atheism vs. agnosticism

The difference between an agnostic and an atheist is the difference between saying "I do not believe God exists" and "I don't know if God exists".

I find devotion / divinity very interesting on many levels. I was raised by an atheist and a lapsed Catholic (who may as well have been an atheist too, or at least a pagan) and, while I remain unsure of ANYthing of this magnitude, I certainly don't identify myself as either.

As for "agnosticism", to me this has a fairly convoluted meaning. I will try to paraphrase the definition that I have heard most often for it: "someone who believes that it is impossible to know whether or not there is a god so they choose to live as if there is not". Now if this is really what agnostics believe, then I think they are indulging in a bit of a cop-out. After all, on what basis do they choose to act as if there is no god. If they are really so neutral on the question of god's existence, couldn't they just as rationally choose to live as if there is a god? I mean if you have zero evidence either way, then really you should flip a coin to decide which way to go, right? But I've never heard of an agnostic who chooses to live as if there is a god. Therefore, what I conclude is that an "agnostic" is really just an "atheist" who doesn't want to fess up to it.

xpost - darn, I took too long!

I am a theist, so get that out there before I start - I'm not a Christian though. The problem is one of definition; no definition is right, but awareness of what people will think when you use a phrase (see: people who say they are 'satanists' and that all that means is a kind of nature worship - they have to understand what that word means to Christians). An atheist is traditionally, and I think most accurately, taken to mean a person who says "There is no God". It is a knowledge claim. Agnosticism would be a claim of no knowledge, quite literally. An agnostic could be a person who says "I believe there is [probably?] no God". They could have a variety of beliefs about God really, but I think that is the most common; that there is no way to know if God exists or not, but on balance...something or other.

I personally feel that atheism as I defined it is a philosophical fallacy, as an almighty being could hide his existence in any way, so claiming that there is no God, or that God is impossible, is not tenable. Of course, if someone wishes to use atheist to mean what I classify as agnostic ie "I believe there is no God" that's fine, as long as they are aware of the history of atheism, both as a word and an idea, and that it has had a different meaning in the past.

None of this is a problem - none of us believe the same thing about anything, so classification like this is always a clumsy tool.

Hi! (This is more because I identify Christianity as the basis of my morals than it is that I am afraid of going to Hell; I also attend church regularly, even if it is as a staff member.)

xposts

(People who claim "but there's no scientific proof of God's existence" hold no sway with me, as the very concept of God is a nonrational one -- by which I mean not "irrational," but "fundamentally incapable of being understood via rational thought," which isn't a value-judgment.)

This is another statement that I've heard many times that baffles me. How can an agnostic be so sure that it's impossible to know whether a god exists? Now I'm an atheist, but not even I would claim that it is impossible to know whether a god exists. How could I know that, unless I had considered all of the potential evidence, which means that I would have had to travel infinitely far across space and time?

I think bringing the whole "belief" vs. "knowledge" distinction into this is a red herring. Of course, any who claims to "know" that which they only "believe" is a crank. I think all of these terms - atheist, agnostic, theist - are about what someone believes.

I agree, but I think there are plenty of theists and atheists who will disagree with you pretty strongly about this.

(xpost: If God exists, it is reasonable to assume that God does so on a plane of existence so far removed from our own as to be unknowable. Furthermore, a being with the capabilities ascribed to God would by definition be inscrutable and unknowable to humanity. Ergo, it is pointless to worry about whether God exists or not because if God is there you can't prove it.)

But if God really has the omnipotent powers ascribed to him, wouldn't he also have the power to make his existence manifest to us mortals?

Also, I think I act basically in accordance with the Golden Rule, but it isn't with any sort of appeal to a higher power in mind -- I just think the world functions better that way.

Well, certainty is a claim that what you believe cannot be wrong, and there are things like this. Belief is more like weighing up the odds - belief is more difficult, because people use it in odd ways, such as when people say they believe in God. A fair number of people who make that claim would say that they know God exists, but 'belief' is part of religious language.

Yes, but that doesn't mean He'd want to.

This just means his existence, if he does exist, could be proved by him, not that his existence is provable by us. It's the postulate made to deny the possibility of disproof.

Lately, I've settled on just calling myself curious. I believe there is an awful lot we do not know about the universe, ourselves and the relation between the two. In some ways, you have to be a fool not to believe that (dark matter? dark energy? there's a whole lot of things going on all around us that we are unaware of and unable to explain). At the same time, I don't believe there are obvious limits on our knowledge -- we know much more now than we did 500 years ago, and 500 or a thousand years from now, we'll presumably know much more still. I think scientific and spiritual exploration at their best and most insightful are both pursuing a lot of the same questions, through different prisms.

