Interesting Conversation

With respect to that Idiot Davis (see post below) I came upon this conversation in the comment section of Zorn's blog. Very interesting.

Observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades

I'd like to thank you for reporting on this. Davis' comments are exceedingly ignorant, intolerant, and abominable!

When will people realize that atheism is not a belief? It is the exact opposite of a belief! We all have the right not to have other people's beliefs imposed upon us. God is a belief. Prayer is a belief. Atheism is not.

ZORN REPLY -- I would differ a little bit about that...I would say that it's a belief that there is no supernatural intelligence that created and/or guides the world. It's not logically disprovable in that "God" is often simply the posited bottom of the bottomless riddle of existence. I don't see any point in quibbling about it beyond that, as, by its very nature, God is an untestable scientific hypothesis -- see Rusell's Teapot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

Eric -- I know you don't want to quibble too much about this point, but I think there is something to the comment that "atheism" is not a "belief." This is important, because many imagine that atheism is just another faith -- no more or less rational or reasonable than any other. Atheists of course disagree with that notion. The reason they disagree is because, contrary to popular misconception, they don't actually pretend to know -- that is, have faith -- that there is no God. They don't assert the lack of God as a certainty in the way that believers assert God's existence as a certainty. Atheists freely acknowledge that they can't disprove God's existence. They may speculate that God's existence is unlikely, and some, such as Richard Dawkins, make philosophical arguments for why it seems to him particularly unlikely, but they don't claim certain knowledge, as do all ardent believers. They're pretty clear about that.

So, many then ask, what differentiates atheists from agnostics? The main thing is that atheists are much less accepting of faith than agnostics. They don't look at God as a 50/50 proposition. They compare belief in God to belief in celestial teapots in order to show that the belief is irrational -- inconsistent with how we approach any other question of fact.

That's not because they know that there is no God or have faith that there is no God, but because they know that -- with respect to these questions of ultimate reality -- it's plain that nobody knows what they're talking about, and faith is merely wishing it so or pretending at knowledge.

What atheists are against, then, is not God so much as faith -- belief. Maybe that's where Kevin is coming from.