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"Agnostic"

I really wish I had some idea of what you said. Oh, and I'm still waiting for any "bits" of evidence. Any at all will do.
I wish you had some idea too. But that's okay; obviously absolutist statements like "no evidence" are factually incorrect, but it doesn't really matter one way or the other.
 
Excellent post!

Yes, the agnostics who insist on carrying water for the theists and religionists do indeed often repeat their strawman claims, to include the outright lie that atheists reject evidence “out of hand”. They use it as an excuse to avoid actually having to present what they consider to be evidence.
 
I wish you had some idea too. But that's okay; obviously absolutist statements like "no evidence" are factually incorrect, but it doesn't really matter one way or the other.

Then add an adjective to the term evidence, such as “reliable” or “valid” or “testable” instead of following up with yet another in a string of accusatory strawmen statements.
 
Yes, the agnostics who insist on carrying water for the theists and religionists do indeed often repeat their strawman claims, to include the outright lie that atheists reject evidence “out of hand”. They use it as an excuse to avoid actually having to present what they consider to be evidence.
Seriously, why do you care?
 
Seriously, review the title of this forum before asking dumb questions.
Curious, do you think it's possible for agnostics to be angry like atheists, or can they only be intellectually lazy and cowardly?
 
I wish you had some idea too. But that's okay; obviously absolutist statements like "no evidence" are factually incorrect, but it doesn't really matter one way or the other.
Lovely dodge. Clearly you have nothing and yet alluded to a couple of bits of evidence.
Is this the best you can do?
The famous 'first rule of holes' would suggest that when you find yourself in one, you may want to stop digging.
 
Then add an adjective to the term evidence, such as “reliable” or “valid” or “testable” instead of following up with yet another in a string of accusatory strawmen statements.
The post I was responding to claimed that Shrink is "still waiting for any "bits" of evidence. Any at all will do"; trying to translate that into "reliable evidence" or the like would literally be misrepresenting his position. I suppose we could say that rather than strawmanning it would be steelmanning his position, in other contexts, but in this context we were specifically discussing the scenario where there's two bits of evidence for and a thousand bits against or "near-certainty that Yahweh does not exist, and yet still... some little bits of evidence."

When atheists make emphatic, absolutist statements that there are not even fractions of a percent worth of evidence for a deity, it's really not agnostics' job to generously reinterpret their claims into something more rational or defensible 🤭
 
Sit in a chair and then TRY to stand up. That to me is the position agnostics choose to call their own. You can't try to get up, you either do or don't, period, there is no trying. You either believe in gods or you don't, there's no trying.
I guess I have a different definition of agnostic.

I’ve always seen it as “not sure” in regards to the purely mechanistic vs metaphysical dichotomy.

I consider myself Agnostic by that definition. And it’s because a great number of things I’ve experienced, sober, with witnesses cannot be explained by a mechanistic universe unless there is a mechanism we haven’t discovered yet.

I strongly suspect what is really going on is far more interesting than any religion and most other visions of metaphysical explanations.

Amusingly, the “simulation” theory fits my rough sketch surprisingly well.

I don’t believe in Jahweh. Cannot resolve the wondrous place I exist in with the petty vindictive needs a-hole that is Jahweh. A huge number worship him and none of them would invite him to their house again if he was a human

But Jesus seems like one of those folks that have shown up all over the world in all kinds of cultures that had no contact with each other that taught the Golden Rule in a way that would resonate with that culture at that time.

Too many have had the “You saw that, right?” Experience for a purely mechanistic univers can account for.

Of course “ The observer influences the event observed through the act of observation.” is a thing in the physics of the very very small. So that might explain some of it if it is truly mechanistic.
 
where there's two bits of evidence for and a thousand bits against or "near-certainty that Yahweh does not exist, and yet still... some little bits of evidence."

What he is saying is to show us these two bits of evidence instead of just claiming them. Everything you are saying comes under the heading of “pure conjecture” because you have no idea whether there is any evidence at all for Yahweh. When you have some, get back to us and we will follow up.


