Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Types of Atheists (Psychology of Atheism Part 1)" video.

  1. This is excellent, but I'd want to add other terms in your discussion of world-views from about 13:00. First, I don't think we have to choose between naturalism, dualism, and immaterialism (or idealism, as it used to be known). It seems to me that it is possible to hold that the basic stuff of the universe has both a mind-like nature and a physical (material) nature: like dualism but without an absolute split. This seems to be the pov of Thomas Nagel (an atheist) in Mind and Cosmos when he declares himself a "neutral monist." It seems to me evident that there are facts of existence that we can't explain without using mentalist language, but dualism seems very problematic for accounting for how much our mind is intertwined with the electro-chemical functioning of our brains. (Test: describe two 12 year olds playing a game of chess, using only statements about brain states and functions.) Second, on epistemology: I am not happy with the only choices being "Science + Reason" and "Divine Revelation." There are things we know by intuition and by non-rational (which is not anti-rational) observation. I think of the way the arts can inform our understanding, but also things like human love, friendship, hostility, and hatred. There's also the way in games that if you're one-on-one with another player, you can sometimes just know whether they're going to come in hard on you. There's the way we can talk about a great poem being "inspired" without necessarily being divinely inspired. And on the other hand, I am very hesitant about what we might mean by calling the Bible "divinely inspired": certainly some meanings of that phrase mean things I couldn't believe. I realise that these positions might be a bit nuanced for a mass survey in a PhD thesis, but they're important to at least some people. For the record, I'm a church-going Christian (Anglican, which some people might regard as CINO), having been in and out of belief for most of my life. BTW, there's a typo in one of your slides: POSTITIVE ATHEISM -> POSITIVE ATHEISM, if you ever feel like fixing it. It's always the block caps where the last typo lurks.
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