The Atheist Blogger

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.

Prayer request sites… I’m sure this sort of thing has been around for a while. But I had no idea just how many sites there are out there that allow one to post to their prayer requests to the electronic world at large, for the purpose of having other people Retweet their petitions up at God.

(Let me make the disclaimer, of course, that I’m not going to rag on the good intentions of so many people that will take the time to try to help a complete stranger with their problems. The motivation for setting up a site to help people in need obviously comes from a good place. The problem, of course, is that petitionary prayer doesn’t actually do anything, beyond a placebo effect at best; and that if you want to help someone in need, they will quite obviously be better off if you actually take action of some kind.)

You’d think that if God was going to respond to a prayer, he’d just do it, without factoring in if there was a massive effort on the part of many people. If the person praying has great needs, the last thing he or she needs is to have to find others that will echo the prayer around. Is there some kind of threshold criteria God uses to determine how he answers, or if he answers? For example, suppose I want divine help in looking for a new job. Is twenty other co-supplicants twice as good as ten? Why would it matter?

These are the kinds of questions I asked myself as I perused a bunch of prayer sites. I found many to be dull, but a few were interesting or funny for one reason or another. What follows is my top ten list.

10. Requestprayers.com

Pretty vanilla site, this is run by the Baha’i organization. Seems odd that they’d give it a commercial rather than organizational extension, but that was true for most of these places. They have one page that purports to have the most powerful prayer ever devised. Testimonitals include:

The Baha’is have some of the most beautiful and powerful prayers in the world. Add that power to a million souls across the globe praying on your behalf from all the religions, and the Light is dumbfounding. Need immediate help? You were guided to this site, and nothing happens by accident!

9. Liveprayer.com

The extremely conservative minister behind this site claims to have started the entire business of online prayer requests, apparently. He also claims to have personally received and re-prayed 60 million prayer requests. Wow! If that was not impressive enough, the main page devotes much attention to President Obama, naming him “God’s Enemy”; plus, they feature a tasteful, if amateurishly photoshopped, portrait of him next to Hiter. There is also extensive advertising for something called The Jonah Project, an effort to better Christianize the U.S. (and the world).

8. CarmelTemple.org

Not just your typical prayer submission site where your request is simply posted to a page for others to dutifully recite. No, this is the Home of the Crystal Prayer Bowl! (Yes, they have pictures of it, too.) Here is what they do with it:

The Crystal Prayer Bowl is used to collect prayer requests sent to Carmel Temple. It is placed under the Blue-White Healing Light at the beginning of healing sessions in the Sanctuary. The prayer requests then receive the energy and prayers of those present. We encourage you to place into the bowl the name (even the initials will do) of the person, persons, or situations that need prayer or healing energy. This procedure has been very effective and that bowl has an excellent reputation!

7. Donjuddministries.org

You can send them your prayer requests, which they will compile with all the others that they receive. Then they will print the entire list out. Why? So that they can “lay hands on the list” as they pray over it. Why not just lay hands on the hard drive and save time, paper, and ink?

6. Prayerblaster.com

I had high expectations for this page, and I was disappointed. I was hoping it would be a bit like Pingmyblog.com. Instead it is just a pedestrian list of links. Not much of a blaster at all, as you’d have to manually go through the list and submit your prayer to each site individually. This page might have been made in 1992.

5. Prayer.la

The folks running this site seem proud to offer an exhausting 218 pages of prayer requests that are all less than one month old. Apparently they expire after that. No stale prayers! Would take hours to go through them all and pray for each one, I’d imagine.

4. Prayerrequestweb.com

Much like prayer.la, in terms of sheer volume, but at least you won’t have to click through 218 pages of prayers. They are all on one very long page that you can just scroll down.

Here is an excerpt that I found particularly pathetic and sad, yet somehow representative of what you’ll find posted. There is a compulsory tone to it at the end… as if the author meant to finish with “Or else!”

Please pray GOD gives me all the desires of my heart that are righteous in GODs eyes.Pray GOD sends me on the mission He has for me now,Pray GOD raises me a mile above those used by Satan to glorify GOD,Pray GOD Blesses me financially now and always.Pray GOD heals my body completely now.Pray GOD brings me my soulmate now,the loneliness is tormenting me. In JESUS Name Pray.

3. Holylandprayer.com

Now this is a “dot com” that truly deserve that extension. Also fitting is the image of the glowing gold Jesus hanging on a cross that adorns their home page.

Here is what they offer, for some nominal fees: If you send them a prayer, they’ll have it prayed in Jerusalem, “steps from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.”

Or, they’ll light a candle for you there. Or do both together and get a discount!

Why would God care where the prayer originated from? Does it get more power coming from Jerusalem? Does that make it more bona fide, somehow? Or is God impressed that you are in dire enough straights that you’d send these people money? (Back in Dante’s time, accepting money for ecclessiastical favors was called Simony and earned one a very hot reward in the Eight Circle of Hell.)

Costs: $10 for a candle, $15 for a prayer. $20 for both.

2. Healinglifecoach.com Looking for something a little different from the same old prayer site? Then this is the place for you.

These folks offer special stones imbued with power because they are not merely prayed over, but “programmed.” Specifically, they tell us:

Programmed Stones can be effective and powerful tools for anything from Prayer, Freedom from Worry and Creative Visualization to Healing, Forgiveness, Gratitude and much more!

How are the stones programmed? They are cleaned and set in the Healing Sanctuary with your individualized and special requests with daily prayers being said over them for a minimum of 30 days. Then they are sent to you!

