belief is theism

Since you have not provided a new definition of belief, I will continue using the one provided by reference.dictionary.com To begin with, I am not a theist. To contend with the general idea of your statement, however, here is a simple thought exercise. Consider a theist that believes in God, but has a dream where they eat their teeth. While you could say they imagined both God (for lack of a better phrasing) and eating their teeth, after they wake up they would likely not accept that they ate their teeth as a true statement. Imagination is not necessarily something that is believed in. It seems now though that we delve into the realm of epistemology, so we need a working definition for knowledge. I assume by "" and know is true" you imply that if you know something, which is to say it is knowledge, it is necessarily true. This I can agree with, but I believe you will find it a very constricting definition for knowledge, since it implies that we can only know something if there is no possibility of it being false. One more definition issue to clear up, as your next argument concerns agnosticism and uncertainty. Your dual definition of agnostic as "I accept I don"t know" and "I accept reality" is a bit lacking, notably the second. Agnosticism is a claim about how well something can be known, especially God or reality. To say agnosticism is the acceptance of reality, when the first (and common) definition of agnosticism is a statement about the ability to know reality, is not a useful or functioning definition, because it begs the question. Next you begin with your argument of certainty versus uncertainty. I am not entirely sure how this is supposed to aid your claim that belief is theism, but I would note the following problems with your statement. While you can accept you know that you don"t know something (as per your definition of agnosticism, which I am inferring that you are comparing in your fourth line in opposition to theism and atheism), this does not necessitate theism or atheism being false. Theism and atheism are beliefs, and are not claims of knowledge. Indeed, you could be both agnostic and theistic for example, suggesting both that you cannot KNOW if God is true, but you do BELIEVE he is. Gravity was perhaps not the best example, because of its rigorous backing, but with your strict definition of knowledge it should still hold as a belief, because you cannot know gravity. This sounds extreme but allow me to explain. Virtually everyone has a basic understanding of gravity. Things fall toward the ground. Many people know further of Newton"s equation for it, or at least the principles behind it that gravity exists in all objects with mass, and the closer two masses are and the larger their masses, the greater the force of gravity pulling the two objects together. This is all well and good, but this is not entirely true; rather it is a very good estimation system for things here on Earth (Citation 1). For this reason, Newton"s laws of gravity were replaced with Einstein"s general relativity theory. Go forward a few more decades, and we have discovered that general relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics (Citation 2). As of yet, this incompatibility has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, with the two "best" theories on explaining quantum gravity being string theory and loop quantum gravity theory. To pull all this back to your claim, if you know gravity, and knowledge, by your own definition, must be true, this implies that you necessarily know the true theory of gravity. If you have a proof for a theory of gravity I am all ears and would be rather impressed, but I think it is otherwise safe to say gravity is still technically outside the realm of human knowledge, as per your definition of knowledge. As to your claim that god is information, how exactly does that support your argument? I see no connection. With your final line, apart from the second petitio principii fallacy, none of it warrants a rebuttal. Theism does not need to be able to exist without belief for your claim that belief is theism, to be true. On the contrary, belief needs to be unable to exist without being theism. The two statements are not one in the same. Your analogy would basically convert to "you cannot have a theism without a belief, and you cannot have a theism that does come from a belief" but once again, the claim of the debate is that belief is theism. Flipping the analogy ruins it: "you cannot have a dead bear without having a bear skin, and you cannot have a bear that doesn"t come from a bear skin". Moreover, you have not rebutted my claim that belief is not necessarily theism, which would hold the claim of the debate false. As such, I will restate it now with more formally and with emphasis. Premise 1: Theism is a belief in gods. Premise 2: Atheism is a belief that there are no gods. Premise 3: I hold one of the two previous beliefs. Conclusion: My belief could be either theism or atheism. So to say it is necessarily theism is incorrect. Indeed, the set of beliefs in innumerable. I could hold a belief in virtually anything and so long as it does not include a god, would not constitute a theism. Citation 1: http://en.wikipedia.org... Citation 2: http://en.wikipedia.org...