So, I don't believe in God or Allah or Vishnu or whatever in any of the cartoonish guises generally ascribed to them. Obviously organized religion has always been mostly about politics and power, and will continue to be. But most of the great religions have also produced visionaries and teachers who in their own ways have understood aspects of existence as significant as the great scientists, and I don't dismiss them out of hand. I don't have to think they're divine to respect their human wisdom.

I had a long response to this that involved me making up a lot of plausible-sounding stuff, but I don't need to post it. All I need to post is that I identify myself as an agnostic; that is what I feel most comfortable calling myself regardless of how it appears to others (and I can't tell you how many people assume I am a hyper-devoout Christian because I sing in a church choir, so the pendulum does swing both ways).

I like how Neil deGrasse Tyson bristles at being labeled and thinks the categories are dumb but then dismisses atheists as in-your-face activists.

well he's buddies with some pretty in-your-face activists, so...

Yeah I guess that was what I liked about going to a Unitarian church – there was this label Unitarian that was so broad an umbrella that you couldn't stereotype much beyond "this person will probably like coffee and jokes about Unitarians." You got to hear a lot of different stories and ideas that way. Other labels are probably like that too but I do rely a lot on shorthand stereotypes, which is unfair but hard to avoid. And my stereotype of big-A atheists is that they are loud in that way.

I had a lot of atheist friends in New Mexico who were really into having meetings, writing blogs, etc about 'religion bad atheism good' and they were always baffled and kind of cranky that I never wanted part of it. I started telling them I was an "apathetist."

yeah, that's lovely. & again i think true more broadly, as a dynamic, that to specifically search out similarities rather than understanding can be kinda superficial, that to try to relate is profound. i sorta- man i wonder if i have tried & failed to articulate this before on here but: i was just reading something that had that emerson line in, "our moods do not believe in each other". sometimes i think that the views non-believers hold of believers' thought processes & logic-systems, & vice versa, misjudge the actual terrain so badly as to stop there being any chance of connecting. like when i was a teenager a major stumbling block to understanding why people believed in god was just insta-verifying bible stories in my head, & wondering how they could believe them. really you believe the world was flooded; really you don't think it was just a parable in the language of the time. but this seemed so obvious to me that i could only really envisage religious people's religious lives being daily routines of thinking about, pledging allegiance to & not getting too concerned about the logical lacunae of bible stories, as if that was the sum total of what religion was, all story no moral. so much atheism seems kinda fussy, & often comes pitched with the righteousness of someone who has personally verified the math behind the big bang theory & has their best men working on theories about the autogenic step.

oh xxxp at Crabbits, Friday, 27 July 2012 01:12
does this look like i am quoting chapter & verse

otm.

As for people reading the Bible (or any religious work) strictly literally, it's effing stupid. Spiritual writing HAS to work on a metaphorical level because what it is describing is beyond logic, beyond human understanding, beyond language. If not, then it's science.

I can't act like I am totally perfect on this, it is one of the reasons my marriage fell apart.

i mean it is complicated, it has the same problems as talking to anyone else who you disagree w/something on, politics or worldview, i am def not perfect because there are disconnects. but i think people having a theoretical opposition to religious belief before they even get close to it is a different thing from trying to relate & failing.

Genuine question, is Jesus rising from the dead a literal truth or a metaphor? And are there any self-confessed agnostics who are on the fence about the truth of that particular matter?

is it a bad question? am i a terrible human for not engaging with believers on their own terms?

The Bible certainly treats Jesus rising from death to walk again on the earth and showing himself to his apostles. complete with stigmata (see doubting Thomas) as a literal truth. Choosing to treat it as a metaphor would place one well outside the mainstram of Christian tradition.

This is a very great hurdle for any agnostics to get across, I am sure. I know it is for me. Rejecting this as a literal truth does not, of course, negate the value of Christianity as a faith. It does mean one rejects one of the core beliefs of Xtianity, tho.

it's both literal and a metaphor, right? that's the genius of christianity, says this non-christian.

I suppose I should have said "solely as a metaphor".

it's bedtime for bonzo a thought before i go: your post suggests agnosticism is more than a simple epistemological issue for you? like it's a political one for degrasse tyson, although i'd be highly surprised if he really entertains any doubts about the impossibility of the resurrection.

but a thought

It's tough to get written evidence of this because it's impolite or something, but I doubt the majority of practicing christians actually believe in the scriptures in a literal sense, at least not all the time, so really i suspect not only is the distinction between agnostic and atheist is a political one, but so is the distinction between agnostic and christian.

