I think it is because we realize the futility of arguing about religion and stay clear. Also, news.yc tends to be more respectful of people in general; just as you won't attack a person on their beliefs in the real world, you won't do so here.
edit: Not to mention such discussion is actually off-topic.
The guidelines of hacker news say that any topic that piques one's intellectual curiosity is allowable. In that light, I am disappointed that the moderators have decided to mark dead anything that has to do with religion, since Hacker News is one of the few sites where the populace has the intellectual maturity to handle the topic. For example, there was a recent high-quality comment thread on a religious topic that got my synapses firing (you might need show dead on to see it):
Now the article was admittedly of low quality compared to the discussion, so maybe that is why it was dead-ed. Then again, maybe pg just fears that allowing religious topics will eventually erode the overall quality of Hacker News. Dead-ing topics is certainly his prerogative. However, I would prefer that he make such policies explicit.
As something that is part of the life of most people on earth, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand religion if we also want to understand our customers, bosses, relatives, and leaders. It seems to me that an intelligent study of religion should be undertaken by any intellectually curious human.
While intellectually I'm interested in the results of this poll, I agree with what was said above. It's simply better not to get into this type of stuff as ultimately it will detract from the value of this site. As such, I've flagged this and I encourage others to do the same.
I considered whether it would be inflammatory, but figured it was different than an article, where the interaction takes the form of discussion thus potentially leading to flame wars if the issue is controversial. Here, the interaction is mainly about voting, and people will feel less of a need to make their voice heard through comments.
So being curious, I decided to take the risk.
So far seems ok. If not, just flag it, and some mod will kill the thing.
It's not like we haven't done it before. We usually chat for a while, people complain, and then either it is zapped or we move on.
It's interesting to me to see how the influx of newbies will deal with the topic. It's a sociological/social networking question, which makes it interesting for hackers. Will the new group play by the older group's rules? Will the newcomers complain more about it "not being HN" than the old farts? Will the newbies pull the oldies out into discussion, or the other way around? Will folks who post regular science-vs-church articles participate here or pass?
But I can certainly agree that it can get out of control. What can I say? I like danger in small doses. This afternoon is kinda slow anyway.
As long as Pandora's Box comes in the form of a poll and defined carefully within some scope of intelligence, this case it's HN, then I say go ahead and open it; the people of the community are always the ones that make-up whatever it's contents are, which are always interesting nonetheless.
Posters here tend to be a little more reserved. Reddit can be a bit like tabloid newspapers. G-d kills millions, Noah unavailable for comment! Atheist saves boy from well; Christians baffled.
The discussion here just tends to be less absolute about things and considers more viewpoints. Nuanced thought is more highly regarded and rewarded (in terms of voting) and people who post with comments that one would never say to another person in real life tend to get down-voted. So, it stays more cordial. I doubt that the demographics on religion are that much different, but I guess we'll see if more people vote. I think it's that it's a smaller community, we recognize people's usernames more often, and you don't have to shout to be heard.
There's been a bit of a reaction against the constant anti-religious bashing on Reddit lately and I don't think that it's any less secular than it used to be. I think people just eventually get tired of hearing the same arguments repeated over-and-over against, with less intelligence and less wit each time. I think that people here realize the problems that a religious debate can lead to, and so avoid them.
The problem appeared when the /atheism/ subreddit became one of the defaults. Some of the /atheists/ aren't in it for discussion, they're there for blind antireligion. When that turned mainstream it pissed a lot of people off.
I never call myself a hacker, because when I studied ESR's writings I was educated about the fact "that no one is a hacker until another hacker calls him so".
(The antithesis to this attitude is, one word, "lifehacker".)
agreed. finally found a good aggregator that didn't seem to have the flamebait/trolling that plagues the numerous others. Really hoping that doesn't happen here as well.
I feel so strongly that this doesn't belong on HN, I've done something I vary rarely do. Cast a downvote. Not just one either, but I've downvoted every comment here discussing religion, regardless of their stance. I haven't downvoted those discussing the relevance of this thread on HN though.
I've met many agnostics who weren't aware that there are different types of atheists, including many who don't know one way or another but lean toward disbelief, which is very close to agnosticism.
The typical misunderstanding of atheism from self-described agnostics is that atheists claim to be certain that there is no God. Some atheists do that, but that's not the only kind of atheism.
