Polemics

Is the definition of atheism “a lack of belief in God”?

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

First, let’s see check with the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God.

Stanford University is one of the top 5 universities in the United States, so that’s a solid definition. To be an atheist is to be a person who makes the claim that, as a matter of FACT, there is no intelligent agent who created the universe. Atheists think that there is no God, and theists think that there is a God. Both claims are objective claims about the way the world is out there, and so both sides must furnish forth arguments and evidence as to how they are able to know what they are each claiming.

Philosopher William Lane Craig has some thoughts on atheism, atheists and lacking belief in God in this reply to a questioner.

Question:

In my discussions with atheists, they  are using the term that they “lack belief in God”. They claim that this is different from not believing in God or from saying that God does not exist. I’m not sure how to respond to this. It seems to me that its a silly word-play and is logically the same as saying that you do not believe in God.
What would be a good response to this?
Thank you for your time,

Steven

And here is Dr. Craig’s full response:

Your atheist friends are right that there is an important logical difference between believing that there is no God and not believing that there is a God.  Compare my saying, “I believe that there is no gold on Mars” with my saying “I do not believe that there is gold on Mars.”   If I have no opinion on the matter, then I do not believe that there is gold on Mars, and I do not believe that there is no gold on Mars.  There’s a difference between saying, “I do not believe (p)” and “I believe (not-p).”   Logically where you place the negation makes a world of difference.

But where your atheist friends err is in claiming that atheism involves only not believing that there is a God rather than believing that there is no God.

There’s a history behind this.  Certain atheists in the mid-twentieth century were promoting the so-called “presumption of atheism.” At face value, this would appear to be the claim that in the absence of evidence for the existence of God, we should presume that God does not exist.  Atheism is a sort of default position, and the theist bears a special burden of proof with regard to his belief that God exists.

So understood, such an alleged presumption is clearly mistaken.  For the assertion that “There is no God” is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that “There is a God.”  Therefore, the former assertion requires justification just as the latter does.  It is the agnostic who makes no knowledge claim at all with respect to God’s existence.  He confesses that he doesn’t know whether there is a God or whether there is no God.

But when you look more closely at how protagonists of the presumption of atheism used the term “atheist,” you discover that they were defining the word in a non-standard way, synonymous with “non-theist.”  So understood the term would encompass agnostics and traditional atheists, along with those who think the question meaningless (verificationists).  As Antony Flew confesses,

the word ‘atheist’ has in the present context to be construed in an unusual way.  Nowadays it is normally taken to mean someone who explicitly denies the existence . . . of God . . . But here it has to be understood not positively but negatively, with the originally Greek prefix ‘a-’ being read in this same way in ‘atheist’ as it customarily is in . . . words as ‘amoral’ . . . . In this interpretation an atheist becomes not someone who positively asserts the non-existence of God, but someone who is simply not a theist. (A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro [Oxford:  Blackwell, 1997], s.v. “The Presumption of Atheism,” by Antony Flew)

Such a re-definition of the word “atheist” trivializes the claim of the presumption of atheism, for on this definition, atheism ceases to be a view.  It is merely a psychological state which is shared by people who hold various views or no view at all.  On this re-definition, even babies, who hold no opinion at all on the matter, count as atheists!  In fact, our cat Muff counts as an atheist on this definition, since she has (to my knowledge) no belief in God.

One would still require justification in order to know either that God exists or that He does not exist, which is the question we’re really interested in.

So why, you might wonder, would atheists be anxious to so trivialize their position?  Here I agree with you that a deceptive game is being played by many atheists.  If atheism is taken to be a view, namely the view that there is no God, then atheists must shoulder their share of the burden of proof to support this view.  But many atheists admit freely that they cannot sustain such a burden of proof.  So they try to shirk their epistemic responsibility by re-defining atheism so that it is no longer a view but just a psychological condition which as such makes no assertions.  They are really closet agnostics who want to claim the mantle of atheism without shouldering its responsibilities.

