At Jamie you will have no argument from me on the existence of love. I am pleased that you have felt and observed it. Might you possibly understand that some of us have felt and observed the actions of God? Or are we to be condemned as hysterics?

Well I'm not a philosopher and I don't think I've ever stopped to consider the meaning of intangibles. I don't feel it's productive to do so.

That being said, I'll submit Draugnar's answer as my own, on very tentative grounds. It is competently formed, and offers some explanation for each of these concepts that don't require a deity but do improve our understanding of the world.

@ fulhamish: "Might you possibly understand that some of us have felt and observed the actions of God?"

No, I can't understand that, because as I've explained in some detail earlier in this thread, I don't understand what you mean by "God" in that sentence.

At yellow I was not aware that infanticide was an issue in the pro choice v. Pro life debate. Do you think that it is?

Oh WTF fulhamish I was really hoping that you had something better to offer than THAT as your point here.

Nobody gives a rat's ass what goes on in your own mind, any more than you give a rat's ass what goes on in the mind of a Jew or a Muslim. Hysterics, no. Irrelevant, yes.

If your claim is that there is a God who talks to you but doesn't talk to me, I really don't care enough to even argue the point.

If your claim is that there is a God who talks to you but doesn't talk to me but I need to obey his commands, then you'd better be able to justify your claim with a preponderance of evidence. Just because I can't KNOW he doesn't talk to you is not anywhere near enough.

Infanticide is not the issue we're discussing.

@ful I'm tabling that infanticide thing for now, it's not relevant to the greater discussion, lets stay focused.

At Jamie, sorry I came in late on the thread. Oak, however, content to let my post stand.

Infanticide was brought up as a direct response to the challenge of me naming a New Atheist position. I did so, it is as extreme a position as any of those religious fundamentalist. Thus as Hecks says the fault line lies not between the theist and the atheist, but between the Humanist/reasonable theist and the fundamentalist. Be the latter theist or atheist.

@YJ

When it comes to meanings of words, all you have to appeal to is how they are used. The rest is interesting trivia.

"leaving aside QM of course"

yeah guys we can stop here

@fulhamish fine, and now I'm saying that it's detracting from what we're talking about now, but perhaps worth revisiting later. I notice that when debating theists they love to "diversify" topics which makes it awful hard to pin them down on any one. With that in mind....

So are you then prepared to acknowledge that adding God to these testable mechanisms is a violation of Occam's Razor, that adding God adds no predictive value, and that the mechanisms themselves do not violate Occam's razor?

"the fault line lies not between the theist and the atheist, but between the Humanist/reasonable theist and the fundamentalist. Be the latter theist or atheist. "

Sounds a bit like the consewrvative/liberal fault lines. :-)

At Yellow we have had a reasonable discussion so I will ignore your last emotional response. I will only say to you for now that perhaps it is not so much a case of Man looking for God but rather God looking for Man. We all know M.L.K had a dream, just like the Prophets of old perhaps? Getting late in London now, but thank you all for the discussion.

Nothing at all emotional or unreasonable about it, sir, just an observation (though I admit it was a bit of an unnecessary dig).

You are, of course, welcome to leave the discussion without acknowledging that you've been hopelessly backed into a corner, and instead change the subject entirely as a parting statement. This is also an unnecessary dig, but I feel it's appropriate given your exit.

Thanks for playing.

Haha OK guys he is right about one thing though, it is time to go. I'll check back later and see how the talk has developed.

When you check back you will find yourself firmly in the corner of not being able to explain your humanism. That is the point of mentioning the Prophets, maybe you might reflect on that?

Unnecessary digs forgiven. Thanks again.

Dude... I have no idea what just happened, only that he claimed I agreed with him.

"I have no idea what just happened,"

that's typically the result of fulhamish inserting himself into a religious discussion here, no worries

For what it's worth, my atheism is functionally identical to Yj's atheism, and most people I know have a similar mindset towards the God hypothesis.

fulhamish I haven't a damn clue what you mean by how prophets relate to humanism, or how I've failed to explain it, or how a potential failure to explain it lends credibility to anything else you've asserted.

I'm not yet saying you're wrong on any counts, but not only have you so far failed to back up your claims, I feel I can say with confidence that nobody here is exactly sure what your claims are.

Prophets and intangibles and love and God, the dots are there, but you haven't connected them in any meaningful way.

Humanism, i guess i'd identify as such. But i don't know where i'd start in defining it.

By what humanists do? Well rituals, like weddings and funerals, these are things all people do and humanist ceremonies can be similar to the traditions from which they've grown but without the religious associations. I've been to a Humanist wedding which was very much more personal - in Ireland a catholic church wedding is pretty standard, and people who don't attend mass every week (lapsed catholics, maybe 70% of the population at a guess, maybe agnostics/atheists, but often recognised in census figures as catholics) these affairs are usually done to appease more religious family members, older parts of the clan who nobody wants to upset; meanwhile the humanist wedding i've seen was about celebrating a personal relationship between two people, their love for each other. There were readigs from various favourite poets, (mostly talking about love, i guess) vows which held personal meaning for the couple, and traditional celtic(irish)/japanese dress&music.

