The Atheist Blogger

Law professor Douglas Whaley has written a book which he describes as an “atheist thriller”. He was kind enough to send me the following synopsis and information.

Franklin Whitestone, a lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, is trapped in the rubble of the Ohio State football stadium when a Muslim terrorist sets off a bomb. During the rescue Franklin becomes a hero by holding onto a girder while allowing over 50 people to escape. This is  captured on television, and is the one bright spot in the what becomes known as  “9/11 Two.”  Franklin is flown to New York City for an appearance on the Jimmy Ball Show (the equivalent to the Larry King program). Accompanying him to NYC is his significant other, Kelly Keyfold, and since the two of them are the guests of the tv show, they dine at a fancy restaurant where Kelly insists on a bottle of wine, telling Franklin it would be good for his nerves to have one glass himself. He does this, but at some point during the meal a  waiter refills his goblet, and so he drinks two glasses of wine. At the studio, Franklin is shown into the green room, where the first guest on the Jimmy Ball Show, a rummy comedian, offers him a drink from a flask. Franklin at first refuses, but, unused to national tv and shaken to his very core, he finally takes another sip. Of course, this proves unwise.

When Franklin goes on the air, the video clip of his heroics is shown and applauded, and then he and the host answer call-in questions from the live audience. One of the callers is a woman from Salt Lake City, and she asks him whether he was praying to God to give him strength during his heroics, and—his judgment clouded by alcohol—Franklin blithely says no. “God,” he tells her, “was not the solution, but the problem—belief in him is what caused the bombs to go off.” This sparks outraged calls from other viewers, and Franklin
makes some other ill-considered statements along this same unfortunate line. When asked by the host if he is an atheist, Franklin replies:

“Let me put it like this, Jimmy. When I was a child I had an imaginary friend who was with me everywhere I went, helping me out, very real to me. I loved him with all my heart. But as I got older I didn’t need that crutch anymore, and one day he just wasn’t there, nor did I miss him. As an adult I’d be embarrassed if I still needed an imaginary friend to help me run my life.”

Of course, saying this is a mistake of major magnitude, as is made clear to Franklin when his life blows up on many fronts, starting minutes after he’s off the air.

The book has much to say about theism versus atheism, and the role of each in today’s society (I am a lifelong professional teacher and this is a subject about which I am passionate). But the novel is much more than that. There is quite a bit of humor in it, as well as a number of action sequences (and some violent encounters). I would hope that anyone picking up the book would find it an entertaining read.

The book can be ordered from Amazon.com ($15.00).

Finally, let me add that I know this is a delicate and controversial subject, and I have tried to handle it in a way that is fair to all viewpoints. The reader can judge for him/herself whether I have succeeded or whether to join the crowd gathering tar and feathers. I would love to hear any and all comments readers have about the  book, and my email address for making them is in the “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel.

Douglas Whaley

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The book is currently only out in America, so we can’t add it to the book club list, but if anyone reads it please write a review. Many thanks to Douglas for passing this information on, and best of luck with the book!

A recent few posts of mine have sparked a mini-debate between Skepdude and I, which has moved from the comments section of this site, to a post I made, and finally across to his response. Whilst reading our two opposing arguments I think it is clear to the casual observer that we are caught in a semantic argument. I doubt we disagree on the actual ideas both are presenting, merely the definitions lying at the heart of them. Indeed, Skepdude has acknowledged the possibility of God on numerous occasions, making him (by the definitions I go with) an agnostic atheist. Other points I fear we have both simply misunderstood one another on, something that is easily done in such online discussions. I will simply dissect his post and reply accordingly, trying to clear up as many things as I can, starting off with the minor problem of gender.

I am not sure if it should be she, it is not clear from the blog, so I’ll refer to the author as a he from this point on. My apologies if this turns out to be incorrect!

I am indeed a he. My name is at the bottom of every article and next to my comments: “Adrian Hayter”, but I understand the confusion. Adrienne is the female version of my name, and my long hair in the comment avatars doesn’t help matters.

