Poll: Atheist, Deist, Theist?
Religion doesn't get as rabidly attacked here as on reddit and digg, in fact the opposite seems true. So, I'm curious what the demographics are here. FWIW, I'm in the theist (Christian) camp.
edit: Not to mention such discussion is actually off-topic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469620
Now the article was admittedly of low quality compared to the discussion, so maybe that is why it was dead-ed. Then again, maybe pg just fears that allowing religious topics will eventually erode the overall quality of Hacker News. Dead-ing topics is certainly his prerogative. However, I would prefer that he make such policies explicit.
As something that is part of the life of most people on earth, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand religion if we also want to understand our customers, bosses, relatives, and leaders. It seems to me that an intelligent study of religion should be undertaken by any intellectually curious human.
So being curious, I decided to take the risk.
So far seems ok. If not, just flag it, and some mod will kill the thing.
It's interesting to me to see how the influx of newbies will deal with the topic. It's a sociological/social networking question, which makes it interesting for hackers. Will the new group play by the older group's rules? Will the newcomers complain more about it "not being HN" than the old farts? Will the newbies pull the oldies out into discussion, or the other way around? Will folks who post regular science-vs-church articles participate here or pass?
But I can certainly agree that it can get out of control. What can I say? I like danger in small doses. This afternoon is kinda slow anyway.
Polls like this one attract new people and change the community.
Any one article will not profoundly change HN, but a steady stream will over time do just that.
And then HN will not be interesting any more.
The discussion here just tends to be less absolute about things and considers more viewpoints. Nuanced thought is more highly regarded and rewarded (in terms of voting) and people who post with comments that one would never say to another person in real life tend to get down-voted. So, it stays more cordial. I doubt that the demographics on religion are that much different, but I guess we'll see if more people vote. I think it's that it's a smaller community, we recognize people's usernames more often, and you don't have to shout to be heard.
(The antithesis to this attitude is, one word, "lifehacker".)
I feel so strongly that this doesn't belong on HN, I've done something I vary rarely do. Cast a downvote. Not just one either, but I've downvoted every comment here discussing religion, regardless of their stance. I haven't downvoted those discussing the relevance of this thread on HN though.
I've met many agnostics who weren't aware that there are different types of atheists, including many who don't know one way or another but lean toward disbelief, which is very close to agnosticism.
The typical misunderstanding of atheism from self-described agnostics is that atheists claim to be certain that there is no God. Some atheists do that, but that's not the only kind of atheism.
Another problem with agnosticism is agnostics seem to believe that one cannot assign any probability without perfect knowledge. Yet you do it every minute of every day, in ever decision you make. We live by probabilities and beliefs (and disbeliefs). I don't see why certain concepts in life should be off limits for assignment of probabilities.
You know, it infuriates me when my theist mother tells my atheist self that I'm probably a theist without realizing it. I won't take any of that "If you're a X, you're probably just a Y without realizing it" nonsense.
Well, I do believe there is no god. And theists define themselves as not believing in the absence of a god. I mean, I think your linguistic objections are pretty disingenious.
"Atheism isn't a belief in something being true, it's a belief in other people being wrong."
I believe it is true that there is no god. And I'm pretty sure theists have a belief that me and the other atheists (and those of religions other than theirs) are wrong.
edit: Didn't capitalize "god" intentionally.
I'm not saying that atheism doesn't exist. I'm saying that it's not the same as agnosticism. Agnostic isn't defined in terms of being anti-theist. It just doesn't really believe in the validity of the question.
It's like the classical, "Are you still beating your wife?" An agnostic doesn't think that the question is framed in an answerable way.
Atheism as a term seems to be more popular in the (much more religious than the rest of the west) US where it is perhaps a minority defining itself in terms of the majority. In places where being religious is the exception, rather than the rule, it seems less sensical for those who are not religious to define themselves in terms of not holding a belief that the minority hold.
As for the negations, do you believe that atheism would have a meaning if there were no theism? Or that there's any specific substance to the term atheism, other than (usually actively) rejecting the beliefs of theism?
