That’s not actually quite true. Some people identify as atheist because they don’t believe in God, but that’s not to say that they believe God definitely doesn’t exist. There’s a clear difference between the two things. Of course, lots of people would consider such people to be agnostics.
I call things the way they are, without re-defining terms or coining new ones. As for truth, it doesn’t come in gradations: a proposition is either true or false.
*Atheism *is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities, or the belief that there are no deities. Since we cannot prove that God does not exist, this translates to an act not of reason, but of
will.
What is this act of the will?
The act of believing on a given proposition.
What is that proposition?
“There is no God.”
This position is characterized by a peculiar sense of pride in the human being, in the human mind, although interestingly it is necessarily accompanied by materialistic and relativistic beliefs that do not confer much honor upon the human being, but rather see him as some sort of superior mammal, who randomly came into being and whose existence has no purpose besides doing what one wants (possibly in such a way that maximum well-being for himself is achieved without hindering the society and ecosystem that provides that well-being, which, as Hobbes shows, leads inexorably to the state of nature).
An
agnostic, instead, acts out of
reason: he is open to the possibility that there may be a God, but he perceives that he does not know whether this proposition, namely “there is a God”, holds true or false, and he, by an act of reason, calls himself an agnostic, from the Greek “to not know”. It is also a position that requires a certain degree of humbleness.
To an agnostic one can show the evidence available to reason alone that hint with almost certainty to the existence of an Intelligent Creator - some incredibly complex in their philosophy, others even too simplistic. With an agnostic one can discuss the *reasonableness *of some of the major stumbling blocks of Christianity, such as miracles, the Resurrection, the visible authoritative Church, the states of heaven and hell (mind you, I did not say one can convince him of their truthfulness, only that one can discuss with them whether these things are, through reason alone, sound and logical).
These things are quickly dismissed by those who call themselves atheist, not by an act of reason which requires engaging intellectual disquisition until the proposition or argument is shown to be unsound or illogic, but by a mere act of will, simply refusing to consider the proposition or arguments.
