Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
> Martin Willett wrote:
>
>
>>>Define strong and weak atheism...
>
>> Weak atheists don't know gods exist.
>>
>> Strong atheists know gods don't exist.
>>
>> I think that's about right, correct me if I'm wrong. ("gods" standing
>> for any number of gods from one and only up)
>
> That's the basic idea, but one could be a bit more pedantic. English,
> like all natural languages suffer from "scope ambiguities" (eg, "Alice
> didn't go to the park because she was tired" has two very different
> meanings. If you don't see the second one, that follow the example
> sentence with, "she didn't go to the park because she had a dentist
> appointment at 10 o'clock.")
>
> So, I'll drop into a symbolic notation to help avoid scope ambiguities.
>
> Let's let "g" be God or gods or anything supernatural enough to count.
> Let E(x) mean "x exists".
> Let ~X mean "not X".
> Let B(x,Y) mean "x beleives Y" where "x" is an individual and Y is a
> proposition.
>
> So now we can define: x is a "strong atheist" iff B(x, ~E(g))
>
> And: x is a "weak atheist" iff ~B(x, E(g)) and ~B(x, ~E(g)).
>
> And: x is a theist iff B(x,E(g))
>
> Now, I use different terminology. I use "atheist" to mean what is
> defined as "strong atheist". I use "agnostic" to mean what is described
> as "weak atheist".
>
> It doesn't really matter what one calls it. Anyway, I am a "strong
> atheist", but my website is a weak atheist.
Thanks Jeffrey. I didn't really need first-order logic to understand this,
but why not be padantic...
*smirk*
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