When this poll was first posted, I worried it would. Then a bit later I saw the number of comments and knew that it had.
What a tar-baby the topic of religion is. A forum just can't seem to touch it any point without dragging in the whole thing.
I think this is a step towards HN being able to handle the topic maturely. Such a process is probably best done by not posting inflammatory articles. I tried to not make the poll inflammatory, though I forgot the agnostic option.
People change, and people are different. Grouping the understanding of life of Einstein or Gates in the same category as every 15-year old who just rejected religion is a limitation I strongly hope we'll overcome in the coming years.
(I don't get why you've been downmodded to -1, I have just +1'd you)
As another poster wrote, often times agnostics approach the question as one of knowledge, whereas most theists as well as "weak" atheists see it as a question of belief. We all (well, almost all) believe all sorts of things that we do not truly know.
I was barked at by numerous dogs. http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+barked+%22numerous+d...
http://kirtimukha.com/Krishnaswamy/Einstein/on_atheism.htm
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. [...]
I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.
If the answer is either yes or no, and you say "maybe", you say "no", substantially.
Why? Because every "no" is simply a refuted "yes" (philosophically speaking).
Agnostics are mathematicians. Or at lest very close to being mathematicians.
There's the old joke of a biologist, a physicist and a mathematician on a train in Scotland.
They see a black sheep and the biologist says: Hey Scotland is full of black sheep!
The Physicist responds with we have evidence of one black sheep in Scotland.
And the mathematician concludes, there exists at least one sheep, at least one of whose sides is black, in Scotland.
So when agnostics say you can't disprove anything, we mean it. We mean it in the literal mathematical sense of negatives not being provable.
Oh but you don't live your life according to such extreme ideological purity, if somethings darn close to a duck you call it a duck.
That's great if it works for you, but my mind is much stricter then that.
It is too small for our telescopes, so we have absolutely no evidence for a teapot orbiting the sun.
You don't believe in that teapot, do you? That's silly.
But Dawkins is a biologist, and I'm a computer scientist, I don't believe in the teapot, but I also don't KNOW it's not there.
And that has nothing to do with shyness.
Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
What I mean is, how can you claim to know anything if you allow the possibility of supernatural things interfering with your experiments?
You simply confirm that if 3 persons of human species are exposed to the same reality (yes, reality, because the impressions may be different, but the reality is well defined and precisely one):
So, if 3 persons of the same species are all concluding more or less different things, then you have the definite answer that none of them is seeing absolutely everything, that is: the whole reality:
So: you can't be God, because:
If you were God, you would know it (together with the exact reality of all things...)
I don't agree with the "refuted yes" idea. In logic, "no" is not necessary equal to "not yes". For example, "not black" could be "white", but also "green". "God" does not have a well defined enough definition: it's very likely that God is not a bearded man on a cloud, but questions like whether omnipotence or omnipresence exist (and their correlations) are a whole new can of philosophical worms :)
And this is exactly the definition of "God".
Also, would you please stop telling people what they believe? I don't think I'm the only person here who finds it to be rude. You can civilly argue a point without telling people that they're not really agnostics or whatever.
Also known as negation: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/profile.html#tendency_t...
Profile of a rapist [...]
3) Negating behavior or comments - [...] Does he try to tell you what you are feeling or thinking? Or worse, tell you what you are not? Comments like "you don’t really mean that" are serious indicators of someone trying to negate you. A person who negates others is trying to take away the other person’s thoughts, feelings and needs and attempting to project his wants onto that person.
You can't act against "logic" without hurting yourself. If you are a hacker (like me), you never ever can act against logic, otherwise your program won't work (and exactly the same happens with life itself).
Most realists believe in only one observable universe. Solipsists just go one universe farther.
Most baseball fanatics pull for only one team. People who hate baseball just go one team farther.
I wonder if a polytheist in anciant Greece which believed in one less god (e.g. didn't belive in Cronos, but did believe in the rest of the pantheon) would be concidered an atheist by his contemporaries?