As you can clearly see from his first paragraph he defined an atheist as someone who says :”I do not believe in God”. Yes he did follow that by saying that this is a generalization, and that “some” atheist say that they “know” or are “certain” there is no god.  But that’s where he stopped. I did not accuse him of defining atheism as a belief. What I did do is to challenge his definition of an atheist and the choice of words he used in that definition. He uses a very extreme definition of atheism.

Well I would hardly call the definition “do not believe in God” a “very extreme” definition of atheism. In fact, it seems to be the one that most dictionaries I have looked in go with:

1. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings. (Dictionary.com)
2. Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods. (American Heritage)
3. The disbelief or denial of the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being. (Websters)

Indeed, some atheists do say they “know” or are “certain” there is no god. When I wrote the standard definition (disbelief), I did not want to ignore those who take this definition further by saying they either know or are certain.

Richard Dawkins in his “God Delusion” talks about 7 levels (if my memory serves me right)  of belief/disbelief and level 6 and 7 are occupied by atheists, with level 7 being the kind who “believes” or “knows” that there is no God. Not even RD who is an ardent atheist sees himself as belonging to category #7, because that category is jsut as dogmatic as the ardent, dogmatic Sky Daddy worshipers. The way the “Atheist Blogger” defined atheism in his entry suggest that atheist are of the category 7 kind. That is what I am challenging. I am not that sort of atheist. Richard Dawkins is not. Anyone with a little bit of integrity cannot accept to be labeled as such.

My point is simple. Accepting that the probability of God existing is really really, infinitesimaly small is by leaps and bounds not the same as saying that you know, or are certain, or believe he does not exist.

I do not see how my definition of atheists as people who say they do not believe in Gods means that I meant they believe there are no gods, or even that they know there are no Gods. Not believing in something doesn’t mean you believe in the opposite. I made that mistake in the past and have since rectified it in discussions. I am not a 7 either. I do not believe in Gods, and I would never say “I believe there are no gods” or “I know there are no gods”.

As for his last point, that accepting the probability of God existing not being the same as saying you know, or are certain, I am in total agreement. That was the entire point I made about agnostic atheism. If you are a 7, you claim to “know” that God does not exist, making you a form of gnostic atheist, “gnostic” used as the opposite of “agnostic”, not the Christian spirituality group. Gnosticism in this case is the view that you can know god.

Yes, as I said, my stance on god’s non-existence is of a statistical nature. Yes, I can’t claim to know that God does not exist, which is another way of saying that I don’t have the “knowledge” that god does not exist, specifically because non-existence is not a provable hypothesis. What does the fact that statistics itself is knowledge have to do with my lack of knowledge about gods non existence? That is a non sequitur.  Just beacuse statistics is considered knowledge, and just becasue I reach a conclusion based on statistics, it does not follow that my conclusion itself can be considered knowledge.  I can have perfect statistics but wrong premises, or an incomplete set of premises and my answer would be wrong, thus not knowledge, even though my statistics were impecable. I really do not see how he has addressed my point that I can’t claim to have knowledge of god’s nonexistence based on his answer.

My point on the statistics was that you claimed your statistical analysis was not based on belief or knowledge, but statistics is in itself that analysis of knowledge. In this case, you analyzed the knowledge you had, which included the fact that there is no verifiable evidence for God, and used this to produce a statistical probability.

Knowledge is a branch of belief? That doesn’t make any sense regardless how you define belief. Just what in god’s name does that even mean? How is knowledge a branch of belief? In what sense? I think the Atheist Blogger needs to elaborate on that point as he’s close to committing atheistic heresy.

Elaborate I will. In philosophy, Moore’s paradox explains the relation between knowledge and belief. Moore stated that to say “It is raining outside but I don’t believe it to be true” is a paradox. You cannot possibly know something and not believe it. In Epistemology, to know P is to believe P is true. In other words, knowledge implies belief. Perhaps I could have related this a tad better in my original article.

