this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Wikipedia defines Agnosticism as:
It is not related to actual knowledge. No matter the claims one can make, no one can be 100% sure whether a god exists or not. It’s called “faith” because people choose to believe despite the lack of irrefutable evidence.
Belief, on the other hand, is definitely a spectrum and you can be convinced or skeptical of affirmations from both sides. There’s also apatheists that simply don’t care whether it exists or not, or Ignostics that question the question itself. There’s plenty of people “on the fence”. The definition of Nontheism for example encompasses all those three, but not Atheism.
Agnostic Atheism is a position that’s very close to Atheism, but not all Agnostics are Agnostic Atheists.
I relate a lot to this. If asked "does God exist?", my personal belief is always that we don't know and that we will never know, and it doesn't matter anyways so why bother? I do certainly see some value in religion, in that it does bring a lot of people comfort when faced with the concept of mortality, and that religious organisations do a lot of charity (this is true where I come from, at least). However, I do think that said value has been greatly diminished, if not perhaps even eliminated entirely, in the face of the attrocities people have committed in the name of religion, i.e. attempts at restricting women's and LGBTQ+ rights, etc.
Belief is not a choice, you're either convinced or you're not.
Wikipedia can also be wrong on various topics so let's not get nitpicky. But, if you want to look up Gnosticism on Wikipedia, you'll see that being a gnostic means having knowledge.
So people can be either theists or atheists and at the same time gnostic or agnostic.
A gnostic theist would mean they believe and also know a god exists.
An angostic atheist doesn't believe and also doesn't know a god doesn't exists. That's most of us atheists.
So people can't be on the fence and say I'm agnostic, that doesn't tell anything about what they believe.
And when it comes to belief, you are either convinced or you're not. There's no middle ground.
Hope I cleared it up.
I think we're just entering semantics at this point. "Agnostic" has been used plenty of times as a position in itself separate from "Atheist": even Thomas H. Huxley, who created the term, saw it as a specifically distinct thing from atheism, and so did Darwin and Ross at the time.
You can indeed have middle ground on beliefs, and the term has been invented for that exact reason: Huxley didn't feel like he fit in any of the definitions that existed at the time.
Yeah, it is semantics.
I think most people don't realise that saying "I'm not sure a god exists" makes them atheists though and I was trying to make that point.
Good discussion nevertheless.