What is the functional difference between deism and atheism?

Pup said:
Or do you mean that it would be like finding a watch and studying it: you might be able to learn everything about how the watch worked, what material it was made of, etc., and even judge the skill of the watchmaker and the purpose of the watch, but you could never learn, just from studying the watch alone, what color eyes the watchmaker had, what the house he lived in looked like, and so forth.
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That's an accurate description of (that part of) my position, yeah. Well said.

What I mainly meant by the part you highlighted, though, (I don't expect there to BE any gaps) is that if there's something I don't understand about the universe I won't do the "god of the gaps" thing and say "god did that". I'll still insist that there's a scientific reason hiding there and I'll want to fill that gap in with observable knowledge.
 
From the responses so far I think the answer to the question Wolfman posed in the title of this thread is

"Very little"

:)
 
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Darat said:
(causal is - acausal sounds like it should be)

But isn't that true for the majority of people who are theists (and indeed atheists)? Certainly in this country you can have discussions about all sorts of things, from politics to football without ever knowing if someone is a theist or not, only if you bring up religion and ask about their beliefs would the differences between the two come to light.
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Ideally that should be true, but it isn't. Literalist biblical fundamentalism is experiencing something of a resurgence on this side of the pond over the past two decades; it's even absorbing other types of Christianity. In times past it may not have been so strange to expect the average Christian to acknowledge that evolution was fact and that the Earth was a couple billion years old; now I don't get that impression anymore. I think it's becoming more and more likely for the average Christian to deny the reality of absolutely anything that contradicts a bible verse. And as such, no - in the US, it's very difficult to find, say, hot political issues for which one side or another isn't animated at some very core level by religious or moralistic belief. Some topics, indeed, such as gay rights and abortion, are of a purely theological bent.

Similarly, it would be difficult to discuss medicine, biology, anthropology, or geology with a theist without risking encountering arguments that are reflective of their religious belief, where their religions have explicit teachings that involve these areas.
 
A couple of thoughts:

From a historical perspective deism is just atheism before Darwin. People like Jefferson were basically atheists except they had no viable explanation for the awesome variety of life on our little dustball. They couldn't describe how things came to be, so they needed some sort of deity.

If the deist god really made all of reality and then just stepped back, I find that creature to be an odd one, indeed. I suppose an infinite intelligence would behave differently, but can you imagine creating something and then not tinkering with it? Unless this being thinks there's nothing to improve upon, which makes him less strange than deviant.
 
TraneWreck said:
A couple of thoughts:

From a historical perspective deism is just atheism before Darwin. People like Jefferson were basically atheists except they had no viable explanation for the awesome variety of life on our little dustball. They couldn't describe how things came to be, so they needed some sort of deity.

If the deist god really made all of reality and then just stepped back, I find that creature to be an odd one, indeed. I suppose an infinite intelligence would behave differently, but can you imagine creating something and then not tinkering with it? Unless this being thinks there's nothing to improve upon, which makes him less strange than deviant.
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Unless it's a game and he doesn't want to cheat.
 
Piscivore said:
Unless it's a game and he doesn't want to cheat.
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We can come up with explanations, but they're all sort of weird.

My favorite would be that it's just crappy at its job. It made this whole mess and now can't control it.

I also find the assumption that a creator must be greater than its creation to be an odd one. Look at what humans create: we build machines that are stronger than us, can count better than us, are faster than us...etc., why do we assume that whatever created the universe is somehow superior enough that it could control its experiment?
 
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TraneWreck said:
We can come up with explanations, but they're all sort of weird.

My favorite would be that it's just crappy at its job. It made this whole mess and now can't control it.

I also find the assumption that a creator must be greater than its creation to be an odd one. Look at what humans create: we build machines that are stronger than us, can count better than us, are faster than us...etc., why do we assume that whatever created the universe is somehow superior enough that it could control its experiment?
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That's a good point.
 
One need not posit a super-intelligent sort of "god"..... To satisfy a Deist, the being in question would only need to be able to cause "bang" events.
Other than that, it could be a drooling idiot. With a rather long life-span....
 
I have some mad scientist in mind, tinkering in the lab late one night with a quantum bubble generator..."I wonder what happens if I reverse the polarity"...
 
I admit to being a little envious of deists. I believed a lot of weird stuff, and in letting it go - it needed to be everything.

I like deists who believe just because they do. I can live with it when people much smarter than I am honestly believe because causes a kind of pain for them not to. I do get it. Skeptics? Sure. Not that there is a contest...

My issue with Deism is that it rises in a world that already accepts some notion that a deity revealed something about itself - and then the deists reject most of what people say that revelation was. To me, a skeptical question would be how a Deist decided which part of the revelatory experience was wrong, and what was right.

Is Deism like homeopathy where we are healthier people by just taking a tiny fraction of belief? :)
 
I darkly remember that I met a self proclamed deist once, and a better desription was an agnostic theist, but used the same tired assertion that the universe has been created by some sort of supreme being. Or maybe i am confusing with somebody else :P.