I find it hard to believe that such things are being writen by someone who claims to be an atheist. This is the sort of apologetic goal post moving tactics you’d expect from religious people who are too embarrased by their religion’s earthly claims and hide behind a God who is out of reach, can never be touched by reason, logic or science. In other words the old definition of God does not stand up to logical scrutiny, so let’s make up a new god which is impervious to reason. This is exactly what Carl Sagan was talking about when he gave the example of the invisible dragon, who breathes heatless fires and leaves no imprints on the flour on the floor. This attitude is pointless, useless and it leads nowhere. We can postulate anything, claim that it is out of the reach of reason, and bam we have ourselves something to be agnostic about. I’m sorry that just makes me giggle.

I agree, the attitude is ultimately pointless, useless, and leads nowhere. The purpose of agnosticism isn’t to lead anywhere though, but to confirm the possibility of a God. It isn’t agnostics that are moving the posts though, but the theists who claim such things. They are the ones who claim God to be outside our observable universe, on another plane of existence, or whatever else they have claimed about it. The agnostics are the ones who simply say, given the nature of such a being, it is impossible to prove or disprove it. You are quite correct, we could come up with something, put it outside reason, and be agnostic about it. The reason we do not do so is because there aren’t a massive number of people claiming something else like this. Another reason why God gets special treatment is because theists are claiming that it created everything, and on some occasions has a direct effect on what happens when we die. These are all things that affect people if they are true, and people are more likely to think about certain ideas if they have supposed affects on them than say, a giant iguana who lives between universes and doesn’t do anything.

Secondly, I don’t think Dawkins would be caught dead using the word “agnostic” to describe himself, but that is my opinion based on what I’ve heard him say and his writings and I may be shown wrong on that.

Possibly because in his book he uses the definition of “agnostic” as someone who “doesn’t know” if they believe in god or not. His scale of 1-7 puts agnosticism in position 4, which agnosic atheists such as myself disagree with. If you used the original definition (and current one used by dictionaries) the Dawkins would be an agnostic atheist. This is clearly evident by his rating of 6.9 on his scale. If a 7 is someone who says you can know there is no god, anything below would be someone who says you cannot know (until you reach the other end of the scale, with 1 being someone who claims you can know there is a God). Dawkins doesn’t seek to disprove God, because he understands this is impossible, but he still strongly disbelieves the notion that one exists. The question of belief in the existence of god and the actual existence of god are different questions. People often make the mistake of using agnosticism purely in terms of belief, when it should be in terms of the truth value of the claim.

Ok, so there goes an ad populum fallacy. The term makes sense to a lot of people huh? First of all, for all those people it makes sense to, we can probably find just as many that it does not, as such that argument holds no water. Secondly, it does not matter how many people it makes sense to, I can still criticize it. How can you claim that agnosticism is a stance which says “we can’t know” and atheism is a stance which says ” I know” and still use the two words together? That my friend is the definition of contradiction, an oxymoron. You can’t know while at the same time saying that you don’t know. Just explain to me how, based on your two definitions, this makes any sense at all? On the flip side how can anyone be an agnostic theist? So this person knows there is a God because he’s a theist, but at the same time he know’s he can’t really know if there is a God? Something’s gotta give, and it seems simple logic is what is giving here.

Firstly I wasn’t trying to prove any point about the definitions other than they mean something to some people, therefore there is reason to discuss them. I never implied that because a lot of people agree with them that they are therefore true. You simply said that the terms didn’t make sense to you, which is irrelevant. Not understanding something is no grounds to dismiss it.

I never said atheism is a stance that says “I know”, I said atheism is a stance that says “I disbelieve”. The stance that some atheists take is “I know”, which is a form of gnostic atheism: Disbelieving something and knowing it to be true or reckoning it can be proven.

Someone can be an agnostic theist by the simple fact that theism is a belief in god, not a position on “knowledge” of god. There are people who claim to know that god exists, or that god can be proven, making them gnostic theists, and people who claim to believe in god yet think the proof is impossible to obtain. Indeed something had to give, and it was your misunderstanding of the definitions of theism/atheism.

And why do you say that knowledge is different to belief when at the very beginning you said that knowledge is a branch of belief? Can you please explain that contradiction to me? If knowledge is in fact, as you claim, belief with facts than if anything belief is a subset of knowledge not the other way around.