Another problem with agnosticism is agnostics seem to believe that one cannot assign any probability without perfect knowledge. Yet you do it every minute of every day, in ever decision you make. We live by probabilities and beliefs (and disbeliefs). I don't see why certain concepts in life should be off limits for assignment of probabilities.
"You're probably an atheist without realizing it."
You know, it infuriates me when my theist mother tells my atheist self that I'm probably a theist without realizing it. I won't take any of that "If you're a X, you're probably just a Y without realizing it" nonsense.
I think more to the point is that it's silly to define oneself in terms of the things that they don't believe in. I don't label myself an anti-Olympian because I don't believe in the Athenian gods. Socialists don't call themselves acapitalists. Atheism isn't a belief in something being true, it's a belief in other people being wrong.
"I think more to the point is that it's silly to define oneself in terms of the things that they don't believe in."
Well, I do believe there is no god. And theists define themselves as not believing in the absence of a god. I mean, I think your linguistic objections are pretty disingenious.
"Atheism isn't a belief in something being true, it's a belief in other people being wrong."
I believe it is true that there is no god. And I'm pretty sure theists have a belief that me and the other atheists (and those of religions other than theirs) are wrong.
What about an areductionist? Aplatonist? Afreudian? Arepublican?
I'm not saying that atheism doesn't exist. I'm saying that it's not the same as agnosticism. Agnostic isn't defined in terms of being anti-theist. It just doesn't really believe in the validity of the question.
It's like the classical, "Are you still beating your wife?" An agnostic doesn't think that the question is framed in an answerable way.
Atheism as a term seems to be more popular in the (much more religious than the rest of the west) US where it is perhaps a minority defining itself in terms of the majority. In places where being religious is the exception, rather than the rule, it seems less sensical for those who are not religious to define themselves in terms of not holding a belief that the minority hold.
As for the negations, do you believe that atheism would have a meaning if there were no theism? Or that there's any specific substance to the term atheism, other than (usually actively) rejecting the beliefs of theism?
If you look at the comments, they are largely free of flaming. Where disagreements did emerge, people are largely civil, much better than in other threads not even related to controversial topics.
I think this is a step towards HN being able to handle the topic maturely. Such a process is probably best done by not posting inflammatory articles. I tried to not make the poll inflammatory, though I forgot the agnostic option.
Agnosticism does fall under the broadest definition of atheism, nontheism, so it wasn't really incorrect. People just feel very strongly about their particular labels.
That's true. I think lst makes that point somewhere, and gets downvoted for it. What is your opinion of the poll, in terms of pushing the HN community towards being able to talk about such things well?
That's an unfortunate misunderstanding about atheists, unfortunately embraced by most atheists. It's like when they discovered they don't believe in a god anymore, any trace of evolution in their view of the universe just freezed. This is bullshit. I can easily call myself secular humanist, vaguely militant-atheist, zen-atheist (there's also zen-christians and zen-buddhists, don't worry), and I doubt very much I will die with the same labels.
People change, and people are different. Grouping the understanding of life of Einstein or Gates in the same category as every 15-year old who just rejected religion is a limitation I strongly hope we'll overcome in the coming years.
The reason why I cannot assign probabilities in this case is that the underlying concepts are too vague (particularly if you don't accept any one religion's terms) and there can be no empirical observations either. I guess doubting the feasibility of assigning probabilities here is exactly what makes me an agnosticist. Your argument is definately interesting though.
I am a strong agnostic... or strongly agnostic, I don't know what's the proper grammatical form. But I DO know strong agnosticism is what sums my own thoughts on god. :-)
(I don't get why you've been downmodded to -1, I have just +1'd you)
I believe lots of theists believe in God without believing in the possibility of an empirical truth. I've certainly met Christian scientists (not to be confused with Christian Scientists) who fall into this category. It would be silly to call them agnostics.
As another poster wrote, often times agnostics approach the question as one of knowledge, whereas most theists as well as "weak" atheists see it as a question of belief. We all (well, almost all) believe all sorts of things that we do not truly know.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. [...]
I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.
The shyness part is probably when people treat the question of belief in certain supernatural beeings as "special". Nobody is "agnostic" about their belief in the Tooth Fairy. They just plain don't believe in him (her?). Beeings from still living religions are treated differently since the issue is more sensitive.
I'm a 3D animator for my day job, I definitely believe in the teapot, I saw it in the Cornell box so I know it exists.
