Ah, my angry blogger strikes again.

[sciolist]

It's all good stuff about certainty, or the obvious lack thereof, in atheism and other theisms. We don't need absolute certainty to operate and it's useful to underline that to avoid hyperbolic stuff.

The thing that made me smile and re-post was this:

"(The flip side of this fallacy is the theists' claim that they cannot supply atheists' demands for absolute certainty about claims of a god's existence or properties. We do not demand absolute certainty. We'd like to see a case made beyond a reasonable doubt, but at this point I'd settle for probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.)"

Which I thought was cute. After that the tone of the post gets slightly ruder, but the content's still nice (in its meaning as accurate). Which is why I read it.

"The problem is that every day I read this or that atrocity against human well-being and happiness — atrocities that shock my conscience to the core — being not just perpetrated but proudly perpetrated by people in name of their god. It's not just the "newsworthy" atrocities — acid in a young girl's face, the murder of an abortion doctor, the rape of a child — it's the systematic and persistent efforts of so many religious people to marginalize, oppress and exploit some large segment of the population: heretics, foreigners, homosexuals, and of course women.

All of this would be irrelevant if it were true that a god actually existed. The truth is the truth; nuclear physics is still true even if it means we can incinerate tens of thousands in a heartbeat; it's still true even if we annihilate the entire terrestrial biosphere in a nuclear holocaust.

But it's not true. There is no god. We're on our own, a microscopic speck of life in an indifferent universe that cares nothing for our happiness or our survival. "

http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2010/09/atheism-conviction-and-certainty.html

PS - Someone please tell me how to use cut tags here - I bet they don't use lj-cut as a syntax.

Comments

Re: Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

That's funny, that's exactly what I thought about the idea that they're all useless at logic.

Well, there's would be several actual reasons why theists might be incompetent at logic (especially self-selection), whereas I'm hard pressed to figure out how theists could be generally good at arriving at the correct conclusion yet categorically bad at describing how they got there.

Re: Assumptions

[jang]

Aquinas was a pretty competent logician, even if he was rather encumbered by a love of Aristotle. It's not the mechanics of proof*; it's the initial axioms.

* well, alright, perhaps it is, rather. I've heard a few "you can't do X from first principles" which often turns out to be a declaration that the speaker has a fairly broken notion of what it is to "do X" (that neatly complements their wrong set of first principles) rather than a tautology.

Re: Assumptions

[barefootbum.blogspot.com]

Perhaps incompetent is not precisely correct. Most of the pros get the logic right most of the time, but they all make rather obvious mistakes. They're semicompetent, which might be worse than incompetent.