The mere fact there is a branch surely explains there is a difference? What would be the purpose of the branch otherwise? H. sapiens branched off from an ancestor on the evolutionary tree, but we would hardly call them the same would we? In philosophy, the relation of knowledge and belief is clear.

“You cannot know something if you do not first believe it to be true.” You’ve gotta be kidding me right? So this is how you think the process of acquiring knowledge works? We first start with something we believe to be true and then find the facts to add on top of our belief to turn it into knowledge? You have it completely backwards my friend. Knowledge and facts lead to belief (trust not faith) that something is infact true, not the other way around. It seems you’re not talking about knowledge of the scientific kind when you use that word. Maybe we are having a semantics battle over here.

Indeed as you have probably deduced by now, I am talking about it in a purely philosophical sense. I would have thought that clear from the start when we were talking about things such as atheism, agnosticism, etc, but I apologize if that wasn’t made clear.

I think perhaps the entire discussion is a semantics battle.

The world was created by God is not a philosophical question, it is a scientific one. God performs miracles, raises the dead, walks on water are not philosophical issues but empirical ones. God’s existence is not a philosophical issue, it is an empirical issue unless you strip him of everything that’s ever been attributed to him, which seems to me that’s what you’re doing.

I always thought of science as the study of the natural world, so a supernatural god being wouldn’t even come close to being something to do with science. Philosophy on the other hand, is the study of problems to do with things like existence, knowledge, beauty, etc. The existence of God is a philosophical question.

Are you agnostic about ghosts? Are you agnostic about talking to the dead? Are you agnostic about UFOs? It seems to me the answers to those questions should be yes, yes, and yes. We just can’t know!

Again, as the answers should technically be yes, most people do not consider them important enough to acknowledge. In fact, UFO’s exist, we just don’t know what they are. Even if you meant aliens, I would not be agnostic about them either. The universe is only finitely sized, and if the aliens live within it, we can know about them.

I’ve just noticed the three links automatically generated below your post which explain agnostic atheism rather well, so I encourage you to read them, as well as anyone else interested in them^[1][2][3].

I’m not sure what you want to in terms of this “debate”. I don’t think continually hopping between blogs is going to be good for anyone, and I think it is clear that we are simply running round each other with different dictionaries and interpretations. I tend to go with the definition Thomas Huxley came up with, you tend to go with the definition that has been hijacked and pushes agnosticism into the question of belief.

Yes, technically we could be agnostic about absolutely everything, but as you rightly pointed out this is intellectual suicide. The only reason we are agnostic about god is because of the status that has been thrust upon it, and the fact that if such a being existed it would have an impact. Agnosticism is useful in this case because it can unite theists with atheists over the issue. Instead of arguing over the existence of god, they can agree that such a being is unprovable and lay the issue to rest. Creationists and biblical literalists are the people who claim that god can be known through the Bible, or through reasoning, and they are the people who make the constant mistakes and illogical arguments.

I have received a lot of support for my original idea of having some kind of website which people could put their name down in support of original definitions, but I think given the amount of opposition who simply refused or could not understand the terms, I will have to abandon the project. I think the best way to argue agnostic atheism is to get people to simply look up the word as I did. Hopefully they will be surprised at how wrong the public interpretation was all these years.

On Monday 22nd September, several thousand new students will arrive at Royal Holloway, University of London, in order to register and join societies. The godless members of our student organisation “Atheist & Agnostic Alliance” will be there too, handing out flyers in order to grab as many new members as we can. Statistics says roughly 30% of students are non-religious, so I’m hoping we can get quite a few.

As part of our affiliation with the UK Brights, we have 1,500 flyers that present a “friendly” message, as well as something that isn’t “in your face”.

UK Brights are also helping us organise an awareness week later in the year. I’ll be taking my camera along to registration and get some pictures of the group in action. No idea how many flyers we will hand out on the first day, or how many will end of torn up in bins on campus. Hopefully a few people will stop to chat, either in support or to try and convert us from our heathen ways.