(apologies if this is way too much of an inside joke)
Sorry to correct you, but you're actually kind of shy (that is, not really determined):
You simply confirm that if 3 persons of human species are exposed to the same reality (yes, reality, because the impressions may be different, but the reality is well defined and precisely one):
So, if 3 persons of the same species are all concluding more or less different things, then you have the definite answer that none of them is seeing absolutely everything, that is: the whole reality:
So: you can't be God, because:
IfyouwereGod, youwouldknowit (together with the exact reality of all things...)
For whatever it's worth, I think your line of reasoning makes more sense. I see the difference between atheism and agnosticism as analogous to the difference between conclusiveness and inconclusiveness.
I don't agree with the "refuted yes" idea. In logic, "no" is not necessary equal to "not yes". For example, "not black" could be "white", but also "green". "God" does not have a well defined enough definition: it's very likely that God is not a bearded man on a cloud, but questions like whether omnipotence or omnipresence exist (and their correlations) are a whole new can of philosophical worms :)
He seems to be saying your thought experiment only shows reality is too complex to be viewed the same way by multiple people, and your claim assumes too much.
How about no? I don't say "maybe", I say it is impossible to prove or disprove. Frankly reducing it to a "yes or no" question is really reductive, and pretty much a christian way to put things, if you will. Q: "Do you believe in god?" A: "I cannot know whether a god exists or not."
If you say: "I cannot know whether a god exists or not.", you already say that you are not cause of yourself (otherwise you would know), and, consequently, there must be anothercauseoutsideyourself:
"another cause outside yourself" is not exactly the definition of "God." To believe that you did not bring yourself into being does not mean you believe in God, it means you're not a solipsist.
Also, would you please stop telling people what they believe? I don't think I'm the only person here who finds it to be rude. You can civilly argue a point without telling people that they're not really agnostics or whatever.
3) Negating behavior or comments - [...] Does he try to tell you what you are feeling or thinking? Or worse, tell you what you are not? Comments like "you don’t really mean that" are serious indicators of someone trying to negate you. A person who negates others is trying to take away the other person’s thoughts, feelings and needs and attempting to project his wants onto that person.
You are probably missing the point that agnosticism is about knowledge and not beliefs (sp?)... and frankly I am tired of keep on hearing people telling me I am an atheis, shy atheis or whatever -- so I am giving up.
You can't act against "logic" without hurting yourself. If you are a hacker (like me), you neverever can act against logic, otherwise your program won't work (and exactly the same happens with life itself).
As I said when someone brought this up half a year ago:
Most realists believe in only one observable universe. Solipsists just go one universe farther.
Most baseball fanatics pull for only one team. People who hate baseball just go one team farther.
My favorite quote is from John McCarthy:
"By the way, I count myself as an atheist rather than an agnostic. My criterion for being an atheist is believing that the evidence on the god question is in a similar state to the evidence on the werewolf question. "
I wonder if a polytheist in anciant Greece which believed in one less god (e.g. didn't belive in Cronos, but did believe in the rest of the pantheon) would be concidered an atheist by his contemporaries?
Count me as an agnostic theist. I believe that there has to be something or someone responsible for our existence, and this entity is therefore at least minimally interested in the progress of our population, and that we simply lack the ability to fully comprehend how the universe works within the confines of our existence. Whether this relates directly to the Christian God that I was raised to believe in is not within my power to understand.
I find it far simpler that some entity has created our existence as it is, rather than our existence merely having spawned from a nothingness for no reason and by no creator.
I also know that this also pulls in the argument of "if our universe was created by an entity, then who or what created that entity?" To that I simply say point to my initial belief that there is likely a proper explanation for both the entity and our existence, but that it is beyond our capability to comprehend or reason about it.
I heard a great quote the other day, "Everyone is an atheist. Who believes in the Egyptian sun god Ra, or the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl? Or any of the other innumerable forgotten gods?"
These results, at least so far (ath=16, dei=4, the=5), are encouraging. I know you'd expect to see less religion in a science and tech community, but I've never seen anything beyond my group of friends, even in the scientific community, where atheists outnumber theists. I'm sometimes split between the views that religion is harmless and comforting for those who believe and should just be left alone, versus every service implicitly building the legitimacy of extremists. If church (or islamic services, or temple) didn't happen normally, extremists would just be obviously crazy with arcane rituals from the past thousand years; but, since it's all so ingrained in our cultural experience, less of a leap is need to understand extremists, which builds this low-level legitimacy for many people, even if we believe that they're criminals.
