A final thought before I leave this for today. There seems to be a differentiation made between “agnostics” and “atheists” – one which can be rather acrimonious, with agnostics being seen as wishy-washy apologists or nice touchy-feely pleasant people, and atheists as understanding the truth and not accepting woolly thought or as mean nasty militant offensive people.
Bollocks.
Seriously it’s always puzzled me. And when someone close to you tells you that they find the “militant atheists” so unpleasant that they’re going to call themselves agnostic instead of atheist, you know there’s something screwy.
Actually though, atheists are agnostics. An agnostic (in a religious sense) accepts that he or she does not know if god exists. An atheist simply doesn’t believe that god exists. To me, that’s essentially the same thing – if the atheist is being intellectually honest.
Basically this (false) dichotomy comes back to the same old crap I’ve been writing about today: equating absence of belief with belief of absence. An atheist is then seen as believing in something – which is just not the case. Talking about “knowing” is philosophically shaky anyway, as it leads to brain melting discussions about whether we can ever really truly know anything at all. Mostly we actually just believe in things – or not. We don’t truly “know” if these things are true or not, but we believe or not, for one reason or another.
So really an agnostic is simply someone who acknowledges that, and I would argue that atheism is simply agnosticism as applied to religion.
Claims that god definitely does not exists – claims to know the non-existence of god – betoken sloppy thinking. With no compelling reason to believe, I’m comfortable with my absence of belief – but do not confuse that with a belief that there is no god. It’s not a belief, a faith, or a dogma or creed.
I simply don’t believe. That’s all.
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This is a great post. I get the impression that the so-called "strong" atheists look down on us weak/agnostic atheists as inferior for some reason (theist cannon-fodder mustn't be enough for them!). I'm content with my non-belief too
It's kind of odd, how much energy goes into arguments around this sort of issue. Really it seems clear to me that there are many many things – including the existence or not of God/Yahweh/Allah/Thor/Zeus … – that we cannot be 100% certain of, but we don't go around believing them. We in fact live our lives as though they are not true. That's so even for theists, for most possibilities, just not applied to their particular flavour of supreme being/s.
But I do think it's worthwhile remaining aware that being completely intellectually honest, we don't "know".
- oh, and thanks
I'm an agnostic atheist. I see no reason to believe in a Sky Daddy, by any name, but I recognize that the question is, in formal terms, _undecidable_, having no possible proof or disproof. Look up Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, if you're not too math-phobic.
Well aware it’s not provable/disprovable. That’s part of my point. I’m not saying categorically there is no god; I simply don’t believe there is.
When I say with certainty that I do not believe that Poseidon rules the oceans, do I have to include a caveat that “I might be wrong”?
When I say with certainty that Zeus is not the cause of lightning, must I include a caveat?
I say, with the same certainty, that the god of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – does not exist.
I attach no caveat to that statement.
Nor do I, except for pedantic logical/philosophical correctness when writing about it
I certainly don’t live my life as though any of these myths could be true.