"The scriptures" is too loose a term there, ok so young earth creationists are a minority but i think it's absurd to suggest the life of christ, from virgin birth to resurrection, is not absolutely an article of faith for the vast majority of christians.

But we're here to talk about agnosticism, not belief. I think from a purely epistemological perspective the existence of a christian god (and muslim, and jewish, and hindu, and greek, etc etc) can be denied outright. I suspect that the god held in mind by those who claim that agnosticism is the most intellectually honest position is a deist god, a kind of platonic ideal of creator and supreme being untainted by creed or myth. But there are a couple of problems with this.

Firstly the idea of a deist god is so vague as to be virtually meaningless. Are they personal or impersonal? Active or retired (a 'first cause' and no more)? Interested in humanity or not? It seems easier to refuse to commit to belief one way or another in something you can't even define.

Secondly the evidence even for this thin god is just not there. People often cite the 'cosmic coincidences' that make it possible for life to exist but this is just abuse of the anthropic principle. Or there is the vaguer feeling that none of this could have arisen by chance. There are seeds of the argument from first cause and the argument from design there, neither of which is sound.

Ultimately it comes down to the idea that 'we just can't know'. That might be true but in fact there are an infinite number of things that we just can't know, it just so happens that most of them are false. I don't see why god gets a free pass.

"i think it's absurd to suggest the life of christ, from virgin birth to resurrection, is not absolutely an article of faith for the vast majority of christians."

i think there's a mao-thought to it where they both do and do not believe in it, in the same way suspension of disbelief works when you are engaged in a work of fiction. i wonder if there's such a thing as chaos magic christians where they make explicit their simultaneous disbelief and belief.

i wonder if there's such a thing as chaos magic christians where they make explicit their simultaneous disbelief and belief.

Chris Hedges is kind of like that with his own personal orientation to the Christian faith.

my brother just got through Lutheran seminary and says that a lot of the professors/theologeans there (ELCA Lutherans, not Missouri Synod) kind of lean that way as well. like not necessarily always going as far as denying the resurrection, but considering a lot of parts of the Bible - the account of the creation, Jonah, etc, to be metaphorical (it being a moral/spiritual text rather than science or historical), and have doubts on the idea of a transcendant/spectral/disembodied 'soul' due to some of their studies on the idea the soul suggesting it being more of a Greek invention, the Biblical reading, some of them are arguing, more likely to do more with a kind of Self based in a physical, living body (there are debates about that though, my brother suspects it's more to do with a lot of current Lutheran academics wanting to reconcile things with a more rationalist view - the Lutheran clergy tends to be pretty liberal and pro-science)

i'm out of the loop w/all this but tangentially, i think inherit the wind's a really awesome text on the boundaries of interpretation wrt the biblical narrative (just a few passages, re: the world being created in seven days, but it always resonated for me)

i think there's a mao-thought to it where they both do and do not believe in it

Probably more mileage to this than I was prepared to admit tbh. Ok this is a terrible piece for being mean & patronising to the faithful but it still makes a good point I think:
http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Do_believers_really_believe?

the insistence that human existence is meaningless ironically allows for an infinite number of randomly generated universes created of every conceivable type of matter and physics. considering quantum strangeness and commonly accepted things like singularities and multiple universes science has theorized itself into a pop mysticism. if any combination of matter/physics is possible then any conceivable spiritual cosmology (and through it your reality as shaped by the infinite variations of electro/chemical soul process) and because there is no meaning there is no reason why not then ironically you could be living in the supernatural universe where tv evangelists are right.

atheism/agnosticism is not coherent when considering multiple universes, which could simply play out in the infinitely long dice rolls of the Big Bang expanding and collapsing and back and forth. infinite dice rolls allows for every deity imagined by man.

Your conception of a god requires that its characteristics are bound to the universe within which it exists. As I stated in my first post above, a god capable of creating a universe would stand outside it, so by the same token, a god capable of creating an infinity of universes would still be extra-universal. Such a god's essence would not be bound by any universe and would not change within any given universe.

Spiritual cosmology

Electro soul

Cmon now we can all exist in a universe where atheists don't encroach on the spiritual and your lot don't.....do the above

"spiritual cosmology" isn't bullshit, it's just jargon. it's frequently misused, but it does have a specific meaning.

the meaninglessness of human existence is only a tragedy because we ourselves happen to be human. all the infinities you talk about, adam, they will never mean anything to me.

the insistence that human existence is meaningless ironically allows for an infinite number of randomly generated universes created of every conceivable type of matter and physics.

This doesn't make a lick of sense, regardless of what universe you state it in.

"spiritual cosmology" isn't bullshit, it's just jargon. it's frequently misused, but it does have a specific meaning.

