Just out of curiosity; which answer did you pick from the poll? They’re all compatible with that statement.
Agnostic checking in…ducks the flying crockery…
I’m probably in the ‘don’t know, don’t care’ category as well. I chose the selection that said basically I don’t think there is a god or gods, but that it’s impossible to prove or disprove. This isn’t ACTUALLY my stance, but it’s as close as it comes in the limited poll selections, so I went with that.
-XT
If I’m being precise rather than brief, I call myself an agnostic as well as an atheist. I chose option two.
Yeah, option 2 and 3 have different criteria, one mentioning God, the other a God. Assuming it’s a generic deity I chose “slightly more chance there isn’t”, although if the question were uppercase G, I’da chosen option 2, although it then wouldn’t have really been about agnosticism per se.
To anyone else who’s wondering; I meant it to be generic god(s) for all the answers.
That depends on what sort of god.
An old bearded man on a throne in a city with streets of gold? Highly unlikely.
Some incredibly advanced alien being that created this universe as some kind of ultra-high-tech lab experiment. No evidence, but it could be…of course, that being would only be god in the sense of being our creator. I don’t know of any way that such a being could influence this universe one he/she had created it.
I don’t know whether or not there is a god. Therefore my default position is that none exist until one is proven to exist.
None of the choices are satisfactory.
That’s why I abstained from voting. By the way, my apologies for my post that followed. Moderator apparently considered it a thread crap, which wasn’t my intention. Sorry!
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I’m pretty sure that there is no god, simply because I haven’t seen or experienced anything that makes me think that there is.
However, I don’t deny the possibility.
I believe that there is an infinitessimal but non-zero probability of some sort of deity, deities or other sentient supernatural forces existing, but as this existence cannot be demonstrated through conventional means and as this existence is not required to explain the various workings of the universe it seems sensible to assume the non-existence of such force or forces for all practical purposes without requiring a position of absolute non-existence.
Clear?
Ditto. The first option doesn’t fit this, because it’s not our duty to prove a non-existence.
I said it’s more likely that a god doesn’t exist. I started to pick the option above it, but I figured maybe it was for “soft” atheists who are reasonably convinced but not absolutely certain. (I’ve never heard anyone say they’re absolutely certain though.) I think it’s unlikely there is a god, but I’m not reasonably convinced.
I didn’t vote because this is the way I see it. There’s no way I can believe in the standard definition of God. But I’d like to believe that there’s something out there and that my consciousness will survive in some manner after I die. The problem is that I don’t believe it. In the same way I don’t believe in wood nymphs (although I’d also like to believe in those, too). Anyway, there was no option offered that really covered this. There needs to be an "other than ‘God’ " option.
Another vote for “don’t know; don’t care,” but since that’s not available, I chose the middle answer: it could go either way. Nevertheless, I feel that the concept of god(s) is a creation of man’s need to explain things he doesn’t understand. I’m okay with there being aspects to our existence that is beyond my capability of understanding. Most people seem to need an explanation and that’s god(s). I can appreciate the explanation on a metaphorical level*, but as a practical matter, it’s entirely meaningless to me, other than it’s usefulness in separating the busybodies from the live-and-let-live practitioners.
- In the same way I think Santa Claus is a metaphor for the spirit of giving and receiving and wood nymphs are a metaphor for being utterly in tune with the natural world, god is a metaphor for the unknown.
Question if I may, Snailboy: Do you normally describe yourself as an agnostic? The fact that you almost picked the way you say you almost picked caused me to wonder.
I notice there are an awful lot of votes so far…and most of the votes come from people not posting, so we don’t from whom they come.
According to his initial statement, Superfluous Parentheses is attempting to find out how self-described agnostics feel on this subject (not how everybody here feels) for a very specific reason…and any votes from people who are not self-described agnostics could skew the results. (The specific reason, by the way, involves a response he offered to a comment of mine, which is the reason I am asking.)
That same question applies to anyone else who voted…and who may inadvertently forgot what Superfluous Parentheses is attempting to uncover.
