Agnostic.com

5 6

LINK PHILOSOPHICALLY SPEAKING | An Atheist with a Tall Hat On: The Forgotten History of Agnosticism - TheHumanist.com

*FTA😘G.W. Foote, a prominent British 
atheist and later president of the National Secular Society, grumbled that agnosticism simply sounded less offensive. “An Atheist is without God; an Agnostic does not know anything about God, so he is without God too,” Foote contended. “An Agnostic is simply an Atheist with a tall hat on.” The difference then was one of class: while many atheists came from the working class, agnostics like Huxley and Darwin were part of the emerging elite and frequented polite society.

Again, this idea that agnosticism is somehow the more rational option has its roots in the respectability politics of Victorian Britain. The definition of “atheism” as a positive denial of God’s existence is a convenient one for religious people because it seems to make the atheist position impossible to prove. But this ignores other definitions, like Bradlaugh’s, that argue the burden of proof does not lie on the atheists at all, but on the theists.

In reviving this forgotten history, it is my hope that those calling themselves agnostics will throw the label off, and all the historical baggage (and tall hats) that come with it.

zblaze 7 Mar 20
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

5 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

2

People have been misrepresenting agnostics forever.

4

This is a typical stereotypical trick of theists. They lump all agnostic and atheists viewpoints together so that they can attack everything and everyone at once without having to think too much. There is overlap, of course, between many agnostic and atheistic viewpoints, but we really don't need theists arrogantly and ignorantly telling us what we believe or do not believe or think. If they want to tell us what we think, they should at least learn how to think for themselves first. But, of course that would require...effort.

Nope, you missed it too. Agnostic is about knowledge, Atheism is about belief. The way I see it is all Agnostics are Atheists.

That is incorrect, 'The way I see it all Atheists are Agnostics.

After these comments I've come to realize that an Agnostic can be a Theist, albeit an honest one, which are few and far between.

@TheMiddleWay A claim of knowledge is worthless and dishonest, if it can't be shown to be true.
Therefore they are agnostic even if they don't claim to be.

All agnostics, yourself included, are atheists, regardless how tall their hat is, or if they want to write a dictionary to define things to their liking.

As for myself, I will accept the American Atheist's description and position: "Atheism is one thing: A lack of belief in gods.

Atheism is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes. It is simply a rejection of the assertion that there are gods. Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system. To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.

Older dictionaries define atheism as “a belief that there is no God.” Clearly, theistic influence taints these definitions. The fact that dictionaries define Atheism as “there is no God” betrays the (mono)theistic influence. Without the (mono)theistic influence, the definition would at least read “there are no gods.”

@zblaze Nope, you missed it. Though your position is defensible, you insist that everyone sees things the same way you do and only the way you do. You deny everyone else their individual perspective.

@Heraclitus In no way have I 'insisted' that everyone sees things the same way I do and only the way I do.
How could I possibly "deny" someone their individual perspective??? LOL What, do you think I'm God or something?
I'm expressing my opinion on the subject on hand, if you don't concur with it, just say so. Don't accuse me of things I haven't done, or things that are impossible......

@TheMiddleWay That looks like a very lame book, I won't be reading it!!

@TheMiddleWay I don't give a flying Flew what became of the founder.

@TheMiddleWay Well put. To lump all agnostics and atheists together is to ignore this important distinction among others.

@zblaze No, I do not think you are God. What a silly irrational thing to say. (And BTW, don't accuse me of things I haven't done.) But, if "in your opinion" you lump all agnostics and atheists together, then you are by definition stereotypically denying them their individual differences and viewpoints "in your opinion." And you don't have to be God to do that.

@Heraclitus What I meant was, you would have to be a god to actually deny someone their individual perspective.
Mordant put it perfectly in the comment below this.

@zblazeFirst of all, I don't see where Mordant in the comment below says you have to be a god to deny someone their individual perspective. But, of course, it not a matter of denying human perspective in actually, but in intentionality through stereotyping.
Secondly, Mordant has already had the honesty and character to back off what you call a "perfect" comment in subsequent comments and has rethought his position and recognized other perspectives. But let's look closer at what you call a PERFECT comment:

"If I can't prove god exists or doesn't exist (knowledge position) then it's bloody hard to develop a belief about god, isn't it?"