I find it far simpler that some entity has created our existence as it is, rather than our existence merely having spawned from a nothingness for no reason and by no creator.
I also know that this also pulls in the argument of "if our universe was created by an entity, then who or what created that entity?" To that I simply say point to my initial belief that there is likely a proper explanation for both the entity and our existence, but that it is beyond our capability to comprehend or reason about it.
Just by everything I've ever learned about reason and the scientific method, and everything I've ever read, while I can completely understand why people would _want_ to believe, it's completely mystifying as to why the vast majority of the world's population (well, in the free, information-rich societies) could make themselves believe. It just doesn't make sense to me, given all evidence is so clearly, hugely against it. (Which, I guess, is kind of the point -- which also doesn't make any sense.)
I went to church on Christmas to hear some carols, and I was struck by the fact that I was actually surrounded by people from different age groups and with different life experience from myself. The younger folk helped out the old when they got sick, and the older folk helped the people with little children when they needed a sitter. This kind of social cohesion doesn't exist in secular society, where I spend 99% of my time surrounded by people within a five-year age interval. If you want to explain the frequency of religious belief, you would be wise to look more towards the social functions that it fulfills, and less at its intellectual arguments.
There was an interesting post on here the other day, which was dead-ed, about this very topic. See here:
http://commentlog.org/bid/4527/Myth-and-Cult-How-atheists-mi...
You can't have evidence against something that does not exist. That's like saying all the evidence is against there being a real-live cartoon Donald Duck. What we can say is that there is a lack of evidence for something. We can further say that unless there is evidence for something we don't see any point in believing in it. But you can't disprove a negative. There is no evidence against God. We simply have no scientific way to talk about God existing. There is a lack of proof. Different animal.
Similarly: If someone believes in a god who regularly answers prayers, works miracles, etc., then a shortage of miracles and surprisingly answered prayers is evidence against the existence of that person's god. If someone else believes in a god whose primary objective is to avoid notice, it's hard to see how anything could be evidence for or against its existence. (And, by the same token, it's hard to see why anyone would care much whether it exists or not. A god whose existence we can't get evidence about is ipso facto one that makes little difference to how the world is.)
... Except that it's pretty plausible that some sort of formalized Ockham's Razor works, where your initial evaluation of how likely something is looks more or less like 2^-(length of shortest complete description). In that case, a universe with a maximally-self-hiding god is much less likely than a universe without one.
Anyway, most theists believe in gods that are (perhaps intermittently) active in the world: answering prayer, healing sick people, raising people from the dead, etc. There's no reason why there shouldn't be evidence for or against the existence of such a god. (I think the evidence is heavily against; others disagree.)
That's assuming a closed system open to inspection.
The universe is neither of those. I can say what is or isn't in the room because I have total control over and full freedom to inspect the room to the level of detail required to find elephants. Your example simply doesn't translate.
You pivot then into the "far away God is the same as missing God" argument. That's another can of worms (One which I did not go into)
What I find humorous is that every 80 years or so we see a resurgence in either atheism or deism. Each time the generation feels like it's way smarter than the one before it. Only the arguments are all the same as they were three iterations ago -- or three thousand years ago for that matter.
The existence and nature of a God, if there is one/them/it, isn't as easy as looking for elephants. But that's what makes the conversation fun -- as long as everyone acts in a civil manner.
For what it's worth, though, I think the argument does translate -- for some but not all notions of God. Specifically, as I said before, if you adopt a notion of God that involves not-impossibly-vague claims about how he interacts with the world we can observe, and if those claims are something other than "he basically doesn't", then it is possible for there to be evidence for or against the existence of such a God.
This is true even without "total control over and full freedom to inspect" the universe. (Just as the claim "Some star within 100 light years of us went supernova between 100 and 200 years ago" is one we can have evidence for or against even without total control of and full freedom to inspect everything within 100 light years of us.)