This is disingenuous and still leaves us asking, “So is there a God or not?”

So there you have it. We are interested in what both sides know and what reasons and evidence they have to justify their claim to know. We are interested in talking to people who make claims about objective reality, not about themselves, and who then go on to give reasons and evidence to support their claims about objective reality. There are atheists out there that do make an objective claim that God does not exist, and then support that claim with arguments and evidence. Those are good atheists, and we should engage in rational conversations with them. But clearly there are some atheists who are not like that. How should we deal with these “subjective atheists”?

Dealing with subjective atheists

How should theists respond to people who just want to talk about their psychological state? Well, my advice is to avoid them. They are approaching religion irrationally and non-cognitively – like the person who enters a physics class and says “I lack a belief in the gravitational force!”.  When you engage in serious discussions with people about God’s existence, you only care about what people know and what they can show to be true. We don’t care about a person’s psychology.

Dealing with persistent subjective atheists

What happens when you explain all of that to a subjective atheist who continues to insist that you listen to them repeat over and over “I lack a belief in God, I lack a belief in God”? What if you tell them to make the claim that God does not exist, and then support it with arguments and evidence, but instead they keep leaving comments on your blog telling you again and again about their subjective state of mind: “I lack a belief in cupcakes! I lack a belief in icebergs!” What if they keep e-mailing you and threatening to expose you on Twitter for refusing to listen to them, or denounce you via skywriting: “Wintery Knight won’t listen to me! I lack a belief in crickets!”. I think at this point you have to give up and stop talking to such a person.

And that’s why I moderate and filter comments on this blog. There are uneducated people out there with access to the Internet who want attention, but I am not obligated to give it to them. And neither are you. We are not obligated to listen to abusive people who don’t know what they are talking about. I do post comments from objective atheists who make factual claims about the objective world, and who support those claims with arguments and evidence. I am not obligated to post comments from people who refuse to make objective claims or who refuse to support objective claims with arguments and evidence. And I’m not obligated to engage in discussions with them, either.

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Polemics

Thomas Sowell: does affirmative action help minorities to get ahead?

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Economist Thomas Sowell
Economist Thomas Sowell – the best economist in the world

My favorite economist, Thomas Sowell has an article in Investors Business Daily that explains what affirmative action really does to minorities.

Excerpt:

Affirmative action is supposed to benefit black and other minority students admitted with lower academic qualifications than some white students who are rejected.

[…]Despite much media spin, the issue is not whether blacks in general should be admitted to higher-ranked or lower-ranked institutions.

The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white.

Much research over the years has confirmed… that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient can be making them worse off instead of better off.

I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago when I was teaching at Cornell University and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.

These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.

The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.

That was a “favor” reserved for black students. This “favor” turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.

None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious problems trying to keep up at MIT, where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.

Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from MIT, and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.

There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.

[…]Mismatching students with educational institutions is a formula for needless failures.

The book “Mismatch” by Sander and Taylor is a first-rate study of the hard facts. It shows, for example, that the academic performances of black and Hispanic students rose substantially after affirmative action admissions policies were banned in the University of California system.

Instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA, these minority students were now graduating from other UC campuses. They were graduating at a higher rate, with higher grades, and now more often in challenging fields like math, science and technology.

[…]Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the left as much as their symbolic presence on a campus?

Now, you might ask yourself on what basis Sowell makes all these assertions, so here are a few of his academic publications about affirmative action, which are state-of-the-art:

Now, I was recently talking to a friend who has empirically false views on a number of topics. He is opposed to capital punishment, opposed to gun ownership, supports affirmative action, and so on. When I ask him why he believes these things, he doesn’t point to any evidence. I offered to give him studies showing that capital punishment has a deterrent effect on crime, that concealed carry laws reduce violent crime rates, that affirmative action laws harm minorities, etc.

If we really want to help minorities, we have to do what makes sense according the evidence. We have to aim to do good, not just feel good.

