally informed of impending hell by a Muslim so there's that. The two big theistic traditions with advanced theology believe in hell. I don't think they can be outliers.

Yeah, I was including Islam in heretical Christianity, as Islam does accept the prophethood of Jesus.

Either way, I think the ranked voting exercise could prove that I'm wrong, that fellow believers really do see other believers as more likely correct over atheism. I'm merely speculating that atheism will win. Kind of like kids fighting over the toy and the parent steps in to take the toy away, "if you're going to fight about it then nobody can have it." In this case, the toy is the most powerful being in the universe and at your disposal through prayer. I think a lot of people would rather there be no toy, then a toy that is bound to cause problems.

I bring up hell as the most convenient example of why a person would choose "no God" over the other guy's God. Hell isn't the only problem, the other guy's heaven or exposition of the world through God might also be utterly repulsive to you. Think DCP and Calvinism. Would DCP choose Calvinism over atheism? Someone ought to ask him.

An interesting way to prove I'm wrong but not make the case for God would be if the ranked voting came up as something pretty close to random. New agey beliefs really are taking hold of people, even deeply ingrained EV's are picking up new age vibes and beliefs. It's possible that people in general no longer "know what they believe," meaning, they have their own general, new age interpretation of their traditional religion. An EV who believes in crystals or QAnon or drones may not be able to explain the Athanasius Creed or think that it's important. It may be that the value-neutral option, which is what I'm trying to get to, isn't atheism, but pantheism. And these two can get really confused. Was Carl Sagan an atheist or a pantheist?

Can pantheists be said to believe in God? If enough people say "yes," then we'll need a different word for deity that isn't compatible with pantheism. Well, I think William Lane Craig is right that God per se, is personal. Muslims and later Christians both picked up Aristotle's prime mover for their theoretical underpinning of God. But was Aristotle anything close to a Christian or Muslim? I think an atheist could believe in a prime mover. But could an atheist believe in a personal prime mover? I think not. How about a person who believes in cosmic energy, is that personal? It may or may not be, depending on the believer.

If I'm right and William Lane Craig is right that God must be personal, then the reason why the value neutral option is atheism is due to the zero-sum element of life that can't be escaped if God is personal. People aren't going to vote for the God helping the other guy at their expense. If everyone is praying for an "A" but the class is graded on the curve, then those other prayers better not count. The only other option I see for a personal God is one who isn't consulted for favors, or at least, a persons outlook is so steeped in relativism it doesn't matter what anyone gets including themselves.

But for traditional believers whose God is clearly tribal, the obvious incentive would be to vote your own God first, and no God second, which would make "no God" win in IRV.

Fair enough. I don't think much of what most people say about God because they have no clue, and that is true of everyone. I don't know that it proves that no God exists. I am in the camp of those who say God does exist, inasmuch as I ascribe to the view that there is something accounting for the existence as opposed to the non-existence of all things. Since everyone is wrong about God (including me), then I don't expect anyone to be right about God, and I don't feel obliged to accept or reject their gods. I am fine rejecting their ideas about God, and I accept that what people believe, with their limited faculties, does not impact what is one way or the other. But, I take your overall point.

[Gadianton]

I checked google for Jordan comments and found reference to him proposing some people have Pan as their God. Perhaps, I think Jordan does a bit of expermenting around with ideas to find which might suggest different and interesting viewpoints.

He said this to Matt Dillahunty during a debate, and yes, he experiments with different positions so he could change his mind next week. As far as it being rude, I'm not a hard yes on that. Matt went straight to "I'll tell you what I believe..." to cheers of his side. I thought it was a weak response. Later, Matt said of the interview, that Peterson was going the route of (mentions some c-tier theologian I can't remember the name) presuppositionalism. Matt is one of these positivist type atheists who likes to keep things extremely simplistic and be right on common sense grounds. He would have been more effective to point out that he was familiar with this apologetics accusation and then give a reason why he believes it fails other than "I'll tell you what I believe.." I think that would have been more effective because I don't think Peterson recognized he was being unoriginal.

