Do atheists not have beliefs?

[historia]

You don't know what I already believe (I don't have beliefs BTW)

This is an assertion that has been made by a few atheists on this forum.

Is it coherent for atheists to claim they don't have beliefs?

[wiploc]

We believe things to various degrees. We have a very strong belief the Earth will continue to rotate and the sun will appear to rise tomorrow. We believe we will wake in the morning, but that belief may be slightly less certain than the belief the sun will rise. The range of certainty of beliefs probably ranges from 99.9 percent down to 1 percent. Or if you will, perhaps it stops being a belief when it drops below 50%.

I'd say it stops being a logical belief, or stops being justified, when confidence drops below 50%. (And probably for some ways above 50% too. We don't normally believe that a coin will come up heads when it is equally likely to come up tails.)

We still believe things when confidence hits 100%. Certainty doesn't preclude belief. Do we stop believing that a woman loves her children because she proves her love by running into a burning building in the attempt to save them?

Strength of belief doesn't perfectly correlate with confidence. Example: Back when I was a conservative, I was more willing to believe that President Clinton fooled around with Monica Lewinsky than many liberals were.

[Mithrae]

If you believe that the trash will be picked up on schedule that is the same as believing in 'God'. Belief is all the same thing. Right?

As I suggested earlier, that seems to be a pretty similar line of thinking as saying that "If violent jihadism is a political ideology that is the same as secular democracy being a political ideology; ideologies are all the same thing." Such guilt-by-word-association thinking seems to both lack any rational justification and leads to obviously absurd consequences (such as trying to use words like 'belief' in strange new ways contrary to common usage; or in the case of this example, deciding to declare that one has no political ideology just to stick it to those jihadis).

And of course all this sophistry of trying to introduce new terms in place of 'belief' tends to overlook the fact that even if it became widely accepted many theists would simply and honestly say that okay, they don't "believe" in a God but just "conditionally accept" her existence or, perhaps less honestly, even "know" that God exists (as indeed many already claim). Even if it were successful, these efforts to rewrite the dictionary would do very little to differentiate theists and religious folk from any more-intellectual-than-thou proponents of the semantic change.

[Danmark]

We believe things to various degrees. We have a very strong belief the Earth will continue to rotate and the sun will appear to rise tomorrow. We believe we will wake in the morning, but that belief may be slightly less certain than the belief the sun will rise. The range of certainty of beliefs probably ranges from 99.9 percent down to 1 percent. Or if you will, perhaps it stops being a belief when it drops below 50%.

I'd say it stops being a logical belief, or stops being justified, when confidence drops below 50%. (And probably for some ways above 50% too. We don't normally believe that a coin will come up heads when it is equally likely to come up tails.)

We still believe things when confidence hits 100%. Certainty doesn't preclude belief. Do we stop believing that a woman loves her children because she proves her love by running into a burning building in the attempt to save them?

Strength of belief doesn't perfectly correlate with confidence. Example: Back when I was a conservative, I was more willing to believe that President Clinton fooled around with Monica Lewinsky than many liberals were.

Again this debate centers around the definition of terms. I am using 'confidence' in a belief as a synonym for 'strength of that belief. Neither strength nor confidence in a belief necessarily has anything to do with whether the belief corresponds to external, objective reality.

Confidence in a belief may very well be determined in part by one's prejudices. When you were a conservative you had a stronger desire to believe anti DEM stuff. That desire informed your belief. Confidence in a belief, or degree of certainty certainly does NOT correspond to whether the belief is true or even worthy of belief.

Religious folks claim to have complete confidence in their faith, while a member of an opposing faith may have complete confidence the other is wrong. They can't both be right.

[wiploc]

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[historia]

Meh, it's just semantics. Define "beliefs" for me then I'll tell you if I have beliefs or not.

From Merriam Webster:

• be-lief | -l"f
  
  1: a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing.
  
  2: something that is accepted, considered to be true, or held as an opinion : something believed.
  
  3: conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence.

[historia]

So what I assume is going on is that you are using some non-standard meaning of the word "believe" in order to make some obscure point that might become clear if we spent enough time coaxing you towards lucidity.

I suspect there are two things lurking behind this insistence that one doesn't have beliefs.

First, this mostly seems to be just a rhetorical ploy. Everyone has beliefs, some folks in this thread just choose to call them something else; mostly it seems to fend off the straw-man argument that there are no differences between religious and scientific beliefs.

Second, it seems to me that these folks are thinking almost exclusively in terms of descriptive claims about the world. Pretty much every example offered up for discussion so far has been scientific or mathematical in nature.

But there is more to the world than just science and math. Any thinking person develops moral, ethical, and political beliefs throughout their life. These types of beliefs are evaluative in nature: not merely describing the way the world is, but rather how it ought to be.

