How Can Someone be an Agnostic and an Atheist at the Same Time?

Stop conflating human scientific achievement with atheism.

Um, im not.

Boy that was easy.

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This seems confusing to me.

As far as I am concerned, “atheism” and “theism” are words that describe how people live their lives. I don’t see them as hypotheses. Theists are not spending their lives testing an hypothesis.

If those terms refer to ways of life, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that theism is true or that atheism is true.

That science is systematic in its exploring the world.

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But why do people live their lives that way? Because that think their worldview is true. How do you determine that? By looking at the evidence and determining which view best explains that evidence. It makes sense to refer to them as hypotheses in that instance. Every worldview has multiple sides. On Theism you have a spiritual side and an intellectual side. Atheism you have an intellectual side and then the way you live because you think atheism is true.

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I was thinking more along the lines of the order of the universe that makes systematic observation and experimentation possible. Why is it the way it is? What best explains an orderly universe?

The “weak” atheist may well make an argument against the existence of capital-G God. That’s a different question than arguing “no gods exist”. As a “weak” atheist who doesn’t assert that “no gods exist”, I’ll happily say that “I believe God doesn’t exist”.

I think it’s worth pointing out that words most often become defined through usage. People who don’t believe in gods refer to themselves as atheists in most cases, and this is probably the most common usage of the word. The needs of philosophy are a separate context, for which a more precise definition may be desirable, but that won’t automatically trump all ordinary usage of the word.

People are a lot more complicated than that.

As best I can tell, the order that we see in the universe is the order that results from the way that we have systematized our interactions with the universe.

Dawkins states that God could exist, but before you said that an atheist must believe that God does not exist. This seems contradictory to me.

A weird place is the best place to be. Our journey through life should always bring us challenges and new experiences.

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Part of my worldview is that I and other humans are fallible. That kind of throws a wrench into the whole Truth with a capital “T” idea. One doesn’t have to believe that gods don’t exist in order to conclude that theists have yet to make a compelling case for the existence of gods.

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Not at all. When I was an atheist I believed God did not exist because I felt like the balance of evidence made God’s existence improbable. But I still believed God could exist. The evidence just didn’t suggest it to me at the time.

This is what you said before:

“Worst definition in the history of the world. I hated it as an atheist and I hate it now. Really it seems to be a definition designed to avoid atheism’s burden of proof. Atheism is a positive claim that there are no gods.”

Dawkins makes no such positive claim that gods do not exist, and yet you still call him an atheist. How is that not contradictory?

I look at these types of questions through Bayesian colored glasses. My approach is very similar to Draper and Swinburne. All about priors and updating beliefs accordingly when new evidence comes to be

Have you ever read any of his work? He constantly makes arguments against God. That’s making a case for atheism and not merely denying Theism because of a lack of evidence for it

He contradicts himself

Fair enough. This seems to be the approach that most atheists take.

I think there is a difference between pointing to contradictions and problems within a specific theological system and arguing against the existence of any god or gods.

That can be true. There can be arguments for naturalism that really aren’t against Theism and arguments against Theism that aren’t really arguments for naturalism. And some can be both

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