Jordan and Matt are matched well enough in socioeconomic standing and they are there to debate, and so I really have no problem with Jordan telling Matt what he thinks Matt really believes, I'm more interested in his reasoning for it. If there's a good argument for atheists really being believers then let's hear it.

[Gadianton]

I believe atheists to be people who believe that when we die there is nothing more and that there is nothing outside the realm that we experience in terms of intelligence that created us as an existence. But, I guess only an atheist would know.

You are probably right that most atheists are also "skeptics" who reject things like afterlives, but fundamentally, it's disbelief in God or gods I suppose. But that doesn't rule out an afterlife, just as belief in God doesn't necessitate an afterlife. That's a really interesting point to me, because DCP being the prime example, even well-educated believers might think belief in God is more about belief in an afterlife. That's capitalism for you; the universe revolves around your personal consumption. Dan seems to think life is meaningless without God, but it's through the backdoor of no afterlife. That opens the door for atheists to have meaning if they can ever figure out immortality. It's possible to believe in God and not the afterlife. Albert Einstein case in point. The Bible doesn't teach an afterlife until around the Babylonian captivity. That really gets to a point of what God is about, a "Jealous God" and a "Man of war" who fights for Israel.

I see it as, like looking at a colour. We all, or most of us will look at the colour blue and we all perceive it as blue but we know that each others experience and perception of what blue looks like to them is very different but at the end of the day it's still the same colour we just read and respond to it based on a mixture of biological and brain processing characteristics within our individual selves

.

Indeed, this goes the route that "God" is something simple like a color, and some apologists even argue this. In a way you're right. Jehovah and Moloch and Horus are all simple-minded tough guys who head up their tribe. But if you're praying to Jehovah, you're certainly not going to want the prayers to Moloch to work and vice versa. In polytheistic times you may have a way out, because you could incur favor from other gods or other gods also had power, in monotheistic times, it's entirely zero-sum. God the father and Allah may have strong similarities, as they are both based on the Prime Mover. But while you can say "blue" in Arabic and you're talking the same thing as a Muslim, its a whole lot more controversial if you're praying to "God" and not "Allah," and could result in hell. And that goes both ways.

[Physics Guy]

Pascal, like most militant believers, seemed to think the option is between atheism and his own personal Santa Clause; between his own narrow view of the Christian God and the lack of any God.

Pascal described his wager in a jotted note to himself, in the middle of a bunch of other jotted notes. The text is too brief, and the context too scant, to infer much about what exactly Pascal meant, beyond the basic notion of considering belief as a game move, and therefore taking payoffs into account, as well as odds, when weighing options.

But most people who believe in God are going to be wrong about God. They are going to wind up in the real God's hell. It was common to hear sentiments from other Mormons back in the day that if Mormonism wasn't true, they wouldn't believe in anything; that's how much they detested other religions. I suspect most people feel the same about religions other than their own, whether it's fear of the other God's flames or supreme distaste for the other God's heaven.

I think this view may represent a Mormon background. Most if not all religions do present themselves as being more right than other religions, but Mormonism is on the far end of the spectrum for claiming to have, through its living Prophets, direct commandments from God about fine details. Mormonism harps constantly on this unusual feature of direct divine guidance, moreover; it's Mormonism's main distinction in the marketplace. And so, inevitably, Mormonism is also on the far end of the religious spectrum for saying that getting all the fine details right is important. When your product is a hammer, your sales staff all have to know that the world is all about nails.

Insisting that a particular prayer has to be repeated word-for-word exactly, for example, is really Mormon. Catholic teaching is apt to consider a ritual valid if the people involved sincerely intended to perform it correctly.

Most people, in my view, don't want any God if they can't have their specific God.

I'd bet that very few believers feel that way, actually. Even really wanting God to be as described by one's own particular religion doesn't usually mean wanting such a specific God, because most religions don't describe God very specifically.

