this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Man, that's worse than what I experienced growing up. Out of curiosity, why did you decide to go with atheism? Personally, I'm agnostic (I think that's the right term) because I see no compelling evidence or argument for either side, and I am of the opinion that a human's finite brain could never even come close to figuring out the answer. And no, the Bible isn't evidence, not one that's even close to being the slightest bit rigorous at least. To me, it's as much evidence for Christianity as the Harry Potter books are for wizardry.
You're confusing belief with knowledge.
If you don't believe in a deity, guess what, you're an atheist regardless of whether you know for sure a god doesn't exist or not.
Most atheists are agnostic because it's not on us to prove that a god doesn't exist, no one should ever take the burden of proving a negative.
Huh, never thought of it that way, thanks for that. If you'll excuse me, I have quite a lot of rethinking to do.
That’s not entirely true, most definitions of Agnosticism frame it as a different position from Atheism.
Plus, you don’t have to prove something to believe it, if you’re convinced that there is no god you can define yourself an Atheist, that’s it. Agnostics are just “on the fence” and have no horse in the race.
No.
If you're not convinced a god exists you're atheist, plain and simple.
Now, you can be a hard atheist where you know a god doesn't exist, or a soft atheist where you don't know.
Knowledge is a subset of belief. A belief when you have strong evidence is knowledge if you will. Like science.
Because one cannot choose a belief, you either are convinced or not, you can't really be on the fence.
Wikipedia defines Agnosticism as:
It is not related to actual knowledge. No matter the claims one can make, no one can be 100% sure whether a god exists or not. It’s called “faith” because people choose to believe despite the lack of irrefutable evidence.
Belief, on the other hand, is definitely a spectrum and you can be convinced or skeptical of affirmations from both sides. There’s also apatheists that simply don’t care whether it exists or not, or Ignostics that question the question itself. There’s plenty of people “on the fence”. The definition of Nontheism for example encompasses all those three, but not Atheism.
Agnostic Atheism is a position that’s very close to Atheism, but not all Agnostics are Agnostic Atheists.
Belief is not a choice, you're either convinced or you're not.
Wikipedia can also be wrong on various topics so let's not get nitpicky. But, if you want to look up Gnosticism on Wikipedia, you'll see that being a gnostic means having knowledge.
So people can be either theists or atheists and at the same time gnostic or agnostic.
A gnostic theist would mean they believe and also know a god exists.
An angostic atheist doesn't believe and also doesn't know a god doesn't exists. That's most of us atheists.
So people can't be on the fence and say I'm agnostic, that doesn't tell anything about what they believe.
And when it comes to belief, you are either convinced or you're not. There's no middle ground.
Hope I cleared it up.
I think we're just entering semantics at this point. "Agnostic" has been used plenty of times as a position in itself separate from "Atheist": even Thomas H. Huxley, who created the term, saw it as a specifically distinct thing from atheism, and so did Darwin and Ross at the time.
You can indeed have middle ground on beliefs, and the term has been invented for that exact reason: Huxley didn't feel like he fit in any of the definitions that existed at the time.
Yeah, it is semantics.
I think most people don't realise that saying "I'm not sure a god exists" makes them atheists though and I was trying to make that point.
Good discussion nevertheless.
I relate a lot to this. If asked "does God exist?", my personal belief is always that we don't know and that we will never know, and it doesn't matter anyways so why bother? I do certainly see some value in religion, in that it does bring a lot of people comfort when faced with the concept of mortality, and that religious organisations do a lot of charity (this is true where I come from, at least). However, I do think that said value has been greatly diminished, if not perhaps even eliminated entirely, in the face of the attrocities people have committed in the name of religion, i.e. attempts at restricting women's and LGBTQ+ rights, etc.
The journey went: disappointment with God, angry at God, apathetic, agnostic, then atheist. I considered myself agnostic for a long time but it always felt a bit like a compromise for me, like it's more palatable to think "Oh, I just don't know one way or another" over seeing god as a stopgap for holes in knowledge.
Rather than the approach of attributing less and less to the divine over time, I decided to attribute nothing and go from there.
Saying that one can't disprove god's existence feels the same to me as saying a watermelon is blue inside until it's observed.
Thanks for your perspective!
Regarding your last point, we only know that the flesh of a watermelon is indeed red because we've seen it before. If, say, an alien would suddenly come to Earth and be presented with a watermelon, they would not know what colour it is without cracking it open or otherwise probing it with various tools (granted of course that they perceive colour like we do)
Attributing nothing to the divine is also the way I go about it. We have scientific explanations for most phenomenon we see on a daily basis, and for those we do not, I do think we will find scientific explanations for them one day. None of the mysteries of the universe that would later be answered have been caused by the supernatural, so I have no reason to think it will be different.
However, I do think that a lack of observable trace of a "divine being" is not necessarily an evidence of nonexistence. To me, my agnosticism is not a form of compromise, but a recognition of the limitations of humans, as well as an acknowledgement relative inconsequence the question of whether a divine being exists or not is to the universe and to my own life. If nothing in my life or in the known universe can be attributed to the divine, why does it matter whether it exists or not? If an extraterrestrial exists in some distant galaxy, surely it would not matter to them whether I exist or not. That's the way I think of the idea of divine beings.
Anyways, it's kind of great to be able to ramble about this on the internet, most of the people I know are religious and unfortunately would not be very tolerant of this type of viewpoint.