"Agnostics are Nowhere Men"

[JoelKatz]

In other words you dismiss the claim, "there is a god" because that claim requires knowledge that nobody can have, but you aren't dismissing the proposition, "there is a god".

I am dismissing the claim because it does not vouch for a valid proposition. Because the proposition is invalid, I can likewise dismiss it as incapable of being true. (You can, of course, make an argument that the proposition itself is also incapable of being false.) My point is that the claim is false, not just meaningless, because every claim claims to claim something.

That's a very nice semantic argument you've constructed, but since you haven't dismissed the proposition you can't make the claim, "there is no god" because, by your semantic argument, you can't have the knowledge which is required to make that claim. Thus your claim to be a strong atheist is destroyed by your own argument.

I have, I have dismissed the proposition as invalid and thus the claim as false. Remember, the proposition we were talking about was one that purported to claim that there was one state of affairs rather than another where those two states of affairs are, in principle, completely indistinguishable. In principle, nothing could confirm, refute, or bear on the proposition in any way. To put it in logic terms, 'X' is a valid proposition because it refutes '~X'. But '' is not a valid proposition.

 

[Darat]

If you don't tell me what you mean by God, we're not going anywhere, Darat.

The question is not about my beliefs about a god - it is about your beliefs.

It makes a difference if you have a specific thing in mind when you say "God". Not everyone means the same thing when they use that word.

Nope all I am interested in knowing is which god you believe - my definition of god has no relevance to that.

 

[Darat]

...snip...

That’s the point.
The “word” “God” isn’t even definable enough to reject. It’s below that, in the territory of utter meaninglessness.
There is no uncertainty or word play involved.
Religious people will continue to say they believe in mythological characters, but when you ask them specific questions about their constitution, you’ll get nothing but nonsense in return. Thus they are not really being honest with themselves, they're just cooking up a meaningless mental construct.

...snip...

If someone wants to call themselves an atheist...fine. But in this view, it is saying that there is something cognitively comprehensible to not believe in.

I disagree - most actual theists I know have a definition of the god they claim they believe in, now that may be a logically incoherent definition or it may be one (such as those that believe in YEC) is provably false but they still hold that belief. Belief has nothing to do with truth value of a certain god existing (when used in sense of this thread) so whether their definition is nonsense to you has no bearing on the matter.

 

[HghrSymmetry]

To you there may be no difference in saying that 'I can't be sure God doesn't exist' or in saying that 'I am as sure as I can be about anything else in this universe that God doesn't exist' but in reality there is.

In the ignostic view, those distinctions aren't even necessary. The sentence is immediately still born when that three lettered "word" is uttered.

I think we've stated our positions fairly well though, so at this point, I'll conclude our exchange.

 

[HghrSymmetry]

I disagree - most actual theists I know have a definition of the god they claim they believe in, now that may be a logically incoherent definition or it may be one (such as those that believe in YEC) is provably false but they still hold that belief. Belief has nothing to do with truth value of a certain god existing (when used in sense of this thread) so whether their definition is nonsense to you has no bearing on the matter.

In the ignostic view, the bolded part above is crux of the discussion.
Yes, they may have a definition, but it is usually vague, inconsistant, and is ultimately cognitively incoherent.

If they want to continue to say they believe in such and such entity, they are free to do so. They simply aren't being intellectually honest (and are probably completely oblivious to that).
But like you said, it has no bearing on the matter because they will continue to behave/believe the same way.

So be it.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Nope all I am interested in knowing is which god you believe - my definition of god has no relevance to that.

I already answered that on this thread.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Carl Sagan couldn't have said it better:

"When people ask me after one of my lectures, "Do you believe in God?" I frequently reply by asking what the questioner means by "God". The term means a lot of different things in a lot of different religions. For some, it's an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. To others - for example, Baruch, Spinoza, and Albert Einstein - God is essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I can't imagine anyone denying the existence of the laws of nature, but I don't know of any compelling evidence for the old man in the sky.

In the cosmic context, the very scale of the universe - more than one hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than one hundred billion stars - speaks to us of the inconsequentiality of human events. We see a universe simultaneously very beautiful and very violent. We see a universe that does not exclude traditional Western or Eastern god, but that does not require one either."

 

[quixotecoyote]

I believe in the same God that Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman believe in. That is: The sum of all the laws of physics.

I define god as my dishwasher. It's even easier to understand and is equally a middle-finger to the concept of meaningful definitions.

 

[wollery]

I am dismissing the claim because it does not vouch for a valid proposition. Because the proposition is invalid, I can likewise dismiss it as incapable of being true. (You can, of course, make an argument that the proposition itself is also incapable of being false.) My point is that the claim is false, not just meaningless, because every claim claims to claim something.

