Atheist Dictionary Missing the Point?

The meaning of "deny" in "deny a motion" is distinctly different from the primary meaning. Sure, you can deny a request, a petition, an entreaty, a whine from your five-year-old, or a command from a cop, but that sense of "deny" is qualitatively different from denying the validity of an assertion.

Yes, that is the way I use the words. What's the point in having both if they overlap to the point of vagueness anywhere but in a graduate philosophy seminar?

• An atheist is a person who is certain (or certain beyond a reasonable doubt if he's a scientist) that there is no supernatural universe whose forces and creatures whimsically, often petulantly, and almost always illogically perturb the operation of the natural universe and make a mockery of the laws of physics, blatantly denying the fundamental premise of science: that the natural universe is a closed system (layman's definition) whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical evidence of its past and present behavior.
• An agnostic is a person who isn't certain, perhaps by holding what he considers a reasonable doubt.

I call that belief a "hunch." But as for the person, I do indeed call him irrational if he is reasonably well educated. It is unreasonable to believe in an extraordinary premise for which no extraordinary evidence has ever been discovered. Detectives have hunches based on evidence.

Jung says no. Belief in the supernatural is an archetype, in modern terms an instinctive belief pre-programmed into our synapses by evolution. Either it was a survival trait in an era whose dangers we can't imagine, or it was a random mutation passed down through a genetic bottleneck.

Even today I don't see any "pockets of godless societies" unless you count the people who find each other and form humanist associations. There are no physical atheist communities; we're too rare to actually do an Ayn Rand and build our own little village. People who called the USSR an atheist society ignore the fact that communism is an offshoot of Christianity. Marx's slogan, "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability," is a paraphrase of a quote from the Book of Acts. Can you imagine self-respecting Jews, Hindus or Confucians founding a movement based on the premise that what a man takes from civilization does not have to correlate with what he gives back? That's irrational and defies the laws of economics. The only way that society can survive is through divine intervention; the collapse of the USSR after decades of producing a "negative surplus" can be seen as evidence of the missing god.

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My family is godless. I never heard of religion until I was about seven, and I assumed it was one of those funny stories that kids make up. We all seem to have a mutation that eliminated or overrode the instinct to believe in the supernatural. I'm sure there are others. But hardly enough to create a society.

Excuse me, but by choice or by chance you're living in a community whose language is democratic. Words are not defined by an academy of scholars, as in Spain, or by the government, as in Germany. The meaning of an English word is exactly what the preponderance of speakers and writers use it to mean in their discourse. To say "the usage is commonly wrong" is an oxymoron when applied to English.

So what? You're just waiting for one to come along that you like? You have no problem with the concept of an invisible, illogical supernatural universe, you just don't like the way it's been dressed up by various cultures? In that case you're an agnostic, waiting for an excuse to believe in something that's unreasonable.

It's from Greek a-, "without," and theos, "god." It literally means "one who is without gods."

I'm willing to stretch the definition of "disbelief" to include "a science-based refusal to believe something that is unreasonable."

We believe in millions of things because not to do so would be unreasonable. In aggregate it's obvious that a few of them will be proven wrong. Even canonical scientific theories are occasionally overturned, or at least highly modified. But we have no way of knowing which belief will turn out to be wrong. That's no excuse for being unreasonable.

An extraordinary assertion, completely lacking in evidence, which claims to falsify the fundamental premise of science, seems rather low on the list of beliefs likely to be overturned by future evidence.

 

To deny a petition, command, motion, etc., is to refuse to perform an act that someone has requested or ordered you to perform. To deny a claim is simply to state that you don't believe it. Those are two qualitatively different responses that happen to be expressed by the same word in English. I would not depend on that being the case in other languages.

This is not the Philosophy board. I rarely read it because it gives me a headache. Any attempt to start a philosophical discussion on the Linguistics board will not be welcomed.

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Like most Americans I have almost no idea what epistemology and ontology are, much less what the difference between them is. If you're going to start an argument over the shades of meaning of the verbs "to exist" and "to know" that only a fellow philosopher could follow, you're on the wrong board.

You still don't get it. YOU don't get to decide what is the "correct" or "accurate" use of a word. The entire philosophy department of your university doesn't get to make that decision, except on their own headache-inspiring portmanteau words like "epistemology" and "ontology," which the rest of the citizenry will live our entire lives without using.

The meaning of a word is established by a consensus of the people who use it. This is why "buffalo" now means the American bison and "snuck" and "dove" are in the dictionary as past tenses. The majority of Americans will tell you patiently that an atheist is a person who believes there is no God. However many of them are even familiar with the word "agnostic" will tell you that it's a person who's not sure about God's existence. Trying to talk to them about epistemology will not help. If you mention ontology they'll think you mean cancer research.

Unlike "agnostic," which is sometimes used in vernacular discourse, "deist" is not. Feel free to use whatever meaning the philosophy department agrees on. The rest of us won't care.

I suppose it's naive by your academic standards. But I'm not a philosopher. Outside the academy it has nothing to do with the search for ultimate knowledge, and is applied strictly to the question of God. I understand that its origin is Greek for "without knowledge," but "companion" is also Latin for "someone you share your bread with."

I'm not making this up. I use the words that way because that's what I learned by living in an English-speaking country and not taking courses in philosophy.

No, I'm no agnostic. The existence of gods has been one of the most important questions in Western culture (and perhaps others) for more than two thousand years. If there were any evidence for their existence someone would have found it by now. With Jungian psychology and the discovery of DNA we even have evidence explaining why belief in gods is so prevalent despite the lack of evidence for their existence.

There is no supernatural universe. This is all there is. Make the most of it!

Besides, even if you cop the Cosmic Watchmaker model, that God popped the Big Bang, created our Hubble Volume, and then settled into his Celestial Barcalounger with a tall cool one to watch it unfold, you have to accept the definition of "the universe" as "everything that exists." If God exists, he is part of the universe, so all you've done is expand the question to, "Okay, you've told us where our Hubble Volume came from, but now where did the God come from?"

 

You're saying that "agnostic" is philosopher's jargon, and I'm saying that it's used enough by laymen to qualify as vernacular. It's probably somewhere in between. The dictionary agrees with you, but I've heard it used in casual conversation for years and that's where I learned my definition.

 

That one is obviously a joke!

Generally, a specialty dictionary contains only the jargon of the specialists, including common words which have acquired jargon meanings. You're not going to find "kayak" or "subconscious" in a gemologist's dictionary.

So an atheist's dictionary would be limited to the jargon of atheism. Anybody got any idea what that is?