DWill wrote:I think you'll find very few atheists who deny that divinity could exist.
As with much discussion relating to philosophy and theology, precision and agreement in the meaning of words can help to resolve differences. Your phrase “divinity could exist” has several possible meanings. It could mean that undetectable supernatural entities exist. It could mean that a supervening power governs the entire universe with deliberate intentions. It could mean that the belief or ritual practice that people have about Gods in some sense constitutes the existence of those Gods, even if only as mental constructs in the framework of worship and reverence.
DWill wrote: Divinity is a simple substitute for god/God.
There is nothing simple about divinity, which refers to alleged entities whose existence is only clear as human psychological projections, not as independent beings. Where the very nature of what exists is in hot dispute you can’t call it a simple substitute.
DWill wrote: Atheists are denying, almost always I think, a specific, prevalent idea of god, that of the Judeo/Christian/ Muslim tradition. Take a look at the two most famous atheist books, by Dawkins and Hitchens. It's clear just from the titles (The God Delusion and God Is Not Great) that they mean that God, the one who created all life forms at a gallop, chose one ethnic group to prevail over others, doles out punishments and rewards differentially according to who worships him most strongly, prevents bad things from happening to good people, answers prayers, etc.
It is most unlikely that any atheists would say that their doubt about miraculous mythological magic of Western mythology does not also extend to the similar evidence-free beliefs from other cultures. In all cases, following the great founder of modern atheism
David Hume, such beliefs are more probably founded on error or deception than on the existence of actual undetectable entities.
DWill wrote:This God is the one atheists repudiate, rather than the idea of god, as that can bring into the picture several ontological issues that aren't a part of the atheist argument, any more than the origin of life is part of the atheist argument.
Even repudiating the existence of Jehovah does not render the idea of God meaningless, since even in Platonic idealism divinity is interpreted as revealed in ethical concepts such as the good, just, love, beauty, true, equal, etc. If these concepts are seen as inherently divine that does not at all mean that there is a real entity from which all good things derive their goodness, but rather that all good things share in a common good conceptual property.
DWill wrote:Atheists are agnostic on those matters, not even close to strong or militant. If it is not in fact the case that the atheist argument is a restricted one, evidence to the contrary needs to be shown.
Atheists may be agnostic about whether the concept of God is meaningful, but not about whether Gods may actually exist. The basis of atheism is the view that all beliefs in the actual existence of Gods is delusional and based on erroneous displacement of symbols into entities.
DWill wrote:We need to see statements from prominent atheists that only science provides meaning, that it answers all questions about existence, that materialism is the only cause possible. It needs to be more than someone's impression that atheists have these beliefs.
I cannot imagine anyone, even the most faithful atheist, asserting that science answers all questions about existence. It obviously does not since there is so much that humans do not know and which remains a scientific mystery. But it is very surprising to me to see you implying a chink of daylight between atheism, materialism, naturalism and physicalism. There is a lot of philosophy that emphasises the logical coherence between these belief systems. Logical positivism as a philosophy of science, for example in the analytical philosophy Bibles Language Truth and Logic by AJ Ayer and the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, was characterised by the view that there is only so much real meaning in a statement as it contains evidentiary content.