When atheists make emphatic, absolutist statements that there are not even fractions of a percent worth of evidence for a deity, it's really not agnostics' job to generously reinterpret their claims into something more rational or defensible

Yer another strawman. It is evidently all that you have. What the atheist is actually saying is that he or she has not been presented with any actuality-based evidence for a God or gods, so there is not reason to accept the actuality of one. And no, that is not an agnostic position, that is clearly saying “no God” unless such evidence can be produced. Do you have any? Does anyone? Point it out. As I said before, how many millennia should we wait until such evidence is produced? Sit on the fence if it pleases you, but we see no need for all this hemming and hawing. No evidence, no God. It’s just that simple. And again, you are just purely conjecturing about this “fraction of a percent”. It means absolutely nothing until you can actually produce it.
 
And it’s because a great number of things I’ve experienced, sober, with witnesses cannot be explained by a mechanistic universe unless there is a mechanism we haven’t discovered yet.

Give some examples.
 
Give some examples.
Reality has a very sarcastic way of ****ing with me. It’s these things that I have the most witnesses to. Bad things tend to happen to me at the very worst time in the most unlikely and obnoxiously personalized ways. Let me think of a couple.

But a more positive example, that did involve drugs, was during a DMT “ritual”. Nothing formal, but a person we had all become good friends with, who had become part of our “family” had to leave to go home to take care of his parents. So we got together to do DMT at my friend’s property near Joshua tree.

I don’t know if you know anything about DMT but the experience is dramatic but very short lived. 10-15 minutes from start to finish. We did it on the sandy bank of a wash with the Milky Way in the center of our view. We took the DMT. and had our experiences. And at the end just as the first sounds of return/re-engage the biggest shooting star I’ve ever seen went from left to right framed in our view like a professional photographer would have.

None of my incidents except the one in my childhood were particularly dramatic. But have you ever had a moment where something happened that was so implausible that everybody involved had to check if anybody else just saw it? Have something get lost and then turn up somewhere it couldn’t possibly have gotten to? Life is full of little oddities like that. We don’t think much about them most of the time. But they all run counter to a purely mechanistic universe. Because there is a point where random chance stops being able to adequately account for all the details.

There is a tale from my childhood that I remember vividly that sounds preposterous but I swear it’s all true. But it’s too long for this already too long post.
 
What he is saying is to show us these two bits of evidence instead of just claiming them.
Edit: This shouldn't really have needed clarification, but 'two bits of evidence for vs. a hundred or a thousand bits of evidence against' was not a precise count. There are more compelling 'bits' of evidence than either #2 or especially #1 below.

I did in post #44: 1) alleged eyewitness report of miracles by John weakly corroborated by 2nd- and 3rd-hand accounts in other gospels, which I'd evaluate at a fraction of a percent confidence or 'probability' of being true, and 2) the formal sworn testimony of four named medical workers that Miguel Juan Pellicer's leg was in fact amputated two years before he became widely known as a two-legged recipient of a miracle from the Catholic shrine in Zaragosa.

There is "no evidence" that the formal sworn testimony of those four medical workers was false or fraudulent, and there is no credible dispute that Pellicer had two legs later on his life. I wonder,
How likely do you think the speculative, explain-away-the-evidence conspiracy theory for this 'miracle of Calanda' is?
 
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Maybe is enough. Many 'I don't know's' I have ever encountered in conversation with anyone, and I hear them every single day, have several 'maybes' described in some sentences directly thereafter.

"Do you think the boss is coming in today?" " I don't know. He worked on Saturday, so its overtime. Maybe he can't stall off those interviews he scheduled"

Do you believe God Exists? I don't know, I haven't seen any convincing evidence, I know I don't believe in the Christian Bible, and I have not heard much about the others that seem convincing, but I also haven't taken a comparative religion class or talked to anyone who was an expert in Eastern faiths. Maybe I haven't done enough exploration to know "

'I don't know' works just fine to express the exact same concept in both cases.
So your argument is that while having absolutely not one good reason to believe in a god yet you still wonder if one does exist. And apparently the same state of existence applies to your boss as well.
I also do not have a duty to seek out more information for theists or or a duty to analyze shit for atheists. I get to stick with 'I don't know if God exists, but I don't believe in any Gods existing either" and then I can be bored with the topic, or too disinterested to pursue further discussion, or too busy to pursue it for as long as I choose.
I believe the debate here is not what you can do for others but how do you yourself hold to a state of wondering about the existence of something you have not one good reason to think does exist.
This is not something that is even up for debate. It's my choice to remain an agnostic atheist who admits upfront that I do not know squat, and declares I do not believe in squat.
No one is questioning your right to have a choice. Only why you made that choice.
So you are in agreement that agnostics are just people who are being willfully ignorant and then calling that a virtue.
 