This premise is blatantly false and nonsensical. Literally, billions of people have developed a belief in a god and not one of them can prove that god exists. You obviously don't have to prove god exists to believe in one.

"Someone who identifies as an agnostic for the above (and historically accurate) reasons, and who doesn't identify as atheist, is simply afraid of the social implications of the label."

So first of all, the so-called "historically accurate" reason(s) alluded to is simply false. If this isn't bad enough, to insist that anyone who doesn't agree with this false stereotypical "historically accurate" misstatement is afraid and cowardly is not only insulting to every agnostic on this website but to the Agnostic.com website itself. Why not just insist that the owners of this website repent of their cowardice and rename this website Atheist.com? Suppose, whether out of willful intent or simple ignorance, I insisted that you change your viewpoint to my stereotypical label for you and if you do not you are a coward?

Some PERFECT comment?!?

3

I have come to regard agnosticism and atheism as two sides of the same coin, so I agree with Foote.

If I can't prove god exists or doesn't exist (knowledge position) then it's bloody hard to develop a belief about god, isn't it? In which case I don't. I don't believe (or disbelieve) in god because information concerning him is unobtanium. My belief position is a direct result of my knowledge position.

The only philosophically defensible atheism is rooted in agnosticism.

Someone who identifies as an agnostic for the above (and historically accurate) reasons, and who doesn't identify as atheist, is simply afraid of the social implications of the label. They are avoiding saying they lack belief in gods, which people hear as "don't believe in [their] god" and see as arrogant and foolish and rude. Instead they say they don't know, which people hear as "not sure" and therefore conclude there is still hope to persuade them of their god hypothesis. This means you have a fighting chance of being treated decently instead of like a three-eyed abomination.

I have the luxury of living in the godless northeastern US in a particularly liberal enclave, and in any case, have never been in situations where believers nose around to figure out if I'm the Hated Other or not. So I don't mind the "scarlet A". But I have sympathy for those who do.

So agnostics are just atheists who are afraid to admit it? I think not.

@Meili Yes, for people who conform to the historic (Huxlian) definition of agnosticism and who understand that atheism is not a positive claim of unbelief. For people with other definitions of either agnosticism or atheism, maybe no.

We can't have a conversation if we don't agree on definitions. I have always advocated for clear and philosophically defensible definitions of both terms.

If you regard agnosticism as "not being sure" or "being open minded" about gods, then that is not a particularly clear or unambiguous or defensible definition of agnosticism, but you can certainly hold to that if you want. I regard agnosticism as what Huxley coined the phrase to mean, which is, the position that no knowledge claim either way can be legitimately made concerning gods, as they are inherently non-falsifiable and non-examinable. Not that you're unsure but are open-minded and might be convinced with the right evidence; it's that god hypotheses inherently cannot ever BE evidenced.

If you regard atheism as the claim that there are no gods, then that does not reflect what most considered atheists claim about themselves. As an atheist I simply don't afford belief to the unsubstantiatable -- which is what agnosticism tells me that god hypotheses are. That means belief in gods or belief gods don't exit. There is simply no basis for either. Atheism is really just one of several outcomes of skepticism and rational thought processes. It's not really even a thing-in-itself, but because religious faith has so much hegemony in society, it's useful in some contexts to talk about the opposite epistemology that rejects the failed epistemology of religious faith, using a separate term.

The question of how likely gods are to exist, or how likely specific gods are to be as claimed, is a separate question. Ordinarily, in any other realm, those would be "preponderance of evidence" judgments, but as agnosticism points out, there is no evidence to begin with, and cannot be.

I think the problem comes when people want to avoid argument and seem "open minded" and confuse that with agnosticism. To me that is either a "discretion is the better part of valor" situation, or at times, just intellectual cowardice, even with yourself.

Of course so many have committed that error that I'm beginning to wonder if agnosticism no longer means to most people what it was conceived to mean. So maybe we need to provide a new label either for historic agnosticism or for what agnosticism has degenerated into.

@Meili Yes! That or they define atheism as a positive claim, which it is not.