Just by everything I've ever learned about reason and the scientific method, and everything I've ever read, while I can completely understand why people would _want_ to believe, it's completely mystifying as to why the vast majority of the world's population (well, in the free, information-rich societies) could make themselves believe. It just doesn't make sense to me, given all evidence is so clearly, hugely against it. (Which, I guess, is kind of the point -- which also doesn't make any sense.)
Religion has been part of society since the days of pre-human hominids. It does not exist solely because of belief. I am willing to bet that few Greeks literally believed that a god carried the sun across the sky in a chariot. Rather, religion fulfills many cultural and social functions that our increasingly secular world has not yet found good substitutes for.
I went to church on Christmas to hear some carols, and I was struck by the fact that I was actually surrounded by people from different age groups and with different life experience from myself. The younger folk helped out the old when they got sick, and the older folk helped the people with little children when they needed a sitter. This kind of social cohesion doesn't exist in secular society, where I spend 99% of my time surrounded by people within a five-year age interval. If you want to explain the frequency of religious belief, you would be wise to look more towards the social functions that it fulfills, and less at its intellectual arguments.
There was an interesting post on here the other day, which was dead-ed, about this very topic. See here:
"The younger folk helped out the old when they got sick, and the older folk helped the people with little children when they needed a sitter. This kind of social cohesion doesn't exist in secular society"
Religious people do not have a monopoly on kindness. If you compare social programs in religious vs non secular societies(e.g europe vs USA) you will find the exact opposite of what you say.
For this American, the unique thing wasn't so much kindness but contact. I may be a nice guy, but from day to day I just don't run into anyone under 22 or over 30.
logic alert. It just doesn't make sense to me, given all evidence is so clearly, hugely against it.
You can't have evidence against something that does not exist. That's like saying all the evidence is against there being a real-live cartoon Donald Duck. What we can say is that there is a lack of evidence for something. We can further say that unless there is evidence for something we don't see any point in believing in it. But you can't disprove a negative. There is no evidence against God. We simply have no scientific way to talk about God existing. There is a lack of proof. Different animal.
You certainly can have evidence against something that doesn't exist. There is very strong evidence that there are no (ordinary) elephants in the room I'm in right now, for instance: elephants are large and easy to see, and the fact that I see none when I look around is evidence for their absence. Direct evidence that there are no invisible miniature elephantoids made from weakly-interacting Dark Matter in the room, of course, is harder to come by.
Similarly: If someone believes in a god who regularly answers prayers, works miracles, etc., then a shortage of miracles and surprisingly answered prayers is evidence against the existence of that person's god. If someone else believes in a god whose primary objective is to avoid notice, it's hard to see how anything could be evidence for or against its existence. (And, by the same token, it's hard to see why anyone would care much whether it exists or not. A god whose existence we can't get evidence about is ipso facto one that makes little difference to how the world is.)
... Except that it's pretty plausible that some sort of formalized Ockham's Razor works, where your initial evaluation of how likely something is looks more or less like 2^-(length of shortest complete description). In that case, a universe with a maximally-self-hiding god is much less likely than a universe without one.
Anyway, most theists believe in gods that are (perhaps intermittently) active in the world: answering prayer, healing sick people, raising people from the dead, etc. There's no reason why there shouldn't be evidence for or against the existence of such a god. (I think the evidence is heavily against; others disagree.)
There is very strong evidence that there are no (ordinary) elephants in the room
That's assuming a closed system open to inspection.
The universe is neither of those. I can say what is or isn't in the room because I have total control over and full freedom to inspect the room to the level of detail required to find elephants. Your example simply doesn't translate.
You pivot then into the "far away God is the same as missing God" argument. That's another can of worms (One which I did not go into)
What I find humorous is that every 80 years or so we see a resurgence in either atheism or deism. Each time the generation feels like it's way smarter than the one before it. Only the arguments are all the same as they were three iterations ago -- or three thousand years ago for that matter.
The existence and nature of a God, if there is one/them/it, isn't as easy as looking for elephants. But that's what makes the conversation fun -- as long as everyone acts in a civil manner.
<i>Your example simply doesn't translate</i>: I wasn't saying "God is just like an elephant", I was saying "Your alleged point of logic, claiming that one cannot have evidence that something doesn't exist, is incorrect". The elephant is a counterexample to it.
