sarahmichigan | Penn Jillette: "I believe there is no god."

NPR is running a weekly series called "This I Believe." The current incarnation of This I Believe is based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by Edward R. Murrow. I was listening to NPR in the car this morning and caught this week's guest opinion from Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller). I LOVED how succinctly he summed up the atheist, rationalist viewpoint on belief and why life isn't hopeless and dreary if you don't believe in a higher power.

excerpt:

"Having taken that step [of rejecting a belief in god], it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."

Read the full text here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He's confusing atheism with agnosticism, and personally, I disliked his position. Believing there's no god does NOT let him admit being wrong about one thing, if it turns out he is: That there is a God.

Then again, I also personally think that Penn Gillette is an entertainment genius but not somebody I'd care to know personally. He also doesn't strike me as someone who readily admits when he's wrong about something.

I knew you wouldn't like it, but I figured others on my FL would. I don't think he's confusing atheism with agnosticism. I think you can start with the proposition, "I believe there is no god," and still be open to proofs in the future that there is a god. That's pretty much what *I* think, too.

He's also trying to condense his position into 500 words, which is what all the believers have to do for this project, as well.

That's not what I meant when I said he was confusing atheism with agnosticism. I meant at the beginning, when he's talking about how others take the "easy route" of atheism. The easy route that he's describing is, in my opinion, agnosticism (unless I'm misunderstanding his explanation). He then describes his own beliefs, which is atheism.

I think, as a description of atheism, it was fine. Slightly elitist, but compared to how he normally presents his ideas, it was downright humble. :)

Atheism / Weak Atheism / me: No belief, at least in the high-level "is there or isn't there" question

Strong atheism / the conclusion people jump to when they hear "atheism", and why I tend to say "atheist to agnostic": explicit disbelief

Agnostic: Belief that there is not enough evidence for anyone to be justified in having any belief whatsoever -- "I don't know, and neither do you."

Your last definition conflates two positions: "I know that God exists" and "I believe God exists." An agnostic says that it's impossible to KNOW that God exists (or doesn't exist): http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861584207 -- an agnostic need not believe that religious beliefs (or lack thereof) are unjustified. Agnostics may well believe that God exists, or that God does not exist, or have no opinion on the matter, they just further feel that that's a belief, not strong knowledge.

All of these posts are entirely my own opinion except where citations are provided.

I think in the interest of not annoying Sarah more, I'm going to let what I've said so far stand without further comment.

Believing there's no god does NOT let him admit being wrong about one thing, if it turns out he is: That there is a God.

That's faith, not belief.

Not if God walks up to him and gives him a firm handshake. "There is no god at all." is a statement of faith as well. The only scientifically valid statement is, "There are ways of explaining the universe without relying on an assumption of God, and methods of simplicity would therefore suggest that God most probably doesn't exist."

I can't make sense of your first two sentences, sorry.

As for the rest, yes, science isn't going to get you beyond "there probably isn't a god". That usually requires something personal about how much the world sucks.

It's a bastardization of the scientific method using god as the null hypothesis: If you can't prove otherwise, it must be because of god. This isn't science, it's just a smokescreen.

The actual null hypothesis is: Nothing happened / There is no effect. The scientist must disprove that nothing happened or simply that it is statistically unlikely that nothing happened. In the case of the existence of god, the null hypothesis must be: There is no god. The believer must then endeavor to disprove by the preponderance of evidence that there is no god /designer. This is the same rule for all of science.

In addition, correlation is not causality. Even if one could disprove the non-existence of god, they would still not be able to attribute causality.

Given the complete absence of disproof of this null hypothesis, the idea that there is a god cannot be scientifically entertained.

I'm with you, I think, in that I think his piece would suffer less had he not gotten into the semantics of whether or not he's an atheist or what label applies to him. Saying "I believe that there is no God" is, to me, saying that one is an atheist. But, leave semantics out of it and just say, "I believe that there is no God" and let people identify or not identify with you, despite how they would label such a position.

Believing there's no god doesn't rule out later admitting being wrong about god's non-existence if evidence surfaces. That depends on another unrelated personality dimension: one's readiness to acknowledge being wrong. There are both athiests and theists who would be hard-headed in sticking to their positions in light of strong evidence suggesting that they are wrong. Then there are others on the opposite end of the continuum, and I fall in this camp, who are easy with the morphing and discarding of what we are comfortable in claiming to "know" based on convincing information. I give Jillette the benefit of assuming he falls in the latter camp as well.

I agree with you that he's an entertainment genius. I think we see a persona he puts on like a glove, for us. I think we have no idea, really, whether or not the real man is flexible in changing his mind, but he did say in this essay "believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong". That statement does not rule out being convinced later that one is wrong and moving from believing there is no god to being personally certain that there is a god. I am giving that interpretation to his words, because I have nothing to convince me of a negative interpretation.

I believe Penn's position is one of nontheism. Agnostism (as I've understood it) implies that the existance of god is unknowable, but potentially very important. Nontheism implies it is conceivably knowable (in which case Penn would be proven wrong and would learn something interesting - along with the rest of us!) but whether or not god exists is irrelevent to our existance.

Wikipedia has a lot to offer on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheism

AgnostICism. I need more sacred caffeine. :)

Penn Jillette: "I believe there is no god."

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