Subject:
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Re: Is religion dead in the water?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 16 Oct 2004 03:50:24 GMT
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Viewed:
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1429 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Laswell wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Orion Pobursky wrote:
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Actually you’re confusing terms here.
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I could say the same:
A-gnostic: without knowledge of god(s)
A-theist: without belief in god(s)
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Agnostics believe that the existance of God is “inherently unknowable”
whereas (most) atheists believe that God’s existance is “unproven”.
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Those are essentially different ways of saying the same thing. Anything that
can serve as proof for the one group should serve equally well as knowledge
for the other, and vice versa.
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There is a relativly small faction of atheists (known as hard atheists) that
state God “does not exist” but this opinion is shunned by most atheists
since, as you stated above, this point of view is just as dogmatic as the
belief in God’s existance.
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And therefore calling themselves atheists is about as accurate as those who
are searching for the god that works for them are when they call themselves
agnostic.
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Some quotes from Wikipedia that may be illuminating (or confusing depending on
if you can keep track of it all):
Some atheists distinguish between two variants:
Weak atheism, or negative atheism, is the standpoint that there is no reason
to believe that any particular god exists. A weak atheist sees no reality in any
god he’s been told about, and doesn’t expect to ever find a god he can believe
is real. This is not equivalent to agnosticism, although there is often an
overlap between the two; an agnostic believes he does not or can not have enough
information to say for certain whether any gods exist.
Strong atheism, or positive atheism, goes further to make the assertion that
there are no such things as gods. This may, but need not, include the opinion
that the existence of a god is logically impossible; strong atheists base this
on logical a priori arguments intending to demonstrate that omnipotent,
omniscient, and/or transcendent conceptions of gods are self-contradictory or
internally inconsistent.
(It also lists numerous variations on agnosticism - the main entry is too
lengthy to quote here).
strong agnosticism (aka hard agnosticism, closed agnosticism, strict
agnosticism)—the view that the question of the existence of deities is
unknowable by nature or that human beings are ill-equipped to judge the
evidence.
weak agnosticism (aka soft agnosticism, open agnosticism, empirical
agnosticism)—the view that the question of the existence of deities is knowable
but the individual has not seen enough evidence or there is evenly-weighted
evidence on both sides of the question of the existence of deities.
ignosticism (aka apathetic agnosticism, apatheism)—the view that the question
of the existence of deities is meaningless because it has no verifiable
consequences.
model agnosticism—the view that philosophical and metaphysical questions are
not ultimately verifiable, but that a model of malleable assumption should be
built upon rational thought. Note that this branch of agnosticism differs from
others in that it does not focus upon the question of a deity’s existence.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Is religion dead in the water?
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| (...) Those definitions stray from Huxley's (URL) original definition> (no offense intended to atheists or agnostics by the domain, but it was the most complete Huxley quote I could find), as he considered himself to be neither a theist nor an (...) (20 years ago, 16-Oct-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Is religion dead in the water?
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| (...) I could say the same: A-gnostic: without knowledge of god(s) A-theist: without belief in god(s) (...) Those are essentially different ways of saying the same thing. Anything that can serve as proof for the one group should serve equally well (...) (20 years ago, 16-Oct-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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