I think Christians & atheists are all agnostic. Christians because the whole point of their religion is “faith”. If you “know” there is a god, there would no longer be any point to the whole thing anymore. Atheists because there is no point saying there is no god when the goalposts can be moved at any time.
I do not believe, which makes me an atheist. I like to add that I don’t “know”, because religion has built up something unknowable by moving the goalposts. So I am an agnostic atheist.
Like plenty of others have explained, it has nothing to do with uncertainty. I am certain there is no reason to believe in god, I am certain making any claim to knowledge is simply unnecessary. More than anything I am certain there is no need for the hypothesis.
No, it’s not. And I don’t appreciate being told I’m really just a confused atheist any more than you appreciate being told you are a confused Christian. Really, it is very offensive to make presumptions about someone’s religious beliefs (or unbeliefs.)
When someone asks you whether you believe in God, you answer “no.”
When someone asks me if I believe in God, I answer “Can you clarify what you are asking me?”
Ignosticism goes hand in hand with theological noncognitism. Many concepts of God are just nonsense words strung together- like a “super-intellegent shade of blue” or a “nonexistent duck.” The words seem to form a phrase, but it’s not really a phrase that signifies anything. How can you believe or disbelieve in that? I don’t know if I do or don’t believe in a nonexistent duck- it’s a meaningless phrase that can’t be answered like that. How can you say “yes” or “no” to a nonsense phrase? all you can really say is “Can you clarify exactly what you mean?”
That said, there are lots of ways that I’m willing to entertain the idea that God is real. God certainly does seem to have a real effect on people’s brains. God makes old ladies hand me Chick tracts in the supermarket. God makes people feel better when they are sad. God makes people kill each other sometimes. I have no good reason to say that’s not God working.
Or the whole “everything is one and that is God,” and other vague concepts of God (including most of those held by real theologists) seems reasonable to me, although ultimately kind of meaningless. Even prayer seems pretty real to me- you pray, it focuses your mind on whatever, and yeah, that probably will make you better at whatever you are praying about. If you pray to God for forgiveness, I’m sure you will probably end up with forgiveness. I think that can probably be called God, and sure, that exists.
Indeed, my own personal concept of God is that it’s a metaphor for making sense of the various things (death, love, time, whatever) that we don’t really have a good mental construct for to be able to talk about directly. God seems pretty useful in that regards, with questions of “real” or “not real” being inapplicable. God is a poetic concept that helps us make sense of this world.
In any case, what it boils down to is that “does God exist” is a question so broad and poorly conceived that it’s beyond arguing about- like asking me what color time is, or if youth is spread on toast. That doesn’t make sense, come back when you can ask me something that means something.
Yeah, “more precisely” stating your position is against the agnostic creed, or would be if we had one. It’d be like organizing anarchists or herding cats.
Agnostics do however have a theme song.
“Well it don’t matter to me what you say, what you say
And it don’t matter to me what you’re doing alright, alright.”
Gnosticism and theism are different categories. One makes a claim about what is knowable, and the other about belief. It is NOT the same as just saying “I don’t know.” It’s about whether or not we CAN know.
Most atheists are also agnostics (“I don’t believe in God, but I also don’t think such a concept is knowable”). Most atheists don’t assert their belief is 100% likely to be true, but this is no different from saying that we can’t prove Thor or Zeus don’t exist with 100% certainty.
To paraphrase from Megamind, ‘You’re agnostic guys are SO naive. I mean, you’re all living a fantasy, in denial. There is no Easter Bunny. There is no Tooth Fairy. And there is no Queen of England. This is the real world, and you need to wake up, throw off your doubts and march with the rest of us!’.
ETA: It’s funny to me to watch threads like this unfold. The very things that make science such an effective tool are the very things that agnostics get dinged on by atheist types. Ironic, really, on a board such as this that an agnostic viewpoint is so put down and disparaged.
Yeah, except that in these same threads we also frequently get posters claiming that atheists are just as religious as Christians and that agnosticism is the only true non-religion, which is just as much of a put down and disparagement. Raindog and former poster FuzzyPickles were fond of this comment, and I remember because it bugged the crap out of me.
Personally, I think the atheist/agnostic distinction is like the distinction between the New Church of Christ and the Church of New Christ, or the distinction between Steampunk and Gaslamp Fantasy. Realistically, atheists and agnostics are not likely to act any differently based on their non-belief except in debates with other agnostics/atheists. I get irritated when agnostics and atheists go at it because half of those insults are directed at me (sort of), but I also just don’t get why they care about defending their particular variation of non-belief so vehemently.
(For the record, I identify as atheist, but would not be offended to be called agnostic. I would be offended if you called me deluded, of course)
Atheists: “The odds are so ridiculously absurd of a specific being existing we’d have to give each of the infinite lotto ticket numbers an ‘ism’, therefore, accept the null hypothesis”
Agnostic: “In the interests of objectivity I choose to maintain careful doubt about any other imaginary things I’m not currently familiar with.”
Agnosticism is fundamentally intellectual dishonesty.
The dishonest stance is holding in contemplation a thing you’ve never seen or experienced for the sake of imagined objectivity.
