Comments on: Beyond Atheism

By: graham

graham — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:28:20 +0000

Secular Himanists (atheists) are guilty of throwing many bombs, yet have their own moral code- and are quite satisfied with only having one life to live. This is possibly the ‘step back’ you are prescribing, or at least it must seem so to them. Still, this is but a glimpse of what atheism might aspire to. I believe that while a magical explanation for an ‘afterlife’ is indefensible, the greater and naturalistic premise for eternal life and purpose is possible within reason.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:33:48 +0000

Talk about coming late to the party…

This really spoke to me and I can’t agree more with your central message – that we need to stand for something.

I’d like to take it even further and see atheists talk more about other aspects of their world view. I say this because I don’t think naturalism is any atheists entire world view.

In addition to being a naturalist, I’d say I’m also a strong humanist – a world view that I believe incorporates naturalism.

If we’re to bring people to atheism, we have to provide an alternative to theist world views. Without the alternative, people just see empty disbelief.

Thanks for this.

By: Craig

Craig — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:48:46 +0000

“If atheists reject supernaturalism — as I think all atheists do and probably must — then it would seem to follow that as atheists we are committed to a naturalistic worldview of some sort or another. Does “naturalistic worldview” = “metaphysical naturalism”?”

I agree that atheism must reject theism, by defintion, although not neccessarily supernaturalism. The question is is if the atheist makes the more substantive move to methological naturalism can they justfy their own positon let alone validy rule out incorporeal entities.

More specifically, is the primary epistemology of methodological naturalism empiricism? If so, what of the well known Kantian critiques of such – that time, space, causality and self appear to be of a non-empirical nature.

Further, does the nature of inductive logic prevent the methodological naturalist making the bolder metaphysical claim that all phenomena is of a non-supernatural nature. If so, is such an example of the fallacy of composition? If my memory serves me correctly, the latter resembles Humes’ critique of his own naturalist position.

So, perhaps the deeper question is, to what degree can an empiricist assert naturalism?

Finally, the NOMA argument could be used to explain why theists refuse to allow their propositons to be falsified in the face of an overwhelming number of defeaters. The naturalist critiques theism as a factual statement. The theist, it could be argued, holds the god, soul, afterlife, freewill concepts, in the first instance, as value-ethical statements (albeit attributing factualness to them dogmatically…). See the Dawkins-McGrath debate on the Dawkins website as a classic example of a dialogue between two people speaking different languages.

By: Rastaban

Rastaban — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 01:17:39 +0000

There may be exceptions, but in general modern atheism is the rejection of all supernaturalism whatever the form. If you reject supernaturalism, naturalism is what remains.

By: anti-nonsense

anti-nonsense — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 05:38:26 +0000

This is way late, but I don’t think all atheists are necessarily completely naturalistic, many sects of Buddhism, are basically atheistic but they go on about re-incarnation and such. Also I would expect there are some atheists that believe in silly psuedo-science like ESP or whatever.