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Split Thread Atheism and lack of belief in the afterlife

Chanakya said:
It ended, because you, to quote a certain wise man, insist on putting your head in the sand.

There are indeed real-life instances of people believing in afterlife, and yet not believing in God (at least not with capital G, although those belief systems do incorporate gods, plural, and with small g, and more correctly referred to as deities I guess rather than God). This has been pointed out more than once in this thread.

You continue to pretend this isn't a thing, which is ...curious. One easy explanation is deliberate dishonesty. The other is, I suppose, such deep-rooted cognitive dissonance that you are unable to see what is right there in front of you, even when it is repeatedly pointed out to you.

It's a venn thing. There's belief in the afterlife. And there's belief in God. And there's the part where the two circles intersect.



eta: Buddhism has been mentioned as one obvious mainstream example of belief in afterlife without belief in God, capital G. Jainism also, I guess. I suppose Judaism, some flavors of it, might be thought of as mainstream example of belief in God without necessarily bringing in belief in afterlife? (Not sure about the last, and happy to be corrected on it by those better informed.)
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You may not realize it but you brought religion back into the question.

I never claimed that an afterlife can exist only if God exists. I merely claimed that some agency (or undefined gods) must exist and you are claiming the same thing.
 
RoboTimbo said:
And you were asked to define gods.
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Since you have been absent for a while, you may not be aware that this is just a "gotcha" question.

No matter how I define a god, the response will inevitably be "You are describing a god that I have never heard of" (some posters have even labeled it the "p-god").
 
psionl0 said:
Since you have been absent for a while, you may not be aware that this is just a "gotcha" question.

No matter how I define a god, the response will inevitably be "You are describing a god that I have never heard of" (some posters have even labeled it the "p-god").
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Are we here again? Haven't we already had this discussion, extensively?
 
psionl0 said:
Since you have been absent for a while, you may not be aware that this is just a "gotcha" question.

No matter how I define a god, the response will inevitably be "You are describing a god that I have never heard of" (some posters have even labeled it the "p-god").
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Ok... but do you believe that your description... whatever it might be... in fact exists?

And if you are agnostic then you cannot give a rational definition anyways... because it would be Argumentum ad Ignorantiam if you do.
 
psionl0 said:
Since you have been absent for a while, you may not be aware that this is just a "gotcha" question.

No matter how I define a god, the response will inevitably be "You are describing a god that I have never heard of" (some posters have even labeled it the "p-god").
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Thank you for ensuring that no gotcha questions are asked in the thread.

I asked you to define gods since you were the one who asked if atheists believe no gods exist. If you can give a coherent definition, you can get your answer (assuming you weren't asking a gotcha question).
 
psionl0 said:
I never claimed that an afterlife can exist only if God exists. I merely claimed that some agency (or undefined gods) must exist...
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Which was a desperate attempt to conflate an entirely naturalistic explanation with a supernatural one, by implying that "agency" is just another way to say "god".

Plate tectonics is the natural agency behind earthquakes. The belief that earthquakes are the result of natural movements of the earth's crust isn't incompatible with atheism just because some people think the agency responsible is some god or gods.
 
arthwollipot said:
psionl0 has in the past steadfastly declined to answer this question, and all similar questions about personal belief. This has led me to characterise their position as "militant agnosticism" - I don't know and neither do you!.
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It could also be a case of wanting to attack the arguments of others without ever having to play defense.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Which was a desperate attempt to conflate an entirely naturalistic explanation with a supernatural one, by implying that "agency" is just another way to say "god".

Plate tectonics is the natural agency behind earthquakes. The belief that earthquakes are the result of natural movements of the earth's crust isn't incompatible with atheism just because some people think the agency responsible is some god or gods.
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That is a really terrible analogy. Earthquakes are real but there is no evidence that anybody experiences an afterlife.
 
Foster Zygote said:
It could also be a case of wanting to attack the arguments of others without ever having to play defense.
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I believe that psionl0 has described this tactic of his as being evasive:

psionl0 said:
If asked directly if gods exist, there is no room for fence sitting any more - unless you wish to Bob the questioner (but then you are just being evasive).
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psionl0 said:
That is a really terrible analogy. Earthquakes are real but there is no evidence that anybody experiences an afterlife.
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Seems like a good analogy to me. It was an example of a phenomenon whose agency has been discovered not to be intelligent and so does not "bring religion into the question".

I cannot see why it's being a phenomenon which is known to exist might make it a bad analogy. The fact that it does exist is, on the contrary, rather helpful in establishing its causative agency. People who had heard of earthquakes but did not know they were real would be hard pressed to confidently establish their cause.
 
psionl0 said:
Since you have been absent for a while, you may not be aware that this is just a "gotcha" question.

No matter how I define a god, the response will inevitably be "You are describing a god that I have never heard of" (some posters have even labeled it the "p-god").
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And yet you clearly have some definition that you use when evaluating the meaning of the word 'atheist'.
 
That's always the game.

"Define the God you don't believe in before you're allowed to say you don't believe in them."
 
psionl0 said:
That is a really terrible analogy. Earthquakes are real but there is no evidence that anybody experiences an afterlife.
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We aren't discussing how real they are. We're discussing the difference between a naturalistic agency and a supernatural agency. And we aren't arguing that belief in a naturalistic agency is correct, either. I'm sure most other atheists would agree with me that there's no sound reason for such a belief. But that doesn't matter. All that matters, for this argument, is that someone could believe in some natural mechanism that preserves consciousness beyond the destruction of the brain, and that calling that mechanism an "agency" doesn't magically make that mechanism the product of a god. It's like someone who threw a lot of perfectly good virgins into the volcano to appease the earthshaker god saying that we might as well call plate tectonics "God".
 
The difference between naturalistic agency and supernatural agency is that you can assign all the special pleadings you want to a supernatural agency which is the entire point of the concept of "supernatural."
 
Foster Zygote said:
We aren't discussing how real they are. We're discussing the difference between a naturalistic agency and a supernatural agency. And we aren't arguing that belief in a naturalistic agency is correct, either. I'm sure most other atheists would agree with me that there's no sound reason for such a belief. But that doesn't matter. All that matters, for this argument, is that someone could believe in some natural mechanism that preserves consciousness beyond the destruction of the brain, and that calling that mechanism an "agency" doesn't magically make that mechanism the product of a god. It's like someone who threw a lot of perfectly good virgins into the volcano to appease the earthshaker god saying that we might as well call plate tectonics "God".
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Yes. After all, we only need to go back a few centuries to find a lot of "agencies" that were assumed to be more or less supernatural, but which we now know are perfectly natural.

Hans
 
That's always the angle.

"Okay literally everything we've found an answer to has been a natural answer, but you can't prove the next thing won't be 'God does it with unexplainable magic.'"

And yes I know that's sort of a truism, as in after we explain something it is almost by definition naturalistic, but that proves the point anymore.
 
I really can't see how an afterlife can be considered as anything but supernatural, and thus tied to some supernatural force. Sure, we have in our historical past attributed supernatural forces to natural phenomena, but in the case of death, the very definition of death would be an oxymoron.

I don't think the earthquake example works. It is a mistake to attribute a supernatural cause to an event, but in the case of afterlife, there's not even an event.
 
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