Sorry, I must have missed where you invalidated the proposition "there is a god". Could you possibly point me to it. I'd be very grateful.

I have, I have dismissed the proposition as invalid and thus the claim as false. Remember, the proposition we were talking about was one that purported to claim that there was one state of affairs rather than another where those two states of affairs are, in principle, completely indistinguishable.

Oh yes, your mangled reinterpretation of Occam's Razor. Sorry, Occam's Razor is a general rule of thumb, not a logical meat cleaver. It is a guide for judging ideas and propositions, not a law or logical requirement. You cannot dismiss a proposition on those grounds, you can only judge that it is (probably) less likely to be true.

In principle, nothing could confirm, refute, or bear on the proposition in any way. To put it in logic terms, 'X' is a valid proposition because it refutes '~X'. But '' is not a valid proposition.

Except that this proposition isn't ' '. It is untestable, not empty, there's a difference.

 

[Darth Rotor]

The question is a definition and this thread is about definitions, I know the question makes some folks uncomfortable especially honest folk but it is the only way to tell if someone is an atheist or not. (And it is not of the type of "have you stopped beating your wife/lover")

I accept your answer, thank you, and will point out the following.

The thread's motive force (I read from post #1), strikes me as yet another attempt to pigeonhole people.

I don't find that particularly productive.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Is identifying as an agnostic atheist a problem?

Not if you wish to so identify yourself. What you call somebody else might raise problems, however.

Do you think you could convince a Catholic that they're really Catholic-Protestant?

Do you mean Anglicans?

 

[Tumblehome]

So deists aren't theists?

Not to me they're not, despite the tap dancing of religious philosophers. I've never understood how gods who don't meddle in the universe are a subset of gods who do, as if people who don't fix cars are a subset of auto mechanics.

But semantic quibbling aside, I reject the purely hypothetical supposition of a deist god as well as the defined, supernatural claims of religious gods, but on necessarily different grounds. Order-therefore-God is the same type of argument from incredulity as ID's complexity-therefore-God.

No, it's allowing for the fact that we don't know everything. To posit otherwise is arrogant.

We don't know everything about the physical world. Using that shortcoming to justify the existence of the supernatural when there's absolutely nothing pointing in that direction is wishful thinking. Psychics and their ilk use the same misdirectional argument to support their supernatural claims, and you wouldn't give them the benefit of doubt (I assume). Why does a supernatural God get a special exemption?

 

[MikeSun5]

We don't know everything about the physical world. Using that shortcoming to justify the existence of the supernatural when there's absolutely nothing pointing in that direction is wishful thinking. Psychics and their ilk use the same misdirectional argument to support their supernatural claims, and you wouldn't give them the benefit of doubt (I assume). Why does a supernatural God get a special exemption?

I understand your frustration with the "God of the Gaps" that people hide behind, but many people who share your viewpoint are also engaging in misdirection by intentionally associating any non-atheist with a supernatural God. It's this "you're with us or with them" attitude that turns many people away from atheism. JoelKatz missed the mark with the logic reference as well. As wollery implied, agnostics don't say there is no answer, we just say nobody knows it yet.

"God" is still an untestable theory. Scientists just recently figured out how to test another untestable theory: string theory. Maybe in the future the atheists will have more solid ground to stand on, but as it stands today, atheism (like religions) is largely an opinion/faith-based belief system. I'm sure that's a hard pill to swallow for many atheists, but I'm of the mind that until science can start eliminating theories, they should all be considered as a possibility. Why not? Right now we can't even prove it's not turtles all the way down. We don't know. That's crazy unlikely, but not impossible if you understand the concept of infinity.

 

[tourmaline]

Been away from a comp for a while. Hopefully Skeptic Tank is still following this thread.

I'd say the opposite. If you're being empirical, then you have to look at the scientific method. In the scientific method you don't prove things true, you just fail to disprove them. The more you fail to disprove them, the more likely to be true they are. They reach a point where they have been not disproved so many times that they are generally accepted as true. But there is always the possibility that at some point in the future they could be disproved. Always. It is, to my mind, the only rational, sceptical and empirical position to hold.



If I were presented with a large amount of good, overwhelming evidence for the existence of God, then I would become a theist (in the sense that I would believe in God, not necessarily that I would worship him). But, even then, I wouldn't claim that I knew the truth, just that the evidence that I have seen makes me think that the God hypothesis is the correct one. I would still be open to being wrong.

In fact, I would say that the agnostic is more likely to be swayed by evidence than the gnostic.If you know you're right, then how are you going to be wrong? If, on the other hand, you believe that the evidence makes a certain conclusion the most likely to be correct (even if that evidence is very, very strong, like the evidence for the non-existence of gods, and therefore that the probability of the conclusion not being correct is infinitesimally small) but don't claim knowledge, then you're already open to being wrong.

