Does the Agnostic believe nothing?

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ASimon

**Despite this, I can go on believing that this dragon does exist, and you can go on believing that this God exists, but neither of us is under any obligation to take the other person seriously in these claims. **

You’re right. We are under no obligation to take each other seriously.

But we are under an obligation of self interest to take God seriously.

To equate God with a fire-breathing dragon is false analogy.

I would be more likely to equate God with the Creator of all the things that exist or might even exist … including fire-breathing dragons. 😃
 
If God does exist, and the atheist is wrong (he might be wrong because he cannot know for a certainty) what does that say about his concern for the future of his immortal soul? If he loses his soul, has he lost a thing of no great value to him. Apparently so, because he doesn’t believe in his own soul either.

The agnostic is really in the same bind. He doesn’t go so far as the atheist, but his life is lived as if there were no God, so he too seems to have no care or concern for whether his soul exists and is going to be “someplace” for all eternity.
 
babylonsfalling said:
an agnostic is unsure of God’s existence

an atheist believes there are no gods.

atheists don’t like that definition because it involves an actual decision made against God’s existence. So they will often try tweaking the definition into some “lack of belief” grey area that stops short of genuine atheism…but they will still call themselves an atheist. It’s good they don’t want to go all the way with their atheism but it also intellectually dishonest.

agnostics actually have the more grown up perspective, and there are no such thing as agnostic atheist…that’s just attention getting word play which as I said conveniently stops short of actual atheism…
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There’s belief, and there’s knowledge. You can believe something because you know it’s true because you have evidence or proof that it’s true. You can also believe something absent that. But this in no way eliminates the distinction between believing something is true and knowing something is true. I don’t think you can know something without believing it, but one can certainly believe something, while being honest enough to admit they don’t know it.

Your definitions of atheist and agnostic demonstrably comes out to the same thing. No intellectually honest atheist can claim to know God doesn’t exist. They can only believe he doesn’t. Therefore, they are “unsure” of God’s existence.

This is why I don’t think “agnostic” by itself is a helpful term. The people that it’s meant to describe are covered already by atheism and theism. I have a lot of difficulty imagining a reasonably intelligent adult, having heard the arguments for belief/unbelief (however informally), not having at least the glimmer of an opinion. Maybe temporarily - but the thing about this issue is that it does tend to force one to pick a side eventually.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
What is an agnostic? Is he someone who never believes anything is certain and all is in doubt? Then why doesn’t he doubt the worth of his own doubts? How can one be an agnostic with conviction?
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ASimon and others have pretty much answered your questions, but I will add this, if anyone is in need of more clarity, which apparently some are even though he made it perfectly clear IMO.

“In the popular sense, an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves there is a God, whereas an atheist disbelieves there is a God. In the strict sense, however, agnosticism is the view that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify knowledge whether God exists or does not.”

Also,

“An agnostic theist believes the proposition at least one deity exists is true, but per agnosticism also believes that this proposition is unknown or inherently unknowable.”

“Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do not hold a belief in the existence of any deity, and agnostic because they claim that the existence of a deity is either unknowable in principle or currently unknown in fact.”

Most atheists are probably actually agnostic atheists by the above definition.

Babylonsfalling, please read that link for agnostic atheism bc you are way way off in regards to that, and a little bit insulting.
Agnosticism

2127 Agnosticism assumes a number of forms. In certain cases the agnostic refrains from denying God; instead he postulates the existence of a transcendent being which is incapable of revealing itself, and about which nothing can be said. In other cases, the agnostic makes no judgment about God’s existence, declaring it impossible to prove, or even to affirm or deny.

2128 Agnosticism can sometimes include a certain search for God, but it can equally express indifferentism, a flight from the ultimate question of existence, and a sluggish moral conscience. Agnosticism is all too often equivalent to practical atheism.
 
ASimon said:
You are assuming that scientific knowledge is the sole form of knowledge…
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How can you possibly prove that scientific knowledge is the sole form of knowledge? It implies that nothing exists but material objects yet we wouldn’t even know they exist if we didn’t have a mind!
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Charlemagne_II said:
Yet you will find no lack of scientific types who are glad to assume, even without credible evidence, that this universe we inhabit is the child of an earlier universe, and so forth ad infinitum.
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You can find people that believe all manner of things bot scientific and non-scientific. Though I’m not quite sure how this response is related to the previous statement being inapplicable to ASimon. Diving into the mind of a theoretical scientist is worthy of a thread of its own.
Charlemagne_II said:
The atheist does not merely assume the non-existence of God. He is certain of it,
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Some do, some don’t. Some terms used to distinguish between these two types are strong/positive/hard atheists (one that asserts the claim there are no gods) and weak/negative/soft atheists. (wiki). This was also mentioned in the first 40 seconds of the 100 second video clip that I had suggested.
Charlemagne_II said:
or he would call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist.
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I think you are making the assumption here that others apply your definitions to these terms. If you consider that some people apply other definitions to these terms, including the ones that were presented in this thread, then you’ll see other reasons why the person uses the terms that (s)he does.
 
tonyrey said:
How can you possibly prove that scientific knowledge is the sole form of knowledge? It implies that nothing exists but material objects yet we wouldn’t even know they exist if we didn’t have a mind!
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Because no other alleged form of knowledge has ever been adduced that has accurately and consistently describe the state of the world we live in, nor has it been able to make testable predictions about what will happen in it. Even certain aspects of quantum theory, which nobody really understands, at least has the benefit of being testable, and we can make predictions based on it.