Edit (in response to a complaint): http://the-brights.net, http://brights.meetup.com

Skepdude recently commented on my article outlining the awareness I think needs to be raised over the true meanings of agnosticism. I feel his points deserved slightly more discussion and dissection than a simple comments thread, so here they are:

Ok, first of all I think you’re making an overly broad generalization when you define atheism as a stance which proclaims either to know or believe that there is no God. I consider myself an atheist, among other things, but I don’t use either “know” or “believe”.

I stated in the article “That is a generalization” in respect to my definitions. I also made sure not to mention atheism as a belief, which it isn’t. Atheism is a disbelief, as defined by the dictionaries. Whether or not you use the words “know” or “believe” personally, the definitions of atheism all rely on a disbelief of gods.

I rely on the lack of evidence to come to the conclusion that such lack of evidence makes the probability of God’s existence very, very very tiny, next to zero. Until further convincing evidence is presented the only logical position is to say that very likely there is no God. This is not a matter of belief nor is it knowledge. It’s simple statistics.

Forgetting the fact that statistics is a branch of science, science being a branch of knowledge, knowledge being a branch of belief…oh wait, you are talking about belief and knowledge. In fact, your admittance that the probability of God’s existence is “very, very, very tiny, next to zero” makes you an agnostic atheist whether you like the label or not.

The problem with your statistical analysis of God is you do not have a good basis for describing evidence that counts. There is no direct evidence of God, as he has never appeared before us personally and said “hey, I’m God”. Theists argue that the entire universe (as a whole, not as separate objects) is the evidence of a God. Your statistical analysis, whilst useful from a atheistic philosophical perspective, is bias as such. When we do a statistical analysis of the number and types of car traveling on a road, we know the description of the data we are collecting. We can distinguish between person and car, and different types of car. If a motorbike came along, there might be some arguing over whether it should be included, but overall we have a full data set. With the idea of God being so incomplete as it is, and such a being existing outside observation, we can never be certain of what constitutes relevant data and what doesn’t.

As far as agnosticism is concerned, regardless of how you define it, I find it to be a lazy position.

This is the point of the article. We shouldn’t go along with personal opinions of what words mean, but rather their actual definitions. I could say I find the word “nigger” to be offensive to blacks, but that doesn’t remove it’s historical position as a word to describe blacks. My personal feelings over a word doesn’t change the definition of it.

Why can’t we know about God, given how God is described by the major religions? Why would a God who’s always meddling in this universe and performing miracles and such not be provable? Of course we can know about God, as long as he is supposed to have some sort of direct effect on our reality, he or she is than well within the realms of science. Science and religion are not two separate magisteria ( I think I just butchered that word).

Which is why we should carefully explain the kind of God we are being agnostic about. We are agnostic about the God who supposedly exists outside the realms of the observable universe. Why would a God who is performing miracles not be provable? Well, perhaps such a being made sure that his miracles, however highly unlikely, always had a basis in the natural world? By saying we are agnostic atheists, we are saying that we do not believe in gods, but at the end of the day, we cannot know about something that has been supposedly placed outside our observable universe, even if such a being acts on the observable universe.

Suppose you lived in a 20m by 20m box, without any way of knowing what is outside the box. The box is your observable universe, since you have no knowledge of what lays outside it. Every night, whilst you sleep, someone takes the lid off the box, and places food for you to eat. You never see them because whoever does this makes sure that you are completely unconscious whilst they do it. You could could either deduce that the appearance of the fruit was a natural occurrence to your universe, or that some “God” was doing it. Even if you had no evidence to suggest otherwise, the proposition needs agnosticism to state “perhaps” or “maybe”. Agnosticism acknowledges the possibility, however remote.

Of course you can never prove that something does not exist, but does that justify taking the “we can not know” position? Are we to be agnostic about fairies, unicorns and Santa Claus? I don’t understand what you mean by an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. Both sound like oxymoron to me. What those terms imply is that I believe or not, while at the same time knowing that I can’t know if I’m right or wrong. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

Given that we know the origin of fairies, unicorns, and Santa Claus in literature, we do not need to be agnostic about them. They have been proven to be false, at least in the context of their definitions.

