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A Lesson on Definitions

Adrian Hayter — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:35:34 +0000

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A friend recently sent me a request in an email:

Adrian, hope you are well. Would you be kind and help me answer this email from a Christian who thinks Atheists are intellectually dishonest – his reasoning is a first for me.
Take care, Robert

Atheists? Intellectually dishonest? At first I think that perhaps this theist has come across an atheist who made some ridiculous statement, and has assumed all atheists think like that. The attached theist “argument” provided all the answers:

Robert, I know Christians have done evil as well! I’m a sinner Saved by grace! By the way it is impossible to be an atheist and be intellectually honest! You can be agnostic at best! In order to be an atheist you have to know everything there is to know! Since you and I do not Know everything there is to know, it is possible for God to exist in the area you do not know: BY DEFINITION AGNOSTIC AT BEST if you are intelectually honest!? I believe you are!!!!!

As I read the paragraph, I realized that this particular theist hadn’t come across a stupid atheist, but rather hadn’t come across a dictionary in what seems like quite a while. He’s confused the meaning of the word ‘atheist’ for starters, and then confused the meaning of the word ‘agnostic’ such that both are mutually exclusive. In his world, you can either be an atheist, or an agnostic (so I’m not sure where that puts him as a theist).

My response was a quick lesson on definitions.

This fellow seems to have his definitions a little off. Firstly, an atheist is simply defined as someone “without gods”, coming from the Greek word “atheos”, meaning ‘a’ (without) and ‘theos’ (gods). Therefore to put any other meaning on the word is to commit intellectual dishonesty yourself. Given that the subject of Gods comes down to a belief (namely theism), to be “without gods” is to not believe in theism. In other words, an atheist is someone who “does not believe in gods”.

The theist in this argument has falsely asserted that all atheists are of the “God does not exist” type, which is a massive error given that most of them do not fall under this category at all. He also makes the wrong assumption that being agnostic is something mutually exclusive to being an atheist, when the complete opposite is the case.

Atheism, as I have previously defined it, is all about belief. Atheists do not “believe” in gods. Agnosticism is the position that certain things in reality (and some agnostics, myself included would say *all* things) are unprovable, in the sense that an absolute position about them cannot be known. I do not deny that absolute knowledge exists, but as an agnostic I deny that fallible and limited beings can ever “know” absolutely what those absolutes are. All knowledge is relative to us, and thus agnosticism is a position not of belief, but of knowledge.

The relationship between knowledge and belief is a simple one. You can have belief without having knowledge, and you can have non-belief without having knowledge. For example, I could be in a dark room, a mile below the surface on the Earth, and espouse the belief that it was raining on the surface, without having any knowledge (relative or absolute) that it was. Likewise, I could espouse the opposite belief, that it is not raining on the surface via the same system.

However, to have knowledge, you must also have belief. It is a fallacious statement to say “I know it is raining outside, but I don’t believe it.” Knowledge implies belief, for as Plato wrote, knowledge is “justified, true, belief”.

Thus there are 4 positions you can have concerning belief and knowledge of God:

Agnostic Atheism – “I don’t believe in God, but I don’t make any claim to have knowledge of the existence of such a being.”
Gnostic Atheism – “I don’t believe in God, and I know such a being doesn’t exist.”
Agnostic Theism – “I believe in God, but I don’t make any claim to have knowledge of the existence of such a being.”
Gnostic Theism – “I believe in God, and I know such a being exists.”

The theist is correct in his argument if you have claimed Gnostic Atheism, and likewise if someone has claimed Gnostic Theism. To know a non-temporal being existed or didn’t exist, you would have to have knowledge of the non-temporal, and as temporal beings this knowledge is beyond our capabilities.

If however, like most intelligent atheists and theists you meet, you claim agnostic atheism or theism, then you are being intellectually honest. You are admitting the possibility (however small) that God may exist (or not exist as the agnostic theist would say), because you realise that such knowledge is impossible for us to know.

This is the original argument Thomas Huxley made when he defined the word Agnostic, and the argument was visualized very well by Bertrand Russell and is known as “Russell’s teapot” (Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell’s_teapot), which deals primarily with the reasons why the burden of proof is on the claimant, but uses agnosticism to reason such a position.

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Even Free-Thinkers Can Be Wrong

Adrian Hayter — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:23:24 +0000

Freethoughtpedia is meant to be an encyclopedia for free-thought related things, such as atheism. Their article on atheism however, is filled with misconceptions and wrong definitions.

They firstly define atheism as a “lack of belief in a deity” when the universally accepted definition is that of “disbelief in gods” (note the singular vs plural). They use this definition to make the following case:

Likewise a Christian may be a strong atheist towards the Hindu gods.

This is a massive error in a definition. It is true that Christians are strong disbelievers in the Hindu gods, but that does not make them atheists. You cannot be both a Christian and an atheist because Christians are theists, and the two are incompatible. Atheism rejects all gods, not specific ones.

The next misconception is the one that being agnostic means you are “not sure” about the existence of gods. However, they take it to the max with this paragraph.

Furthermore, agnosticism is a type of atheism. Mainstream media and many people will rarely make note of this because many choose to use the term agnostic to describe their lack of belief due to the negative connotations the media associates with the term atheist, but technically agnostics are atheists: You cannot believe in something you are not sure exists!

Agnosticism is not a type of atheism. It does not cover disbelief in the existence of gods, it covers whether or not the existence of gods can be known. For instance, if I were to claim that outside reality (the universe as we know it) there existed a fairy cake, you would have to be agnostic about it. There is no way currently that we can see what is outside reality (or if indeed there is an outside), so you cannot either prove or disprove my statement. The same applies to God. Since God is supposedly unseen and unobservable, we cannot detect it, and so one must remain agnostic about it to be rational.

The second thing that should be noted about this paragraph is that you can believe in something if you aren’t sure it exists. Knowledge implies belief, not the other way around. Knowledge is often considered a subset of belief, mainly because it is the result of rational justified belief. To have knowledge you must first believe it to be true, otherwise it just wouldn’t work. However, you can believe in something without having knowledge of it. This is precisely how science works. If scientists simply gave up believing in their theories because they hadn’t got enough evidence to prove them, then we wouldn’t get anywhere.

Technology works on the same premise. People look at a current system / product and say “I believe I could do better than that”. They then go away, start thinking about how to approach the design / implementation, and eventually come up with a better system / product.

There are some that claim you can be an “agnostic theist“, implying someone believes in gods but recognizes that the knowledge of gods’ existence may or will never be known. While this is technically true, we are unaware of any practical use of such a term, as the generic definition of [deist] seems to fit that bill.

They manage to get a correct definition of agnosticism into their argument against agnostic theism which seems a bit bizarre, not to mention contradictory. There are plenty of people who are agnostic theists, and an argument from ignorance isn’t going to work for an encyclopedia. As for the definition of a deist, it is simply a person who believes that there is a god (or gods) but they have no control over the universe. They simply created it and for whatever reason do not (or cannot) control anything in it. These people are not theists, and whether they are agnostic or gnostic about their beliefs depends on whether they think the evidence for such a god is available.

I think the idea of a freethoughtpedia is great. As long as sources are cited and proper definitions are used. Free-thought means you do not subscribe to any doctrines. Dictionaries do not count as doctrines, neither do any form of research paper. Use them. At the moment, freethoughtpedia looks more like conservapedia than wikipedia, and everyone knows which of those is the more reliable…