It hardly makes sense that they would. Many of them emphasise that God is unknowable. Believers may seem to be more committed to fine details than they really are, though, for at least a few reasons.

One is that fundamentalist religions often make a point of teaching that all their details are really important. They're worried about their high-demand faithful drifting off to more liberal denominations that let them keep their hopes and encouragements while letting them sleep in on an occasional Sunday or accept blood transfusions. So these kinds of religions do hammer a lot on the tremendous importance of all their detailed doctrines. Some of them pretty much do say that the only alternative to their big package deal, of every jot and tittle of their teachings in an inseparable bundle, must be the bleakest possible atheism. This is first of all nonsense, however, and secondly really not typical of most large religions.

Another reason for the illusion of specificity is that people need placeholders. If you visit ancient ruins that have been excavated and partly restored, buildings are often shored up in places with big chunks of obviously modern concrete. The original pieces are lost, and we'll never know how they looked, but the building needs something in that bit of wall to hold up the original roof. In a similar way it is psychologically—maybe even neurologically—hard for humans to frame certain ideas without inserting some particular details just to complete the structure. Suppose you believe it's important that Jesus was a real human being. So you believe he had some particular beard style; even if you don't think his particular choice of trim was important, you believe it's important that he was human down to the point of making such choices. You could try to picture Jesus as this guy with a pixelated lower face, representing an unknown beard, but in a way that would be a bigger error than imagining one kind of beard and getting it wrong, because no real human being has ever had a pixelated beard, so although with the van Dyke you'd be getting his beard wrong, with the pixels you'd be getting his humanity wrong. It's arguably better to pick your favourite mental image of Jesus's beard and go with that, while remembering that it's just a placeholder that you made up.

Not every religion or every individual believer necessarily goes that route. Islam famously rejects all kind of specific images for God, and even for the face of Muhammad. A big part of the pre-medieval Christian controversy over icons was the tension between keeping the religion vivid and concrete versus confusing divine reality with details painted by humans. Some amount of placeholder insertion is inevitable, though, I would say.

Then a third reason why details may seem more important than they are is just that people get used to them. A small child may reject their beloved teddy bear when its missing eye is replaced with a slightly different button. A few devout believers of a particular kind might even agree that if they had to give up some familiar detail in their picture of God, then they'd just abandon belief in any kind of God at all. Over time, though, the child will probably get used to the new button, and recognize that the rest of the bear is the same old bear. And if there are any believers who are really atheists in the sense that they are only one fragile detail away from atheism, then I would say that some of these atheists really will be Jordan Peterson's kind of atheists, who really believe in God and just don't acknowledge it. They still love the old bear, and they'll get used to the button.

Having said all that, I think I probably do agree that quite a few seemingly enthusiastic religious believers probably are really atheists, in pretty much the sense that Gadianton seems to be raising. I disagree that most believers are like that, but I bet that some really are. The faith in which these supposed believers are so enthusiastic is really not belief in God, but rather the security of being right about everything important. Having to concede even one little detail shatters that security in being infallible. I think I would agree, here, with Gadianton, however, that that kind of belief was never really much of a belief in God in the first place. If you take the concept of God at all seriously, the idea that a human being is going to understand God all that clearly should just be absurd. We are not to God as characters in a novel are to the author; we are not even to God as semi-colons are to the author. We are to God as semi-colons are to God.

[Physics Guy]

You can reject ranked voting and maintain monotheistic purity that "God" is conceptually tied to your deity, but then there is no way to arbitrate between Warren Jeff's wager and Pascal's.

I take this to be repeating the common understanding that Pascal's wager was supposed to support belief in every detailed doctrine of Pascal's own faith. Even if that was exactly what Pascal himself meant by his jotted Pensée, the Wager raises the more serious point that belief can be considered a game move, for which payoffs have to be considered as well as odds. If Pascal meant something foolish beyond that, then, sheesh. Ignore the foolish part and deal with the serious point.

