Is agnosticism actually atheism without the attitude?

[barleycorn]

It's coherent, we understand what it means. It's almost redundant to profess your lack of belief in it, but if someone else is professing a belief then it makes sense to make it clear that you don't agree and that you're not delusional like he is.

But is not coherent by virtue of the fact it is logically inconsistent, something cannot be simultaneously pink and invisible. So while the sentence “There exists outside of space and time an invisible pink unicorn” is grammatically correct it is incoherent because it confers no meaning.

I don't quite follow why it becomes meaningless. I can see a meaning in the statement.

Whilst negative attributes may have a meaning in a conversational (ie subjective) context when it comes objective meaning they have non.

 

I don't think I agree that there is no point in expressing disbelief in something simply because it can't be defined with falsifiable attributes (ie tested). Maybe it should be redundant and there should be no need to state disbelief, but in a world where people don't communicate using formal logic and do express belief it's useful to make it clear that you don't agree.

I disagree, without some form of definition then what exactly is there to express belief or lack of belief in?

For example if I were to adopt an ignostic approach to the question "do you believe in God" I would have to reply "I don't know what you are talking about when you say God so you will have to define it for me". At which point either a sound definition can be produced thus allowing debate or it may become clear that the theist themself doesn't really know what they mean by God. In the latter case their concept of God is meaningless and as such not worthy of debate.

 

jb

 

ETA: Furthermore the ignostic approach has the added bonus of annoying the hell out of theists.

[RootsBooster]

An atheist is someone who believes that they have enough information to conclude that there is/are no god(s). Being an atheists means you are no longer an agnostic.

Where did you get this definition from?

.

If you don't believe that something exists you have concluded that it does not. They are simply two ways of stating exactly the same thing.

No it just means the belief isn't there. Example, it can be because you haven't been convinced yet. .

[RootsBooster]

I disagree, if this argument were valid we'd have to conclude that no one can know whether Santa exists, or fairies and that we're all therefore agnostics regarding those possibilities.

That's not the case though is it, it's impossible to prove a negative (in most cases) but that doesn't mean that we can never consider ourselves to have enough information to conclude something.

An atheist is someone who believes that they have enough information to conclude that there is/are no god(s). Being an atheists means you are no longer an agnostic.

I'm not sure what you think that sentence means.

If you don't believe that something exists you have concluded that it does not. They are simply two ways of stating exactly the same thing.

Forming an opinion requires that you think you have enough information to know whether it is true or not. I suppose you might want to qualify it with things like 'probably' or 99%, but if that's your belief then that's your conclusion and you have to act as if it were 100% stone cold fact. Otherwise you haven't really reached a conclusion and don't have a belief.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism

 

In this case I'd say that having discovered agnosticism after his atheism, the person is no longer atheist, they are no longer in a position to decide on belief or non-belief in a logical way. And who'd want to claim to be an atheist through faith or feeling or some other non logic based way of determining your belief...

 

Maybe such people exist, but like I said, they must be a little bit dim.

 

I'm using the common definition of the word, wasn't this definition established earlier in the thread.

An atheist is not simply someone who is not a theist. It is someone who does not believe a/any god(s) exist(s).

It is if the two believes are a binary set.

Not believing in Santa means believing that santa doesn't exist. There is no other option.

A theist is someone who believes in a god.

An atheist is someone who does not.

 

We are using the same definition.

 

You are just refusing to accept that non belief means you have concluded something, an illogical position to adopt which are doing presumably as it allows you to keep conflating the two terms. Believing that there is no god (atheism) precludes you from believing that you can't know (agnosticism).

 

You are confusing lack of belief with denial.

[flamingjimmy]

I'm using the common definition of the word, wasn't this definition established earlier in the thread.

An atheist is not simply someone who is not a theist. It is someone who does not believe a/any god(s) exist(s).

1stly, that's not the same as the definition you used earlier, which was 'someone who has concluded that god/s don't exist'. I'm happy with the definition you've used this time, an atheist is simply someone who is not a theist, in other words, it is someone who does not believe any god/s exist. They are two ways of saying the exact same thing.

 

A theist is someone who believes in a god.

An atheist is someone who does not.

Yeah that's it. Not someone who believes that there are no gods, as you go on to say later.

 

You are just refusing to accept that non belief means you have concluded something, an illogical position to adopt which are doing presumably as it allows you to keep conflating the two terms. Believing that there is no god (atheism) precludes you from believing that you can't know (agnosticism).