They include questions like:

• Do you believe that rape is wrong?
  
  Do you believe that women should have the right to vote?
  
  Do you believe that Donald Trump should be reelected?

Surely these are all beliefs. To claim one doesn't have them, or doesn't need them, seems completely misguided.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 45 by wiploc]

If you don't believe you'll get paid for work, you'll quit working.

If you don't believe your house will be where you left it, you won't find your way home.

If you don't believe kindness is better than cruelty, you'll be unlovable and unloved.

If you don't belief food will fix your hunger, you'll die.

I'm not sure that your examples necessarily work.

I don't believe I'll be paid for my work. What's this? A pay cheque. I guess my belief was wrong.

I don't believe my house will be where I left it. I take the usual route home and, voila, there's my home. I guess my belief was wrong.

I don't believe that food will fix my hunger. I eat a hearty lunch and my hunger is fixed. I guess my belief was wrong.

I don't believe kindness is better than cruelty. I try both and discover the opposite. I guess my belief was wrong.

It certainly helps a lot if you can put your beliefs to the test and not just accept them at face value. Therein lies one of the failings of relying on faith.

[Divine Insight]

If you don't believe you'll get paid for work, you'll quit working.

Wrong. You quit working when you expected to get paid and found out they aren't going to pay you. No belief required.

Expecting that something will happen is not the same as believing that it will happen.

If you don't believe your house will be where you left it, you won't find your way home.

Again, expectation is not the same as belief. You might end up going home to discover that your home was blown away by a tornado. Then what good was your "belief" that your home would still be there?:

Belief is useless. Expectations is far more reasonable.

If you don't believe kindness is better than cruelty, you'll be unlovable and unloved.

I'm a loving person by nature. My nature has nothing to do with believing that kindness is better than cruelty. In the very concepts of kindness and cruelty are a matter of opinion. Other people do not necessarily agree with my opinions of what constitutes kindness and cruelty.

If you don't belief food will fix your hunger, you'll die.

And so on.

Expectation is not belief. You are desperately trying to conflate concepts for the purpose of winning a semantic argument. So sad.

Also what about knowledge?

What about it?

Is knowledge a belief?

Is knowledge a belief?

No. But you believe what you know. If you know that 3 is bigger than 2, then you also believe it.

Once more you are trying to semantically force "beliefs" onto everyone. For what purpose? To support the theists underhanded attempts at trying to claim that scientific knowledge is no different from their theistic beliefs?

Can you show me a dictionary that defines knowledge as belief?

That would be weird. Are you saying that you don't know the difference?

You're the one who seems to think that knowledge equates to being no different from theistic beliefs.

I feel like I'm being baited, but I don't see the point of this line of questioning.

The point is that all you are doing is helping to support underhanded theistic arguments that having knowledge is no different from having theistic beliefs.

The least you can do is acknowledge that theists are not using the term "beliefs" in the same way that you would like to use the term.

Having knowledge, and expectations based on knowledge does NOT equate to having beliefs. There's no need to equate those unless you are a theist who want to claim that knowledge and belief are the same thing.

[Divine Insight]

.

If you don't believe you'll get paid for work, you'll quit working.

If you don't believe your house will be where you left it, you won't find your way home.

If you believe that the trash will be picked up on schedule that is the same as believing in 'God'. Belief is all the same thing. Right?

Apparently the trash pickup is more reliable than answers to prayers. At least, the trash pickup can be verified to have occurred.

Perfect example! We may very well belief that the trash will be picked up, only to discover that on some days it's not picked up. Therefore are "belief" was proven to be wrong.

wiploc, Should we then continue to "believe" that the trash will always be picked up when it was scheduled to be picked up? Or should we admit that believing that the trash will always be picked up is a useless thing to do.

We can put the trash out EXPECTING it to be picked up. But believing that it will be picked up is ridiculous.

Expectation is not the same as belief.

[Divine Insight]

We have a very strong belief the Earth will continue to rotate and the sun will appear to rise tomorrow..

Why call that a belief?

It's simply an expectation. Any number of things could actually cause this event to never happen.

A large asteroid could hit the earth causing it to stop rotating and even possibly fall into the sun.

The sun could hiccup and envelope the earth instantly vaporizing it. Not likely? Sure. Impossible? No.

A black hole could be headed toward our solar system and disrupt the paths and rotations of all the planets and the sun.

Having a "belief" that everything will continue on the way it has been years is both unneeded and uncalled for.

Why not just say that we expect that things will keep on going the way they have been going for years.

No need to have beliefs. We can simply expect that things will continue on normally. Believing it's going to happen is simply not needed. Nor would belief matter if things should happen to diverge from what we expect.