'bullshit' has a specific meaning fyi, and it's not 'something that doesn't have a specific meaning'

ironically

HOISTED

Your conception of a god requires that its characteristics are bound to the universe within which it exists.

not at all. why would a God be bound to that which it creates? is there anything man has made that he is subservient to? keep in mind God is incorporal, the source of all forms, He is not contained by any.

As I stated in my first post above, a god capable of creating a universe would stand outside it,

could you repost your reasons why? i don't understand this. the universe is everything material, what is this "outside" you speak of? are you saying God is limited by time and space here?

the insistence that human existence is meaningless ironically allows for an infinite number of randomly generated universes created of every conceivable type of matter and physics.

This doesn't make a lick of sense, regardless of what universe you state it in.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Sunday, July 23, 2017 5:49 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

00 Singularity
10 Big Bang
20 Heat Death/Cold Death
30 GOTO 00

Why would

Lookit

You can't believe in a god and then start asking people why would

Why the fuck would there be a god

Jaysus

The fuckin neck

why is there anything? i dunno, there is. the universe is here. shit just happens. why the fuck not.

I predict great things for this thread

Lookit

Ye fellas get a kick out of this because if ppl bother to argue about yr god I dunno ye get tokens or some shit

I'm wise to ye

The universe conveniently is available to take calls. Your buck isn't. I don't think even you believe that there's a case on an arah why not basis

And even if you do believe the backdoor angelphysics nonsense you typed without tittering upthread

btw ppl who try that, godscience etc, should be made profess their chemical and mental pasts while hooked up to lie detectors etc just for the record so we know where we stand

then you're the only one who thinks it

well not makes sense. It's at ninety degrees from sense. It's not on the axis of sense

but if you think it brought anyone reading it closer to a god pick a god any god now ladies and gentlemen was this your god or if you think it made yon god an iota more real to anyone reading who had not already accepted in their hearts the spiritual fact (NB not an actual fact) of that God then you are kidding yourself on a different level to the level on which I already suspect you to be kidding yourself which is on another pleateau entirely from the level upon which you imagine you are kidding anyone else

which you aren't.

"the insistence that human existence is meaningless"

I mean what a start!

Fact, the fuck are you even doing on an atheist Vs agnostic thread. I'm safe spacing this shit, seeing as you won't leave space alone.

Any agnostics, have we any agnostics here tonight?

Me: a god capable of creating a universe would stand outside it

Adam: reasons? i don't understand this.

Because it is logically impossible for a god to only exist inside a universe that has not been created.

God as that fella we all know who actually painted himself into a corner

the poor putz

I should have been clearer and said "to only have its existence inside a universe that the same god has not yet created."

...unless the definition of God changes from 'an entity that stands outside the universe and creates it', like a scientist performing an experiment, in which we could surmise that God has either created an infinite OR finite number of universes; to 'that from which the universe is created', like a seed or a stick of dynamite - the nucleic centre of the universe

I'll accept that definition but it needs to come from a theist delegation as a consensus and therefore no more of the bearded bush lad or the rest of em.

Always held a yen for the craftsman god concept, if you have to have one.

All this would be much clearer if we could see god making universes and take notes.

like a seed or a stick of dynamite

seeds grow by accreting stuff from outside themselves and organizing it, not by creating it from nothing. dynamite expands its own substance, so it probably a better analogy, but that leaves the idea that god's whole substance and activity is identical to the whole substance and activity of the universe, which makes a kind of pantheistic sense, but leads to the obvious question about why it would be useful to retain any concept of god at all.

PUTZGOD

Why is my dog so scared of thunder? Is it just an excuse to be allowed up on the couch?

Why is my dog so scared of thunder?

Because:

• We're talking about a dog.
• It's a very loud noise; it can be louder than almost any other natural sound.
• It has no visible connection to anything a dog understands.
• It can't be escaped; it's everywhere.
• Remember that humans are often frightened of it, too.

I think I've said a variation of this on all of our religious threads but: these kids of debates will always founder if there's a failure to distinguish the different kinds of values or "language games" at work in religious narratives vs other "explanatory" frameworks. Robert Bellah's extraordinary "Religion in Human Evolution" draws on Merlin Donald's distinction between "theoretical culture" (which Bellah identifies with the post axial religions) and "narrative culture" (pre-axial). I haven't read Donald yet but that seems like a useful distinction to me--in particular because it raises the questions of social function, value, and the non-negotiable relationship between theory and narrative. It's almost as if raising the question of the "existence" of god is a kind of confusion of categories, a holdover of the failed medieval attempt to unite theory and narrative.