And this isn’t quite right. An atheist is someone who has weighed the evidence for the existence of the supernatural and found it lacking.
LSLGuy’s Language Uncertainty Principle (“LUP”) finally rears its head …
The terms “atheist” and “agnostic” have agreed carefully parse-out meanings in academic philosophy and academic theology.
They mean something very different to the man in the street.
Or more precisiely, they mean whatever the listener happens to think they mean. The broad-brush meanings are fairly well-agreed to, but any attempt to put the meaning under the magnifying glass, or to ensure that two people have a truly common understanding falls prey to the “LUP”: as you put the terms under a magnifying glass, they just get blurry, not bigger with more details visible. And each observer sees a somewhat different blur.
Derleth,s blanket statement has delineated the central region of what he thinks they mean, nothing more. The hard/soft and other expansions are precisely about trying to increase the precision of definition of terms that are not in fact hard-edged, nor even necessarily adjacent in concept-space.
Meaning, even in a single person, is a lot more like an electron cloud than an orbiting planet. Between two people, much less a whole society, the meaning of terms is simply not precise enough to support “This is black, that is white, and there is no in between, or need to admit of same” statements.
I’m not trying to be hostile, just agreeing with the many posters who see this philosophical area (and the terms used in it) as rather gray. Professional philosophers have written tens of thousands of pages trying to parse the conceptual issues related to faith; they may have gotten it fairly clear amongst themsleves, but I certainly haven’t read enough to know that for sure.
I am sure however that even if I did understand it all, I couldn’t be confident that I could speak to this audience (or any other) and they’d understand it all too. Hence the effort to qualify and expand the terms.