Militant Fundamentalist Agnostics

I bookmarked an old blog post from way back in 2013 (so long ago, right?) called Militant Fundamentalist Agnostics and the meaning of atheism. It's a reminder to not be "that person" regarding my beliefs. I don't think I've ever been that person even though I'm an advocate for agnosticism. I know atheists are a full spectrum from a weak rejection of theism as unproven to a strong assertion for proof that there are no gods. I usually call the strong atheist an anti-theist to make that distinction.

That blog post starts with identifying the Militant Fundamentalist Agnostic (bonus points for the accompanying comic from my favorite XKCD):

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.

Atheism and the Scientific Method

Scientific America published an interview with Marcelo Gleiser titled Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method, Prize-Winning Physicist Says. I don't agree with this particular agnostic's conclusion. He makes the false assertion that atheism is as a belief in non-belief. Atheism might mean that in the strongest sense, but the broadest definition of atheism says it's simply a lack of belief. The atheist is unconvinced. Here's Gleiser's false assertion:

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.

Agnostic Spectrum of Probabilities - The God Delusion

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has a section called "The Poverty of Agnosticism" which obviously criticizes agnosticism. He's a renowned author for disbelief and the book is great except for that section. Most of the section is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of agnosticism with its focus on God.

Dawkins asks "How about the question of God? Should we be agnostic about him too?" The words "God" and "him" tells me he's talking about the very specific Abrahamic God. That God is unbelievable and unproven when you apply the scientific method advocated by agnosticism. If an agnostic believes in that God then they should rightfully identify as whichever flavor of theism matches their belief and primary concern for the subject. The question of that specific God is the wrong question concerning agnosticism.

Agnostic and Atheist at the Same Time

I came across a great article by Godless Mom called How Can Someone be an Agnostic and an Atheist at the Same Time? I agree with everything she said so this will be a short post.

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.

Courtney wrote:

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.

I didn't understand this at first but I've grown to better understand it and accept it. It's a strong atheist or anti-theist who would claim there are no gods. The more common weak atheist simply rejects the gods as unproven. That's why the flipside of this is that atheists are also very often agnostics whether they like it or not. That's fine and we all gravitate towards the labels that make the most sense for how we want to portray our viewpoints about theism.

An Atheist with a Tall Hat

Humanist magazine posted an article called An Atheist with a Tall Hat On: The Forgotten History of Agnosticism. The opening argument is that atheism and agnosticism are the same.

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.

This is where the writer strays when he says agnosticism is only a novel position if atheism is a positive defense of God's nonexistence. Claiming agnosticism says no such thing about atheism. Atheism is and can continue to be a rejection of God's nonexistence as simply not proven. The burden of proof is on the believer making those claims so atheism doesn't serve as a positive defense with or without the existence of agnosticism.