For what it's worth, though, I think the argument does translate -- for some but not all notions of God. Specifically, as I said before, if you adopt a notion of God that involves not-impossibly-vague claims about how he interacts with the world we can observe, and if those claims are something other than "he basically doesn't", then it is possible for there to be evidence for or against the existence of such a God.
This is true even without "total control over and full freedom to inspect" the universe. (Just as the claim "Some star within 100 light years of us went supernova between 100 and 200 years ago" is one we can have evidence for or against even without total control of and full freedom to inspect everything within 100 light years of us.)
<i>You pivot then ...</i>: What I'm saying is not "far away God is the same as missing God" but "professedly inactive, or indiscernibly active, god is hard to distinguish from no god". It seems to me that there is a difference.
<i>What I find humorous is ...</i>: You're welcome to find humour wherever you please, but for what it's worth I don't think I'm way smarter than people in the generation before mine, and I don't think skeptics generally think they are. (I expect skeptics generally think they're smarter than average people in the previous generation, but no more than they think they're smarter than average people in the present generation. Whether they are is a separate debate.)
concerning two populations of scientists in the US, one supposedly representative of all US scientists and one supposedly representative of "leading" ones.
Ignoring the (very severe) issues of sample bias here, it seems that HN contributors are intermediate in skepticism between Larson&Witham's two populations.
That is interesting. Do you know of such a study that breaks it down across scientific disciplines? I've heard that while the proportion of atheistic scientists is high, it is actually skewed towards the softer sciences.
If you are a Christian, you are probably very much an atheist when it comes to other religions gods (by commandment, I believe). So, what would be the right answer?
That isn't what theism means, i.e. believing in a specific god. Essentially it means believing that the primary cause of reality is conscious, and continually and intentionally active throughout history (the former by itself is deism). The specifics are a different matter.
When I was young I was brought up without any conversation whatsoever on religion. I do remember returning home from school one day (Church of England, so we said the lords prayer at assembly) and I asked my mum, "Mum, is dad in heaven?" and she just looked at me and replied "Don't be silly, he's at work." That pretty much resolved my religious beliefs until I was around 14.
At 14 I slowly converted to Christianity and at about 15 I would probably have called myself an Anglican. This, however, went down hill extremely quickly. I remember my youth group got a talk from a parishioner who said we shouldn't listen to sinful music like 'Marilyn Manson' or other rock and roll. Me and a few friends went to our group leader after the guy left and said 'if you bring someone here preaching that bullshit again we're gone', I can't exactly remember how many weeks went past before I never went back.
After leaving, I quickly began realising that a lot of what I was being taught was complete BS, that they were trying to get me to question science. Well I'm a sci-fi writer, that shit doesn't stick with me. I quickly learnt that all the religious phenomena are merely a form of hypnosis.
Today I believe nothing. I am not an atheist, I see it as another bullshit religion just with a non-existent god at the top, because all I hear are people like Richard Dawkins preaching in the belief that there isn't a god... but any form of belief in the absence of evidence (the existence and thus non-existence of god is fundamentally unprovable) is FAITH, they have faith there isn't a god. I mean fundamentally Christians believe in the existence of a hypothetical entity, where as Atheists like Dawkins believe in the non-existence of a hypothetical entity. It's the opposite side of the same coin, where as what I believe most atheists really believe is that the 'coin' doesn't exist.
If I cared, I'd be on the atheism subreddit right now. But I don't, and that's why I'm here, learning about tech. I hesitate to say this, but let's stay on topic. The atheism subreddit can be so vitriolic and it would be a shame to foster that here, not that this poll in and of itself does that.
I'm not certain that a Creator exists, but in view of the available evidence, it seems like a not-unreasonable bet -- depending of course on what the stakes are. (The degree of confidence you want in any Proposition X will depend in part on what happens if you're wrong.)
And over the long term, following the Summary of the Law that Jesus stressed -- which can be recast as, 1) face the facts, and 2) seek the best for others as you do for yourself -- appears to be adaptive behavior for individuals and cultures.
The Summary of the Law is by no means uniquely Christian, incidentally; it's Jewish (hey, Jesus was nothing if not a good Jew), and also finds expression in other faiths.
Those that refuse to believe x can not even imagine the astounding effects of y.
Einstein nailed it by stating the following:
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." AND
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
I'm a panentheist. I'm not sure in which category that falls (deism sounds the closest).
