Reply #112: Are you arguing for a category of half-assed belief?

[BurtWorm]

Or belief if and only if prayers are answered, otherwise non-belief?

Some atheists fall into magical thinking (always temporarily and/or unconsciously) because humans in general fall into magical thinking. Magical thinking, despite being highly valued by religious, cultural and political leaders and highly reinforced in us from a very young age, is fallacious thinking. It's belief that phenomena can be caused by things that have no cause-and-effect relationship to them. It's what lies at the heart of most religious belief: The volcano blows because the volcano god is angry with us for not propitiating it; if we give it a goat, it will be appeased and won't blow again. If I ask God for a favor, God will grant it to me, unless I am not asking God the right way, or God is angry with me, in which case, he won't grant me my prayer. Magical thinking is caused by our mistaken belief that anything that seems to act in the world acts because something intends it. It does take discipline to unlearn the old habit of seeing intentionality everywhere and to accept randomness and accident for what they are, as frightening as it is to us to contemplate. An intentional universe is a much more comfortable place for us intentional beings. But that certainly doesn't mean that the universe is intentional. Far from it.