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.