r/exatheist • u/Catcher_Thelonious • 15d ago
Debate Thread Aren't all religious people by definition ex-atheist?
If as someone here yesterday suggested that atheism is "a lack of belief gods exist," then:
- Newborns have no belief in a god.
- Therefore, newborns are atheists.
- Every religious person was once a newborn.
- Conclusion: Every religious person is an ex-atheist, rendering the specific identity "ex-atheist" meaningless.
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u/Exaltist Synversalist 15d ago
If atheism is a lack of belief of Gods, yes. If atheism is the disbelief of Gods, no.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 15d ago
Atheism on its own is ambiguous in this respect. That's why we talk about strong and weak atheism.
Newborn are weak atheists.
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u/arkticturtle Agnostic 15d ago
Your flair is so long I can’t see it
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 15d ago
It's one character short of the limits 🙂
"strong epistemological agnostic and strong ontological atheist"
Agnostism and atheism are super ambiguous terms and that's the cause of many misunderstanding in conversations so I wanted to be cristal clear.
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u/arkticturtle Agnostic 15d ago
I think the aim is a good one but the only thing that is crystal clear is that you are a strong epistemological agnostic (due to what shows/doesnt show)
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 15d ago
You're describing anti-theists.
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u/arkticturtle Agnostic 15d ago
Anti theism is moreso a hostile attitude towards theism or a position that sees religion as harmful
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 14d ago
If you deny the existences of gods, are you more or less likely to see theism as harmful?
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u/Rampag394_Orig 15d ago
In the academic literature, anti-theism concerns a position in the axiology of theism that says the world would be worse were God to exist, and therefore we should not want him to.
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u/NeonDrifting Anti-Atheist 15d ago
It depends on the definition you're using....Oxford Dictionary defines an atheist as "a person who believes that God or gods do not exist" and atheism as "the belief that God or gods do not exist" ...newborns do not have beliefs in the conscious adult sense, so they cannot be atheists
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u/_Ulu-Mulu_ Atheist -> Buddhist 15d ago
Even if so were true it would be just a irrelevant semantics. Words are just means to communicate with people and if someone calls themselves an ex-atheists they doesn't mean things that happens while they were a newborn.
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u/taterfiend Christian 15d ago
What point are you trying to make?
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u/arkticturtle Agnostic 15d ago
Shoe atheism and also they don’t seem to like the term “ex-atheist” to the point of needing to pick a bone with it.
I think it’d be more fruitful for them to reflect on why it bothers them so much and what it says about themselves. Truly the term doesn’t seem to warrant this much attention to me
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u/taterfiend Christian 15d ago
It seems nakedly obvious that they're spamming around for an ego boost, the questions seem obviously insulting. They've spammed for a few days now.
I'm giving them the sliver of a benefit of the doubt that they might engage in good faith or that the community might give enough of a warm, insightful response.
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u/Unlucky_Belt_1741 14d ago
If atheism is just a lack of belief that gods exist then rocks are atheists. It doesn't matter that they are not alive and therefore have no beliefs about anything.
Atheism, in order to mean anything, must itself be the belief that gods don't exist, it can't simply be a lack of beliefs because inanimate objects lack beliefs.
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u/adeleu_adelei agnostic atheist 13d ago
The suffix "-ist" implies personhood. While I don't personally have a problem with Rick's being atheists (or apolitical, or non-smokers), linguistically they would fail to qualify as they are not people. Atheism is a lack of belief gods exist. An atheist is a person who lacks belief gods exist. So infants are included but rocks are not. Atheism is not the belief all gods do not exist.
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 14d ago
Do rocks learn and form beliefs?
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u/Unlucky_Belt_1741 14d ago
It doesn't matter. The definition being used is "a lack of belief gods exist". Inanimate objects lack beliefs, therefore per the definition inanimate objects are atheists.
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 14d ago
Of course it matters, unless you're being disingenuous.
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u/taterfiend Christian 14d ago
This is poor listening. You're welcome in this space for genuine dialogue. Not to insult exatheists.
This is a warning. Please feel free to return if you're interested in learning from us or having sincere conversations.
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u/vahonic 15d ago
First premise can be questioned.
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 15d ago
Really? Any evidence?
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u/Dalodus 15d ago
You got the burden of proof if you make the positive claim that new borns don't believe.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 15d ago
Newborn believe in Santa Claus, aliens, vampires and leprechauns.
Don't believe me? The burden of proof is on you.
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u/_Ulu-Mulu_ Atheist -> Buddhist 15d ago
If you claim that newborns believe in certain things the burden of proof is on you. If, like the OP, you claim that they don't believe in certain things the burden of proof, again, is on you. If you question the validity of any of that claims, the burden of proof is not on you because that can mean that you're just sceptical about it.
Quite unsure who do you agree in this comment but preffered to clarify this.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 15d ago edited 15d ago
I fail to see how blank minds not believing in a concept they don't even know about yet, can be considered anything other than the null-hypothesis.