I am not sure if the description is apt, but to me there was no basic difference between deism and theism : it is always about starting from an assertion without evidence (a creator exists or existed and created the universe) or stating there is evidence , but looking at them only themselves agree to be demonstrating their pet theory. The emperor pretend to have blue cloth instead of red cloth, but to anybody looking, the emperor cloth are still about as non existant in both case.

That may sound harsh, but really there is only a difference of form, it is still the same take-on-faith principle underlying.
 
Kopji said:
To me, a skeptical question would be how a Deist decided which part of the revelatory experience was wrong, and what was right.
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Setting aside the question of God for a moment (otherwise we can't have this conversation at all) you can move on to the evidence at hand. Assuming there is a god who created the universe, how would we learn about him? Some people have holy texts, but they tend to be contradictory and have obvious errors. Clearly they aren't reliable. So if we don't have a book from god, what do we have? Well... the universe. Physics. All that stuff. That's half of it.

The other half is logic and philosophy, applied to try and deduce what we can about the maker by the state of the universe. I think any honest deist will say that this is a fairly futile exercise, but it passes the time. Whenever you come across some philosophical point or religious assertion you can try to determine if it is conflicting with logic or current knowledge. Science will always win over non-science because scientific truths are the closest thing we can have to a primary source unless god contacts us directly - and I've seen no evidence that that's his style.

This approach does not, itself, support or refute deism because deism is not dogmatic and is interested in analyzing claims rather than making them. The singular claim of deism (and even then it may vary from person to person) is simply that some form of god exists or existed - and while we would LOVE to find a way to scientifically test that claim it doesn't seem possible.

I agree that generally speaking it is best to start from the position that something unseen does NOT exist - so atheism seems a logical and correct mindset to me. In my particular case, however, I find myself with a spark of belief. It seems unnecessary to try and stamp that out; if it someday smolders and dies on its own I won't mourn for it and won't mind calling myself and atheist but until them I feel comfortable starting from the (admittedly unsupportable) position that there is a god.

More than that, I feel that there is a benefit to it. I think that there is something to be gained by approaching philosophical, logical, and moral questions from a different angle. Even if you disagree I don't think you can say there's any harm done.
 
As quick guess, atheists are more likely to need Plait's advice to not be a dick?
 
TraneWreck said:
A couple of thoughts:

From a historical perspective deism is just atheism before Darwin. People like Jefferson were basically atheists except they had no viable explanation for the awesome variety of life on our little dustball. They couldn't describe how things came to be, so they needed some sort of deity.
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I would agree with you, but wasn't there a form of athiesm in biblical days as well?

The Fool Hath Said...There Is No God
Of course I don't agree with the statement, but if it was in there, most likely someone thought like that and they needed the disclaimer.


TraneWreck said:
If the deist god really made all of reality and then just stepped back, I find that creature to be an odd one, indeed. I suppose an infinite intelligence would behave differently, but can you imagine creating something and then not tinkering with it? Unless this being thinks there's nothing to improve upon, which makes him less strange than deviant.
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Well, southpark's answer was that creators created us so they can watch a reality show.

Stephen King suggested that maybe god just died.

There can be any number of ways of answering that.
 
GrandMasterFox said:
I would agree with you, but wasn't there a form of athiesm in biblical days as well?

The Fool Hath Said...There Is No God
Of course I don't agree with the statement, but if it was in there, most likely someone thought like that and they needed the disclaimer.
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I read a pretty interesting book about the Rennaissance, A Wolrd Lit Only by Fire (it got a little heavy on Martin Luther in the second half, but over all, was good), and one of the surpring things I learned was how many people became atheists around that period. The advancements in astronomy and the discovery of the New World (as well as other scientific achievement) caused a lot of people to turn from the Bible. It was just wholly inadequate as a description of the world.

The point is that there have been periods of atheism prior to Darwin, but they were mostly born of doubt about dominant religions. There wasn't much of a positive argument to be made.



GrandMasterFox said:
Well, southpark's answer was that creators created us so they can watch a reality show.

Stephen King suggested that maybe god just died.

There can be any number of ways of answering that.
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None of the answers seem to arrive at something worth believing in and, especially, a creature that deserves no worship.

I didn't express what I found odd about deism very well. It seems to me that a lot of the motivation for deism is to retain the aspects of religion people enjoy without being burdened by nonsensical scripture and history. They want an infinite creator that maintains a robust after life and (for some) can serve as the basis for objective morality, but they want to do away with miracles and insane, primitive beliefs.

That's all fine and dandy until you consider the reasons for such a hands-off creator. We have incompetence, inability, uncaring, indifference, or malice as possible reasons for simply allowing children to die of lukemia, for instance.

The best thing we can say about such a being is that we humans are just beneath its notice, but no matter how its fleshed out, I don't see why anyone would really want such a creature to exist.
 
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