@mordant Gobbledygook. Language changes over time. The historical meaning of words once were the bastards of even more historical terms. Ironically, words frequently morph to the exact opposite of what they originally meant. That is a statement about human nature, I believe.

What's important is that one person speaks and the other person understands. If you'd like to establish a mutual understanding with me about what the term agnostic means for us or what people in general take it to mean presently, then we'll both be the better for that conversation, I believe. But if you want to insist that humanity adheres to historical meaning of words, you might as well seal yourself in a tomb with a few friends who feel the same and pat each other on the back for preserving the one true language the rest of your lives.

@Meili I understand the language evolves, and if you accept an "evolved" meaning of agnostic then we are back to my suggestion that either the original meaning or the evolved meaning need new words. Unless you are suggesting that the old meaning has been pretty universally abandoned. In that case, sure, all that matters is what it has come to mean. The canonical example I always give is that in Elizabethan English, "convenient" meant "fitting, proper, appropriate" and today it means "easy, expected, requiring no special effort". The archaic meaning has little practical impact in today's world, and we wouldn't have an argument about what the word means just because the meaning has changed. But it's rather different, and tends to muddy the waters, if two significantly different meanings are in wide use, and which one is being used is not clear from typical contexts.

My impression is that they are both in wide use. The Wikipedia article on agnosticism is typical in its definition: "the view that the existence of god, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown OR unknowable" (emphasis mine).

If it's unknowABLE (Huxlian meaning) then it is not a question of tentative or provisional non-knowing; it is a permanent condition. If it is unknown, on the other hand, then literally speaking that means there are conceivable circumstances under which one might obtain this knowing.

So the question I'd pose is, do you think knowledge of supernatural beings and realms are inherently unknowABLE, or just simply unknown at this time? And if the latter, what condition(s) do you conceive of, whereby it could be knowable?

@mordant I'm not sure why you are suggesting that the evolved or original meaning needs new terms of you also accept that language evolves. We accept a wide range of words in the English language that have multiple meanings, either slight variations of the same idea or even completely different meanings. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point both the old and new meanings of convenient were true. You learn to extract meaning from context or ask for clarification, if possible.

Anyway, I would say that anything that actually exists would have to be knowable, though not necessarily comprehensible to human beings. For example, we have ideas of what the center of the earth consists of but we can't be absolutely certain we're right because we can't currently observe it personally. It exists but presently isn't entirely comprehensible to humanity. Because it exists, it is knowable but that knowledge is not accessible to us and won't be until we have more advanced technology.

So if a God or Gods exist, they must be knowable but I would say that humanity doesn't have the capacity to know God. Perhaps a more evolved humanity will obtain that capacity or perhaps it is only knowable after death, as religionists tend to claim (if God does indeed exist). In other words, I would say it's unknowable to us but could be knowable under different circumstances, but only if it's actually true, which we can't know. Lol. I would also say that any species who is unable to comprehend God also lacks the capacity to say with certainty how they could comprehend God and so all I can do is conjecture on that point.

@Meili Thanks for the response.

If a thing exists, it's part of the natural world.

God hypotheses generally place deities conveniently outside that realm, in the supernatural.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that IF a god exists as part of the natural order then like every other non-supernatural thing it could be in theory at least indirectly detectable and observable; we simply may not know how to go about it yet.

Huxlian agnosticism addresses supernatural gods by pointing out that the supernatural is outside of or "above" nature and that this renders the supernatural a useless concept. If a thing is supernatural, it can't be seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelled either directly or indirectly and therefore no information can ever be conveyed about it, only conjecture. Supernatural gods can only be the subject of unsubstantiatable assertions. No evidence could ever be presented for or against them. Hence, gods are unknowABLE, not merely unknown and potentially knowable under some imaginable future regime of understanding.

Once a supernatural being penetrates and interacts with the natural order, at least for that act it becomes part of the natural order. But the doctrine of religious faith specifically disparages this. We are to walk by blind leaps of religious faith, not by "sight". We are not to expect such displays of accessibility from the deity. That would promote reliance on "mere" human wisdom. The deity is said to have intervened in human affairs, but not recently or overtly in some shared intersubjective reality that we could all agree to. He's limited to personal subjective experience and imagination.

