Right, begbert2, I think you’ve convinced me you’re more right on this than I was.
Mrdribble, I didn’t read every single back and forth here, but what it seems to me your saying is that you are 100% certain that there is no God. The idea that there is a way to prove the existence of God is flawed–its impossible to **prove **100%. Now I know God exists; that is, I am 100% percent certain, because I know the personal relationship that I have with him is real. Yet, its impossible for me to prove this to you, as it is somthing happening within me. However, it is also impossible for you to be 100% certain that there is no God–you dont believe in him becuase you see the improbability of it through lack of evidence; yet if you rely on science the way most all atheists do, then you would still have to mantain that their could be evidence out there for his existence, we just havn’t found it yet. So you see, there can not be a 100% percent certainty for him not existing–only a 100% certainty that you feel you have not found suffcient evidence for it.
Oh, I’m still 100% certain *your *god doesn’t exist, Hold Fast. That’s not what this was about.
Sweet! Now that my cognitive dissonance feels better (since you were of course the last holdout of super-hard atheism on the entire planet), we can get back to talking about the differences among agnostics, rather than the differences among atheists, and of course how we atheist types should view the agnostics in question.
On the one hand there are the philosophical agnostics, who bear the title mainly because they know you can’t disprove solipsism and the like. Such people are awesome, because I’m one of them; also there’s nothing wrong with their logic as far as that goes. Of course, being a philosophical agnostic doesn’t mean you’re an atheist; you could instead be a god-believer who merely lacks certainty (and/or is aware of solipsism). These latter people are of course mistaken in their beliefs, all agnosticism aside.
Then there are the agnostics who claim to be below their thresholds of beleif for both the positive and the negative assertions about god’s existence. I figure there are around three categories of these; anyone can feel free to expand on these:
-
The agnostics-from-principle. The types who think asserting complete uncertainty is a philosophically superior position - these people got philosophical agnosticism on the brain and forgot to take into account the way decisions are actually made. They needn’t actually entertain real belief (and I doubt they do); they just need to think that all the smart people claim to be smack in the middle. They’re wrong, of course; all evil wizards aside, beliefs are formed based on available evidence, and in the absence of evidence, the null hypothesis prevails. In the god debate the null hypothesis is the one alternative that all others branch out from; that all god-theories are wrong. (The other theories agree with it about all the theories but one.) In the abscence of evidence, the correct route is therefore disbelief, and those who are unaware of this can be viewed as confused or mistaken.
-
The agnostics-from-aversion. These people are atheists who don’t like the term atheist, becuase it is perceived as pejorative and/or because they think that “atheist” means “pushy atheist asshole”. In contrast they might think that “agnostic” means “somebody who’s not pushy” or “somebody who doesn’t care”. I don’t like redefining the words this way; agnosticism has enough meanings already between knowledge and belief continua without giving it ‘pushiness’ and/or ‘interest level’ definitions too. As for how these agnostics could be viewed by atheists, they might be seen as definitionally impaired, or alternatively as merely lacking the courage of their convictions. It’s just as easy to call yourself an apatheist, after all.
-
The agnostics-from-uncertainty. These would be the ones who actually really are uncertain, to the point of having met neither threshold of belief either way. This would not include atheists who are merely claiming agnosticism as a philosophical high ground or who’re averse to the term atheist; these are the truly unsure. In my opinion these people wouldn’t act like atheists; they’d act like theists of some stripe, because to seriously and in-your-active-life entertain the idea that a god exists, you have to have some specific idea in mind about which god you have this non-trivial level of belief in, and you’ll be trending towards covering your bases in case they actually do exist (which you think is a very real possibility). So what you’d have here is a wavering theist, more than an agnostic. In fact I’d expect most of these types to self-identify as theists, and accordingly I’d expect them to probably not laud uncertatinty as a superior position. Clearly, atheists would view these types as needing to ditch some credulity and face the (lack of) evidence squarely; there’s really not enough basis for any significant belief in gods.
I think that covers it. Did I miss anything?
Which God are you talking about again? They’re not created equal, and there are pitfalls that a diety can fall into that make them extremely disprovable. Gods that are based on the bible typically fall into all of them and can be readily dismissed. It’s the dieties made out of noodles that one has to grudgingly (or with glee) admit retain the slight sliver of a possibility of existing - while we simultaneously do not actually have any belief in their existence.
Hold Fast is a Christian IIRC.
This idea doesn’t need to be applied to one God. Every single religion out there(perhaps with exception of the noodles) claims the existence of a spiritual world, and also that they have made some sort of contact with someone or somthing on the other side. Not only are you calling roughly, I would say, 70%-80%(and thats a conservative measure) of all humans that have ever existed liars, your creating a “pitfall” that atheism easily falls into–so without even arguing why the Christian God is the right one, atheism can be “readily dismissed.”
What pitfalls are you referring to? The pitfalls that begbert2 was talking about were (I imagine) those of being logically impossible (in which case, it’s not even worth considering) and of being readily observable (in which case, the lack of observing it gives evidence for its nonexistence). I’m don’t really see how pitfalls that apply to deities could even really apply to atheism.
So, such a “spiritual world” can be observed. If it exists, it shouldn’t be too hard for us to find it.
Not liars, merely mistaken. And since you also believe that the vast majority of humans that have ever existed were liars or mistaken, I’m don’t see how that’s a point against atheists.
As an agnostic I view atheists pretty much the same way as I view those who believe in God. It takes just as much faith in the unknown to declare that there is NO God as it does to declare their IS a God. The truth is it is unknown.
No, it doesn’t. It just takes treating gods like any other baseless, physics breaking, logic ignoring claim. It doesn’t take any faith at all to declare that there is no God; just a willingness to admit the obvious instead of bending over backwards to pretend that God is an idea that deserves to be taken seriously.
Are you “agnostic” about Dracula style, supernatural vampires? Star Wars being a documentary? Invisible pink unicorns? No? Well, those are more plausible than God. Agnosticism is just another way of giving religion a privileged status it doesn’t deserve. No one would be agnostic if we treated religion like we do other claims of equal lack of merit.
Strinka did an admirable job of answering Hold Fast for me.
You would seem to be what I just above called an “agnostic-from-principle” - and that being the case my answer to you is that you are making at least one of two erroneous assumptions: You’re mistaking atheism for a declaraction of absolute proven certainty of knowledge, and/or you’re mistaken in thinking that one needs to have absolute proven certainty of knowledge to make a statement. If I flip a coin ten thousand times and it always comes up heads, then I am justified in declairing that it’s not a fair coin, or the flips were rigged, or that something else funny was going on, despite the fact that there’s an 0.01% chance that I have merely beat the odds. (Beat them to a bloody pulp, that is.)