News

Was Barack Obama a successful President? What were his greatest accomplishments?

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Labor Force Participation 2015
Labor Force Participation 2015
Congressional Budget Office: Debt to GDP ratio
Congressional Budget Office: Federal Debt Held by Public to GDP ratio

(Source: Congressional Budget Office)

This National Review article is a summary of some of the things that we’ve been talking about on the blog over the past year. It’s worth contrasting his confident words with the actual results he’s achieved.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Begin with the continued rise of ISIS and an ISIS-inspired attack on American soil in San Bernardino.

Obama’s widely-panned Sunday evening speech on combating ISIS is fresh in our minds; he’s haunted by the fact that the day of the attack, in an interview with CBS News, he declared, “Our homeland has never been more protected by more effective intelligence and law-enforcement professionals at every level than they are now.” In the weeks between the Paris attack and San Bernardino, Obama told the public there was no known “specific and credible threat” to the U.S. — a point that in retrospect only emphasized how blindsided authorities were by the San Bernardino attack.

[…]It’s easy to forget that in mid November, after the Paris attacks, numerous congressional Democrats started publicly expressing doubts and frustration with the administration’s approach to ISIS. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told reporters that the Obama administration ignored the rise of ISIS in 2012 because it contradicted the narrative of the president’s reelection campaign. More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Commandfiled formal complaints that their reports on ISIS and al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials.Elsewhere in the war on terror, a prisoner released from Guantanamo Bay in 2012 became one of the leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Bowe Bergdahl, the Army soldier that Obama traded for five high-value Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, was charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, did an interview where he compared himself to fictional heroic spy Jason Bourne.

It was a rough year for American national security. In addition to lingering questions about the security of classified and sensitive information on Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail server, the Office of Personnel Management revealed in June that it suffered two apparently separate breaches of its computer system, meaning the sensitive information of about 21.5 million current and former federal workers is now in the hands of foreign hackers. (The Washington Post reported that the breach forced the CIA to withdraw personnel from China, but Director of National Intelligence James Clapper disputed the report, without going into detail.)

[…]The new Republican-controlled Senate and House failed to repeal Obamacare, but the outlook for the president’s signature domestic legislation grew considerably murkier in 2015. Twelve of the 23 health-insurance co-ops largely funded through Obamacare by federal loans failed; as a result roughly 700,000 Americans were told they needed to get a new insurance plan. In November, UnitedHealth Group, the biggest U.S. health-insurance company, said it had suffered major losses on policies sold on the Obamacare exchanges and would consider withdrawing from them.

The New York Times found that in many states, more than half the plans offered for sale through HealthCare.gov have a deductible of $3,000 or more — leaving many purchasers to conclude they can’t actually afford to go to the doctor despite paying for insurance.

[…]Defenders of the president will be quick to point to the unemployment rate at 5 percent, contending he’s presiding over a roaring economy. This year Democrat Bernie Sanders received some attention for echoing a point made by Republicans during the Obama era: The official unemployment rate excludes those working part time who want full-time work, and those who have stopped searching but if offered a job would take it. Sanders contended the “real” unemployment rate is higher than 10 percent; he pointed out that youth unemployment is particularly high. Wages remain mostly flat; when President Obama took office in January 2009, the average weekly earnings of rank-and-file workers in the private sector was $296.88. The preliminary figure for October 2015 is $306.80 — a 3 percent increase over seven years.

Mollie Hemingway has an article on Obama’s failures up at The Federalist.

Here’s a snip:

Another claim made repeatedly by the Obama administration was that people were stupid idiots to be worried about terrorists exploiting entry pathways to the country on account of how good our vetting is. When the Republicans in Congress worked on a bill to improve the process of vetting refugees from Syria, the White House issued yet another — yet another! — veto threat. The statement began:

The Administration’s highest priority is to ensure the safety and security of the American people. That is why refugees of all nationalities, including Syrians and Iraqis, considered for admission to the United States undergo the most rigorous and thorough security screening of anyone admitted into the United States…. The current screening process involves multiple Federal intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), State, and Defense, all aimed at ensuring that those admitted do not pose a threat to our country.

