[lbo-talk] theists vs atheists

[Autoplectic]

On 5/31/05, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> As others have pointed out, the burden is on the
> person who asserts the presence of the supernatural,
> not on the person who is without a belief in it.
> "Atheism" simply means "without a belief in God" [or
> theism]. It doesn't mean "asserts there is no God,"
> though many atheists do that, too. What Hitchens has
> called "anti-theism" or even misotheism is the active
> denial or assertion of nothing in God's place. Atheism
> is not the assertion of something but the lack of a
> belief.

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There's negative atheism which, in a nutshell is a denial of the
belief in god with regards to the various arguments the theists put
forward; that those arguments are demonstrably false.

Positive atheism goes further and asserts that god is ontologically
impossible; the structure of reality precludes the possibility of
omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipotence, perfect foreknowledge and
the like. These concepts are shown to be incoherent via reductio
arguments. The current most capable defender, imo, of the theist
argument [it's an ontological argument] is Billy Joe Lucas. Patrick
Grim and others have used Cantorian and Godelian arguments to show
that the idea of omniscience is incoherent.