Maybe it's worth being pedantic on this, because perhaps there's a real risk of theological arguments getting crammed into the Procrustean bed of exhaustive propositions. I mean the kind of argument in which everyone agrees in advance that only a few well-defined issues are involved, and every position has to take a definite stance upon all of them. This is a convenient game rule to have, all right, when it is possible. It just normally isn't. That doesn't make logic useless, but it adds possibilities.

Not every meaningful proposition has to be exhaustive. It is perfectly possible to commit to one issue while being agnostic about others. Even in roulette, you don't have to bet on one number. You can bet on all black, or all red.

It makes perfect sense to believe in something firmly while being vague about its details. We do it all the time—literally all the time, because our brains process only a tiny fraction of the information that is in the world. You know the keys on your keyboard are there, but you probably have no idea of their chemical composition, or exactly how much dust and crud is under them. I think that any given extrasolar planet is extremely unlikely to host intelligent life, and yet I am sure that there are zillions of intelligent species in the universe somewhere. So my firm belief in alien intelligence is very vague about the important detail of where that intelligence is—I have a fudge factor of millions of light years.

In physics we have the concept of an ensemble (pronounced as in French, or as close as one can get). The ensemble concept doesn't get a lot of play in popular science literature, in kind of the way that war movies show you a lot of rifles but rarely show ration packs. In many places you can get an undergrad physics degree without ever hearing about an ensemble, but if you do a PhD you'll be talking about ensembles for the rest of your life. You cannot get away from them.

An ensemble is a set of possibilities, usually a very large set, like the set of all possible positions and velocities of all the air molecules in a container. The set has some constraints, like the limited volume of the container, or the total number of molecules, or their average energy. The possibilities in an ensemble may not all be equally probable; in fact the ensemble's constraints are often expressed in terms of the probability distribution, like by saying that the likelihood of any molecular velocity is a bell curve.

The temperature of the air, for example, is literally just the average energy of a molecule in the ensemble. We happen to express this particular kind of energy in special units like degrees Celsius, instead of Joules, for the same kind of sentimental reasons that make the British measure most liquid volumes in liters but beer is in pints. Anyway, the way we describe something like a container of air is with an ensemble. We do not even attempt to say where every molecule is or how fast it is moving. We just assign the container an ensemble, with some temperature and pressure and volume, but allowing any and all detailed ways of having those average or total quantities.

In reality only one possibility is actually true at any one instant, but it is completely impossible for us to find out exactly where every molecule is, and how fast it is going, and keep on updating that information continuously as the molecules zip around at the speed of sound. And even if we could actually pin down all that information, we wouldn't care enough to bother doing it. The ensemble is our way of asserting the few pieces of information that we know, and about which we care, while professing nothing but perfect agnosticism about all the other details. We tell you the temperature and the volume and the pressure, and we're serious about those. Concerning all the bazillions of other characteristics of this container of air, we profess only ignorance.

If I believe there is intelligent life in outer space, then I do have to believe that it is somewhere. I do not, however, have to commit to any specific belief about exactly where it is. I can believe that the air consists of gazillions of moving molecules, and also say that the air temperature in this room is 20°C, without thereby committing to any particular prediction of exactly where all those molecules are at any particular instant. I can believe in God, without having to stipulate that this is the God of Jansen or Jeff.

The fact that I am being vague about the details isn't any kind of cheating on my part. It doesn't make the assertions that I do make meaningless or invalid. It might be more impressive if I could also specify some more details, but on the other hand it might not make much difference. Perhaps the statement I've made is the main thing worth saying.

We all think like this all the time, every moment, and it's great that we do. Getting the important things right while ignoring insignificant details is how the little lumps of meat in our skulls get us along in the world. Even physics just rolls with it. So why should we discuss belief in God as if every such belief had to be a belief in some long list of detailed doctrines? Nobody thinks like that, really. Nor should we.