Indeed, most gods have also been proved to have their origins in literature only. These are not gods I would say I am agnostic about. What I am agnostic about is the idea of a god, some kind of being, energy, whatever, which is outside the universe. I don’t believe such a thing exists, because for me that would be too easy. However, given the nature of philosophical thinking, I have to admit that the possibility is there, however remote. Even Dawkins admits his agnosticism by saying he is 99.9% certain there is no God.

Whether the terms “agnostic atheist/theist” make sense to you or not isn’t the issue. They make sense to a lot of people, which is the reason for the article. Your definition is wrong though. What the terms imply is that whether we believe in God or not, the proof of such a being is impossible to find. Knowledge is different to belief. A belief does not need evidence to support it, merely ideas. Knowledge is a belief that has facts. You cannot know something if you do not first believe it to be true.

I don’t buy your whole “yes, but I don’t think it can be proven” line of reasoning, simply because it is not useful. It is meaningless. It can be applied to anything. Make up any fancy fantasy you can think of, and you can apply that line of reasoning. Agnosticism is a dialogue stopper. It is giving up, throwing your hands up in the air and saying, we can never know. The implication is that we should stop wasting our time. What if that sort of logic was to be applied to anything that’s just too hard for us to figure out currently?

I firmly believe that we should stop wasting time trying to “prove” or “disprove” God. Give that the very definition of God puts it outside our realm of existence seems obvious to me that you cannot prove it. Yes, Russell’s teapot is a good example of this. If we cannot prove it, we simply say so and move on. There is no point building massive telescopes for the sole purpose of finding Russell’s teapot, when by it’s very definition puts it outside our observation.

Agnosticism isn’t a scientific method, it is a philosophical method. We do not use it on anything that is too hard for us to firgure out for the reasons you have stated. It is simply not useful. Philosophy has never strived to prove anything. Indeed, all it has done is prove the diversity of the human mind. Agnosticism is an approach on philosophical questions, not scientific ones. It should only be used as such. Agnosticism allows discussion of beliefs or disbeliefs, but states that as soon as you try to prove or disprove those beliefs, you are going to reach a dead end, and you really should stop wasting time.

Pick a side. Either you are convinced there is a God, or you’re not, or you’re on the fence. But you can’t have it both ways, and that’s what your agnostic atheist and agnostic theist terms are, having it both ways. That’s not a position any logical person should take.

Here we have the classic misunderstanding of those terms yet again, which again justifies my article and reasoning for the agnostic project. Agnosticism is not an “on the fence” position. An “on the fence” position would be “I honestly do not know” or “I honestly don’t know what I believe”. An agnostic admits the possibility, but says that they cannot know. Not knowing and not being able to know are too very different things. The former is a form of ignorance, the latter is an admitance to a lack of justifiable method.

We can’t prove that Russell’s teapot does not exist. Does that imply that we should be agnostic about it? There’s millions of things we can’t disprove. Does that lend them legitimacy, simply because we can dream of them?

On a technical level, yes. However I doubt very many people are agnostic about absolutely everything. Agnosticism isn’t about making some claim a legitimate claim, but rather saying “the claim is impossible to prove or disprove, therefore we should stop wastimg time trying to do so”. It pushes the claim to the mountain of the possible, and leaves it there. I could claim a million things, each being possible, and each unable to be disproved. Agnosticism does not have a say on whether they are probable, but whether they are possible. Anosticism does not have a say on whether you should believe such things, and many people would probably choose not to; if the possibility is there, however remote that possibility may be, it must be recognised, if only to designate it as such.

Of course, as I have previously stated in regards to the origins of gods, my ideas would probably reach the same scrutiny. If I simply made something up I wouldn’t expect people to be seriously agnostic about it, simply because I pulled it out of thin air.

I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now, but before I make a move on it I thought I should throw the idea to my blog readers and get their opinions.

