Someone had the temerity to ask me to “take down” my definition of ‘adeism’, and presumably to change the title of this blog, or even to remove the blog.

1.      This is NOT the definition for adeist that I coined in 2003. Adeism is the word I chose to describe the weak-atheist position of unbelief in supernatural beings. I hope you take this down, because I’m going to promote the usage of adeism as I coined it.

What a cheek!

Unbelief in the supernatural, or better yet an argument that ’supernatural’ is a false category, is not a weak position – it obviates the possibility of superstitious mumbo-jumbo and any religious deity other than cult deities such as the Emperor Hirohito (and we know what happened to his pseudo-divinity).

I responded: 

Sorry, but I am *not* taking it down because I disagree with your definition, even if you did coin it earlier than I.

 

While searching for an official definition for the term that I wished to adopt, I found, as recently as 2007, that there was *no officially accepted* definition of adeism.

 

I think that I found your definition on an atheist message board, where you had previously posted a paper that you’d submitted for a course. Your position, as I recall, was just to the atheist side of agnosticism. I found the paper quite interesting, but disagreed with your terminology for the following reasons:

 

If deism is the weakest form of ‘theism’, then I see refusal to believe in *even* the weakest position as being the strongest form of atheism. The opposite of weak is strong. Deism, as I see it, was a hedge position that snuck the concept of supernatural past the censors by essentially saying “God got it started, but the lack of evidence of His interference is explained by his voluntarily giving up interference.” This contrives to make room for a supernatural creator and attempts to put God beyond question or examination. It’s a theistic notwithstanding clause.

 

I don’t buy *even* that contrived position. My strongly atheist position on this could be summed up by the term ‘adeism’. Basically, as soon as any agent interferes with the physical world, then that agent is necessarily *of* the physical world. The supernatural is a pseudocategory invented by humans to explain away the patently obvious noninterference of a deity in any physical events (which includes psychological events).

 

As you can tell by my delay in posting, I have neglected this blog, so you need not worry that hordes of people are reading my definition. 

 

I can’t stop you from promoting your usage of ‘adeism’ and like the case for VHS technology you just might prevail over ‘Beta’ because most people don’t think the logic through to the obvious conclusion.

 

 

The actual conversation is in the comments section of my ‘about’ post, but I was annoyed enough to bring it up to the front page.

As to the argument from primacy, it could be used in an argument that the conceptualization of Egyptian gods preceded the copy-cat invention of Jehovah/God/Allah, and that therefore Jews, Christians, and Muslims should “take down” their religions and revert to worshipping Ra and the gang. I’d like to see all those religions taken down, but on the basis of factual information and logic and not on the basis of a fallacy of logic.