So your argument is that while having absolutely not one good reason to believe in a god yet you still wonder if one does exist. And apparently the same state of existence applies to your boss as well.

I believe the debate here is not what you can do for others but how do you yourself hold to a state of wondering about the existence of something you have not one good reason to think does exist.
The trouble is that we have about the same, or in your terminology "not one good reason" to imagine that the alternative scenario is true either. If G and not-G are equivalent scenarios with little or no reason to believe or disbelieve either of them, then they are about equally plausible and we should have about 50% confidence that G is the case, and about 50% confidence that not-G is the case.

The complication arises in determining equivalence between those variables: The more specific G becomes, the less it is equivalent to not-G and therefore the less plausible it must be, all else being equal. For example, "Brad Pitt ate a meal today" (a) is more probably true than "Brad Pitt ate spaghetti today" (b) which in turn is more probably true than "Brad Pitt ate spaghetti at Richard Norton's house today" (c). C is a subset of B (alongside spaghetti with David Fincher, spaghetti with Morgan Freeman etc.), and B in turn is a subset of A (alongside a meal of pizza etc. etc.), so the share of probability or conceptual space that C occupies must necessarily be no larger than and all else being equal will usually be much smaller than that which A occupies.

It's only when pared down to a single and apparently fundamental or irreducible attribute - consciousness, the single most certain thing we can know and also one of the great enduring mysteries of science - that we'll be left with a genuine equivalence between G and not-G: Either reality is fundamentally conscious or it is not, and we genuinely have no conclusive way of differentiating between those two possibilities. The former (that reality is fundamentally conscious) has the edge and indeed by many atheists' reasoning, not my own, it should be treated as the 'default' presumption with the alternative laughed out of consideration, since lacking the ability to detect the presence or absence of consciousness we have "no evidence" that non-conscious stuff even exists at all! Indeed there are other, more reasonable psychological and developmental explanations for why we invented this notion of 'non-conscious' stuff, and introducing the notion of non-conscious stuff adds more questions than it answers, reducing parsimony and 'violating' Occam's Razor... so it's actually a pretty substantial edge that the 'reality is fundamentally conscious' view ends up having.

Regardless of whether it's ~60:40 (my ballpark) that reality is fundamentally conscious or ~100:0 (atheist reasoning, if they applied it consistently without special pleading) that reality is fundamentally conscious, we'd also have to note that "reality is fundamentally conscious" isn't strictly synonymous with theism. Some ways of thinking about panpsychism might be non-theistic alternatives to pantheism or panentheism, for example. But it's a pretty solid starting point for an agnostic ~20-80% range of confidence or speculation that the nature of our reality may indeed be some kind of god.
 
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Or a rational person might ask for any person who possesses such evidence to show it, and to this point, there is none, so a rational person might make a rational decision that there is no God or gods. On the other hand, a superstitious person might accept “evidence” that has no way of actually being verified other than “faith and belief”.




This is the outright lie that we get all the time from the agnostics who insist on carrying water for the theists and religionists who also make this strawman accusation on a regular basis. Show some evidence and we would always be willing to acknowledge and consider it. Do you have any?

So your argument is that while having absolutely not one good reason to believe in a god yet you still wonder if one does exist. And apparently the same state of existence applies to your boss as well.

I believe the debate here is not what you can do for others but how do you yourself hold to a state of wondering about the existence of something you have not one good reason to think does exist.