I agree with most of what you said.

The highlighted part, to me, sounds like the attitude of a skeptic not agnostic.

An agnostic, taking the stance of 'god is unknowable,' is making a claim about the knowledge of god. I dont understand what this assertion is based on.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

The highlighted part, to me, sounds like the attitude of a skeptic not agnostic.

I think the two are very closely related.

An agnostic, taking the stance of 'god is unknowable,' is making a claim about the knowledge of god. I dont understand what this assertion is based on.

Well, I'm not sure that I wouldn't define it more as "God is unknown", rather than "God is unknowable". But, if we're talking about something which is empirically untestable like God, then how could it be knowable? I don't really think it's proper scientific/sceptical thinking to claim knowledge about things which are empirically testable.

Perhaps I should ask on what grounds a gnostic would assert that they have knowledge of God?

 

[Tumblehome]

I understand your frustration with the "God of the Gaps" that people hide behind, but many people who share your viewpoint are also engaging in misdirection by intentionally associating any non-atheist with a supernatural God. It's this "you're with us or with them" attitude that turns many people away from atheism. JoelKatz missed the mark with the logic reference as well. As wollery implied, agnostics don't say there is no answer, we just say nobody knows it yet.

"God" is still an untestable theory. Scientists just recently figured out how to test another untestable theory: string theory. Maybe in the future the atheists will have more solid ground to stand on, but as it stands today, atheism (like religions) is largely an opinion/faith-based belief system. I'm sure that's a hard pill to swallow for many atheists, but I'm of the mind that until science can start eliminating theories, they should all be considered as a possibility. Why not? Right now we can't even prove it's not turtles all the way down. We don't know. That's crazy unlikely, but not impossible if you understand the concept of infinity.

"Very clever, young man, but you can't fool me. It's reality all the way down."

I see that we're coming at this from different philosophical angles and we'll probably never agree no matter how many posts we exchange. My worldview is based on what we know now, with the necessary disclaimer that it's subject to change. Yours strikes me as being based on what we don't know, which is a valid point philosophically, but it seems to trivialize what science has taught us so far. The meme of "keeping all options open at all times" serves a purpose, but more as a niggling reminder to keep us honest as we concentrate on the task at hand today, rather than as a guiding principle.

Since my position is based on the knowledge that we've gained to this point, I don't accept it as a belief system. And I'm not on a membership drive, so if that scares people away from atheism, so be it. I suggest the problem is more with them in not accepting--with the necessary conditons--what we've learned so far about the universe.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

 

[tourmaline]

I think the two are very closely related.



Well, I'm not sure that I wouldn't define it more as "God is unknown", rather than "God is unknowable". But, if we're talking about something which is empirically untestable like God, then how could it be knowable? I don't really think it's proper scientific/sceptical thinking to claim knowledge about things which are empirically testable.

Perhaps I should ask on what grounds a gnostic would assert that they have knowledge of God?

A gnostic atheist would say god is knowable but doesnt exist. This could be based on anything(?) including evidence (or lack of). A gnostic theist does the same except they believe in god.

An agnostic contends that god is unknowable. Your basis is that god cant be empirically tested. Isnt this an assumption? Wouldn't the skeptical view be that "I dont know if god is testable" rather than asserting that "god is untestable?"

 

[llwyd]

Think of it like the "is tossing 100 heads in a row impossible" thread. No, it's not impossible to do that. Is it impossible to toss 100,000 heads in a row? No, it's just very, very unlikely. How about every single coin toss from now until the end of time being heads? So unlikely as that we might as well call it impossible, but not actually impossible impossible.

To an atheist agnostic such as myself the existence of gods (or, indeed, any supernatural entity in my case) falls into the same category as the latter coin toss example. About the same probability as the world around me actually being the Matrix. Either the one from the film of the same name or the one from Doctor Who. So close to zero that I might as well call it zero in everyday speech but, if I'm being entirely accurate, actually non-zero.

This is pretty much my position also. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that God exists but I cannot say that's it's absolutely impossible. I don't know why this should be such a big deal anyway. Being both an agnostic (or a weak atheist) and a very weird sort of a Christian, I don't anyway think that the possible (well, very, very, very unlikely) existence of God is a very interesting or important aspect of religion. I mean even if such an unlikely creature(s) would exist, we would still have to think for ourselves. Maybe this idea of God is a good one and so we might end up someday creating Her, who knows.

 

[HghrSymmetry]

Nice shot.

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This one is a bit Al Gorian for the first 7 minutes as it's mainly just a verbatim restating of the wiki article. The last couple minutes though entertainingly illuminate the folly of definition attempts.