I don't recall Bruno ever csaying if you don't believe in something then you believe in it.
What he's said is that atheists defend/support/reinforce the same idea/conception of god that the literalist or fundamentalist abrahamic religions use. Atheists can't say there is no God without defining what they mean by God, and invariably they choose some variant of an omniscient omnipotent creator who answers prayers and judges us, rather than any of the myriad of other conceptions of god. In this way, atheists pretend there is only one acceptable definition and will usually fight to say that it is only definition, or the one everyone means, or believe the one all believers believe in. That's a perfect case of defending the idea of what God is or can be, even if it is only to then attack the idea. Honest theistic reasoning would use logic to say, "okay perhaps God cannot be this, but we have not ruled out these other possibilities which are as far as we know not inconsistent", rather than "we have ruled out this definition of god, and it is the only definition, therefore there is no god" Jason On Wednesday, October 15, 2014, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 10/15/2014 7:25 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: > > > On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:00 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: >> >> Bruno seems to think that if you fail to believe in the existence of Santa Claus you must have a definite idea of what "Santa Claus" refers to and therefore you do believe in Santa Claus. A curious inference for a logician. > > That's just fancy language, wherein semantic of "Santa" is mapped to "fictitious entity, old, fat, gift giving etc"; so you applying belief predicate to it results in believing untrue fiction. > > What's more curious than this is why you choose "Santa" instead of "house" or "Brent" in your example. > > But roughly I'd say yes, to negate some proposition you have to know semantic it refers to and point to/represent that idea, with all its possible flaws, and note said negation. And that isn't curious, I'd call it normal because I can't think of some inversion before I have a grasp on some usual state of affairs. PGC > > I works with "house" and "Brent" too. What's curious is that failing to believe in anything implies that you do believe in it. I suppose it goes along with the spirit of "everything". If I can think of it clearly enough to fail to believe it exists then it must be among the the everything that exists. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