As far a flaming goes, this subject is all about beliefs, as we don't truly know how the universe ticks. No point trying to "win".
re: comments about whether HN is mature to handle religion topics - I think curiosity and humility are key. I feel that the ability to throw away pre-defined beliefs is fundamental in order to learn about other perspectives and ultimately allow an intelligent discussion about religion to take place.
Deism is the belief in a supreme natural entity that doesn't use super natural abilities.
I remember reading a section in the bible when I was younger, when I was into all the Christian stuff, that described how god knows how many feathers are on a bird and that 'god knows how many hairs are on your unborn childs head and that he has a plan for everyone before they're even born'. I believe this line is what Deist Christians believe, that there was a big bang but that fundamentally everything had already been arranged to happen long before the Earth had even formed.
I suppose when I was Christian I was probably a deist. I couldn't believe that some magical power made the red seas part, and either it never happened or god arranged a freak weather phenomena that could. I mean to create Earth how it is he obviously must have planned a Mars sized object crashing into primitive Earth to form the Moon. So at the time I took the bible on its word and I used the rational notion that a freak tidal behavior combined with a freak weather phenomena and possibly numerous other effects could have caused it, but god never lifted a finger to alter things.
The reason I never liked Intelligent Design and the reason I found it insulting when I was Christian was that God is supposed to be a supreme being, in fact everything he does including kids getting hit by buses is supposed to have a purpose... so why the fuck is he so incompetent he can't arrange for evolution to happen how he wanted it to? I mean Intelligent Design basically preaches God is an incompetent hack who can't do anything right because he kept having to nudge things to get it right. I mean imagine if Da Vinci never died, and he'd spent every year since he's did all his paintings touching them up and changing them slightly, he wouldn't be famous he'd be described as the worlds most incredible hack because he never did anything right. The ID God hasn't managed to get a single thing right in like 4 billion years! I found it fundamentally insulting.
I find religion absolutely fascinating, but also one of the most difficult topics to deal with in an open forum (as opposed to a personal conversation, where you can get into an in-the-moment flow and show respect while also bringing up challenging ideas). So while I'd certainly enjoy more intelligent conversations about religion, I'd worry that adding it here would not be worth the risk.
Unless we're hacking gods, or the Large Hadron Collider poked one in the eye and there's a scientific study detailing the result, why in the hell is this even posted on HN. This place is turning into Digg before my eyes.
One thing I've noticed is that hackers seem to like statistics, and I poll on what language you use would do equally well. I know that personally I like collecting information even if it is completely irrelevant.
Are you saying I should have added an agnostic choice? Or there is a better intepretation to what I've seen than "religion is not attacked as rabidly?"
That's quite noble of you. I appreciate it. I tried not to be harsh in that comment, though it may have come across that way. I rewrote it a couple times.
Thanks, you didn't come across harsh at all. I cringe on re-reading that comment and wish it could be purged, but sometimes we have to live with our actions...best, regardless.
I wonder how many atheists are actually agnostics (depend on your definitions, naturally). No one can (yet?) prove the existence or non-existence of a god, and although there are some who claim that they can show that a god isn't necessary for all of this reality stuff to have come about (read: Dawkins), I am less convinced of that -- we (via science) don't know enough to make that argument. Yet.
Are you sure there is no god at all, or do you just doubt?
Myself, I suspect the universe itself is "god", so to speak. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
I think most of them make it clear that they are 'weak atheists', who believe (as John McCarthy puts it) that the evidence on the God question is about as strong as the evidence on the Werewolf question. Strong atheists are much rarer -- I'm actually not familiar with their arguments.
If you were to ask me free-form about my religious views, the answer you would get would be very dependent on how you asked the question.
If you asked me, "Do you think a god exists?", I would say "no", and you would call me an atheist. If you asked, "Do you think a god could exist?", I would say, "yes", and you would call me an agnostic.
On the other hand, if you asked me "What term most closely describes your views?", I would say "secular humanist" and emphasize the humanist part. Ultimately, the question of the existence or non-existence of a god doesn't enter my life very often and that's the way I like it.
(As an aside, the term for the beliefs you describe is pantheist)
I think it depends which God you ask if someone believe in.
For example, the Platonic idea of The Good is a pretty abstract philosophical concept which does not exist in the physical world - rather the physical world is some kind of shadow or reflection of this Good. You can't really prove or disprove the "existence" of this interpretation of reality, although some would say you can apply occams razor to it. Plato would argue that you cannot not belive in this, if you just consider the question reationally.