[I]f poor, vulnerable refugees are vetted this much, surely we must be vetting regular immigrants even more, right? Bad news. One of the San Bernardino murderers came into the country on a fiancé visa. Her tough application included questions such as, and I’m not joking:

  • “Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?”
  • “Have you ever ordered, incited, committed, assisted or otherwise participated in genocide?”
  • “Have you ever committed, ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in torture?”

[…]The New York Times further reports that the murderer was openly calling for violence against the U.S., but we totally missed it because of how bad our vetting is:

WASHINGTON — Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad. She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it… Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.

ABC News also reported that a “Secret US Policy Blocks Agents From Looking at Social Media of Visa Applicants, Former Official Says.”

[Obama] issued a veto threat after claiming we couldn’t do any better at screening people. Turns out we’re asking them to volunteer information about how bad they are and respecting the “privacy” of their public comments calling for violent jihad.

Andrew C. McCarthy also has a similar post up at Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

In his reluctant Dec. 6 Oval Office Address, Obama said things like: “Since the day I took this office, I’ve authorized U.S. forces to take out terrorists abroad precisely because I know how real the danger is.”

Inquiring minds wonder to what effect? How did terrorism’s leadership, which he said was “decimated” in 2012, reconstitute itself so effectively? And why is Obama intellectually incapable of calling Islamic extremists what they are?

He talks of increasing allied air assaults. But we’re 17 months into the assaults. Why does it take new terrorist attacks to ramp up what he said we were already doing? And why do 75% of the sorties return without dropping their ordnance? (Hint: Obama’s strict rules of engagement prohibit collateral casualties and require advance leaflet drop warnings.)

In his weekly remarks Saturday Obama said “Our airstrikes are hitting ISIL harder than ever.” Which wouldn’t take much.

He also stated, accurately, that Special Ops forces are in action, but neglected to mention they total about 250 against an ISIS army estimated at 40,000.

[…]Then, there’s the Iran nuclear deal. You may recall, although you’re not supposed to, the interminable negotiations were touted as preventing the world’s largest national exporter of terrorism from developing nuclear weapons. We now know Iran hasn’t even signed the agreement.

And Iran has violated existing U.N. resolutions in recent weeks by testing not once, but twice, ICBMs capable of carrying nuke warheads. The second test came as the U.N. was still discussing the first violation.

So why is it that so many Americans voted for such a miserable failure?

Here is an illustration. Suppose you have someone who comes from a cultural background that is incompatible with American values. Her culture is much less successful than American culture, because their beliefs are all false. But she is loyal to her failed culture, and cannot bring herself to blame her own people for their failures.

Well, she will have to avoid all evidence that American policies work, such as the evidence from red states succeeding while blue states flounder. She refuses to read anything (e.g. – economics textbook, civics book, American history) that would overturn her misplaced loyalty to the failed values and policies or her community. She only listens to news sources that confirm her desire to blame America for her misfortunes and the misfortunes of the people from her culture.

Who will she vote for when it’s election time? She will vote for someone who blames America for the failures of her community, too. Regardless of whether he is competent to be President or not. The desire to have someone who blames America for the failures of her own culture is so strong that she will not care if she votes for a President who fails horribly at everything he tries.

And that is why a buffoon like Obama can be elected and re-elected as President in America, even though he does such a poor job.  There was no reason to believe that Obama could succeed in any of the things he talked about in his speeches. He had no demonstrated ability in any of the areas he campaigned on – no achievements whatsoever. The people who voted for him had no evidence that he was capable or competent.

Instead, they voted for him because it made them feel good about themselves, despite their failures. He blamed others for their failures, and they liked that. They did not want to take responsibility and adopt values and policies that worked – the true values and policies that made America great. They wanted to feel superior to those detestable Christians and those evil patriotic conservatives.