<i>You pivot then ...</i>: What I'm saying is not "far away God is the same as missing God" but "professedly inactive, or indiscernibly active, god is hard to distinguish from no god". It seems to me that there is a difference.
<i>What I find humorous is ...</i>: You're welcome to find humour wherever you please, but for what it's worth I don't think I'm way smarter than people in the generation before mine, and I don't think skeptics generally think they are. (I expect skeptics generally think they're smarter than average people in the previous generation, but no more than they think they're smarter than average people in the present generation. Whether they are is a separate debate.)
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
concerning two populations of scientists in the US, one supposedly representative of all US scientists and one supposedly representative of "leading" ones.
Ignoring the (very severe) issues of sample bias here, it seems that HN contributors are intermediate in skepticism between Larson&Witham's two populations.
At 14 I slowly converted to Christianity and at about 15 I would probably have called myself an Anglican. This, however, went down hill extremely quickly. I remember my youth group got a talk from a parishioner who said we shouldn't listen to sinful music like 'Marilyn Manson' or other rock and roll. Me and a few friends went to our group leader after the guy left and said 'if you bring someone here preaching that bullshit again we're gone', I can't exactly remember how many weeks went past before I never went back.
After leaving, I quickly began realising that a lot of what I was being taught was complete BS, that they were trying to get me to question science. Well I'm a sci-fi writer, that shit doesn't stick with me. I quickly learnt that all the religious phenomena are merely a form of hypnosis.
Today I believe nothing. I am not an atheist, I see it as another bullshit religion just with a non-existent god at the top, because all I hear are people like Richard Dawkins preaching in the belief that there isn't a god... but any form of belief in the absence of evidence (the existence and thus non-existence of god is fundamentally unprovable) is FAITH, they have faith there isn't a god. I mean fundamentally Christians believe in the existence of a hypothetical entity, where as Atheists like Dawkins believe in the non-existence of a hypothetical entity. It's the opposite side of the same coin, where as what I believe most atheists really believe is that the 'coin' doesn't exist.
And over the long term, following the Summary of the Law that Jesus stressed -- which can be recast as, 1) face the facts, and 2) seek the best for others as you do for yourself -- appears to be adaptive behavior for individuals and cultures.
The Summary of the Law is by no means uniquely Christian, incidentally; it's Jewish (hey, Jesus was nothing if not a good Jew), and also finds expression in other faiths.
Shameless self-promotion: I blog about topics like this at http://www.questioningchristian.org.
Einstein nailed it by stating the following: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." AND "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
As far a flaming goes, this subject is all about beliefs, as we don't truly know how the universe ticks. No point trying to "win".
re: comments about whether HN is mature to handle religion topics - I think curiosity and humility are key. I feel that the ability to throw away pre-defined beliefs is fundamental in order to learn about other perspectives and ultimately allow an intelligent discussion about religion to take place.
(not trying to debate, just wondering if people really use that term and I somehow haven't heard it)
I remember reading a section in the bible when I was younger, when I was into all the Christian stuff, that described how god knows how many feathers are on a bird and that 'god knows how many hairs are on your unborn childs head and that he has a plan for everyone before they're even born'. I believe this line is what Deist Christians believe, that there was a big bang but that fundamentally everything had already been arranged to happen long before the Earth had even formed.
I suppose when I was Christian I was probably a deist. I couldn't believe that some magical power made the red seas part, and either it never happened or god arranged a freak weather phenomena that could. I mean to create Earth how it is he obviously must have planned a Mars sized object crashing into primitive Earth to form the Moon. So at the time I took the bible on its word and I used the rational notion that a freak tidal behavior combined with a freak weather phenomena and possibly numerous other effects could have caused it, but god never lifted a finger to alter things.
The reason I never liked Intelligent Design and the reason I found it insulting when I was Christian was that God is supposed to be a supreme being, in fact everything he does including kids getting hit by buses is supposed to have a purpose... so why the fuck is he so incompetent he can't arrange for evolution to happen how he wanted it to? I mean Intelligent Design basically preaches God is an incompetent hack who can't do anything right because he kept having to nudge things to get it right. I mean imagine if Da Vinci never died, and he'd spent every year since he's did all his paintings touching them up and changing them slightly, he wouldn't be famous he'd be described as the worlds most incredible hack because he never did anything right. The ID God hasn't managed to get a single thing right in like 4 billion years! I found it fundamentally insulting.
