From Keith77: The reason I wrote on this subject had to do with a video I watched with Richard Dawkins where he said he could not totally say that there is no god. I just think that if you are going to consider yourself an atheist, it means that you’re more likely to accept a totally godless universe. Otherwise you may find yourself subscribing to agnosticism. I was referring to atheists, not believers.
Atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. The former is about belief, the latter is about knowledge.
Most folk I know who identify as atheist also identify as agnostic.
And, btw, there are also folks who call themselves agnostic theists.
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I get your point and maybe I’m a bit of a hard liner being not only an atheist but also an antitheist where I tend to feel that agnostics seem to sit on the fence on this issue. I just wish more atheists would come totally out of the closet.
Agnosticism is as valid a reason for atheism as I can imagine, like Professor Dawkins, I am both an atheist and an agnostic. If I knew there were no deity or deities, we’d likely not need a specific word for not believing in them.
It does get annoying that Christians and a majority of agnostics themselves get the two confused. It almost feels like it’s being done on purpose sometimes.
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How so?
An atheist says they do not believe in any of the gods with which they’ve been presented.
An agnostic says that they have no knowledge of the existence of any gods.
These are two very different things.
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Indeed they are, though its hard to imagine a better reason for witholding belief from a claim deities exist, than the complete absense of any knowledge that any deity exists. I mean what is the extent of our collective knowledge about invisible mermaids?
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That is a corruption of Huxley’s coining of the term “agnostic”. He believed that gods as generally posited aren’t knowABLE. Inherently and definitionally.
Later people tried to style it as some sort of “undecided” “middle ground”. And that view has become so common that the meaning in common parlance has shifted, or at least, split.
I prefer (perhaps quixotically) to try to reclaim the term as it was originally intended, meaning-wise, which is to say, “I have no way of falsifying god claims, therefore I don’t know about any gods”. And this fits well with the definition of atheism, which is, “I see no valid reason to believe any god claims” (knowledge position vs belief position). CyberLN is absolutely correct, the two terms are not only compatible, but most atheists are also agnostics.
Another advantage of this is that it guards against the charge that atheism is a fundamentally arrogant positive claim that there are no gods, that we atheists have been everywhere and everywhen and we know that for a fact. That isn’t really a defensible claim, nor is it a necessary claim. We want believers to just present evidence for their claims, otherwise they are bullshit. Much simpler.
Okay, I guess I’ll get no love from this crowd. Jeez-o-pizza! No love from believers…no love from atheists! Where’s a guy to turn for companionship? I was only trying to bounce an idea off ya. I wasn’t looking for a slaughtering. Sorry I brought it up!
Did you start posting here thinking you would?
You did so and got a number of responses.
No one slaughtered you. The IDEAS that you posted about were scrutinized.
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Even the Babble says, “as iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens his brother” or words to that effect (can’t be arsed to actually look it up, lol). That’s the spirit in which responses are offered here. We’re trying not to just be an echo chamber. You had an idea, we gave you our honest and authentic views of it. That it wasn’t very favorable or resonant, doesn’t mean we hate you or something. It just means we simply disagree. It isn’t personal.
Try to shed any residual notion from theism or being midwestern or whatever that “if you don’t have something ‘nice’ to say, don’t say it”. It’s not easy (what is?) but it’s worth the effort IMO.
Keith77
Here is a list of what I am:
Human, obvious.
Humanistic, practicing Humanism.
Scientist. Not so obvious, but applicable.
Skeptic in that I refuse to accept any claim without proof.
Secularist in that I refuse to accept ANY religious lobby when it comes to deciding Public Policies.
Agnostic in that there are some things I do not know and am without that knowledge; thus, agnostic. Every last person on Earth IS agnostic to some degree and magnitude. I cannot put this any simpler.
Atheist in that I refuse to accept the preposterous claims of their god-things.
Antireligionist in that religion has proven to be more detrimental than supportive.
Apistevist in that I shall NEVER rely on faith for determining truth.
Rational Anarchist read Robert A Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
So… Please explain why an atheist cannot be agnostic?
Franklin
You’re fine, man. I think you’re cool. Don’t give up. 
And once again, the need for rigour is established.
I have, for some time, proposed a framework in an attempt to establish this. Starting with the basic concept that assertions possess the status “truth value unknown” until they are tested via one or more proper tests.
Under this framework, belief, as practised by mythology fanboys, is nothing more than uncritical acceptance of unsupported assertions, and indeed, they continue to provide evidence of this in quantity.
Consequently, if you are NOT accepting unsupported assertions uncritically, but demanding evidence to establish the truth-value thereof, you are not engaging in “belief” by definition. We need a separate term for this epistemological practise, though my talent for the relevant neologisms is limited by my own admission.
This is the point where I propose, that the rigorous conception of atheism, is nothing more than deep and proper suspicion of unsupported mythology fanboy assertions. It is, quite simply, the only observable characteristic that atheists have in common, and should therefore be considered its defining feature.
Then, we have issues to address before we start delving into the minutiae of ‘agnosticism’. A central principle applicable here being that any entity asserted to possess contradictory or absurd properties, can be summarily dismissed on that basis without further ado. This allows us to sweep away, at a stroke, all of the fantasy magic entities humans have concocted in their various (and ridiculous) pre-scientific mythologies. These can be removed from serious discourse and placed in the trash can via this simple expedient.
But, as regular readers of my output are aware, this does not exclude the possibility of a god type entity in its most general form, merely the fatuous cartoon characters excluded above. It does not exclude the possibility of a god type entity that does not arise from a mythology, nor one that is either consonant with known physics, or provides consistent extensions thereto.
Of course, such an entity, while more plausible than mythological cartoon characters, still requires us to provide data pointing to the existence thereof. Otherwise, the existence assertion in this case remains forever in that limbo I opened with - “truth value unknown”.
In addition, regular readers of my output are doubtless aware of this post of mine, in which I point out that even seeking plausible candidates for the “god role” is a lot more complicated than it seems, and that post provides an insight into how cosmological physics will complicate that process as the science progresses. I admit honestly that said post is speculative, but it presents ideas that, tellingly, no mythology fanboy has ever alighted upon from first principles.
As a corollary, even defining what a ‘god type entity’ actually is, is fraught with pitfalls, and this naturally impacts upon the question of whether such an entity can be known or not. In the case of a temporary braneworld experiment by a past species in another ‘universe enclave’, even detecting that the universe one occupies was the product thereof, would require formidable and diligent intellectual labour - labour of a sort mythology fanboys are unaccustomed to conducting.
Even if, in the speculative scenario I provided, we were able to determine that some past species in some other ‘universe enclave’, launched our universe using laboratory machinery, this would still tell us nothing about that species, other than it was capable of conducting the requisite experiment. What that species looked like, what its biology was grounded upon (or even if it was biological in origin) - all of this would be beyond our reach, unless we obtained privileged access to some very special data.
Issues of this sort are, of course, grist to the mill for science fiction writers, but also provide useful insights into the whole question of whether or not we can actually know even the most basic details, about any god type entity that actually exists. Which is why I routinely cite success in such an endeavour as Nobel worthy. The distinction between possible and actual, as science has already taught us via the Higgs Boson, frequently requires us to labour massively to resolve it.
Conjuring facile ex recto apologetic spells, is so woefully insufficient here, that no serious commentator will waste time on such an exercise. If it transpires that we have to push cosmological physics to previously unimaginable limits, simply in order to resolve the ‘possible versus actual’ distinction, then fabrications intended to force-fit reality to mythological assertions are not merely failures, but dishonest ones.