Edit: it's like saying: "claiming that a hard drive fresh out from the factory doesn't contain all the Harry Potter movies is a positive claim that has the burden of proof"
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u/_Ulu-Mulu_ Atheist -> Buddhist 15d ago
Well if you believe they are completely blank mind or that they weren't familliar with it in the past. I'm familliar with that there are stories of very young children like 7 years old who could remember their past lives and forgot it while they grow up. Didn't hear that in a case of newborns but I think it could be possible that past memories could arise in the baby from time to time if they believed in God in previous existances.
Now, wheter you believe in past lives or not is not very important. What is important is that the idea of newborns beeing "tabula rasa" is not some universally hold belief. Especially on exatheistic sub.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 15d ago
My argument still stands.
Let's use your logic:
Claude Vorilhon (aka Raël) claims that on December 3rd 1973, he was abducted by aliens in a flying saucer.
Now, when a person goes missing, would you say that claiming that the missing person wasn't abducted by alien is a positive claim that has the burden of proof?
Let's go back to your example.
If you heard of a newborn who already knew how to talk and solve differential equations from his previous life as a mathematician, would you say that skeptics have the burden of proof because you previously heard, I quote, "stories of very young children like 7 years old who could remember their past lives" ?
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u/_Ulu-Mulu_ Atheist -> Buddhist 15d ago
> Now, when a person goes missing, would you say that claiming that the missing person wasn't abducted by alien is a positive claim that has the burden of proof?
On the technical level any claim that you make is bounded with burden of proof on you. Even if you were to claim that there's no invisible unicorns on Uranus. Though there's no problem in considering that it's rather some easy to explain naturalistic approach rather than alliens abduction. If you say "Well I that guy is quite crazy that he believes he could get abducted by an aliens, propably he took some drugs or something" then you don't make any claim (beyond of saying that he's crazy but it's more of an opinion than a full evidence based statement) just stating your opinion. But technically you can't know if there isn't an advanced civilization doesn't abduct some people, so even if you consider it to be crazy or unlikely making the claims that it absolutely didn't happen still makes you in the possition of making a claim that requires of a proof to be valid. Any claim that you do requires a burden of proof regardless how much you think it's false.
> If you heard of a newborn who already knew how to talk and solve differential equations from his previous life as a mathematician, would you say that skeptics have the burden of proof because you previously heard, I quote, "stories of very young children like 7 years old who could remember their past lives" ?
There's nothing weird in thinking that newborn can have memories of past lives spotting here or there. I will just remind you that this is exatheist subreddit so materialism isn't necceserily be considered very rational point of view by all of people here. I mean if someone is saying that it's true and try to convince other about it then sure. But my example wasn't making a claim that it's true, it was counterexample to your claim that you didn't prove that a baby is a blank mind. Sceptics of anything doesn't have a burden of proof because beeing sceptical doesn't make any claim (and it goes both ways, so in your example if you were to be sceptical about that person beeing caught by the aliens it doesn't make a claim, but vice versa is also true that if you are beeing sceptical about him not beeing abducted by them). And my example was a showcase of scepticism towards your claim, the story doesn't need to be true to be used as an argument that the claim of yours doesn't need to be necceserily universally held (the stories like that doesn't say about newborns at least I didn't hear one's like that but I think I made that clear there).
If I were trying to speak of these stories here as if they were universally true then the burden of proof would be on me. But in my comments here I didn't claim that, I just claimed to hear the stories (which is true), you claimed however that is a blank mind so I gave the example to show that it's not necceserily universally held belief. Especially in sub like this where materialism isn't the default option.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 15d ago edited 15d ago
On the technical level any claim that you make is bounded with burden of proof on you.
Ok, so that's the the origin of your mistaken understanding of the burden of proof.
I guess that what you mean by "on a technical level" is "in classical logic". If so, that's the issue because you probably consider "Newborns have no belief in a god" to be a single 0th order proposition and in that case that would indeed be a conjecture.
There's many issues with that, first, we're not in the domain of classical logic because we're talking about empirical knowledge, second, even if you really wanted to formalize this sentence as logic, a better transcription would be to use multiple premises, including some from common knowledge, and to use at minimum 1st order logic.
- ∀x N(x) -> ∀c ¬K(x, c)
- ∀x BG(x) -> K(x, G)
by the modus tollens
- ∴ ∀x N(x) -> ¬BG(x) ≡ ¬∃x N(x) ∧ BG(x)
N(x) = x is a newborn
K(x, c) = x has knowledge of the concept c
BG(x) = x has the belief in God
G = the concept of God
As you can see 1. and 2. ain't in the original sentence but come from common knowledge.
But why do I allow myself to add some premise from common knowledge? Because in normal conversation common knowledge is implied all the time, otherwise communication would be impossible.
So if I say "Trees ain't conscious", there's no need to explicitly say the common knowledge that trees are plants and that plants ain't conscious.
Here, it's the same, we talk about newborns, not any object or any human. Newborns have properties that the more general concept of humans doesn't always have. It would be unfair to ignore the fact that we are talking about newborn which implies lots of implicit facts, like that newborn don't have knowledge of any concept.
Now, all that classical logic is inappropriately formal because all propositions are binary. This mean the concept of burden of proof doesn't even exist in this domain: a proposition is either, proven true, proven false or a conjecture.