So far HN has been relatively free of OS flamewars. Hopefully we can steer clear of the other two (politics and religion) as well.
(Or is this another one of those "I wonder what this does to my karma, can it be used to hack the system?" posts?)
Are you sure there is no god at all, or do you just doubt?
Myself, I suspect the universe itself is "god", so to speak. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
If you asked me, "Do you think a god exists?", I would say "no", and you would call me an atheist. If you asked, "Do you think a god could exist?", I would say, "yes", and you would call me an agnostic.
On the other hand, if you asked me "What term most closely describes your views?", I would say "secular humanist" and emphasize the humanist part. Ultimately, the question of the existence or non-existence of a god doesn't enter my life very often and that's the way I like it.
(As an aside, the term for the beliefs you describe is pantheist)
For example, the Platonic idea of The Good is a pretty abstract philosophical concept which does not exist in the physical world - rather the physical world is some kind of shadow or reflection of this Good. You can't really prove or disprove the "existence" of this interpretation of reality, although some would say you can apply occams razor to it. Plato would argue that you cannot not belive in this, if you just consider the question reationally.
On the other hand, the biblical God Yahweh is a beeing with a physical shape and with intentions and emotions, which walk around in the physical world in historical times and interact with people (and killing them left and right!). The existence of this beeing could easily be proved if you meet him, but cannot strictly speaking be disproved as long as he remains in hiding. But the evidence can be weighed the same way we weigh evidence for the existence of mammuths or unicorns.
The christian notion of God has historically been kind of a mixture of these two ideas (and to a lesser degree many other). Due to this complexity of the concept "God", it is not even clear what it means to believe or don't believe in God.
If you didn't create yourself (and you didn't, otherwise you would know/remember/etc.), and (consequently) some other one did, how do you call it?
Natural selection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
If you believe god created you, what name do call that god by? Jesus? Allah? Yahweh? Buddha? Zeus?
Theists, talk amongst yourself. If you ever settle on one name for god, then maybe we atheists will start taking you more seriously.
Logically, if you didn't create yourself:
1) Maybe a god created you. 2) Maybe something else created you. 3) Maybe you weren't created at all. (Ex: Maybe the matter and energy in the universe have existed forever.)
As an atheist, I'm humble enough to admit I can't pick #1, #2, or #3 conclusively.
But, as I have said before, I agree with you in that I don't feel the real truth of the matter can be proven externally. I choose to believe in God, but I have no 'proof' scientifically speaking.
"God" is defined this way: the only one not caused by anything else.
So, if God is the only one not caused by anything, but simply cause of Himself, nobody can reach God, if He doesn't allow to be reached.
So, the only possibility for us to know something about God is that He deliberately decided to communicate Himself to us.
From this premises, it's clear that there can only be one real Religion, and that all the other ones are simply negations of some parts of the real one...
The religion and "meta" discussions of late have polluted the /newcomments link to the point where it is almost useless. The lame thing is that even if the post is marked dead, you still get the inane discussion from the bozos who don't know or don't care that the original post is dead.
My suggestions for technical improvements are removing comments on dead posts from newcomments and raising the karma for posting topics about religion to 10000+.
And, there is informative contribution, like this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=470158&whence=%69%7...
As for your other point, I don't know if disallowing certain topics is the solution. I see value in easing the community into discussing controversial topics without flamewars. They draw flamewars because people are so interested in the issues, so everyone gains if we can get past the flamewar stage.
For example, I am considering broaching ID, because no one really gets what its about, or its significance. I want to clearly demarcate it from creationism, and also explain the theory as clearly as possible. If you want, I can send you my blog post link once its written, so's you can give thumbs up/down.