The Atheist Blogger

To think that blog carnivals are meant to bring people of similar beliefs together. Such philosophies seem to have been completely lost when I hosted the Carnival of the Godless two days ago. SocraticGadfly had an article on the Pew Survey which claimed that 1 in 5 atheists believed in God. As he pointed out, 50% of “agnostics” made the same claim.

The quote which started the debacle was this:

Hey, idiots. If you believe something, you can’t agnostic about it!

As many people probably know, this isn’t true at all. Agnosticism is defined as “an intellectual doctrine or attitude affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge”. Simply put, the position on whether certain things can be claimed as absolute truth or knowledge.

Ergo, if you believe in God, you can be agnostic about it if you don’t claim absolute knowledge of God. These types of people are referred to as agnostic theists or agnostic deists. I’ve covered them before in my article about agnosticism.

I myself am an agnostic atheist, not believing in any gods, but not claiming that my belief (or disbelief) is absolute truth. You only have to change one word in SocraticGadflys sentence to make it correct:

Hey, idiots. If you know something, you can’t agnostic about it!

However, this isn’t what he said, and in the interests of using the correct defintions, db0 (Divide by Zero) from The Antichristian Phenomenon (which coincidently had an article in the same carnival) corrected SocraticGadfly in the comments of his article.

His response was to claim that agnostic theism was a subset of theism, not agnosticism. In fact there is no real subset at all. Theism and Agnosticism are completely different things. One is about belief, the other about knowledge. Agnosticism can be applied to everything, so technically if there were a subset, everything would be a subset of agnosticism.

SocraticGadfly didn’t stop there though. Pressed by db0 to reconsider his own definitions in light of actual dictionary definitions, he lost all sense of reason:

You’re a theist, and on the edge, if not past it, of being a theist troll.

…

you’re lying, to me and to yourself, when you claim you don’t want to argue about this. You do.

…

If you don’t understand that, understand this: I just banned your IP, as you’ve gone past the edge of being a theist troll.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that behaviour seems similar to that of young earth creationists or IDiots. Call your opponent a troll, say they are lying, and then ban them. It’s utterly despicable behaviour from someone who wasn’t trying to argue with him, but correct him on a dictionary definition.

Later, when Gadfly claimed that db0 had said he was a theist, I saw he had simply misread what db0 had actually said which was

Indeed, most of the time when I said that I was agnostic people assumed that I was a theistic agnostic. I eventually had to explain my irreligion as “Atheist” to avoid misconceptions. Then if people need a more detailed explanation, I explain that I am an Atheistic Agnostic.

Gadfly has issued an apology for his mistake, but not for his attitude, and he is still under the impression that he is correct, even when 2 other people have come forward to challenge his definitions. Gadfly has shown no rational thought whatsoever. He’s now freely admitting to using definitions from a book published 28 years ago which says this about agnosticism:

It is usually applied, however, principally, to suspension of belief with respect to God.

Just shows how times have changed. I’d originally posted this article a few hours ago, but then decided to take it down to give SocraticGadfly a chance to say something / apologise. In my opinion, he has given a shallow apology for something that should have never come up in the first place, and he has kept to his own out of date dictionary without looking at dictionary compilations (dictionary.com does a good job of this). He is still insulting many people who agnostic atheists.

Possibly Related Posts:

• A Quick Poll
• It’s Official! Pineapple Is Theists Worst Nightmare
• Labels Are Annoying…
• Kieran Bennett: Why Atheist And NOT Agnostic?
• What Is Agnosticism?