OJB has posted a comment on my article about atheism saying:map editor civilization III
Every atheist I know (including myself) would subscribe to definition 1, which is not believing in a god as opposed to a definitive belief that there is no god. Since there is no good, objective evidence for a god this is just common sense.map editor civilization III
Therefore the original contention is a straw man.
To begin with, I completely disagree with his assertion that there is no good, objective evidence for a god. I have previously posted simplified versions of the cosmological and moral arguments for the existence of God, and hope to post further on this in the near future. I think the evidence for God is actually quite compelling.map editor civilization III
But anyway, that's not what I'm talking about today. Instead I want to focus on OJB's differentiation between "a lack of belief in the existence of God", and the "belief that there is no God". To be honest, I struggle to find much difference between these views unless I make the first equivalent to agnosticism. Otherwise, we end up with OJB having the following views:map editor civilization III
1) A lack of belief in the existence of God.
2) No view of whether or not there is a God.
3) Does not claim to not know if there is a God (or else he would be an agnostic rather than an atheist).map editor civilization III
Views (2) and (3) seem to be contradictory, and so I suspect that OJB is really an agnostic rather than an atheist. An atheist believes that there is no God. An agnostic does not know if there is a God, and so obviously is lacking belief in God's existence, yet at the same time does not categorically deny that there is a God.map editor civilization III
Therefore I do not think that my original argument is a strawman. There are many people who absolutely deny the existence of a God, including philosophers Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx (and most communist countries), and Friedrich Nietzsche. My article on atheism was intended to counter this view - not agnosticism in general. We'll get to that some other time.map editor civilization III
Comments
I think you will find atheists come in two categories, "strong" and "weak".map editor civilization III
Strong atheists are the more stupid of the two; as they say that there definitely is no God. (The only way one could be sure that this was true, is if one had complete knowledge of everything that was knowable in the universe).map editor civilization III
You will find the definitions explained in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_and_strong_atheismmap editor civilization III