Agnosticism vs. Atheism

John, I agree with you. Thanks for the succinct re-statement of the problem. However, doesn't this formulation pose a level-of-confidence issue (which, now that I think about it may be the root of the difference in the arguments here)?Allow me to illustrate. You point out that what Mr.J and others have posited is "If (God exists) then (evidence of God)" must presuppose that G(g)od(s) must leave evidence, and how this may not be a valid assumption. I agree. OTOH, if we restate the problem as1. If (God A exists) then (evidence of God A)
2. If (God B exists) then (evidence of God B)
...
n. If (God n exists) then (evidence of God n)
n+1. Not (evidence of God {A, B,...n})At what point is it rational and reasonable to declare Not (God)? I agree that it's not possible to declare the Absolute Truth (tm) of the statement "not God", especially since you can conceive of a falsification of the underlying assumption. Of course, by strict logic isn't it impossible to make any declaration of Absolute Truth (tm) on any subject? "1+1=3 for sufficiently large values of 1" if I claim unity may be defined differently somewhere... (and no, Rrhain, I don't want to get into an argument - I'm engaging in a reductio ad absurdum to emphasize the point. A joke, yes?)Anyway, it is my position that any truth (small "t") claim can be assigned to a position on a continuum of confidence based on evidence. "not (evidence)" may not permit you to declare absolutely that "not (claim)", but "not (evidence)" iterated over a sufficiently large data set may allow you to provisionally declare "not (claim)" with a high degree of confidence. Yes? No? I'm full of it?[This message has been edited by Quetzal, 09-26-2003]

Heh. Yeah, it is fun. If I understand what you're saying here, basically as long as we're only dealing with a specific deity or someone's particular conception of a deity, and that deity is alleged to be interventionist, then it is valid to state that particular deity doesn't exist (the positive "strong atheist" stance) if there is no evidence that would be expected of said intervention. The folks arguing against the strong atheist stance are therefore arguing against what they conceive as a fallacy of composition - i.e., taking the non-existence of a specific god (or multiple examples of non-existence) and generalizing to the whole class of "gods". That makes sense. The domino analogy is a good one. I guess I'm coming from the standpoint that if a large but finite number of god-conceptions have been falsified, there's not a whole lot of point to continuing the endless chain of falsification. As you state... ...for all intents and purposes at some point you might as well behave as though there weren't any deities. I think the strong atheist simply makes the small, albeit epistemologically strictly erroeous, next step, and positively state that since the conceptions of A through n have been falsified, the god-hypothesis has been falsified. I'm not sure I can agree with this bit, in the sense that it almost smacks of begging the question. There are beaucoup claims for which we can have only very speculative inference (like the Higg's boson or abiogenesis or extraterrestrial sentience) for which there appears at this point to be little or no direct evidence, but yet can be provisionally accepted as a reasonable inference (i.e., placed somewhere on our confidence scale). There are also a large number of claims for which there is not evidence that we basically reject for that reason. Do you believe in ESP, remote viewing, etc? No? If not, do you simply state "there is not evidence" and claim agnosticism? How about Noah's Ark? Absence of evidence for a great flood aside, do you state that Noah's Ark doesn't exist? Even though we are looking at simple lack of positive evidence in favor, there are in fact many reasons why arkian remnants - even if the ship had once existed in some form - might have disappeared over the intervening millenia. Are you an arkian agnostic, or do you state "It didn't exist"?I'm not trying to put you on the spot with the above - you can consider them rhetorical questions. I hope they illustrate my point that at some level we all make strong, non-existence claims for many things. And just as you or I would probably state "not (ark)" due to lack of evidence, the atheist states "not (god)" on the same basis. The difference between atheist and agnostic is that atheists include "gods" in the range of non-existent phenomena for which they are willing to make a positive claim - even if it means lumping in the non-interfering, non-corporeal, non-involved, yet unfalsifiable generic "god" the agostics are so wrapped up about.