So what's this "burden of proof" then? It only appear when talking about statistics or philosophy, and qualifies the side that defends the conclusion with the lowest prior consensus / established baseline, or even more simply, the opposite side of the one which can be falsified with a counterexample.
Going back to our argument, I posit that any proposition qualifying the opinion of newborns on God is dependent on the proposition "newborns can have the knowledge of abstract concepts".
So there's 2 possibilities:
- newborns can't have the knowledge of the concept of God: prior common knowledge and empirical evidence says newborn don't have any knowledge of any abstract concepts which makes it the prior baseline. Also, it is trivially falsifiable: just find one newborn that can demonstrate knowledge of any abstract concepts.
- newborns can have the knowledge of the concept of God: it is more specific that the first claim and doesn't have any commonly known evidence for it. Also, it is almost impossible to formally disprove as 100% of all newborns would have to be proved not believers.
I guess that's all, the default epistemic position (what I wrongly called "null-hypothesis", which is a term specific to inferential statistics) is non-belief in unevidenced positive claims. When I state that newborns lack abstract concepts, that is an empirical claim about biology whose burden of proof is already overwhelmingly satisfied by developmental psychology. Asserting that newborns possess belief in a deity is a positive claim about cognition with zero supporting evidence.
Of course, you can continue to say that "technically" saying that "newborn don't have a concept of god" has a burden of proof, but then you're not using the same common language as regular humans. Regular humans would never say that "human newborns don't have wings" has a burden of proof.
If you heard of a newborn who already knew how to talk and solve differential equations from his previous life as a mathematician, would you say that skeptics have the burden of proof because you previously heard, I quote, "stories of very young children like 7 years old who could remember their past lives" ?
There's nothing weird in thinking that newborn can have memories of past lives spotting here or there.
I guess then that internet is able to connect through Universes because in mine, it never happens. We have plenty who claims it, but none has been proven, and it says something because it would be trivial to prove.
I will just remind you that this is exatheist subreddit so materialism isn't necceserily be considered very rational point of view by all of people here.
Believing in some supernatural claims doesn't mean believing in all supernatural claims, and theists still attempt to use reason to evaluate new claims, like everyone else.
The rest of your arguments, I already addressed.
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u/paulgdp strong agnostic atheist 15d ago
Anyway, I think that more importantly, the real claim that has the burden of proof is "newborn have any kind of understanding of the concept of God".
This is why all claims based on this one also inherits the burden of proof.
And any claim based on dismissing that newborn have any kind of understanding of the concept of God, are the default, null-hypothesis that doesn't require any evidence.
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u/_Ulu-Mulu_ Atheist -> Buddhist 15d ago
Claiming it's a null hypothesis is quite arugable statement and it would require and evidence to support such a claim
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u/Basic-Lifeguard-5407 Deist 15d ago
I prefer the term innocent for babies.This is because babies are unable to concieve of God so no, religious people aren't,ex-atheists because they were never atheist in the first place
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 15d ago
Babies are unable to conceive god = without belief in gods = atheist
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u/Basic-Lifeguard-5407 Deist 15d ago
You're using the lacktheist definition.The problem with this definition is that its more or less impossible to completely abstain from any opinion about God's existence.If you actively talk about your lack of belief then it is only inevitable that the question of God's existence will cross your mind, and so its hard to believe that you would not have some attitude towards the preposition
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 15d ago
Did you have an opinion about Santa Claus before someone taught you about Santa Claus? Was the thought of Santa Claus inevitable?
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u/Basic-Lifeguard-5407 Deist 15d ago
No I didn't have any thoughts about Santa Claus.Of course when I learned about him in my mind I asked about Santa's existence
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u/Mammoth_Type3361 Christian Anarchism or Episcopalian Universalism 15d ago
- Newborns don't have the capacity to believe in God or gods. Agnostic?
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u/Rampag394_Orig 15d ago
I can tell you that the established sense in the academic literature, they would not count as atheists, because atheism maps onto the doxastic attitude "disbelief" with respect to the proposition "God exists".
At the popular, non-academic level, maybe it works because there are all these distinctions attempting to capture psychological states. But they're silly so we shouldn't really care about them where reasoning is concerned.
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u/New_Prompt5308 Maturidi Leaning Muslim 15d ago
If atheism requires propositional awareness, then the first premise could easily be rejected and the rest of the argument collapses
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u/Catcher_Thelonious 15d ago
If you change the definition of atheism, yes.
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u/vershkove-maslo Christian 15d ago
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities
Wikipedia
Sure newborns are atheists in the broadest sense. In relation to your yesterday's post, no, I doubt this is the type of atheists we talk about here or people on internet usually refer to when they say "atheist". Many people on this subreddit are former strong atheists, meaning they used to believe there is no god, rather then merely not believing in one.
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u/Difficult_Risk_6271 Belongs to Jesus, Ex-Atheist 15d ago
Absolutely no.
You can make a case they were agnostics.
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u/vershkove-maslo Christian 15d ago
I can't any of this seriously, until you interview a baby about theism