You don’t know if Leprechauns live in your shoes, what do we call people like you? You don’t know if invisible pink unicorns live in your bedroom, what do we call people with that belief? You aren’t sure if a teapot is orbiting Mars, what are those people called?
Well I would say that agnostics are a humble bunch, we don’t profess to know if there is a god or what that god is like. We just think that it is the height of arrogance to say that we know all there is to know about the situation.
I am agnostic to the idea of an overarching intelligence but would say I am atheistic to the idea of the Xtian god for example.
But what physicist would ever go so far as to say, “You will never be able to know if you are in part of a multiverse?” To close the door, in advance, against the possibility of more knowledge, more evidence, seems to be functionally the same as denying the idea a priori.
Again, I certainly respect anyone who says, “We don’t know.” But those who say “We can’t know” seem to be rejecting the possibility of further information. God might change his mind and reveal himself to us; the only way that cannot happen is if there isn’t a God at all!
They may believe that the existence of deities is currently unknown but is not necessarily unknowable.
they could be operating with the assumption that they are not real until evidence does come around.
But really I think you misunderstand something
There are Theists and there are Non(a) Theists and there are all degrees between.
There are those who are Gnostic, who believe they know and those who are agnostic and say we do not currently or will never know.
It sounds like you are a Gnostic Non-Theist, in that you believe that there is no god, and there is now possibly there is one.
People can be any degree of both of those axis. Gnostic Atheists and Agnostic Theists exist.
You are making a claim that you have NO data to support.
Now I think that god of Abraham is 100% false, no question.
But there may be some thing in the future that does prove a super natural god does exist.
I agree that it may be foolish to act on any religious belief at this point in time but to be closed to the possibility is just as “intellectual dishonest”
So the weight of proof falls on the defense? As if you could walk into a court room with any schlub off the street and say to the judge, “It’s the height of arrogance to say we aren’t sure that this man has in fact committed a crime.”
I used to be pretty live and let live on this issue, until I got into discussions on this subject on this board and found that the folks who did the most putting down, dismissing and disparaging weren’t the theists, but instead the atheists. Granted, not all of them…but enough, and in vehement enough ways to make me rethink the ‘atheists are just as religious as Christians’ argument. Go back and do some searches on agnosticism on this board and read through them from the perspective of someone claiming to be an agnostic.
I pretty much adopted my title because of some of those discussions and the almost rabid insistence by some atheists that I was really just a cowardly and ashamed atheists, but just didn’t have the cojones to admit what I really was. As if trying to force me into being a ‘conservative’ wasn’t enough, I also had to be told what my beliefs (or lack there of) REALLY were.
No, there is certainly a distinction, though in practice I’m pretty much an atheists (without all the balls, guts and moxy to just come out of the closet and admit that I know how things REALLY are :p). I don’t believe in God or gods…or IPUs, or George Washington impersonating space squirrels, or 9/11 conspiracy theories. Where I draw the line though is where people (a minority of atheists, IMHO, though sadly a very VOCAL one) say they KNOW that there isn’t any God (or IPU’s, or space squirrels or even government conspiracies by shadowy Jewish cabals staffed by sooper sekrit ninja explosives experts and…ok, ok…that IS pretty crazy and highly improbable :p). A lack of evidence is merely a lack of evidence…it proves nothing, though such a lack certainly can be highly indicative of something, and can be a good base line for drawing a good solid position on something. It’s like the multiverse part of string theory…there is no real evidence that there ARE multiple universes, or that our universe sits on a membrane in a larger bulk universe. None…zip. But it COULD be that way. It’s not completely, 100% outside of the realm of possibility, though it’s highly speculative. And real, honest to non-Gods scientists types ARE speculating on it, and have even developed theories about it and what it could be like…because that’s how science works. They may never know if there is a multiverse out there…but it won’t stop some of them from thinking about it, researching it, developing the math for it or keeping an open mind about it. I put God, or deities or supernatural beings or extra-dimensional mutant space wombats pretty much in the same category…highly speculative, perhaps interesting to think about, but improbable.
Then again, SOMETHING caused the Big Bang and the beginning of our universe, and that was certainly ‘supernatural’, in that, afaict, it’s only happened once…and we’re not even sure what it was, what caused it, why it happened, what the preconditions were, or really anything about it except that it happened. We don’t even know if it was the first and only time it has or will ever happen, or if we are but the latest (or maybe not even that) in a long line of such events, starting with…well, who knows? Certainly not I, though it’s interesting to speculate. Assuming you haven’t locked down your mind completely and simply discounted any further thought on the subject, already knowing the answer to be what you think it is.
Be truthful here…wouldn’t it be cool if there WERE extra-dimensional mutant space wombats?
“True Believer” is probably a better term than religious, it applies to all mass movements no matter if they are religious/social/governmental concepts.
Although to be fair, us Atheists have been smoked out recently, we were quite for thousands of years.
So like the kid who stands up to a bully for the first time we are yelling pretty loud at this point in time…
No. Honesty requires you accept the* full *consequences of the decision you make. If you choose to make the decision to entertain the possibility of something unfalsifiable, fine, but then everything else unfalsifiable should deserve equal weight in your mind. If you do that it is honest, but I don’t think anyone can. They choose what they like, and that always has fuck all to do with what’s real.
I’ve gone a little past middle school, I can read more than one line at a time.