(I hope you do not mind my mentioning this, SP. The answer to your question interests me very much…and I’d really like as little unnecessary skewing as possible.)
I suspect I should have phrased the poll a bit better, but I’m not certain how. When I posted this poll I suspected that there would be only a few self-described agnostics who’d choose the “sure but no way to prove (either way)” options. Mostly because I don’t describe myself as an agnostic, even though technically I am; I just think that the lack of evidence alone is enough to be as certain that gods don’t exist as I can be that santa claus doesn’t - which is certain enough that calling myself agnostic would be misleading without further clarification. I think that “atheist” is the most succinct description of my position on the matter of gods.
It appears that others take a more technical position and describe themselves as (a)theistic AND agnostic. Which is fair enough. Or maybe they just don’t like the (a)theist label, which IMO is just silly.
I’m still confused by some of the people who claim that they “don’t care” and “therefore chose the middle option”. At least some of them seem to have misunderstood the poll (and I wrote the poll as it is now exactly to get as few as possible of those kinds of answers) - the question isn’t if they care about the existence of god, or are religious or anything. It’s just asking for an estimate; it doesn’t need to be a scientifically or religiously reasoned estimate. I’m fairly sure some if not most of the “don’t care” group actually would think one or the other option is more likely if they had to put money on it and some of the responses seem to indicate that there are people who just don’t want to pick an answer.
In the end, though, even if we leave out the “sure” votes, it looks like on average most agnostics think that god(s) are unlikely, with a smaller but significant (and larger than I’d have guessed) set of “50%” voters.
Slight hijack, but thank you for not capitalizing the word god.
When I was about 12, I wrote an essay at school and my teacher got upset that I didn’t put a capital letter when writing god. She said, “You capitalize your own name, shouldn’t you capitalize his name?”
From that day on - I have NEVER written my name with capital letters - not on my passport, driver’s license, mortgage papers - nada.
It actually came in handy once when someone stole a check and signed my name with capital letters - the bank caught it immediately and there was no question whatsoever that it was an obvious forgery!
I’m not sure why it matters if what agnostics speculate as to possibilities or lack thereof. If agnostics are confident in saying they don’t know, what’s the practical effect of speculation one way or the other? If there’s no evidence of a god, but I understand that the existence of god is probably beyond my capability of knowing, it’s not logical to say there might be or there might not be. Just because I can’t detect something doesn’t mean it’s not there, but just because I can imagine something being there doesn’t mean it is. Either way, it changes nothing. My life continues as is. Ergo, it’s a pointless diversion.
It only matters because I wanted to know 
I can understand that you regard it as pointless, but that doesn’t imply you think the chance of a god existing is 50%. You could be absolutely sure a god exists and still think he/she/it is irrelevant.
Yes I do consider myself agnostic. There seems to be two definitions for atheists that people use: one I fit and one I don’t. However, I’ve never heard a definition of agnostic I didn’t fit so that’s what I call myself, sometimes agnostic atheist depending on the circumstances.
I think part of the problem is that there is no precise definition of god. If you look at a specific religion, you get a fairly precise idea of what they think a god is, but it says little for the general concept of god. (For the record, I think all religions are created. If there is a god, no one actually knows about him.) For instance, I once read that it had been hypothesized that our particle colliders could be creating universes which, to us, just appear to be particles that disappear in a fraction of a second, but from inside, could be giant universes like ours that last billions of years. No matter how unlikely this is, let’s suppose it’s true. If we were unknowingly creating universes in this manner and unable to even observe what was going on in them, would we be deist gods to anything in the universe? Keep in mind that from their perspective, we’d be immortal. What if we did know we were creating universes, we could observe at least to an extent, and we could even tweek our machines to create universes which different properties?
These questions aren’t meant to be answered. I simply pose them because I think some people will say yes, some people will say no, and some people won’t be able to give a simple yes or no. There are many more such scenarios that I think blur the lines, yet don’t necessarily involve any magic, just theoretical science. Rather than go on and on, I’ll just stop right here.