God of the gaps for atheists

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Wootah
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God of the gaps for atheists

Post #1

Post by Wootah »

Recently I wrote:
You know, a lot of atheist talk is like a lifelong prisoner no longer believing there is anything outside the prison cell. Religion or not I just don't think it is justifiable. I do think it is a worldview and when I point it out atheists tend to get very offended (as if I attacked a sacred belief).
This is a discussion of what this means and if it is valid claim.

We know the sun rises and sets every day, day in and day out. Assuming only common sense knowledge you would be right to assume that it will always be the case.

Similarly for death. Assuming common sense knowledge you would be right to assume death is the end of life.

But then someone shows that the sun is a ball of energy and is burning up and you realise that one day the sun will not rise (or set). That it is simply a habit of life that you assumed was normal.

To date, the atheist believes death is the end, because of the same reasoning. As soon as someone rises from the dead that satisfies their burden of proof then they will change their view.

But this has two philosophical issues.

1) Humes problem of induction
https://beisecker.faculty.unlv.edu/Cour ... uction.htm

2) The god of the gaps fallacy
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

From rational wiki: God of the gaps (or a divine fallacy) is a logical fallacy that occurs when believers invoke Goddidit (or a variant) in order to account for some natural phenomena that science cannot (at the time of the argument) explain. This concept resembles what systems theorists[1] refer to as an "explanatory principle".[2] "God of the gaps" is a bad argument not only on logical grounds, but on empirical grounds: there is a long history of "gaps" being filled and the remaining gaps for God thus getting smaller and smaller, suggesting "we don't know yet" as an alternative that works better in practice; naturalistic explanations for still-mysterious phenomena always remain possible, especially in the future where research may uncover more information.[3]
In the end the atheist claims about death are simply a gap and they are quick to fill it with nothing. That nothing happens after death.

So back to my quote.

If you were born inside a locked room and given food and water and air and whatever to survive through a hole then it is possible you might never wonder what is outside the room. That room just happens to be he universe and death is the border to what might be beyond.

Responses please :)
Proverbs 18:17 The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.

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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #2

Post by Miles »

Wootah wrote: Thu Aug 19, 2021 11:39 pm Recently I wrote:
You know, a lot of atheist talk is like a lifelong prisoner no longer believing there is anything outside the prison cell. Religion or not I just don't think it is justifiable. I do think it is a worldview and when I point it out atheists tend to get very offended (as if I attacked a sacred belief).
This is a discussion of what this means and if it is valid claim.

We know the sun rises and sets every day, day in and day out. Assuming only common sense knowledge you would be right to assume that it will always be the case.

Similarly for death. Assuming common sense knowledge you would be right to assume death is the end of life.

But then someone shows that the sun is a ball of energy and is burning up and you realise that one day the sun will not rise (or set). That it is simply a habit of life that you assumed was normal.

To date, the atheist believes death is the end, because of the same reasoning. As soon as someone rises from the dead that satisfies their burden of proof then they will change their view.
Atheists have only one thing in common for certain: a lack of belief in the existence of god. Anything else imputed to them is almost certainly to be an overstatement. And I'm not at all familiar with how the rising from the dead scenario goes, but couldn't someone rise from the dead and then die again, and permanently so?


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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #3

Post by Wootah »

[Replying to Miles in post #2]

You should be able to reply to the thread and dismiss it rationally, logically, easily and thoroughly I am sure.
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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #4

Post by TRANSPONDER »

Yep. It absolutely is a fallacy and a very common and favourite one. It goes like this: 'Atheists don't know for certain that there is no God, or that Jesus didn't rise from the dead, or that Matthew's Natal star wasn't something that actually happened. So their rejection of these things is illogical.' And they may add 'after all, they don't know everything and Science has been wrong before'. This can appear in ''have you looked everywhere in the universe?' or 'You can't be 100% sure'.

This somewhat relies on a strawmanning of atheism - saying that it claims to know there is no God or that Jesus didn't rise from the dead or that Matthew's star is a fairy -tale. Atheism claims no such thing; it merely says that these are extraordinary claims and require extraordinary evidence, and that has not been forthcoming. What we get is Faith in the Bible and the fielding of logical fallacies like this one.

