Reflected
Living in fear in the year of the tiger.
There is a distinction between non-belief (lacktheist) and negation of p (God existing), the graphic provides that. But I don't see the issue with a simple negation to the proposition, if a Christian presents the proposition, "does God exist", they are typically referring to the abrahamic god, that is the most widely recognized concept of a god. When I was an atheist, and I took the hardstance (in some cases I still do), I would negate the proposition of the Abrahamic god existing, but not w/e concept of god that could possibly exist. I think that places an unfair burden on the atheist while providing the backdoor for any theist. I have come across "christians," I forget how to accurately place them, that believe the simple state of existence/being is God. And I have known, and still know, followers of the Norse gods, and when they define what each god means, there really isn't anything to argue with, as you find they are simply ascribing events that can occur to their gods. With that, if a christian presents their god, I know their god, at least when I converse with them, is tied to to their text. Their texts makes claims, etc., and from a bayes theorem approach I can introduce these claims and come to a conclusion on the likely possibility of such claims being true based on the information we have today. So from that approach I can come to a conclusion on that specific god and negate the proposition of that god being true, but that same approach can't apply to every possible concept of god at the same time.In the context of belief in a higher power, shouldn't the variable x be restricted to the set of gods, as in.∀x∈G, with G=[All gods imaginable],
Which would make the position of the atheist and the believer, whichever type the latter is, formally logically distinct from one another?
Reducing atheism to simple non-belief in at least one thing, in the context of faith, seems to me inaccurate and petty. It doesn't reflect that the atheist denies the entire set of gods possibilities.
This section basically sums up my approach, and what I will assume is the approach of a majority of atheists, and that's restricting to philosophers, not laymen:
Jeanine Diller (2016) points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist. Indeed, many atheists are only vaguely aware of the variety of concepts of God that there are. For example, there are the Gods of classical and neo-classical theism: the Anselmian God, for instance, or, more modestly, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good creator-God that receives so much attention in contemporary philosophy of religion.
Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify (Diller 2016: 11–16). Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities. Nor have they reflected on what criteria must be satisfied in order for a concept of God to count as “legitimate”, let alone on the possibility of legitimate God concepts that have not yet been conceived and on the implications of that possibility for the issue of whether or not global atheism is justified. Furthermore, the most ambitious atheistic arguments popular with philosophers, which attempt to show that the concept of God is incoherent or that God’s existence is logically incompatible either with the existence of certain sorts of evil or with the existence of certain sorts of non-belief [Schellenberg 2007]), certainly won’t suffice to justify global atheism; for even if they are sound, they assume that to be God a being must be omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, and as the character Cleanthes points out at the beginning of Part XI of Hume’s Dialogues (see also Nagasawa 2008), there are religiously adequate God-concepts that don’t require God to have those attributes.
Atheism and Agnosticism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
plato.stanford.edu
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