I'd argue that without the supernatural claims for deities, they become for practical purposes, indistinguishable from very powerful, advanced sentient beings, and this is not how people typically think about deities. Also, taking the magic out of the picture, so to speak, makes it harder to suggest that the appropriate response to such a being is to worship or obey it. We tend to like our deities morally perfect and incapable of mistaken judgments, and capable of "first-mover status" as Creator of all existence and of life itself. In other words it takes a supernatural deity to "explain", however poorly and inconsistently, where everything came from and why, which seems the whole point of religion.

So I'd argue that an actually existent deity concerning which we could ever know anything would have to be for all practical purposes, a highly advanced and powerful alien who might well have less than unimpeachable character and thus who it would be prudent to distrust rather than to hopefully embrace.

As such, I do't see the sort of kinda-sorta-maybe provable god you're talking about, as having much to do with common notions of god, and certainly with common theist notions of god.

Still ... maybe you're positing a god that's quite different from the common Abrahamic formulation. What such a beast would be good for or relevant to, I'm not sure.

@mordant Right, I don't accept the common Abrahamic formulation of God, nor any other I know of. Also, I would say that what's most likely, if any sort of God exists, is not that we lack the skill to detect God but that we lack the capacity. According to Google's top result, "about 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum" is visible to the human eye. If the ranges for all our senses are similar, that leaves a vast amount of the natural world that we can't detect with our senses. I would also submit that it leaves the door open for many other aspects of the natural world to exist which aren't currently detectable to us even with the aid of current technology.

I've had experiences that I define as supernatural, but I do believe that with full understanding, they would be considered part of the natural world. I define them as supernatural because people understand what I'm saying better. I have chosen to believe that they are the result of an unknown power, possibly a being, because I prefer that explanation to being crazy which is the only other reasonable explanation I know of for those experiences.

So I don't really know where my definition fits in your understanding of historically accurate agnosticism. I resent the implication that my agnosticism is a cover for atheism. I don't believe it's true for me. I also have quite the disdain for things that have an air of elitism, like "historically accurate" terms defined by experts on the subject. I might just be jaded from finding out that the authorities I placed all my trust in for the majority of my life turned out to be feeding me a huge load of bullshit. But anyway, at the moment, I don't see any merit in adhering to historical terms that don't honor the spectrum of humanity and lead to conclusions that are less than favorable about others. While I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from exploring ideas from experts, I believe that you haven't accomplished anything of real value until you have formed your own ideas on the subject.

@Meili Thank you for helping me to better understand your position and your thinking concerning it.

I agree with you that any god or god-like being would have to be naturally explicable.

It is true that a small part of the full electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the naked eye, but that doesn't mean that the rest of it is unknown and/or undetected by humans either, or even not well-understood by science if not by the everyday layperson. Our space probes and [radio]telescopes, for example, regularly explore large swaths of the EM spectrum not visible to unassisted viewing. So I tend not to think of as much of the data being imperceptible as you do. And as such, the notion that some sentience could be hiding in plain sight in that way seems fairly unlikely ... though, admittedly, to my knowledge, not outright impossible.

I don't have any way of knowing if your agnosticism personally is a "cover for atheism"; if the shoe doesn't fit, you shouldn't wear it. I was simply pointing out that I can see where it could be for some ... and not even really a conscious cover, more of a deflection to avoid drawing all the possible conclusions that flow from agnosticism, because of the historic aversion to the label of atheism. But I don't pretend to know if that is what your personal situation is, and even if I did, I wouldn't assume it's deliberate intellectual dishonesty or cowardice on your part.

False! This ignores individual distinctions and stereotypes all non-believers. You are essentially saying that all who not agree with your overly simplistic stereotype as cowards.

@Heraclitus Not at all. It simply honors accepted historically accurate philosophical definitions. Also see my last paragraph of my last reply above to @Meilli. I don't know you or any other individual person so I am talking the general case as I see it, nothing more nor less. If the shoe doesn't fit, you needn't put it on. It's entirely possible to be an unbeliever for reasons I don't entirely agree with or I don't feel are entirely philosophically defensible, and that is the right of others to their own beliefs (though, not to their own facts).

