Some atheists here say atheism is mainly a lack of belief in God, therefore there is no worldview there for them to defend.
Okay, well the solipsist can do the exact same thing. The solipsist lacks belief in other minds. The solipsist humbly admits that they don't have absolute knowledge of anything existing outside of their own mind (check out the Egocentric Predicament for more info on that matter) so they disbelieve in other minds/an external reality in much the exact same way the atheist disbelieves in God in this situation. We don't know for sure if there is a God so I do not believe. We don't know for sure if there are other minds/an external reality so I do not believe. The form of the reasoning shared by the solipsist and the atheist here is virtually identical.
If an atheist is using this reasoning, I am wondering why they are not a solipsist... As the Cognitive Psychologist Justin L. Barret has said:
"no scientific evidence exists that proves people have minds."
[Source: Justin L. Barret. "Why Would Anyone Believe in God?". 2004. p. 95.]
I'm 99% sure Jesus was not the son of God in anyway. Nor was he held in a hypostasic trinity with his dad and spirit, violating basic Euclidean relation to show the glory of the godhead.
There could always be a "God", but the "revealed" religion of humanity can be proven false via history and their warped theologies.
Those rosaries you've been praying won't save you.
The sophist must act as though other minds exist in order to operate within the world. The atheist has no need to believe that a god does.
>>816929
Pascal's wager my friend
>>816938
That would make sense if there were a 50/50 chance of God existing. The chance of the Abrahamic God existing is far lower than that.
You will cease to exist someday. That's something probable enough to bet on.
>>816956
Can you prove what you claim?
burden of proof
phrase of burden
1.
the obligation to prove one's assertion.
>>816929
What's that got to do with solipsism?
It doesn't matter though. You're just a sentence, an idea in my head. i'm the only real thinking person and the whole universe is in my head and nothing else exists. this whole concept of solipsism serves to remind me of this fact.
>>816969
>You can't prove there's no afterlife, therefore we can never know. So that means it's safer to believe in one because I have no understanding of Pascal's wager. Which means my God exists, and he'll reward me by saving me from dying!
Stupid reply.
>>816999
>muh appeal to stone fallacy
>>816893
>therefore there is no worldview there for them to defend.
Well, there are many worldviews - potentially innumerable - that are consistent with lack of belief in any god; nobody *simply* lacks a belief in a god - such a person also holds other beliefs, and it is incumbent upon that person to support those beliefs with the best reasons available. But to assume that such reasons must ultimately rely on some god-concept is to beg the question.
> We don't know for sure if there is a God so I do not believe. We don't know for sure if there are other minds/an external reality so I do not believe. The form of the reasoning shared by the solipsist and the atheist here is virtually identical.
The similarity is more superficial than you're suggesting. I am a conscious mind, and my consciousness is bound to my physical body; I sense my own body parts, and I sense my whole body in mirrors and photographs, so I have a good reason to conclude that other bodies - constituted and behaving in fundamentally similar ways as my own body - are also connected to a private consciousness; I can't know this consciousness as I can immediately know my own mental states, but there is at least some similarity with my physical existence and the physical existences I experience all around me as "other humans."
But what such similarity is there when it comes to whatever supposed god a theist wishes to defend?
>>817014
The argument in favor of Solipsism:
(a) The only thing one has direct access to is the contents of one's own mind (one's mental states). What one knows most certainly are one's mental states - one's thoughts, experiences, emotions, and so on.
(b) Just because one sees an object does not mean that the object exists. One could be dreaming or hallucinating. There is no direct conceptual or logically necessary link between the mental and the physical.
(c) The experiences of a given person are necessarily private to that person. The contents of one's mind are the only things one has direct access to. One cannot get ‘outside’ of one's mind to encounter any other objects including other persons. Other minds are even more removed.
The basic form of the argument:
My mental states are the only things I have access to.
I cannot conclude the existence of anything outside of my mental states.
Therefore only my mental states exist.
>>816893
>"no scientific evidence exists that proves people have minds."
You mean consciousness? There's a lot of indicators, like displays of self awareness that indicate it. There is no hard proof of any consciousness but your own, because you can't experience someone else's consciousness.
But that's in the same way that you can't tell if an apple is red. You can only tell that there's red photons (if you believe your senses) and it seems to behave in a manner consistent with being red, that is, it appears to reflect red photons.
Further more, the idea that other people have minds is based on the idea that other people are like yourself. The idea of god is that god is unlike everything else.
>>816893
By that logic everyone is a solipsist.
You don't believe in every god.
>>817030
Somewhat you are right.
Let me try to say it like this:
People tend to identify. They identify either with their memories, or their thoughts, their emotions, their deeds, their bodies, their favorite food, their favorite animal etc.
If one can get rid of all identification, then what is left?
>>817016
That was posted so fast that I'd be very surprised if it was thoughtfully in response to my post, rather than mostly a stock reply. But regardless:
> (a) The only thing one has direct access to is the contents of one's own mind (one's mental states). What one knows most certainly are one's mental states - one's thoughts, experiences, emotions, and so on.
Okay.
> (b) Just because one sees an object does not mean that the object exists. One could be dreaming or hallucinating.
This depends on what we mean by "exists." There are philosophically rigorous ways (as found in many idealisms) to define this term so that "to exist," "to be real," "to be actual," is simply "to appear in accordance with the basic laws of mind-dependent experience."