These days, agnosticism is seen as another position on the existence of God, namely “I don’t know”. It is supposedly a neutral position, used by people who do not want to subject themselves to the usual stereotypes that atheism comes with. What agnosticism really is though, is something completely different.

Agnosticism isn’t a position on whether God exists or not, as theism and atheism are, but on whether it is possible to know if God exists or not. There is a big difference. A person who is an atheist says “I do not believe in God”. That is a generalization as I realize some atheists would say “I know there is no God”, or “I am certain there is no God”. A person who is agnostic says “I do not think you can prove or disprove the existence of God”.

The difference is that belief and disbelief have nothing to do with proof. Once something is proved there is no need for belief, only in semantic terms (e.g. knowledge implies belief). One would never say “I believe we walk on two legs” as a statement of faith, nor would one utter “I do not believe we have three arms” as a statement of disbelief. Both examples have been proved through observation and general reasoning. Everyone knows that we walk on two legs, just as everyone knows that we do not have three arms.

So it is pretty clear then that agnosticism and atheism are indeed separate, but are so because they do not cover the same things. They not mutually exclusive. By common definitions, you cannot both be a Christian and an atheist, or a Christian and a Muslim, because of incompatible beliefs (God / No God, Yahweh / Allah).

In fact, most atheists would agree with the statement “I do not think you can prove or disprove the existence of God”, and so would a large percentage of theists. I am an agnostic atheist, and some of my closest friends are agnostic theists. For someone to do a survey of different beliefs about God and cite agnostics as separate to atheists and indeed theists is pure lunacy, and shows an ignorance towards the definition of agnosticism.

It also shows that a large number of people have no idea what the definition of agnosticism is either, and have just been taught that it is a word for non-committal about the existence of God, rather than an admittance that it is impossible to know. A good example of this recently came from Friendly Atheist, who found an interesting survey / artwork that uses a grain of rice to represent one person in the City of Birmingham, UK. The rice is arranged into “religions”, the most prominent being Christianity, but with Agnostics and Atheists in close second and third place respectively. Sure, it is a great view of how religion is diverse, but I have some questions for the agnostics in that group:

1) Yes or no, do you believe in God?

A question involving belief in something has a yes or no answer, there is no middle ground. Agnosticism is an expansion of a belief, not a belief. You could answer “Yes, but I do not think God can be proven”, which makes you an agnostic theist, or you could answer “No, but I do not think God can be proven”, which makes you an agnostic atheist.

2) Given that agnosticism isn’t a religion (neither is atheism but I can understand why the survey has it), which religion do you belong to?

If you are an agnostic theist, you could pick any, seeing as knowledge is not a prerequisite for being a member of any religion I have heard of. If you are an agnostic atheist, you could simply say “non-religious”, or you could claim Secular Humanism (which some see as a religion, others not). You could even claim Buddhism, as they have no God figure technically speaking.

I don’t want to argue points about what is or isn’t a religion though; my main argument is against these kinds of surveys which perceive agnosticism as some kind of position on God’s existence, when really it is a position on the (for lack of a better word) provability or knowability of God’s existence.

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So what am I getting at? Well, I personally believe that enough is enough, and in a response similar to the “Out Campaign“, I think agnostics (both atheist and theist) alike should join together in supporting the statement “I believe/disbelieve (remove non-applicable) in the existence of God, however I do not believe that God can be either proven or disproven. I am an agnostic theist/atheist (remove non-applicable”.

I suggest some kind of website to be set up, where the correct definition of agnosticism is given, along with the above statement of “unknowability”, and where people who agree can add their name to a list in support of said statements.

The website itself would have no direct affiliation with either atheist or theist sites, nor would it favour one over the other. It would be a place for both atheist and theist blogs to link to if they agreed with it.

A possible inclusion to the site would be the definition of “apatheism”, which as far as I can tell is the best equivalent to “I don’t know”, although it also encompasses “I don’t care”.

What I really need is some feedback on whether or not this is a good idea, and what people think generally. I’m not trying to be as big as the Out Campaign, nor do I want to achieve anything other than the awareness of agnosticism.