@mordant I have no quarrel with your historic definitions, just the narrow manner in which you interpret and apply them to others. And when you reject "some sentience could be hiding in plain sight " (which I also reject) you also appear to refer to a narrowly defined and stereotypical Abrahamic-type pagan personal god. Our thinking need not be so constrained. However, when I read your reply to Meilli I see that you are not as narrow-minded as you first appeared. I would only call upon you to open it up and consider other viewpoints a little more.

@Heraclitus Point taken. Of course here in the US when people go on about the existence of god it is the stereotypical Abrahamic deity. So that is what I tend to address. I recognize of course that there are all sorts of god concepts, although it's my view that almost all suffer from the same non-falsifiability problem. It isn't that they are Abrahamic, it is that they are supernatural.

@mordant Cool.

1

This sounds like someone speaking from a theist position. To admit you don't know God or that you don't believe in God is as "without God" as someone who believes in God but never has any divine interactions. I'm agnostic because I admit that I can't prove God exists or that God doesn't exist. If you ask me, the athiests and the theists are more alike since they both take a position that they can't prove to be true.

Yeah, you have missed the point entirely. The atheist position is not a positive declaration/claim, it is a negative claim. A negative claim cannot be proven, and the burden of proof is always on the person that asserts a positive claim, like a theist.

Other than the tallness of your hat, the label of Agnostic is also the label Atheist whether you like it or not. If you lack a belief in a God or gods you are an Atheist.

I'm glad you are!

FTA: The definition of “atheism” as a positive denial of God’s existence is a convenient one for religious people because it seems to make the atheist position impossible to prove. But this ignores other definitions, like Bradlaugh’s, that argue the burden of proof does not lie on the atheists at all, but on the theists.

@zblaze I would say that if God exists then the burden of proof is on them, if they have any interest in proving that they exist. I don't lack belief in God but do lack evidence of one. I also lack any desire to worship God or go to any great lengths to please a being who I have no evidence exists. I do have a strong belief that some sort of "power" exists but I figure if it's in the form of an intelligent being, they are perfectly capable of doing whatever they do without me participating in oppressive and meaningless religious rituals. So I don't accept that I am an atheist with a tall hat. I believe I possess the middle ground and the theists and atheists are on the ends of the spectrum.

@Meili There is no 'middle ground' or 'middle way' between knowledge and belief, you either know something or you don't. About gods, I don't know, so I'm agnostic. You either believe in a god or you don't, if you do, you're a theist, if not you are an atheist.

I'm curious, why do you believe that there "May be a God or some undefined 'power' that exists?

"I don't lack belief in God but do lack evidence of one." Your words.....
"This sounds like someone speaking from a theist position." Again your words, but now it is my opinion.

If you don't lack a belief in God or gods, it is a double negative, which means you have a belief in them. In my opinion that makes you a theist. It is very possible to be a Theist and Agnostic at the same time. If any Theist is an honest one, they will freely admit to being Agnostic. The vast majority of them are not.

@zblaze I consider myself an agnostic theist. I didn't say that outright because occasionally people have gotten in a tizzy over that stance.

I made no claim of middle ground between belief and knowledge. I reject the idea that any human being has true knowledge of God. Even if biblical stories of encounters with God were true, I would still insist that the humans who had those encounters could not truly comprehend God as a child cannot comprehend an adult until they have become an adult themselves, therefore they still lack enough knowledge to truly claim understanding of God. (Incidentally I know a number of people who claim to have seen God or even to have regular encounters with Gods.)

So from that perspective, I reject the notion that any theist, agnostic, or atheist has knowledge of God or of the lack of a God, regardless of who has the burden of proof. It's all about belief with agnosticism taking the middle ground between atheism and theism. I reject the notion of agnostics being atheists with tall hats because I believe it's totally possible to believe in something that you lack concrete evidence of and I consider atheism to entail a disbelief in all Gods.