No one is questioning your right to have a choice. Only why you made that choice.
So you are in agreement that agnostics are just people who are being willfully ignorant and then calling that a virtue.
You are doing it again. This is stupid. Now if you decide you would rather not spend your time learning the intricacies of law and biology, and physics and theology and astronomy, and mathematics and philosophy and geology and theater arts, and music and linguistics and anthropology because you would also like time to spend with your family and coaching your son's softball team, would you characterize yourself as a person who is being' willfully ignorant' and calling it virtuous, or would you characterize it as just prioritizing your time consistent with what you want to do and what you should do with that time? . We are all willfully ignorant about almost everything on that list, because there really is only soo much time we can devote to study and learning and the subjects and most of us try to be virtuous

. You know that mischaracterization was a silly ploy to goad. it was a jerk move.

Agnostics and atheists and theists all have the same right not to 'study' a lot about those topics. Some want to go down that rabbit hole and investigate and read, and take classes and keep digging and digging, and others would rather take up painting, or join a tennis club, or sing in a choir. Part of life is deciding what we want to do in our leisure time. I do not intend to spend the time it would require to study theology and comparative religion and religious philosophy to preclude all arguments and all possible Gods and all evidence pertaining to the topics. I will instead say 'I don't know' and 'I don't believe'.
 
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The trouble is that we have about the same, or in your terminology "not one good reason" to imagine that the alternative scenario is true either. If G and not-G are equivalent scenarios with little or no reason to believe or disbelieve either of them, then they are about equally plausible and we should have about 50% confidence that G is the case, and about 50% confidence that not-G is the case.

The complication arises in determining equivalence between those variables: The more specific G becomes, the less it is equivalent to not-G and therefore the less plausible it must be, all else being equal. For example, "Brad Pitt ate a meal today" (a) is more probably true than "Brad Pitt ate spaghetti today" (b) which in turn is more probably true than "Brad Pitt ate spaghetti at Richard Norton's house today" (c). C is a subset of B (alongside spaghetti with David Fincher, spaghetti with Morgan Freeman etc.), and B in turn is a subset of A (alongside a meal of pizza etc. etc.), so the share of probability or conceptual space that C occupies must necessarily be no larger than and all else being equal will usually be much smaller than that which A occupies.

It's only when pared down to a single and apparently fundamental or irreducible attribute - consciousness, the single most certain thing we can know and also one of the great enduring mysteries of science - that we'll be left with a genuine equivalence between G and not-G: Either reality is fundamentally conscious or it is not, and we genuinely have no conclusive way of differentiating between those two possibilities. The former (that reality is fundamentally conscious) has the edge and indeed by many atheists' reasoning, not my own, it should be treated as the 'default' presumption with the alternative laughed out of consideration, since lacking the ability to detect the presence or absence of consciousness we have "no evidence" that non-conscious stuff even exists at all! Indeed there are other, more reasonable psychological and developmental explanations for why we invented this notion of 'non-conscious' stuff, and introducing the notion of non-conscious stuff adds more questions than it answers, reducing parsimony and 'violating' Occam's Razor... so it's actually a pretty substantial edge that the 'reality is fundamentally conscious' view ends up having.

Regardless of whether it's ~60:40 (my ballpark) that reality is fundamentally conscious or ~100:0 (atheist reasoning, if they applied it consistently without special pleading) that reality is fundamentally conscious, we'd also have to note that "reality is fundamentally conscious" isn't strictly synonymous with theism. Some ways of thinking about panpsychism might be non-theistic alternatives to pantheism or panentheism, for example. But it's a pretty solid starting point for an agnostic ~20-80% range of confidence or speculation that the nature of our reality may indeed be some kind of god.
You lost me with this paragraph. Why are you paring it down to 'consciousness' and are you referring to ours, or a hypothetical diety's? I was following a path into the middle of your forest, and it just disappeared. LOL, I know I can always go backwards and earn my philosophy degree before I come back, but marching forwards is a real problem!
 
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Well, if we're looking for dispositive proof of the existence or lack of existence of god(s), then there is none to be found, however, we don't live in a universe where patently absurd propositions are accorded possible viability until they are disproven (viz. Are there teams of invisible unicorns pulling chariots around the moons of Jupiter; perhaps Santa Claus travels from Alpha Centuri to earth a few times a year, etc.). No, we routinely dismiss such absurdities because they lack the slightest shred of evidence and are, thus, understandably regarded as absurd.