In fact it is the religious claims that are illogical because they not only invest Faith in what has no adequate support (though it may take discussion before that becomes apparent), which has them not just saying 'This seems likely, given the evidence' but 'I know this is true', but at the same time, they must be dismissing the claims of other religions or even other denominations out of hand, just on the basis of Faith. That's illogical.

A popular version of this fallacy not too long ago was to say that our knowledge is confined to what we can study and understand. But there is a whole universe out there that we know nothing about. How can we say there is no God?' Aside that we oughtn't to care a hoot about a god at the other end of the universe, but one that Ought to be detectable in the universe that we can study, the logic is that nobody knows what is in the Universe that we don't know about - and that includes the Religious. For them to claim they Do know is what is illogical. Atheism simply reserves investing Belief until we have some decent evidence. Stuff that pops into the mind of the believer is Not evidence that carries any weight.

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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #5

Post by brunumb »

Wootah wrote: Thu Aug 19, 2021 11:39 pm If you were born inside a locked room and given food and water and air and whatever to survive through a hole then it is possible you might never wonder what is outside the room. That room just happens to be he universe and death is the border to what might be beyond.
I think you would be constantly wondering what was outside the room and, with your imagination, you would create all sorts of scenarios for what that might be. In the absence of knowledge that is what we humans tend to do. In the case of what happens after death, we have no knowledge so we imagine all sorts of things. But we do have knowledge about life and we can observe and investigate the processes that occur in living things. That knowledge tells us nothing about any afterlife. Anything we might suggest that happens is just an attempt to fill that gap in our knowledge. As yet we have no compelling evidence or reason to claim that death is not the end.
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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #6

Post by TRANSPONDER »

brunumb wrote: Fri Aug 20, 2021 1:38 am
Wootah wrote: Thu Aug 19, 2021 11:39 pm If you were born inside a locked room and given food and water and air and whatever to survive through a hole then it is possible you might never wonder what is outside the room. That room just happens to be he universe and death is the border to what might be beyond.
I think you would be constantly wondering what was outside the room and, with your imagination, you would create all sorts of scenarios for what that might be. In the absence of knowledge that is what we humans tend to do. In the case of what happens after death, we have no knowledge so we imagine all sorts of things. But we do have knowledge about life and we can observe and investigate the processes that occur in living things. That knowledge tells us nothing about any afterlife. Anything we might suggest that happens is just an attempt to fill that gap in our knowledge. As yet we have no compelling evidence or reason to claim that death is not the end.
That is a very good point. I previously had a lot of discussion about the 'Materialist default', which is asking why we assume everything 'Out There' would work as it does here.

The logic is that everything we know about here works naturally, with no reason to suppose a god is involved (never mind which one).
. So the default is to assume that what we don't know will also work naturally until we have some compelling evidence that it has a god involved in it. That we don't know (yet) whether it is or it isn't means 'we don't know'. it does not means (logically) that we assume a god until it is proven to be natural.

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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #7

Post by Bust Nak »

Wootah wrote: Thu Aug 19, 2021 11:39 pm 1) Humes problem of induction
https://beisecker.faculty.unlv.edu/Cour ... uction.htm
It's only a problem if one fails to distinguish inductive reasoning from deductive reasoning. Embrace inductive reasoning, acknowledge that it's less than logically certain conclusions, it's a feature, not a bug.
In the end the atheist claims about death are simply a gap and they are quick to fill it with nothing. That nothing happens after death.
a) we have a bit of evidence to back that up re: consciousness and brain activity. b) we readily acknowledge that we don't really know what happens after death. These put us above the criticism of "nothing" of the gaps.
If you were born inside a locked room and given food and water and air and whatever to survive through a hole then it is possible you might never wonder what is outside the room. That room just happens to be he universe and death is the border to what might be beyond.
You can wonder, just don't go assuming that there is anything outside of the room. Which is entirely rational behavior. I'd rather be factually wrong for rational reasons than be accidentally correct for the irrational reasons. Luckily for us factual correctness and rationality usually go hand in hand together.