But I don't believe that there is no god, I just don't believe that there is one.

 

I have come to a positive conclusion about many gods, I'm perfectly willing to say I'm sure that the god that most Christians worship for example does not exist. I certainly believe that. However I'm not willing to rule out possibilities that I have never considered. Perhaps one day someone will enlighten me about a god that I will believe in, who knows. For now, I don't believe in any gods.

[Phanerothyme]

I'm not an atheist unless I identify myself as one. No one else can call me an atheist because they don't actually have a clue what I believe.

 

So until I say "I am an atheist"*, I'm not.

 

*for illustrative purposes only.

[Phanerothyme]

But I don't believe that there is no god, I just don't believe that there is one

 

You sound confused mate, you should consult a priest.

[MrSmith]

It is not so much that one needs a definition of God to be without belief but that without a definition of God the term itself is meaningless.

 

The problem with discussing theism/atheism/agnosticism is therefore the assumption that each of the three positions accepts “God exists” as a meaningful proposition. By calling oneself (or indeed anyone else such as a new born baby) an atheist you are giving tacit acceptance to the concept of God because it (atheism) assumes that there actually is something understandable to lack belief in.

 

For any non-analytic proposition of the form “X exists” to be meaningful it must be either verifiable or falsifiable. Conversely a proposition would be cognitively meaningless or nonsensical if it expressed a proposition which was unfalsifiable.

An example of a cognitively meaningless proposition would be…

“There exists outside of space and time an invisible pink unicorn”

… which, whilst expressing an idea the idea is incoherent and unverifiable/unfalsifiable. To say one lacked belief in such an entity would therefore be nonsensical and pointless.

 

From an attribute based perspective one must have positively defined attributes for the proposition to have any meaning.

In cataphatic theology God is defined through positive attributes or terminology. Such definitions however impose limits on God and thus may not be compatible with notions such as omnipotence. The implication of cataphatic theology is that God is knowable (through his works and the divinely inspired Bible for example) and as such open to verification or falsification (with the exception statements such as “God is Love”, which whilst meaningful in a conversational context they do not express any meaningful proposition).

In contrast apophatic theology (or negative theology) seeks to define God not by what it is but by what it is NOT. In essence an apophatic God eludes definition by definition. Examples of negative attributes include:

God was not created

God is not conceptually defined in terms of space, time or location (a cataphatic statement would be "God is everywhere" whereas an apophatic approach would expand upon this stating that God is also outside of creation, and furthermore we don’t know, nor can we know everywhere that God is).

As such negative attributes are unfalsifiable by definition and the concept of an apopthatic god itself meaningless.

 

Given the reliance of atheism upon theism to provide meaning to the terms one cannot say one is an atheist until the question “what is God” has been answered with falsifiable attributes. In lieu of a coherent definition of God any discussions for or against its existence are therefore meaningless.

Atheistic claims therefore need to be considered in respect to a particular concept of what one claims to consider "God" to represent, or in the words of Theodore Dange:

 

“Since the word "God" has many different meanings, it is possible for the sentence "God exists" to express many different propositions. What we need to do is to focus on each proposition separately. … For each different sense of the term "God," there will be theists, atheists, and agnostics relative to that concept of God”.

 

 

I would also to touch briefly on whether it is right to call babies atheists. Arguments as to the meaningfulness of the concept aside I think that to call a baby an atheist is about as sensical as saying babies lack belief in the pre-election Tory manifesto. It would be more accurate I think to state that ‘babies lack belief’, or babies are abelief.

 

 

jb

 

I can’t have a belief in that which as no definition, if it as no definition then I can't believe it exists, therefore I am an atheist; we do have a biblical definition of God which is impossible therefor I am still an atheist. To be a theist you must believe in God and one must know what God is to believe it exists, without knowing what it is you can’t believe it exists. I have yet to meet a theist that can define God therefore they are all atheist.

[flamingjimmy]

You sound confused mate

Perhaps you don't understand what I said, but I'm not confused at all.

[Phanerothyme]

It's just you could have phrased your first double negative a little more eloquently, to avoid the obvious interpretation of the reverse corollary that leaps out at the reader.

 

But I though a little levity might be preferable to pointing this out.

[flamingjimmy]

I'm not an atheist unless I identify myself as one.

Well that's just not true at all. Atheism is not about what you say, it's just a lack of belief. Regardless of the semantics about what atheism means, it certainly doesn't matter what you say. You could go round screaming "Jesus is coming!" all day long and still be an atheist as long as you didn't believe it.