No. Taking no position of belief on the matter of Assertion A (the existence of gods) is, in popular usage, atheism.
It may be in your culture - in mine it is agnosticism. In fact even Professor Dawkins admits he is a functional agnostic, because he does not know that Gods do not exist (one can not unless one possesses the quality of omniscience after all, which paradoxically might make one a god?) Hence the Dawkins - an atheist, in British atheist circles that I frequent, is someone who finds the existence of deities highly improbable, not someone who categorically denies there existence - shades of meaning - but it is not someone who believes that they "do not know that there are no gods". If you head over to Richarddawkins.net, and try your definition of atheism out you will receive a very er, warm, welcome. The Atheist bus campaign was even accused of being a lukewarm agnostic bus campaign for saying there "probably" was no god. Maybe this is a cultural thing?
Now of course when I use atheism, i mean what Flew categorised as strong atheism, as opposed to the weak atheism which can be applied to all non-theistic positions, inculding agnostics - positive atheism rather than negative atheism. Of ocurse i understand the difference, it's philosophy of religion 101, so to speak, and that si my academic background. It is conventional however that if you mean weak atheism (negative atheism) you define it thus - as the popular usage, at least in the UK, is strong atheism.
As to the usage in popular speech, Merriam Webster offers
Etymology:Middle French
athéisme, from
athée atheist, from Greek
atheos godless, from
a- +
theos god
Date:1546 1
archaic : ungodliness ,
wickedness
2 a
: a disbelief in the existence of deity b
: the doctrine that there is no deity
Now of course atheist is one of those labels which changes its meaning over the centuries. Originally a perjorative, it was used in 2nd and 3rd century Rome to label Christians, as deniers of the state Gods. We can cheerfully say that athist can have multiple meanings, but in common usage atheist means someone who does not believe in gods, which a-theist implies. You are correct to point out a-theist means not having a positive belief etymologically in the greek - but that does not make it what it means today, any more than Huxley's a-gnostic means someone who does not have religious experiences or recieve divine gnosis.
Still if by atheist you mean simply negative atheism, sure.
Your misunderstanding of the terms "atheism" and "agnosticism" might be the problem here. Atheism is to be without theism, a position of non-theism. Simple as this: An atheist is anyone who is not a theist. There are gnostics and agnostics among them.
That is negative/weak atheism - not atheism as commonly employed. If you wish to use this, and its a very recent innovation (post about 1992 as I recall, but drawing from Flew as i remarked) that si fine but you have to make clear what you are talking about, else you will simply have endless arguments. Weak atheism is generally NOT considered atheism by a large number of uK atheists or philosophers of religion. The definition is extremely problematic, for reasons we can discuss if you wish.
To reiterate: "I believe gods do not exist," is not the atheist position. It is, in context of this discussion, merely a subset of atheism. "I do not believe gods exist," is not an expression of any belief, and states no claim regarding the existence of gods. It is, from my observation, the position most typical of atheists on this forum. And (here's where your mistake comes in, cj.23...) it is not agnosticism, because it expresses no claim regarding the truth value of the know-ability of the existence of gods.
OK, so you are employing weak/negative atheism as representing the atheist position? What do you think of strong atheism, or even Dawkin's statistical confidence atheism? I think you will find many if not most strong atheist would actually reject this neologism, and deny those who hold such beliefs as atheists, and if you want objective evidence this is so try go on some uK atheist forums -- I have seen what happens many times... (I have been a member of various atheist communities for 15+ years now, so I speak with a little experience of these matters...) It may be that this forum has adopted weak/neagtive atheism as the norm in discussion, buyt that was i am afriad not clear to me. We are going to get in to explicit/implicit atheism next aren't we??
Now agnosticism...
You see, agnosticism does not mean what you think it means. In the context of the existence or non-existence of gods, it has to do with knowledge, the ability or inability to know whether gods exist or not. You may find it interesting that agnosticism can be considered a subset of atheism or of theism. But probably easiest to resolve your misunderstandings one at a time.
I'm pretty sure it does. If you want a lecture on the history of the term agnosticism, and a long discussion of what TH Huxley meant by it and how he employs it with illustrative quotes from
Agnosticism (1889) I'm your man as it happens, as it's something I know very well indeed, having actually read a lot of Huxley over the years. For now I will merely refer you to my post above in this thread!
You are correct in saying that it has to do with knowledge, in that Huxley denied Special Revelation or Direct Revelation. Hence "agnosis". Huxley did not however in anyway deny that knowledge fo the divine was theretically possible -- in fact quite the contrary. I can see you need to know a little more about TH Huxley, so here is an amusing quote to get you started --
"There is a wider teleology that is not touched by the doctrine of evolution."
'On the Reception of the Origin of the Species' in
The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol 2, ed Francis Darwin, 1887, p.479
T.H Huxley incidentally was described by one of his close associates as "one of the most religious men i have ever met." What Huxley denied was simple -
special revelation - he felt that a God could be knowable, and if you really want a biographical history lesson I'm up for it.
I don't know how you've missed the many simple discussions on this point since you've been here for two years and have over 1,000 posts. But obviously you have. The bright side? Now that it's been clearly explained, one more time, you won't be accidently or honestly making that mistake again.
I don't actually tend to get involved much in the religious debates here, as I get plenty of those elsewhere. The last week or so has been an exception, as I was bored and had some spare time so I thought i'd click on a few threads.
I hope we can proceed forward now, but thanks for clarifying your position. I was not aware that you were advocating weak/negative atheism - you really really should specify that y'know, if that is how you are meploying the term, because it is not the popular usage at all.
cj x
