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Gods, I love your descriptions Dan.
Thanks!
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I think you can say, via definitions of knowledge, that you "know" THOSE baboons aren't there. But that's because the claim involves evidence which is not only absent, but there is some evidence against.
If a person made a more ephemeral claim that there are such baboons somewhere, you wouldn't be able to say you know there are no such baboons anywhere.
I suppose so, yes. But then my response would go from, "no there aren't" to "so?"
Baboons. Somewhere. Got it. So what's for lunch?
Because at this point, what is the person even saying? There's something somewhere that I can't see? Well, yes. That's entirely accurate. It smells like cinammon buns? Okay. Why not? Have fun with that.
I'm happy to indulge any story someone tells me. I especially like the one about four people who go up in a rocket ship and get hit by cosmic rays. But when the person starts saying "now here is how you must live your life in order to please the purple baboons," that's when the indulgence stops. No, I'm sorry, I'm going to continue to sleep with my girlfriend, even if the purple baboons don't like it. Because there's really no reason to believe the baboons are there, whether there is evidence against them or not.
And if we step into specific definitions of God or gods, things become stickier. If I've got one guy on my left telling me that God's son died for my sins, another guy on my left saying no, he was just a prophet and so is Mohammed, and a third guy in front of me saying screw those two guys, it's all about Vishnu, then I have three contradictary accounts (amongst others) all proclaiming God. Given that they all contradict one another, and all have the same amount of evidence supporting them (i.e., none) it's impossible to give any of them the benefit of the doubt.
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But to say that one knows God does not exist, when there are no evidentiary requirements in conflict with the evidence at hand, is to make a statement of faith along the same lines as those who say they know he does exist despite the same lack of evidence.
I wouldn't say that's true, mainly because of simple logical rules. The onus to provide evidence one way or the other is on the person trying to say that things are different from what's in front of us. If the evidence isn't there, you go to the default reality. (i.e., what's in front of you.)
This why, to me, saying "God exists" requires a leap of faith outside of evidence. Saying "God doesn't exist" requires looking around for God, not seeing him, and saying, "Yup. No God." The person asserting God can say "well, he's somewhere," but in the absence of evidence the default reality stays the same.
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I think I'm very similar in temperament to you Dan, and I consider myself an agnostic that at this point has no reason to believe or even entertain hypotheses of Gods, and feel some certainty that no evidence will ever be presented.
I think you're right, and it's probably just a matter of personal definition. You say tomagnostic, I say tomathiest.
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