Those general laws of experience display a continuity, a regularity, that we recognize as violated by dreams and hallucinations; that is, even if we can't know with 100% infallibility that we are not dreaming or hallucinating right now, that does not mean that we have absolutely no criteria to distinguish hallucinations/dreams from reality. We can have good reasons for claiming that we aren't currently dreaming/hallucinating, and this doesn't mean that we have to provide indubitable proof that we aren't currently dreaming/hallucinating. For example, I can remember a majority of events that obey a regular pattern of natural laws, and I can distinguish these from the outlandish and disconnected events I classify as "dreams." The fact that there is a continuity of what happens in waking life, and a fractured irregularity of what happens in what I call "dreams," allows me to differentiate the former from the latter and deny objective reality to "dreams." What's more, I can agree with other human bodies regarding what occurs in the "real world" (which occupies most of my experience), whereas the bizarre exceptions I experience in dreams/hallucinations are not endorsed by the testimony of other human bodies.
>>817016
>>817067
> (c) The experiences of a given person are necessarily private to that person. The contents of one's mind are the only things one has direct access to. One cannot get ‘outside’ of one's mind to encounter any other objects including other persons. Other minds are even more removed.
>There is no direct conceptual or logically necessary link between the mental and the physical.
Okay.
>The basic form of the argument:
>My mental states are the only things I have access to.
Yeah.
> I cannot conclude the existence of anything outside of my mental states.
Okay.
> Therefore only my mental states exist.
Not quite, it seems to me; only my mental states are *known* by me to exist - but this doesn't mean that my mental states are the only things I am *justified* in believing in the existence of.
This solipsistic argument assumes that we can't believe a proposition P unless we *know* infallibly that P is true - but this standard seems arbitrarily high to me.
>>816893
This is a terrible argument. The idea that atheists do not thing things come from God does not lead to the idea they do not think things come from anything. OP's point addresses a straw man.
Besides even if there was an immaterial soul what's the point of it. We know that at least some if not all of the major thinking functions take place in the physical brain.
>>816938
Statistically Ps wager is just as likely to fuck or reward you as the Atheist variant is so it's just more effort invested in the only life we know exists for certain.
>>816938
God's omniscience my friend
>>816893
I don't see the comparison.
You know you have a mind and think. Therefore it is not an unreasonable assumption to infer other people do.
You don't have any experience of being a God to infer that Gods might exist.
>>816893
I want to fuck that rabbit
>>817458
I thought the same thing.
>>816893
the image is making me think things. i dont wanna be a furry. please help
>>816938
I'm sure God would be really impressed with you falsely believing in him so you can get a free pass into Heaven.
I have more respect for people who don't believe, and people who do believe, than people who straddle the line and pretend. I hope God is real, so he can smite the fuck out of you fools.
>>816893
The thing that bores me, as a non-superstitious person, call me an atheist if you like I don't really care about the word one way or another, is that I don't give a shit if people want to vaguely believe in 'God' whatever your definition of that may be.
It's all the nonsense some (most?) religious people want to tack onto that that annoys me, comparing being an atheist to solipsism doesn't really justify thinking wafers magically turn into the body of a dead guy, or that the creator of the Universe turned himself into a flying carpenter or that anyone can know what "God" thinks about dietary requirements or how I have sex.
No amount of abstract philosophy is going to breach that distinction.
>>816893
>We don't know for sure if there is a God so I do not believe.
This is not the reasoning the majority of atheists use to justify their lack of belief in a god. The reason they don't believe in a god is the same reason they don't believe in Father Christmas:
>There's little to no evidence for the existence of such a being and it seems very unlikely given my understanding of the way the world works so I do not believe.
They believe plenty of things they can't know for sure, such as the existence of things outside their own mind, because even if they acknowledge they can't know such things exist, they consider it likely.
>>816893
>>817039 hits the nail on the head
>>816938
Pascal thought that up to get the church off his back
>>816929
No clue why you think Euclid is greater than God.
>>817598
Let me ask you a question.
You have a belief about religion. Would the world be a better place if everyone shared your belief about religion?
>>817384
Not true.
It dooms you either way.
You are either a fool for saying there is no God, or you are like the devil and know there is a God.
Either way, you're doomed.
>>816893
Hard solipsism is a problem we may never have an answer to, but we move and interact with the world as if we are not a brain in a vat or in the matrix or whatever, for practical purposes.
>>816938
You cant choose to believe, you either believe something or you dont, also pascals wager implies the only choice is to believe or diabelief in the christian god, what if the hindus got it right? Or the muslims, or every other teligion for that matter.
>>820361
There is no God at all you, until you post evidence that there is one retard.
>>816929
Allah(swt) has no son or relative brother.
>>820400
See the universe?
God made it.
>>820416
Prove it.
>>816893
I'm 99% sure other minds exist. I'm 1% sure a personal god exists. I'm not 100% certain on either matter, therefore I don't know, but I know one is astronomically more likely than the other.
>>820421
I'll let God prove it to you. Or, of course, someone could tell you that "God" is the title for the being who made the universe.
So you're basically arguing facts and definitions.
Good luck with that!
>>816893
.... how?
Atheism is the position you hold when you've been informed people believe in god, but none of them have been able to prove it to you.
I can't prove to you that I have a mind. But when you're talking about god, you're presumably talking about something that exists outside your own mind, so all I ask is for you to show me what it is that made you believe in god. So far, no religious person I've asked has answered this question.
>>820502
>Or, of course, someone could tell you that "God" is the title for the being who made the universe.
>assuming a being made the universe
>>816956
>The chance of the Abrahamic God existing is far lower than that
1 truly philosophical fulfilling grand deity > 999 forms of human idealism
Honestly, its like you don't want to think.
>>816893
I respectfully disagree.
A solipsist is master of the question "do other minds exist?" If he wills it so, then it is so for all.
An Abrahamic, or theistic believer concedes, if He wills it so, then it is so for all.
The difference relies on the locus of power whether external to oneself or internal to oneself. Or alternatively, the difference depends on capitalization.
>thread about atheism AND solipsism
wow could you get any more highschool