In short, I dislike being labeled as an atheist because, yes, I would consider myself more of a theist, albeit an honest one who acknowledges that my belief is largely unsubstantiated. At the same time, I prefer to be distinguished from the pure theists who harbor many conflicting beliefs, such as insisting that there is plenty of evidence for their particular flavor of God(s) while simultaneously acknowledging they don't have real evidence because they advocate blind faith in their God(s). I would adhere to the label of agnostic over theist because I think that belief in a specific God is inherent in the word theist.

As to your question of why I believe that there may be a God or undefined power, it is because I have had many supernatural experiences. So I feel more exists than just the world we can sense with our five senses. I have a set of beliefs about the spiritual side of things but again, I openly acknowledge that they are beliefs, not knowledge. They work for me, allowing me to live this life without taking things too seriously, without feeling the need to kowtow to an invisible being, while treating others respectfully and making logical and reasonable choices.

@Meili "I want to believe in as many True things, and as few False things as possible." -Matt Dilahunty That is the attitude I have, and it's hard to fathom why anyone would want to believe in any false things, and then to accept the false comfort from those beliefs as reality.
"It's far better to embrace a hard truth, than a reassuring fable". -Carl Sagan-

"I made no claim of middle ground between belief and knowledge." And then a paragraph later... "It's all about belief with agnosticism taking the middle ground between atheism and theism."

Agnosticism is NOT ABOUT BELIEF, it is about 'knowledge' or lack of knowledge, while Theism or Atheism are about 'belief' or non belief.

How can a stance of Agnosticism/Knowledge possibly be a middle ground between Theism and Atheism which are stances on 'beliefs or non beliefs"?

I don't think that it is, and the dissonance/conflicting beliefs that must exist in the label Agnostic Theist would be as severe, if not more so, then in the label Gnostic Theist. Best of luck with that.

I appreciate you answering my question about why, and it does sound like a response from a believer/Theist. "I have had many supernatural experiences" To many people, unexplained experiences/events are considered 'supernatural'.
Experiencing an unexplained event is not proof of the supernatural, it is proof of an unexplained event.

“No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.” ― Robert G. Ingersoll 

@zblaze You start out making a good point but then ruin it by oversimplistically stereotyping all agnostics and lumping them together with all atheists. Individual viewpoints have nothing to do with the tallness of a hat. This is condescending stereotyping. Such labeling may make it easier for you to categorize people but it denies the reality of individuality.

@Heraclitus I was wrong in stating that all agnostics are atheist. I realized it after finding a truthful theist that is also agnostic, on this thread. Then of course there are agnostics like middle way, that neither believe or disbelieve....a craven stance, sitting on a picket fence in my opinion.

How about you, are you a believer or a non believer?

@zblaze Used to be a believer, but now I am a non-believer. Yes, there are closet atheists and probably even more closet agnostics. I don't judge them because in some cases the persecution from friends and family can be not only intense but absolutely devastating. Lives have been ruined.
And, of course, in some parts of the world you can be killed, sometimes even by the government.

There are many ways of being agnostic, atheist, and even theist:
ADEIST
APATHEIST
APISTEVIST
ANTI-THEIST
IGNOSTIC
NULLIFIDIAN
OMNIST
PANTHEIST
PANENTHEISM
RATIONALIST
THEOLOGICAL NONCOGNITIVIST
VERIFICATIONIST
STRONG AGNOSTICISM (also called "hard", "closed", "strict", or "permanent agnosticism" )
The view that the question of the existence or nonexistence of a deity or deities, and the nature of ultimate reality is unknowable by reason of our natural inability to verify any experience
with anything but another subjective experience. A strong agnostic would say, "I cannot know whether a deity exists or not, and neither can you."
WEAK AGNOSTICISM (also called "soft", "open", "empirical", or "temporal agnosticism" )
The view that the existence or nonexistence of any deities is currently unknown but is not necessarily unknowable; therefore, one will withhold judgment until evidence, if any, becomes available.
A weak agnostic would say, "I don't know whether any deities exist or not, but maybe one day, if there is evidence, we can find something out."
APATHETIC AGNOSTICISM (Apathest)
The view that no amount of debate can prove or disprove the existence of one or more deities, and if one or more deities exist, they do not appear to be concerned about the fate of humans.
Therefore, their existence has little to no impact on personal human affairs and should be of little interest.
HARD ATHEIST
MILITANT ATHEIST
AGNOSTIC ATHEIST
SKEPTICAL ATHEIST
PRACTICAL ATHEIST The view that one should live their life with disregard towards a god or gods.
Practical atheism doesn't see the god question as irrelevant, in contrast to apatheism.