Once upon a time, we thought people got sick because of demons or curses. This might have been considered scientific knowledge in its day. But once we originated the germ theory of disease, that became a part of our scientific understanding of the Universe. The “demons and curses” theory of disease didn’t become just an alternate way of knowing why people got sick. It just became wrong.
 
ASimon

**Your definitions of atheist and agnostic demonstrably comes out to the same thing. No intellectually honest atheist can claim to know God doesn’t exist. They can only believe he doesn’t. Therefore, they are “unsure” of God’s existence. **

They are not technically the same thing, but in a practical way they are. Neither the atheist nor the agnostic worships God. No matter how you slice or dice it, for the atheist and the agnostic God does not exist. The only practical difference (and this is a time honored understanding of the two terms, no matter how diligently people try to define them anew to suit their own purposes) the atheist is certain there is no God, whereas the agnostic declares uncertainty, but is a fellow traveler with the atheist.

Clarence Darrow, for example, never called himself an atheist, but did call himself an agnostic. He knew the intellectual trap of saying you know there is no God, so, like Bertrand Russell who also called himself an agnostic, he avoided it. But all of Darrow’s writing on religion is hardly distinguishable from the writing of atheists. Imbued with the modern heresy of scientism, he demanded that in the absence of proof positive, one had no obligation to believe anything. So despite his legalistic jockying for position, he comes out on the atheist side, not the side of a neutral umpire who is objective and indifferent to the outcome of the dispute.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
They are not technically the same thing, but in a practical way they are. Neither the atheist nor the agnostic worships God. No matter how you slice or dice it, for the atheist and the agnostic God does not exist.
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Non-theistic may be a better term here since it envelopes the concepts described thus far. Also stating that they don’t worship “a god” may be more fitting. Even with a capital G the word “God” doesn’t necessarily refer to the same god concept (Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, so on…).

There are also positions that are totally external to the dichotomy that it I think you are trying to define. Panpsychism, panentheism, pandeism, polytheism, deists, so . There are also those that have belief for a concept of a God that is “the creator” but don’t see that god as worthy of worship.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
ASimon
They are not technically the same thing, but in a practical way they are. Neither the atheist nor the agnostic worships God. No matter how you slice or dice it, for the atheist and the agnostic God does not exist. The only practical difference (and this is a time honored understanding of the two terms, no matter how diligently people try to define them anew to suit their own purposes) the atheist is certain there is no God, whereas the agnostic declares uncertainty, but is a fellow traveler with the atheist.
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Alright then - so what about Christians who believe in God, live their entire lives according to His Word, but can’t bring themselves to say they know for sure that God exists. They can only have faith that the proposition is true. Are they agnostics too? And equally damned for it?
 
ASimon said:
Alright then - so what about Christians who believe in God, live their entire lives according to His Word, but can’t bring themselves to say they know for sure that God exists. They can only have faith that the proposition is true. Are they agnostics too? And equally damned for it?
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No one is damned for having sincere beliefs…
 
tonyrey said:
No one is damned for having sincere beliefs…
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Even if these sincere beliefs were acquired due to refusing to search for Truth, but the person has persisted in these beliefs and utterly convinced themselves, so that they are sincere?
 
Charlemagne_II said:
What is an agnostic? Is he someone who never believes anything is certain and all is in doubt? Then why doesn’t he doubt the worth of his own doubts? How can one be an agnostic with conviction?
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‘Agnostic’ doesn’t say anything about whether the person believes or disbelieves in God. It doesn’t say that they’re simply unsure, either. It is the opposite of ‘gnostic’— a position about whether truth can be known, not about what that truth is. An agnostic believes that it is impossible to determine whether or not there is a God(s).
So, an agnostic can be either an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. Most atheists are agnostic atheists, because they don’t think it’s possible to actually prove that there is no God. A gnostic atheist, the rarer position, believes that there is no God, and that this is a fact that can be absolutely known.
Most theists are gnostic theists, because they naturally believe that their chosen deities can be known to exist. A rarer position is the agnostic theist, who believes that it is impossible to know for certain that God exists, but chooses to believe anyway.
Someone who just means that they personally don’t know whether God exists would not be considered an ‘agnostic’. Just ‘unsure’.
 
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