Your OP seems to assume that your worldview has already established what the criterion of valid evidence(s) are, which if I'm arguing from the theist perspective I wouldn't concede to you that you've established this.

You'll first have to define what valid evidence looks like and then demonstrate that the paradigms of your own worldview adhere to that standard without being self contradictory.
 
Your OP seems to assume that your worldview has already established what the criterion of valid evidence(s) are, which if I'm arguing from the theist perspective I wouldn't concede to you that you've established this.

You'll first have to define what valid evidence looks like and then demonstrate that the paradigms of your own worldview adhere to that standard without being self contradictory.
If it were me, I'd start my OP with 'I don't know' and that can start a more of a conversation with either you or him, than a debate. Mind, 'I don't know' can just as effectively end a conversation as it starts one too. It's a very user-friendly stance. There are people on either side of the theist/ atheist debate , who are real uncomfortable with any position that denies a firm stance is ever required in the first place. It's just so hard to create an adversarial dynamic in an environment where someone announces that he does not know and doubts anyone else really does either.

That may be why I come across one of these kinds of threads every month or so. There is a subset of atheists and theists who go out of their way, and put a lot of time and effort into bashing 'I don't know'
 
If it were me, I'd start my OP with 'I don't know' and that can start a more of a conversation with either you or him, than a debate. Mind, 'I don't know' can just as effectively end a conversation as it starts one too. It's a very user-friendly stance. There are people on either side of the theist/ atheist debate , who are real uncomfortable with any position that denies a firm stance is ever required in the first place.

It has less to do with comfort and more to do with the the fact that denying the possibility of knowledge is problematic and comes with its own pile of contradictions. That isn't to say that 'I don't know' is a position you can't take, rather it's a position which I don't think is very defensible.

That may be why I come across one of these kinds of threads every month or so. There is a subset of atheists and theists who go out of their way, and put a lot of time and effort into bashing 'I don't know'

Yeah I don't agree with 'bashing', but if they put forth a convincing and sound argument I'd say that's fair game.
 
It has less to do with comfort and more to do with the the fact that denying the possibility of knowledge is problematic and comes with its own pile of contradictions. That isn't to say that 'I don't know' is a position you can't take, rather it's a position which I don't think is very defensible.



Yeah I don't agree with 'bashing', but if they put forth a convincing and sound argument I'd say that's fair game.
Of course its defensible. I am defending it just fine. I am not that 'strong' an agnostic. I don't deny the possibility of knowledge of God. I deny that I have it or sufficient evidence to warrant the investment of a lot more time or study searching for it. It is definitely possible that God directly provided you with the knowledge, and God did not provide it to me or that I don't understand or see the evidence. It is possible that God may provide either to me next month. His advocates, and they are a very diverse often are a very passionate and determined sort, will probably not be afforded a lot of my time.
 
Of course its defensible. I am defending it just fine. I am not that 'strong' an agnostic. I don't deny the possibility of knowledge of God. I deny that I have it or sufficient evidence to warrant the investment of a lot more time or study searching for it.

Ah, I wasn't referring to the knowledge of God, rather the knowledge of anything. Knowledge that A=A, knowledge that words have meaning, knowledge that you exist or reality is meaningful, etc. - knowledge of universal categories.

And I would hold that most of the confusion/bad argumentation between theists and atheists comes from a misalignment of what constitutes 'evidence' and how that evidence is deduced.
 
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Ah, I wasn't referring to the knowledge of God, rather the knowledge of anything. Knowledge that A=A, knowledge that words have meaning, knowledge that you exist or reality in meaningful, etc. - knowledge of universal categories.

And I would hold that most of the confusion/bad argumentation between theists and atheists comes from a misalignment of what constitutes 'evidence' and how that evidence is deduced.
Most of the confusion/ bad argumentation, comes from a rush to argue. It is a process driven by adrenalin and because we like the rush it gives, so we rush!. Defining terms like 'evidence' is a slow very tedious job. It kills the momentum and the good time finding out who 'wins'.
 
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