GNOSTIC THEIST claims knowledge of and belief in a god.
AGNOSTIC THEIST believes, but claims god is not knowable.
GNOSTIC ATHEIST doesn't believe, and claims to know about god's existence.
AGNOSTIC ATHEIST doesn't believe, but claims no knowledge of the existence of a god.
POSITIVE ATHEISM is the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist.
NEGATIVE ATHEISM includes all other forms of non-theism.
PRAGMATIC ATHEISM atheism is the view one should reject a belief in a god or gods because it is unnecessary for a pragmatic life. This view is related to apatheism

The above list I am sure is not complete.

I'm not even quite sure how I would label myself. I usually think of myself as an Ignostic, but I could also accept the label of Agnostic Atheist. My wife is an Apathest and one of the finest persons I have ever known. For a long time I thought of myself as a Panentheist and in some ways have not completely abandoned the viewpoint as I think nature ultimately explains everything, but we only a minuscule understanding of it. Not really much for labels as it often confuses more than it clarifies. To me, Hard Atheism is just a comfortable (and sometimes cowardly) way of cutting off thought, and I never want to do that. Once you do that I think you have lost your human "soul", so to speak.

@Heraclitus Yeah, I don't believe mankind has a soul, and has nothing to lose in that department, or the department of metaphorical hearts. I believe the mind/consciousness creates them out of thin air, similarly to how they create gods and higher powers.

I'm a Hard Agnostic Atheist, and don't feel as if I've lost a thing. Especially my openness to thought.

@zblaze I was speaking metaphorically. I didn't mean a literal soul, of course, that's why I put it in quotes and used the term "so to speak." To me, if you have lost your capacity for critical analytical thinking, you have lost your "soul". You are zombie-ing through life. You might say that you have lost your brain, but to me, it goes deeper than that because you have voluntarily given up your brain to others.
I presume what you mean by a Hard Agnostic Atheist.is probably the same, or similar, to the Strong Agnosticism defined above. A Hard Atheist simply claims there is no God so there is no agnostic aspect. Most Christians seem to think that all atheists are Hard Atheists.

@Heraclitus What I meant by hard is according to this definition; STRONG AGNOSTICISM (also called "hard", "closed", "strict", or "permanent agnosticism" )
The view that the question of the existence or nonexistence of a deity or deities, and the nature of ultimate reality is unknowable by reason of our natural inability to verify any experience
with anything but another subjective experience. A strong agnostic would say, "I cannot know whether a deity exists or not, and neither can you."
I agree that most Xtains think that, as well as many folks on here.

2

So, where does 'agnostic atheist' fit in?

Would that have a bowler hat? 😉

Everywhere. Agnostic is about knowledge, Atheism is about belief. The way I see it is all Agnostics are Atheists, and all Agnostics are Atheists.

Actually, all Theists are Agnostic as well, they are just dishonest about what they 'know'.

@zblaze Your overly simplistic stereotyping of all agnostics and all atheists is wrong and narrow-minded. You may be comfortable pigeonholing people not having to consider various individual viewpoints, but your dogmatic insistence on this narrow stereotype is reminiscent of theist dogmatism

@Heraclitus You're right, that was written wrong. What I should have said was "Everyone is agnostic, in other words, no one knows if a higher power or a god exists. Those that don't claim it as their position are either deceived, ignorant or liars.

My point being, agnosticism, which is about knowledge, is not a middle ground stance between Theism and Atheism, which is about beleif

@zblaze Cool. In fact, I remember when it was standard Christianity NOT to claim that you knew that God existed. Rather, you had faith. Faith is in things "not seen" or not known. Where there is knowledge, there is no need for faith.
Things have changed. Now many people claim to know things that they not only don't know but can't know. As a society, it seems we are forgetting how to think critically. Sad.

Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:314466
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.