“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” ― Marcus Aurelius
Religious literalists and creationists can be annoying, and liberal believers whose theology is entirely apophatic can also be annoying; however anyone who espouses atheism on the internet will soon encounter an even more annoying group: the Militant Fundamentalist Agnostics.
The what? Surely that’s a contradiction in terms?! Sadly not, the Militant Fundamentalist Agnostic, while pretending to complete ignorance of gods, will confidently assert the central dogma of the agnostic faith, and cling to it tenaciously. Their one dogma is the claim that atheists make dogmatic assertions about the non-existence of gods. And hence, by declaring themselves to be free of such unwarranted, beyond-the-evidence assertions, they feel themselves superior, not only to the believers, who have no proof of their deities, but also to the atheists, who have no proof to back up their supposed claims of certain non-existence.
According to newly released General Social Survey data analyzed by Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University, Americans claiming “no religion” — sometimes referred to as “nones” because of how they answer the question “what is your religious tradition?” — now represent about 23.1 percent of the population, up from 21.6 percent in 2016. People claiming evangelicalism, by contrast, now represent 22.5 percent of Americans, a slight dip from 23.9 percent in 2016.
I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation. It’s not just me; it’s also my colleague the astrophysicist Adam Frank, and a bunch of others, talking more and more about the relation between science and spirituality.An atheist doesn't declare: "I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe." An atheist declares they don't believe because the evidence for belief is insufficient to sway them to belief. The facts don't support the hypothesis for gods. Gleiser's characterization of atheists is as preposterous as some of the atheist reasons to dismiss agnostics.
Dilbert is one of my favorite comics. The recent Sunday comic is a good one so click that link.
The article covers the false choice that is sometimes presented between being an unbelieving atheist and an unknowing agnostic. Agnosticism isn't fence sitting or a middle ground between atheism and theism. Agnosticism isn't a secular refusal to weigh in on the existence or nonexistence of gods. Agnosticism says knowledge is the important consideration and the correct conclusion about knowledge is that we don't know. We could know in the future, we may never find the knowledge, or the first cause of the Universe could be completely beyond our capabilities as an unknowable concept.Of course, not everyone who identifies as an agnostic will claim to be a theist or atheist, but all agnostics are one of these two. They either have an active belief in a god or they do not and if they do not, whether these people like it or not, they are atheist. This is the definition of the word: no belief in god. It makes no difference if you claim knowledge of zero gods or not. Atheism is NOT the claim there are no gods.
One sometimes gets the impression that religious and nonreligous people alike consider agnosticism a more rational and sophisticated creed than atheism. On the contrary, agnosticism differs from atheism in name only. The distinction between the two is really about class and politics, not substance.The article continues with some accurate background on agnosticism before it makes a false comparison to atheism.
To maintain his hard-fought respectability, Huxley unveiled the term in 1869 at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society, an eclectic group of leading believers and nonbelievers in Victorian Britain. He argued that Christians and atheists both shared a belief in the certainty of their views and that this certainty was unjustified. For Huxley, rather than claiming special knowledge, to be agnostic was to profess one’s lack of knowledge.
This seems a novel position only if one understands “atheism” to mean a positive defense of God’s nonexistence. But this wasn’t the meaning that many nineteenth-century atheists accepted.
Hello Earth and the rest of the universe! I used to host a website and blog called Agnostic Universe for many years. I let it go because it took up more time and money than it was worth since I managed and paid for the website.
