Kevin Padian

On FORA.tv, a conversation with Kevin Padian, one of the witnesses for science at the Dover trial. Kevin Padian is a University of California Berkeley professor and curator of the Museum of Paleontology. This is not a particularly exciting conversation because both the interviewer and Padian have a very calm style, but it is an interesting conversation nontheless.

Deism and Theism

Obviously, many people in Western society get stuck in an increasingly elaborate, circular theistic stage. I'd categorize "theistic beliefs" as including deistic (pre-cosmology and pre-evolution supernatural agency) or theistic (varying degrees of God did it) beliefs coupled with the emotionally essential afterlife beliefs.

Deism: The belief that God exists but is not involved in the world. It maintains that God created all things and set the universe in motion and is no longer involved in its operation. (www.carm.org/dictionary/dic_c-d.htm)

Theism: the doctrine or belief in the existence of a God or gods. (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

I am including within the concept of theism, both deism and more-interfering-deity beliefs.

Developmental Atheism

I think that most atheists in Western society have passed through a series of conceptual stages:

1) blank-slate aconceptual at birth (to coin a neologism);

2) magic-thinking acceptance of the simplest, most widely publicized explanation ("God did it" theistic stage);

followed by 3)

a) disbelief in deities (atheistic non-acceptance of deistic or theistic claims)

or,

b) uncertainty (agnosticism = we can't know either way).

atheism