If that annecdote is a good reflection of what it means to be a humanist, to do humanist things, then this is as good as a definition.

"Adding God to these testable mechanisms is a violation of Occam's Razor, that adding God adds no predictive value, and that the mechanisms themselves do not violate Occam's razor?"

See this is what I mean.

THis is what atheists say. Agnostics don't say this kind of thing.

We just say "tell me more about your belief in God," that or we just say "that's nice."

Many agnostics not only don't know, but don't care. Atheists *definitely* care.

You can cite the dictionary at me again, but I feel I don't need to prove to you that the meanings of words change.

If you want to see whether I'm right you should go outside and interview people what these terms mean, especially people who identify with the words themselves.

(Christians in particular seem to think agnostic means the same thing as atheist, but this is out of ignorance - they are all "lost" after all).

But anyway, basically this is the fundamental difference between my agnosticism and mainstream atheism:

Atheism is based on a positivist materialist view of the world, my agnosticism is based on a case-by-case skepticism of anything and everything.

I have a practical set of beliefs that I use to help me get through each day, beliefs about the sunrise, eating food to live, how to behave with other people, but these are based on an expounded intuition and have nothing to do with what I believe is *actually* true. I believe them for the sake of having something to believe.

But when we are talking about metaphysics, my answer is a giant question mark.

Can you respond to the fact that there is both a material and ideological difference between an agnostic whose main emphasis is uncertainty about God's existence and an atheist who, though he may also believe it is not known, at best de-emphasizes this belief, and at worst claims to know something about God, e.g. his existence is unlikely (insert vacuous argument about Occam's Razor).

An agnostic will tend to be exponentially more permissive in his metaphysical beliefs than an atheist.

I am for instance willing to entertain the possibility of ghosts, spirits, demons, afterlife, and so on. An atheist will dismiss this as unproven superstition. Sure it is unproven, but nothing can be proved in the first place.

I'm just sort of baffled how you can equate two groups that have such a fundamentally different approach.

**insert vacuous argument about Occam's Razor**

There is nothing vacuous, that is about other beliefs and how to structure /model a logical system.

We don't need anything which add no information/predictive power to our theory.

So we don't propose to talk about elves/pixies when discussing gravity.

We don't propose to talk about God when discussing evolution.

And we don't waste time on meta-physics when discussing the natural world.

It doesn't require one to be an Atheist to take and use Occam's Razor; there are many theistic scientists who apply it very successfully.

Ora, I understand your position perfectly, believe me.

I just don't think anything is certain and don't think logical argumentation necessarily reveals truth.

Hence, I'm agnostic.

You're right, I don't waste my time on metaphysics usually. But when people are asking me what I believe about metaphysics, the only honest answer I can give is "I don't know one way or another."

I'm not saying Occam's Razor is bunk, I'm saying arguments for and against God's existence are futile and lead to nothing.

God is DEFINED as a supernatural metaphysical being (at least usually). For this reason nothing meaningful can be said about whether such a being is real. The concept is by definition inapprehensible.

There is a difference between living your life in the natural world and believing earnestly that the natural world is A) as it seems and B) all there is.

A huge difference. Atheists like yourself tend to believe A or B or both. Agnostics probably believe neither.

Often agnosticism is represented as being too soft on theism, taking it too seriously.

I disagree, I think agnosticism is being consistent about skeptical inquiry. Agnosticism is more skeptical than atheism.

I'm an atheist? Did i not put forward a purely pantheist position earlier? I even went so far as to deny that we, as humans, can know - i may have a belief system, but i still hold onto an agnostic's skepticism.

Not that this undermines your point, just that my personal position is different. (i'm now unsure what we're argueing about, so i'll stop)

"God is DEFINED as a supernatural metaphysical being (at least usually). For this reason nothing meaningful can be said about whether such a being is real. The concept is by definition inapprehensible. "

But that is the point of OR. God cannot be seen nor felt by measurable instruments so unless we see something not attributable to natural causes, we should not look to the supernatural to explain it.

Now, realize, I am a theist, even a monotheist believing that the God of the OT is the God of the NT but that our lack of comprehension means we can't fully understand what caused the personality shift from angry vengeful turning sities to stone and drowning soldiers in seas to a truly loving and caring God, nor can we be certain that our own predispositions haven't affected our perceptions (like Anthropomorphism for God - Theimorphism/Deimorphism?) and this isn't reflected int he writings (I happen to really think the "ant famr to pet/child analogy works well for comparing the OT and NT God). So I'm not some atheist or even agnostic writing off God in Science as OR, but a believer saying that Science is about the how and Religion is about the Why (the search for fact versus the search for truth) and that OR applies to Science and therefore God should be left out of the How until we can't explain the How, then we look for the next God Particle to explain the How.

Wait, what is OR?

To give you an incredibly over-simplified version of why I am agnostic:

"Things happen. No one knows why. Everyone has their guesses. Some people have impressively complex and self-consistent explanations. But no one really knows what's true or real. So everyone's guess as good as anyone else's. If someone says spirits live in the trees, how can I say they are wrong?"

-Agnostic.

O ccam's R azor.