On the other hand, the biblical God Yahweh is a beeing with a physical shape and with intentions and emotions, which walk around in the physical world in historical times and interact with people (and killing them left and right!). The existence of this beeing could easily be proved if you meet him, but cannot strictly speaking be disproved as long as he remains in hiding. But the evidence can be weighed the same way we weigh evidence for the existence of mammuths or unicorns.
The christian notion of God has historically been kind of a mixture of these two ideas (and to a lesser degree many other). Due to this complexity of the concept "God", it is not even clear what it means to believe or don't believe in God.
I don't understand the causation/design argument. Anything complicated enough to create the universe must be just as, if not more, complicated as the universe It creates. If God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster created our universe, then such Entity must be at least as complex as our universe, begging the infinite regress of who created said Entity and why is said Entity so complex? Causation itself is a red herring. The universe is, period, properly viewed in imaginary time, not real time. In imaginary time, it is neither created (caused) or destroyed. It just is. And if you don't understand that, I suggest you re-read 'A brief history of time'. Thus if the universe has no cause then structures within like ourselves should need no Designer, otherwise, who designed the Designer? Design in an un-caused universe ends up being an illusion given to us by natural selection. Within (real) time, natural selection works, creating things like human apes and elephants. Within imaginary time, nothing is created nor destroyed. Natural selection explains design. Imaginary time shows there is no beginning, no need for a cause. Clinging to the god delusion is going to require more than first cause and design arguments boys and girls. There is one sense in which God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster do exist, and that is, they exist as memes. They are viruses which hijack the human mind and in some cases cause the human it hijacks to hijack, say, airplanes. There is a great poster out there with the words, "Imagine no religion" superimposed over a picture of the twin towers. Without God, the meme of God, that is, those towers would still stand. I think its time this species grow up and get rid of the god delusion or else we bloody well deserve to go extinct.
If you believe god created you, what name do call that god by? Jesus? Allah? Yahweh? Buddha? Zeus?
Theists, talk amongst yourself. If you ever settle on one name for god, then maybe we atheists will start taking you more seriously.
Logically, if you didn't create yourself:
1) Maybe a god created you.
2) Maybe something else created you.
3) Maybe you weren't created at all. (Ex: Maybe the matter and energy in the universe have existed forever.)
As an atheist, I'm humble enough to admit I can't pick #1, #2, or #3 conclusively.
By that logic, all theories would need to be proven down to the detailed fundamentals before deemed worthy of discussion.
It's like saying you have to determine the make, model and age of a car in the parking lot before you are allowed to assert that (any) car may exist in the parking lot.
But, as I have said before, I agree with you in that I don't feel the real truth of the matter can be proven externally. I choose to believe in God, but I have no 'proof' scientifically speaking.
I can only speak for myself, and this is the way I see it (but this is already Faith):
"God" is defined this way: the only one not caused by anything else.
So, if God is the only one not caused by anything, but simply cause of Himself, nobody can reach God, if He doesn't allow to be reached.
So, the only possibility for us to know something about God is that He deliberately decided to communicate Himself to us.
From this premises, it's clear that there can only be one real Religion, and that all the other ones are simply negations of some parts of the real one...
This is the stupidest thing you've ever posted and you should be ashamed of yourself. There are plenty of other sites where you can wallow in junior-high level discussion and polls about off topic subjects. These types of posts encourage stupid people to comment, contain no useful or interesting information, and bring out the worst in smart people.
The religion and "meta" discussions of late have polluted the /newcomments link to the point where it is almost useless. The lame thing is that even if the post is marked dead, you still get the inane discussion from the bozos who don't know or don't care that the original post is dead.
My suggestions for technical improvements are removing comments on dead posts from newcomments and raising the karma for posting topics about religion to 10000+.
Do you think the poll itself is uninformative/uninteresting? I think things turned out alright, the comments have been pretty civil. Don't worry, I probably won't post something like this again, at least until the newbie surge passes.
As for your other point, I don't know if disallowing certain topics is the solution. I see value in easing the community into discussing controversial topics without flamewars. They draw flamewars because people are so interested in the issues, so everyone gains if we can get past the flamewar stage.
For example, I am considering broaching ID, because no one really gets what its about, or its significance. I want to clearly demarcate it from creationism, and also explain the theory as clearly as possible. If you want, I can send you my blog post link once its written, so's you can give thumbs up/down.
edit: Not to mention such discussion is actually off-topic.