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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #8

Post by JoeyKnothead »

Edit: missed some quotaters again
Wootah wrote: Thu Aug 19, 2021 11:39 pm Recently I wrote:
You know, a lot of atheist talk is like a lifelong prisoner no longer believing there is anything outside the prison cell.
Not unlike some atheists who think theists talk like a lifelong toddler, believing anything they read because someone has a crayon.
Religion or not I just don't think it is justifiable. I do think it is a worldview and when I point it out atheists tend to get very offended (as if I attacked a sacred belief).
Maybe equating em with prisoners is the problem, and not the reference to their world view.
This is a discussion of what this means and if it is valid claim.
I've given up expecting valid claim from theist.
We know the sun rises and sets every day, day in and day out. Assuming only common sense knowledge you would be right to assume that it will always be the case.
If assuming and common sense were valid we wouldn't have need for scientists.
Similarly for death. Assuming common sense knowledge you would be right to assume death is the end of life.
Good for you, death is, by definition, the end of life.
But then someone shows that the sun is a ball of energy and is burning up and you realise that one day the sun will not rise (or set). That it is simply a habit of life that you assumed was normal.
This fails to acknowledge for the second time that the earth's rotation on its axis gives the appearance of a relatively unmoving sun appearing in the east and setting in the west over a period of time. The sun is, contrary to opinion, the center of the solar system.
To date, the atheist believes death is the end, because of the same reasoning.
This atheist believes that words have meanings, and if we change those meanings that's apt to lead to a breakdown in communication.

Death, nor the sun, care one for the other.

You're comparing apples to ducks.
As soon as someone rises from the dead that satisfies their burden of proof then they will change their view.
Remember now, dead is a term that refers to folks that are it.

The term you're looking for is zombie.
But this has two philosophical issues.
1) Humes problem of induction
https://beisecker.faculty.unlv.edu/Cour ... uction.htm
When Hume comes here making making claims we can all pile on him.

What, in particular, do you find so compelling about his argument?
2) The god of the gaps fallacy
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
From rational wiki: God of the gaps (or a divine fallacy) is a logical fallacy that occurs when believers invoke Goddidit (or a variant) in order to account for some natural phenomena that science cannot (at the time of the argument) explain. This concept resembles what systems theorists[1] refer to as an "explanatory principle".[2] "God of the gaps" is a bad argument not only on logical grounds, but on empirical grounds: there is a long history of "gaps" being filled and the remaining gaps for God thus getting smaller and smaller, suggesting "we don't know yet" as an alternative that works better in practice; naturalistic explanations for still-mysterious phenomena always remain possible, especially in the future where research may uncover more information.[3]
I disagree with the "works better in practice" part. Without particulars that's too broad a statement.
In the end the atheist claims about death are simply a gap and they are quick to fill it with nothing. That nothing happens after death.
Plenty happens after death. Gases build, liquids pool, decay sets in. Various bacteria are prone to picnic.

Maybe if you'd quit trying to tell us all what atheists think, you'd stop and think how goofy is it to declare nothing happens after death.
So back to my quote.
If you were born inside a locked room and given food and water and air and whatever to survive through a hole then it is possible you might never wonder what is outside the room.
Much like if you were locked in a room with a crayon, you might write a compelling argument.
That room just happens to be the universe and death is the border to what might be beyond.
I might be Teddy Roosevelt, but I ain't.
Responses please :)
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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #9

Post by Wootah »

brunumb wrote: Fri Aug 20, 2021 1:38 am
Wootah wrote: Thu Aug 19, 2021 11:39 pm If you were born inside a locked room and given food and water and air and whatever to survive through a hole then it is possible you might never wonder what is outside the room. That room just happens to be he universe and death is the border to what might be beyond.
I think you would be constantly wondering what was outside the room and, with your imagination, you would create all sorts of scenarios for what that might be. In the absence of knowledge that is what we humans tend to do. In the case of what happens after death, we have no knowledge so we imagine all sorts of things. But we do have knowledge about life and we can observe and investigate the processes that occur in living things. That knowledge tells us nothing about any afterlife. Anything we might suggest that happens is just an attempt to fill that gap in our knowledge. As yet we have no compelling evidence or reason to claim that death is not the end.
You are having it both ways, you want to claim that you would wonder what is outside the room and yet when it comes to death and the universe you think you know how it is.

Anyway that was my point before. I hoped this helped you to understand it.
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Re: God of the gaps for atheists

Post #10

Post by brunumb »

Wootah wrote: Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:27 am You are having it both ways, you want to claim that you would wonder what is outside the room and yet when it comes to death and the universe you think you know how it is.
You need to trade in your mind-reader for a new one. I am not claiming that I know how it is. I don't know how it is. No one knows how it is. It is the believer that claims to know how it is and can't accept it when people don't buy into their fantasy.
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