tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736821.post7944391355688633099..comments2023-08-08T04:19:26.974-07:00Comments on THE CALLADUS BLOG: The difference between "Faith" and "Trust" - No, you don't have "faith" in an elevator!Calladushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17620879847877868166noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5736821.post-24176967099330784362013-03-13T20:31:24.855-07:002013-03-13T20:31:24.855-07:00The longer I think about these things, the more I ...The longer I think about these things, the more I think that an important component of atheism is simply linguistic. The world around us does not change in response to what we believe or not. If there is a supernatural being whose decrees are what make my existence real, my not believing in that being could not possibly extinguish it, or existence. Likewise, if no one holds the tiller of the world, my belief to the contrary does not change the phenomena that are integrated into and, from my perspective, "explained" by that belief. That is, in some very important ways, belief and nonbelief are <em>both</em> independent of evidence—not in the sense that either is equally supportable by evidence, but in the sense that belief or nonbelief are both <em>interpretations</em> of what must always be the <em>same</em> evidence. And those interpretations are dependent on the subjective fallibility of humanity either way. To deny that this is the nature of evidence, or that the concept itself is subject to our limitations, is dangerous, I think. (Consider by contrast the brilliance of science, which begins by <em>assuming</em> that we are fallible, and uses methodological standards, repeatability, systematic probing of biases, and conceptually abstract symbolic systems like mathematics to resist the limits of ordinary interpretation.)<br /><br />For example, if theism is about the fundaments of being, or the unity of all things, as some people do believe, then what is "atheism"? One is hard-pressed to deny that all things are connected, or that the "experience" of being, in the way that we can talk about it, is perhaps irreducible to physical phenomena, except trivially. Consider interesting things like coincidences, which no matter how well they might be explained statistically and physically, are nevertheless "experienced" and communicated within a linguistic and cultural matrix that is not really <em>explained</em> by reduction to its physical components. That is, we can understand from the law of large numbers that "miracles" happen every day, but that fails to extinguish the natural, underlying tendency of people to embed events within systems of "meaning," even when we can recognize that tendency itself as reducible to underlying physical phenomena. And the very idea that something might be "meaningful" suggests the tension between the determinism inherent in causal accounts and the <em>experience</em> of free will. What does it mean that different people can <em>interpret</em> different meanings from the same events?<br /><br />I don't mean to say that interpretation and "meaning" require recourse to supernaturalism; I mean that reduction of the human experience to, say, biology, chemistry, and physics, does not change the experience. Nor does it explain what it feels like to weep in anguish. And communicating that feeling (and others) is an important part of being human. We are on the linguistic plane, with a game of words, whether we like it or not.<br /><br />So I think a valid and important definition of "atheism' is the very simple linguistic one, that the word "God," and words like it, are not conducive to, or useful for, a full existence. We are better off struggling against ineffability without neatly-defined words for it.Peter Wallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15026459298407890137noreply@blogger.com