The bad thing about these really interesting debates is that you need to invest so much time in them...
Renegade: As you answer each of my sentences with ten new ones, and because I feel sorry for Swamper's harddisk, I am starting to be more selective in what I reply to. If I feel something has been covered previously, or if we seem to agree on something, I've left it out. If you feel that I skip something very important, please point it out to me, and I'll comment on it. OK.
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Originally posted by Renegade Hope this makes some sort of sense?

It does. I have no quarrels with that - I'm not advocating a specific interpretation of "disbelief", just explaining my previous comment.

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Originally posted by Renegade It's not an issue of temporality though. I'm not saying that before becoming an agnostic you have to adopt a solely atheistic position for x amount of time before being permitted to progress towards agnosticism, I'm simply saying that - logically - agnosticism is dependant on the rejection of belief in God.

Agree.

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Originally posted by Renegade Think about it: you say that you moved towards agnosticism from a theistic position. Logically, it is impossible to be a theist / deist and an agnostic simultaneously - the former holds a belief in God, the latter doesn't (how can one simultaneously hold and suspend belief?). Ergo agnostics can't be theists, so the position of agnosticism must, at all times, be preceded by a lack of deistic and theistic beliefs which - put simply - represents a position of atheism. Now your adoption of the agnostic mindset may have been instantaneous upon the rejection of your theistic beliefs, but the fact remains: your agnosticism was dependant on the rejection of said theistic beliefs which, if you accept the definitions I've used (which you aren't obliged to, by the way), is a position of weak atheism. So, in other words, based on what you've told me, your journey towards agnosticism was - logically, if not temporally - preceded by the acceptance of a weak atheistic mindset.

(Seeing that we're really at the bottom of the argument, I'll allow myself to go into minor details here.) I just agreed that agnosticism is dependant on the rejection of belief in God, but now you're talking about rejection of God preceeding agnosticism. You state that "precede" should not be interpreted in a temporal fashion, so I ask you: What's your distinction between logical dependence and logical precedence? And now that we're at it: How does the two relate to logical implication?
Say, if we have two statements
A: "X used to post on TA but doesn't no more", and
B: "X has been banned from TA"
it's clear (to me) that B implies A, and I would further say that B is dependant on A being true to be true itself, whereas I wouldn't say that A precedes B (as, clearly, B temporally precedes A). Would you allow for the "logical precedence" to conflict with "temporal precedence"? I don't want this to be a red herring, but I really cannot understand your use of "precede" here. It seems to me that you establish the "precede" from logical implication/dependence, and then use the "temporal" semantics of precedence for condemning agnosticism as an ill-supported shift (shift by definition being a temporal concept).

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Originally posted by Renegade This is one of the points I'm trying to make though. Weak atheism is the default belief system. It's the complete absence of belief with regard to God and theology, so if it isn't the default position than what is?

Well, to use your formal statements from your reply to Subey:
X="I believe there is a God"
Y="I believe there is no God"
Weak atheism: ~(X)
Agnosticism: ~(X) U ~(Y)
Clearly the "natural belief" cannot be weak atheism, but simply
Meta-agnosticism:
That is, the totally empty belief. If you allow for weak atheism to be somehow unresolved on proposition Y, then you must also allow for a belief system with no belief on X as well.

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Originally posted by Renegade Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you want to claim that there is an omnipotent God that exerts constant influence on the world, that loves each and every one of us and sent his own son down to die for our transgressions, then you're going to require a greater standard of evidence than the testimony of some young girls in the 19th century who say they saw the silluette of the virgin Mary in the kitchen once before you can say that such beliefs are "rational".

But how do you determine what an "extraordinary" claim is? And would the claim of the deist be extraordinary? The claim that esp is real?

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Originally posted by Renegade Again, while the definition is somewhat arbitrary, if we can identify a point at which beliefs cease being rational, then basing an entire world view on the scattered, inconsistent testimonies of people throughout the ages - not one of which can be independantly verified - surely must qualify.

Remember the thread about the woman who was led to the killer of her son in a trailer park by "God"? That example requires a little more than hand waiving to get rid of. I'm not saying that it proves that the biblical God exists, but only that some reports on supernatural events are at least as hard to contest as those related to global warming/Bush administration lies.

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Originally posted by Renegade The position of "postponing judgment on the ontological status of that for which no evidence exists" is consistent with "standard logical inference rules", again, if there is a justifiable reason (i.e. evidence) to postpone said judgement. That is, there is nothing inherently illogical or irrational about agnosticism in itself, but it does become irrational or illogical if the shift from atheist to agnosticism cannot be justified. So, to talk in particulars here, what specific reasons can you offer to justify making this shift in belief systems?

