Uh, I subscribe to an etymology of courtesy – if somebody calls himself a Preterist, and can define what he means by Preterism, then he’s a Preterist to me.
It would seem to me that the case between Agnosticism and Pragmatic Atheism (the “weak” variety – 'tain’t weak at all, just differently founded than Dogmatic [“strong”] Atheism) is quite simple. The Agnostic is convinced that, at least at our present state of knowledge, whether there is a god or gods is not a knowable question. The Pragmatic Atheist takes a more positivist approach: if you have no evidence, or inadequate evidence, to determine the existence of something, then the reasonable conclusion is that it does not, in fact, exist.
There is inadequate evidence to convince most reasonable people of a race of small grey aliens inhabiting a planet around Zeta Reticuli who have mastered interstellar travel and in consequence abduct humans and perform numerous experiments on them. Reasonable conclusion is that whether such a planet exists, and if so whether it has a race of aliens meeting that description, no such aliens with the characteristics described exist.
The Pragmatic Atheist reviews the evidence regarding each proposed god and determines there is inadequate evidence to assume he or she exists. He or she therefore forms the presumption that such a deity does not exist.
This is the classic use of presumption in a quasi-legal formulation: the thing I will take as true until and unless evidence demonstrates otherwise. If I were, for example, to show up at David B.'s doorstep, ask him to join me at the nearest funeral home, and raise the person there, subject of a previous autopsy as David knows, from the dead, and ascribe my abilities to something my God has equipped me to do, David, knowing my probity, would accept this as fair-to-middling-good evidence that I am indeed acting in a capacity for the God I’ve been telling him about the last two years. But until and unless I come up with adequate evidence to demonstrate that god’s existence to David, he will maintain that no such god has been proven to exist, and the reasonable assumption is that neither he nor the small gray aliens exist.
The question is not one of absolute certitude but of how a reasonable man deals with what he considers insufficient evidence. And while I have quite adequate evidence to prove God’s existence to my own satisfaction, I am quite willing to grant that that evidence, which is in nature either subjective or subject to strong critical interpretation, may be inadequate to prove God’s existence to my atheist friends.
