Agnosticism vs. Atheism

I'm an agnostic... and i feel offended when people call agnostics "watered down atheists". Maybe some of my reasons are wrong, or my basic definitions are incorrect (agnostics don't make a claim as to the existence of god, while atheists say there is no god) but i figure being atheist takes just as much faith as someone who believes in god (a theist).i'm thinking at some point all atheists look at theists and say "well, there is no objective evidence for a god"... but then go on to say "therefore there is no god".like if i held out my hand and said "is there a coin in my hand"... a theist would say "yes, there is a coin in your hand" and an atheist would say "there is no evidence to support there being a coin in your hand, so there is no coin in your hand".is my reasoning flawed, or are all you atheists just as religious and dogmatic as those theists?

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Poor analogy. How would the theist know there was a coin in your hand if neither he nor the atheist (sorry, Smoky, 'athiest') could see it? On second thought, don't answer that.

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There either is or isn't a coin in your hand. But we can all agree on the definition of a coin. The problem is we can only pretend there's consensus on what the word 'God' means. Is it the big magic guy in the sky or is it a creative life force? Is it intelligible to humans or is it by definition beyond our comprehension?

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crap... can i please answer the first part? i'm still going to hold it's a valid analogy. how do theists know there is a god? aside from subjective "evidence", well he doesn't know. however (i'm positive i don't actually have to say this next part to relay new information) the theists absence of proof is not proof of it's absence.as far as the definition of god... i see the atheist's claim "there is no god" as pretty absolute. like, there are no gods. if this is just an abbreviation of "a god that holds the properties of a christian definition does not exist" than fair enough... but is the statement of an absence of god only limited in that respect?i think the most basic definition of a god is something like "a higher being". There is no evidence that suggest a higher being does not exist (bla for double negatives).That's fine if you want to just not give any serious attention to the purple, cinnamon smelling, face scratching baboons (i first read that as balloons... so you can imagine my disappointment when they turned out to be just baboons). But to actively assert they do not exist anywhere... that takes faith. it is one thing to say "the existence of PCSB doesn't matter to the real world" and something completely different to say "PCSBs don't exist".

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Atheists aren't people who take a ridiculously dogmatic stance that there is, hasn't been, and never will be any gods. They're just people who are as sure that there's no god as they're sure that winged monkeys won't pop out of their ass in the next five minutes. If you call that "agnosticism" than there's no difference and agnosticism is meaningless.

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so what do you see as a difference between agnostic and atheist? or is there even one? i can accept this less severe definition of atheism, but why even have the word agnostic then? maybe we should combine the two and make a super word! AGNOTHISM!... er... what is agnostic broken down into it's prefix/suffix/root words anyway?p.s. how do you get those quote boxes that are all blue and cool looking?[This message has been edited by TheoMorphic, 09-19-2003][This message has been edited by TheoMorphic, 09-19-2003]

fine, we must discard unlikely possibilities, but what do you do about claims that you don't know the probabilities of? The evidence we have leans towards the absence of a christian god, however who's to say there is no higher being. Science just take a "no comment" stance on the likelihood of a higher being.you say you can't function if you don't discard "unrealistic possibilities". how unrealistic is god? i see where you're coming from when you say we can't know anything (except that "i think") and so at some level nothing is known for sure, so being agnostic is just redundant. What assumptions does science make? i think science makes 2: 1) what we observe is an indication of actual reality. and 2) fundamental natural laws have remained unchaned through out time. There's no "agnostic" camp for various theories of science because THAT would be a redundancy (the assumptions science makes already addresses percieved reality). however, to make the assertion from a scientific point that being agnostic is a redundancy doesn't hold because any higher beings fall outside the realm of science, and are not addressed in it's initial assumptions.edit: added quote from crashfrog for clarity[This message has been edited by TheoMorphic, 09-20-2003]

ok, this just came to me, but it applies to your gouda example too. We have examined gouda. Gouda has a tendency to not appear in large blocks above people's heads. And baboons have a tendency to not be purple (was that one of the requirements before?), and they have a tendency to not scratch faces unknowingly, and not smell of cinnamon buns.So we can make assertions regarding these things. But there has been no contact with any form of higher being. no objective evidence supports his existence. but we don't have some similar structure that we can study and draw connections from. We have baboons in the wild, and in zoos... so it's not unreasonable to assess there are no baboons that are purple and smell of cinnamon buns. but we don't have some version of god that we can examine and decide "well, this 'god' is incredibly complex, so any unobserved gods that are supposedly even MORE complex probably don't exist". Why should the default position be an absence of god when we can't make any even semi ball park figures about his probability.lets say we have a black box. we know inside the black box there could be ANYTHING. maybe a pineapple, or a mouse, or just air, or a vacuum. we've never actually looked inside the box and measured the probabilities of different things showing up. so now we have this sealed cave with a black box inside. How can we make any guesses about what the black box contains when we've never examined it in real life?"but what about claims you don't know the probability of?"
aren't we supposed to treat all unknown probabilities as equal?

non-observed events only leave evidence when they have interacted with our reality. Maybe god is just some couch potato laughing his ass off as the zany inhabitants of the TV show "earth" destroy their world in a nuclear holocaust.

i would suggest you change this to "within the limits of what is knowable, there is no evidence of a God."you may see it as an added redundancy (the unspoken agnosticism about everything) but that unspoken admittance of not being able to truly know something only applies when assertions are made in science. matters outside the realm of scientific understanding are not inherently covered by the uncertainty blanket. rather, science just doesn't touch subjects like that. that's the point exactly. there IS no such thing as evidence of absence (on an absolute level, i.e. you can't prove a negative), so why make the claim that the lack of evidence of god is in any way, shape or form, evidence for his full absence. even stating this tentatively is incorrect because it regards a matter that (most of the time by the definition of god) can't be known.if you want to claim there is not god (for whatever reason) fine, as long as you realize it's based on the same lack of evidence that theists make their claim on.

After 6 or so pages it seems the discussion has gone back to a point made in post 3... It can be said that certain gods don't exist, however it can't be said that all gods don't exist.So non-theists seem to fall into two groups: "don't know", and "don't care".mark (and i) would fall under the first group... we don't want to make an assertion either way for the gods that haven't been though of...while crashfrog goes in the second group... he just doesn't care about gods that have no impact on our life. It seems like he agrees that we can't know, but knowledge either way just simply doesn't matter.