Those who are genuinelly unsure of God’s existence.
Those who assert that Atheism is invalid because it’s not possible to prove God doesn’t exist, therefore Agnosticism is the way to go.
In my opinion the former is a true Agnostic. and the latter is just a pedantic argument of logic. The latter does not indicate whether the person saying it believes God exists or believes God doesn’t exist. It says nothing about what the sayer actually believes. If you are to take the argument further then the very idea of belief is ‘invalid’ we shouldn’t believe in anything there is no absolute proof of. There’s no absolute proof of anything, therefore nothing is true or false. Or it is, but we humans have no right to make statements of truth or falsehood, because we are incapable of knowing anything absolutely.
I don’t discount the latter statement. It may be technically/logically true, but it may also be technically true that it’s not possible to prove that things in front of us exist. That’s no reason to behave as if they don’t.
I think Atheism is valid because you can add the words ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to the above phrase and make it false.
I believe God doesn’t exist because there is overwhelming evidence that God is a human invention, and it would have to be such a massive coincidence for something made up by humans to happen to exist that it is safe to assume it doesn’t.
I apologise if this is offensive. In my defence I get annoyed when people make Atheism out to be just as dellusional as theism because it is wrong to be sure about something technically unprovable. I think it is unreasonable to live your life with such a pedantic outlook.
Pretty much. Few people are agnostic about gravity being caused by invisible magic fairies, or any other evidence free, physics violating ideas. It’s mostly religion where people claim agnosticism; it’s a means of admitting that religion has no evidence for it, without having to actually say that it’s wrong.
There is a different application for the word that you might find more valid:
people who tend towards the conclusion that there is a God, and carry out their lives under the assumption that such is the case, but who harbor the belief that they might be wrong, that there might be no God after all.
Not to start an argument, because I tend to agree with the OP but it seems pedantic in and of itself to make the distinction between different kinds of Agnostics and atheists. It is possible to have a more multi-faceted view of spiritual matters than just choosing between either believing in a God or not. But other than that you make a good point.
When someone talks about something that exists outside the laws of physics, they are creating a situation where there is no standard by which I can judge the truth.
If we stay inside the laws of physics then I can use those laws as a standard to determine if things are true or false. If someone creates a hypothetical without a standard by which I can judge things then I have no choice but to say that I can’t determine if it is either true or false.
I think it is more accurate to say that we can’t prove if god does or does not exists because god’s existence can’t be judged by anything. There is no standard of proof. I wouldn’t call it being non-committal. If you use the standard of physics then you can say for certain he does not exists, but then you wouldn’t be answering the question fairly.
I guess your right, this all does sound pedantic. But talking about god is mostly an exercise in formal logic so people tend to go on the side of logical accuracy. What is so wrong with that?
I’m agnostic in the sense of “the nature of god is unknowable.”
I believe we exist, and the world exists. To me, this fact alone is pretty much god in the god-as-a-force-of-nature sense. But this is all to vague and undefinable to count myself among the theists. I mean, to some degree it’s more that I believe in the world than I believe in god. On the other hand. the world is so beautiful and amazing and baffling that yeah, that’s enough for me to start calling stuff god.
I don’t really buy the god/science divide. Back in the day, we believed illness was caused by evil spirits. Well, that turned out to be true. If a virus isn’t an evil spirit, I don’t know what is. Likewise, I conceive of the wonder of existence as god, and all the numbers in the world don’t challenge that a bit.
Hear, hear [to the OP]. When someone asks me “Do you believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone/the Earth is round/Shakespeare wrote Hamlet/God doesn’t exist?”, I say yes. If they then say “But, don’t you admit it’s possible you could be wrong?”, I’ll say “Yes again; although I have reasons for believing as I do, they are not conclusive, and I admit the possibility that I am mistaken. I have beliefs which I accept might be wrong. So what? This is my general modus operandi. It doesn’t mean I don’t or shouldn’t actually hold those beliefs, all the same.”
Most of the time, agnostics strike me as people so caught up in pedantry as to have forgotten how to do this, at least on one rather narrow issue.
If you’re willing to commit yourself to “The wonder of life and whatnot = God”, then you might as well go ahead and label yourself a theist, what with your believing in the existence of God. Your reluctance to do so suggests that you are not actually entirely comfortable with using the language of “God” in precisely this way, perhaps because you are aware of how much it departs from most usage of such words by others. Very well; I would agree (I think that equation is extraordinarily silly, and that speaking that way only muddies the waters pointlessly). But to the extent that you are willing to embrace that equation, you aren’t an agnostic, as far as the usual understanding of the term goes; you’re a theist.
