Sorry, I need to interrupt myself for a moment.
I have recently encountered a large set of articles from people telling the world what an atheist is. What they say is so absurd that it is embarrassing.
An example of what I am referring to can be found at the Daily Kos.
The posting begins with an equivocation. It begins with the claim that atheism is not a belief system, which is true enough. However, snkscore then shifts to saying that atheism is not a belief – as if to say that the fact that atheism is not a belief system that it is not a belief. Which makes as much sense as saying that since tigers are not herd animals then they are not animals.
However, the issue that I am referring to is the claim that atheism is not a belief.
So, snkscore states:
So, if someone asked me "Do you believe there is no god?" I would probably simply respond "Yes" but really the correct response to convey my position is "I don't believe that there is a god."
This is false.
In fact, it is such an absurd falsehood that every time I read it or hear it written it embarrasses me – because there are people out in the world who will think that because I call myself an atheist, I, too, must embrace such absurdities.
Here's the proof.
You determine the meaning of a term by looking how native speakers of a language use that term. Competent English speakers do not use the term 'atheist' to refer to cats, rocks, chairs, tomatoes, or any other thing incapable of having beliefs. However, they would certainly accept the proposition that the phrase, "does not believe that there is a God" applies to cats, rocks, chairs, tomatoes, or any other thing incapable of having beliefs.
The claim that the latter is a meaningful substitute for the former is even more absurd than claiming that the earth is 6,000 years old. At least the counter-argument that the earth is 6,000 years old takes more than a paragraph to write.
The fact that I have seen so many atheists embrace this absurdity in spite of the fact that it is so easily shown to be false is one of the reasons why I hold that atheists are just as capable of ignoring evidence when it flies in the face of a favored proposition as any theist.
What is an atheist?
An atheist is someone who, if asked whether the proposition, "At least one God exists" is true or false, would confidently answer that it is false.
No cat, rock, chair, or tomato would do such a thing.
If a person, when asked whether the proposition, "At last one God exists" is true or false, merely stands there and drools, he may well lack a belief in God, but he is not an atheist. An atheist confidently assigns the value 'False' to the proposition..
An atheist does NOT assign the value 'False' with absolute certainty. An atheist can hold that there is some measure of doubt as to whether the proposition is true or false. However, he does not hold that this ‘doubt’ makes it a coin toss.
However, an atheist is assigning a value to a proposition and, as such, needs to justify why he assigns that value and not some other, and why he assigns the value confidently rather than uncertainly.
The reason why atheists seem to like the absurdity of "has no belief in God" is because it gives them a way to bypass this second step. It is absurd to ask an entity that lacks a belief in God to justify its state. Try it. Walk up to the nearest inanimate object and demand that it justify to you its lack of a belief in God.
If it answers, go see a doctor.
However, once the atheist admits that an atheist actually assigns a truth value to a proposition, he can't be lazy any more. Since he is actively assigning a value to a proposition, he needs to justify that assignment.
It's just so much easier to be lazy.
What really happens is that this absurdity that atheism refers to the lack of a belief in a God actually does little more than to demonstrate that atheists lack certain key mental faculties that make them blind to what is obvious. If the atheist can be so blind to something so obvious, then it is no wonder that he is also blind to the evidence for the existence of God.
To make matters worse is that this absurdity comes from people who claim that it is a virtue to embrace reason – yet who, in practice, simply ignores an argument that so clearly demonstrates that a favored proposition is false.
This mind-numbing absurdity is only convincing to people who start with a desire to embrace this mind-numbing absurdity. To the rest of the English speaking population, it is just another demonstration of the intellectual incompetence of atheists.