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Atheism vs Agnosticism
Sunday. 12.5.10 5:46 pm
Randomjunk and Middaymoon both commented on how agnosticism is a more neutral stance than atheism. This is an opinion held by many people, christians included, but I think it stems from a misunderstanding of what it means to be atheist or agnostic.

First, the actual oxford dictionary definitions of the two words.

Atheism
noun
disbelief in the existence of God or gods.

Agnosticism
noun
a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.

Two very import points from those definitions. Atheism is not the stance that God (or Gods) absolutely do not exist, and no one can ever say otherwise. That would be fundamentalism, which for obvious reasons is the very opposite of most atheistic beliefs. While there may be a few, less intelligent atheists who say things like that, the most celebrated and intelligent atheists take a stance that, while it is possible that god exists, the probability of his existence is very low, due mainly to the sum of all scientific knowledge and how it relates to the stories of the bible.

On the other hand, Agnosticism, by that definition, is actually something I find annoying. By the wording ".. that nothing is known or can be known" it suggests that an agnostic would believe that the existence of god (or gods) is entirely outside the realm of science. Which is simply not true. I think scientists have every right to view existing evidence and make statistical analysis on the probability of the existence of god (or gods).

For this reason alone, I'm proud to call myself an atheist and would never call myself an agnostic. As many prominent atheists have asserted, christian fundamentalists have created a backwards debate, whereby they are constantly demanding of scientists to present their proof. When by all rights, the burden of proof should lie at the feet of christians. Their claim is far more wild, irrational, and based on absolutely nothing even closely approaching scientific fact. In comparison, evolution, the age of the universe, and many other widely held scientific facts and theories have been tested, retested, and most have stood the tests of time and the challenges of the scientific process.

Religion, specifically christian fundamentalism, has miserably failed to provide scientific proof of the claims of a "young earth" theory to support creationism. Many theories have been put forward, and have withered under direct investigation by scientists. Some don't even warrant a response, so ridiculous is their premise.

I'll end with a very interesting link to a website I'm still sifting through. It provides a very detailed list of many creationist rebuttals to evolution and other widely held scientific facts, and the response of science to these rebuttals.

Talk Origins - And index of creationist claims
4 Comments.


It's a bit easier to say I'm agnostic because I don't know if there's a term for "I don't know, but I'm not saying anything is or isn't unless something comes along that proves it either way."
» randomjunk on 2010-12-05 06:22:44

What she said. ^
I don't think it's outside the realm of science. Nor do I think that it is. It might. It might not. Now what would YOU call that?
» Silver-dot- on 2010-12-05 07:41:22

I have read some Richard Dawkins, and I've followed some of these types of debates. I haven't personally known christians who despise atheists merely because they do not believe in God. Most of the christians I know and read about have a problem with atheists for very human reasons: because when they are drawn into a debate with an atheist, the atheist often ridicules their thoughts and beliefs instead of listening to them. One author I read put it, "The strategy is not to argue with religious views or to prove them wrong. Rather, it is to subject them to such scorn that they are pushed outside the bounds of acceptable debate." If you said something like, "I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers" and someone said to you in an angry tone of voice, "the only people who like the Red Hot Chili Peppers are mindless sheep who were indoctrinated by their equally foolish and naive parents and by evil record companies whose aim is to take advantage of the weak-minded," your first inclination would not be to change your mind about the Chili Peppers, but rather to develop a bad feeling about the person you are talking to. I think the negative thing about Richard Dawkins is how unhappy and angry he is, and how "evangelistic" he is about his atheism. It seems like Dawkins would not be content to be an atheist unless the whole world around him was atheist, too, and he thinks the best way to go about it is to insult the intelligence of everyone he is trying to convert. So sometimes it is difficult for atheists to avoid sounding condescending or patronizing to religious believers. But after all, usually the kind of people with whom you would have these conversations will be your friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. Sometimes people talk about things that are "so obviously true that you would have to be an idiot not to believe them", and there is someone sitting across the table from you who you like and respect very much whom you've just labeled an idiot, maybe even unknowingly. Anyway, I know you feel strongly about this matter, but I hope the likes of Dawkins won't convince you that the eradication of Christianity is so important that it should trump all of our relationships with our friends and neighbors. Anyway, many of my atheist friends are always saying things to me like, "I think of you as a smart person-- but how can a smart person believe such monumentally stupid and irrational things?" These friends are all very smart and most of them are scientists, and they believe in things like the Big Bang, and they consider the possibilities of string theory and the theory of multiverses, where there could be an infinite number of universes, all with different dimensions and timelines and physical constants, separated by non-space like holes in a block of Swiss cheese, they believe in cosmic background radiation, even though it wasn't even discovered until 1964. The idea that there are things out there that are fundamental to the workings of the Universe, or that are even outside the Universe all together, that exist in direct contradiction to the laws of physics that we have discovered in the small corner of existence that we call The Universe, doesn't really seem that far-fetched to me, in the context of everything else we have discovered so far. Agnostics tend to believe that some things are "infinitely unknowable"; because humankind is limited by our five senses and our instruments and our geographical location so that there are things that we could hypothesize about that we would have no possible way of ever testing, not in an infinite number of human lifetimes, but that doesn't mean that they aren't true or that they don't exist. It also doesn't mean that we should stop exploring or that any of this undermines the incredibly useful framework of science as a way to discover truths about the Universe. In this way agnostics are very open-minded.

Dawkins usually tries to pick Christians who believe without thinking, or who hold fringe beliefs, so that by mocking them he can mock the entire community of believers. But the world is filled with all kinds of people, thinking and unthinking, smart and not-as-smart, kind and mean-spirited. The flaw is with Mankind, not with his religion.

Anyway, this comment is way too long, so I'll stop writing, but the short story is that I think about this kind of stuff a lot, and sometimes I write about it:

http://zanzibar.nutang.com/r_5281/Metaphysics_and_the_Middaymoon/

So if you ever wanted to talk about it more, I'm obviously always around on the 'Tang.
» Zanzibar on 2010-12-05 11:32:17

"Agnostic Atheism"
^That term is also used. Which I find strange.

Perhaps the reason that agnostics do not discuss is because there is nothing to discuss. Nothing known for fact so what can be used as evidence to fuel discussion/debates? You don't get much past "I don't know"/"I'm not persuaded"/"It all sounds so radical." Or perhaps it's just fear that one side or the other will persuade them out of their agnostic ways. ;)
» Silver-dot- on 2010-12-06 06:39:53

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