Your point of view is flawed, because first, there is no evidence that suggests we should set aside the standard of physics in this case, and second, even if we do set aside the standard of physics in this case, the evidence supports a complete lack of interaction with the divine, a situation that can most readily be attributed to a complete lack of the divine.
Let me actually clarify this: I, of course, don’t care if someone has, themselves, no position on the matter; if it’s as much an up-in-the-air question to them as “What’s Indistinguishable’s favorite color?”. Knock yourself out with your utter lack of a belief one way or the other.
But if one says something like “We don’t know and we can’t know, and therefore no one should pretend to know, or think they have a well-founded belief”, that crosses the line into grating, misguidedly pedantic agnosticism for me. It’s not overreaching arrogance of me to have a belief on the matter which I consider to be informed by reason; it’s just me applying the same standards to the question of God’s existence as I do to everything else in ordinary life. If one ponders the evidence and reaches a different conclusion, that’s fine by me, but the idea that I shouldn’t make any strong conclusion from anything short of infallible proof is ridiculous.
I’m just not a black and white kind of girl. Having ambiguity and inconsistency in my world view doesn’t bother me one bit and I feel no real need to resolve any of this. My view on these things is very complicated, I don’t really understand it myself, and I’m not concerned with people who want to shove me in the categories they’ve made.
The wikipedia article on agnosticism gives a pretty interesting breakdown of different types of agnostics. I guess I pretty much belong in the “ignostic” category. Kind of a belief that we don’t have meaningful vocabulary or conceptual understanding to even begin discussing these things, much less start making conclusions. Any idea of god that I have is so vague (“god is everything and nothing”) that there really isn’t any way or point to talking about it even if I did have the vocabulary for it. It doesn’t really mean anything.
Which is why I find discussions about theism and atheism equally uninteresting. Neither one of these positions really had any meaning to me. “God exists” and “God doesn’t exist” are, in my mind, both pretty pointless things to say and are both pretty much equally devoid of meaning or relevence. They are both true and false to me, and as such, meaningless.
It’s like arguing about the existence of JBEURnedD. To begin with, I don’t know what any of you guys mean and suspect you don’t really know either. Furthermore, JBEURnedD can mean pretty much anything and probably means something different to everyone, so there is no way to even start discussing it. And finally, it doesn’t matter one whit if JBEURnedD exists or not anyway since it doesn’t really mean anything anyway and certainly isn’t something that really plays a role in our lives. The nature of JBEURnedD is unknowable. And so is the nature of god.
I can conceive of it as god. You can conceive of it as the results of traceable cause and effect or whatever. I don’t see these as different things. We are both using a set of metaphors. I can also conceive of the wonder of existence as “Mike” and you can think of your morning shower as “god.” We still haven’t come up with something meaningful or useful.
Of course god exists if you walk around calling stuff god. And of course god doesn’t exist if you walk around never calling anything god. Doesn’t mean anything in the long run. I can’t figure out why people get so worked up about which set of metaphors people draw from.
Without Agnostics you couldn’t have the debate. Atheists believe just as much as any other religion. Agnostics are the only ones who do not believe.
Well only the true Agnostics. Agnostics of today are too lazy to seek knowledge and just believe the existence of god(s) can’t be proven. How do you know until you look? For instance if this holds up, it raises a lot of theological questions. It would certainly lend credence to to there being some sort of creator of the universe which would make us artificial intelligence (well semi-intelligence).
We set aside the standard of physics because that is implied in the question. Everyone assumes that god is an someone who can bend the laws of physics.
The evidence that supports a complete lack of interaction with the divine is based on physics.
This is the best (and only actual) definition of agnostic. Also, on the substance of the matter, I agree that whether or not any gods exist is unkowable by the definition of “a god.” Under this definition, an honest Christian is agnostic.
The problem is that most believers (and many unread nonbelievers) use the term “agnostic” to mean “I’m in the middle,” and it’s not all that useful to state the obvious (i.e., that the existence of a god is unkowable), so the word doesn’t really fill a need.
Is “Yeah, maybe there’s a God, but I don’t really give a shit. I haven’t seen much evidence either way,” non-committal pedantry or just blowing off the question?