Well, apart from me not agreeing that a "shift" is actually taking place, I would say the the story from before is a good reason. Personal experiences might be good reasons as well (e.g. I've experienced weird events myself that I cannot explain convincingly to myself using current theories of physics, unless I allow for my mental soundness to be brought into doubt).

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Originally posted by Renegade Oh absolutely, of course it can. Like I said, strong atheism - in its most literal interpretation - is a leap of faith as strong as that of any theistic belief. While I hesitate to call myself a strong atheist on logical grounds (in the sense that it is impossible to prove positively that God does not exist) in practise I do hold to a fairly strong atheistic position. That is, I feel fairly certain that there is no God.

Nice. So how certain are you that there's no God - as certain as you are that Greenland exists? As that atoms are real? I'm curious to know how you distinguish "believing" from "feeling fairly certain"?

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Originally posted by Renegade The difference between me, however, and a lot of other theists I've met, is that my positive claims concerning the non-existence of God can - I feel - be justified logically and empircally, whereas theirs cannot. I know it sounds arrogant, but I'm still waiting for someone to come along to knock me off my perch...

Can you give a taster of how your positive belief claims can be justified logically and emperically?

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Originally posted by Renegade If you go back through my posting history on these forums, for instance, I think you'll find that my political outlook has changed a fair bit over the past couple of years (although my distaste for the GOP and conservatives still remains ).

There's an old quote, I don't know who made it (it may even be a dane), that "if you're not a socialist when you're young, then you have no heart. If, however, you remain one in adulthood, then you have no brain." So apparently you have both heart and brains. I have none of them.

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Originally posted by Renegade However, if we were to run with your reasoning here, then surely it would make just as much sense to presume that unicorns, goblins, quorgnaxes (which I just made up) or any other type of beings exist as a default position - but where would this leave us? Would you say that believing in quorgnaxes before you even can even possibly know what they are constitutes a "rational" perspective?

No. Point taken. However, assuming that they exists, there's no reason why God couldn't be one of Jung's archetypes, and hence that there's no need to get to know him. A belief/disbelief in God would therefore not be "irrational" at that point.
As to unicorns and goblins (can't tell if this applies for quorgnaxes as well ) they have the distinct trait that they live on planet Earth, and when we call them a fantasy, what we mean is that we believe that they don't exist on this planet. As regards to their existence somewhere else in the universe, I wouldn't classify it as irrational to postpone judgement on that.

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Originally posted by Renegade It's all semantics I guess, but when I said incomprehensible I meant it, to quote dictionary.com yet again, to refer to something that is "impossible to know or fathom". So my question is, to put it another way, what is the difference between a God that cannot be "empirically" understood ("undectable") and a God that cannot be "rationally" understood ("incomprehensible"). Then, pragmatically, what is the difference between these two gods and no god at all?

The incomprehensible God can be undetectable. The undetectable needs to be incomprehensible. Take the God's of greece for example. They were both detectable and comprehensible, as they intermingled with the population and were driven by very human desires. Take as another example one of Lovecraft's cosmic characters, like the "sleeping" god Cthulhu. He(?) has a small influence on human ways, through controlled nightmares, but is motivated(?) and ruled(?) by forces that cannot be understood nor detected by any human being. Thus he(?) is detectable but not comprehensible (i.e. incomprehensible). May be bad examples, but I hope they convey my distinction between incomprehensible and undetectable.

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Originally posted by Renegade But how does that alter the circumstances of our current paradigm? Quite literally anything "may" exist or be shown to exist in the future, so what do we gain by making baseless speculations that are inconsistent with what we currently understand about the universe? ... That's an interesting analogy, but again it doesn't help us in our current situation. We may be the product of forces we can never understand, but if we cannot possibly understand them, in what sense does speculating on their existence assist us? Is there "rational" cause to speculate on their existence, or on the existence of any other sort of forces inaccessible to us?

And here I, once again, come to doubt your definition of "rational" as being of pragmatic or ethic nature. As stated in my second post, I agree that there's no obvious gain from postponing belief on things for which no evidence exists (and I act as if they do not exist myself), but that is not really an epistemological argument.

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Originally posted by Renegade Let me put it another way: do you consider yourself an agnostic (or, at least, view agnosticism as a tenable position) solely due to the fact that our senses are fallible and that some events must therefore exist beyond their scope, or are there other reasons for your leaning towards this view?

I consider agnosticism a tenable position, mainly, because I'm not a materialist. I do not equate matter (meaning what can be describe by current physical theory) with existing. That our senses fail us once in a while doesn't have anything to do with it.

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Originally posted by Renegade Agreed. But the dragon in my garage - as I've defined him - is not inconsistent with available evidence either. Does that mean - even though I made him up just then - it is possible for him to exist?

Yes, it's possible. It would be one hell of a coincidence, but...

Last edited by trancaholic on Apr-22-2005 at 00:20