1. Ipraytoday.com

This was my favorite site because, beneath the name and prayer entry fields, it has a “capcha” device, so that you can prove you are a human being! To be fair, I suppose this is more to save the devout from being asked to repeat bogus prayers, but it struck me as hilarious to think of it as a spam filter for The Lord God Himself. I can only imagine Jehovah’s fury at realizing he was tricked into granting the request of a bot.

-S.A. Alenthony

www.blackburnianpress.com

If you still don’t think that religious parents who inflict their religion on their children isn’t tantamount to child abuse, watch this BBC documentary and have a rethink. Deborah Drapper is a 13 year old fundamentalist Christian, who lives in a reclusive environment with her family. She spouts off bad arguments from the likes of Ray Comfort when trying to convert people (she even uses his “atheist test” tracts) and she falls to sleep each night listening to Kent Hovind spreading constant lies about science.

If you think you can handle that, as well as her emotional and sickening breakdown at the end (Jesus *sniff* he…*sniff* he died for MY sins! *bursts into tears*) then watch it. The documentary only goes to show how dangerous these religions can be. They have turned a perfectly ordinary and probably very intelligent girl into a person who is ignorant of the ways of science and spreads the “loving” message that we are all pathetic and deserve Hell to 5 year old children through puppet shows.

Absolutely disgusting. Here is her blog, which I am going to read and comment on as much as I feel like. Someone needs to save this girl from Ray Comfort and the other people who lie for Jesus.

Ever since I came across Richard Dawkins’ scale of belief in The God Delusion, I disagreed with the way it was set out (I found it a rather too simplistic way of determining positions on an important question) . When I fully understood the true meaning of agnosticism, and how it is not a “on the fence” or “I’m not sure” position, I rejected Dawkins’ scale completely. Any scale concerning the belief in God that puts agnosticism as a dead centre position is completely misunderstanding agnosticism. Agnosticism isn’t concerned with the belief in God; it is concerned with knowledge. Namely, whether or not a god can be proven. Agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive positions, as they are positions on different areas.

In my opinion, when considering the question of God there are three aspects that must be addressed: Belief – Whether or not you believe in God, Knowledge – Whether or not you claim absolute knowledge of the existence of God, or claim God can be proven in some way, Certainty – How certain you are of your beliefs (of disbeliefs). Although the three aspects are closely related, they are exclusive to one another. That is to say, one can believe in God, not claim absolute knowledge, and also be relatively uncertain of their belief.

The difference between knowledge and belief is subtle but explainable. Knowledge can best be seen as a subset of belief, and this can be demonstrated by the fact that someone can believe something that is provably wrong (such as someone claiming they believe 1 + 1 = 3), but they cannot know something and hold a disbelief in it. I cannot disbelieve that 1 + 1 = 2 because I know it to be true. Of course, one could argue that a person might lie, but this doesn’t change the fact that when answering truthfully they would admit belief. This argument also does not allow for people who are willingly ignorant for obvious reasons.

Once the difference between knowledge and belief is fully understood, the difference between knowledge and certainty should be quite easy to see. I have explained this to quite a few people when talking about my position on gods, and the best way I can explain it is with the following problem:

Suppose you are alone in a dark empty room. You can hear the pitter patter of raindrops on the ceiling above you. With this limited observation, (a) could you know that it is raining outside the room?, and (b) could you be certain it was raining outside the room?

Rational people would answer a definite “no” to (a), simply because there are an large number of explanations for the sound other than “it is raining outside”. Friends usually have some fun coming up with alternative explanations, such as a sound system, a mental delusion, a hallucination, etc. The answer to (b) really depends on the person, and answers vary along a large range. Most people come to the conclusion that they would be “pretty certain” it was raining outside, and that this decision is based on previous experience of listening to rain on a roof. If one were to plot a probability distribution of all the possible explanations, “it is raining” would be the highest bar. It is simply the most likely explanation for the sound. They key thing to remember about certainty and knowledge is that you can be 100% certain about something and still be wrong. I am 100% certain that I’ll be alive tomorrow, but that won’t stop a stray car or my heart suddenly having an attack.

The relationship between certainty and belief usually depends on the type of belief. For example, I’m a “believer” (not the best word) in the theory of Evolution, and I’m 100% certain that it is true. I’m also a “believer” in the Higg’s boson, but not as certain about it (although I’m certain enough to have a bet with a friend over it). Believers in God are usually quite certain, if not 100% certain about their beliefs. I’d say most atheists were also quite certain about their beliefs.

So, we have three aspects of a position on God to create a scale out of. Belief, defined through one’s atheism/theism, Knowledge, defined through one’s agnosticism/gnosticism, and Certainty, defined through “Strong”/”Weak”. I’ve used the Strong/Weak terms out of their original definition simply because they are good words to use for the aspect of certainty. To clarify, someone who is “strong atheist” in this scale would say they are 100% certain about their disbelief in gods, and a “weak atheist” would be someone who is not 100% certain.

The Scale

1. Strong Gnostic Theist - Believes in God, holds God as provable (or proven) and is 100% certain about its existence.
2. Strong Agnostic Theist – Believes in God, holds God as unprovable (or unproven) but is still 100% certain about its existence.
3. Weak Agnostic Theist – Believes in God, holds God as unprovable (or unproven) and is uncertain about its existence.
4. Apatheist – Could be described as 100% uncertain about their beliefs. Usually agnostic, and with a distinct sense of apathy on forming any opinion on the existence of God.
5. Weak Agnostic Atheist – Disbelieves in God, holds God as unprovable (and unproven), but is still uncertain about its non-existence.
6. Strong Agnostic Atheist – Disbelieves in God, holds God as unprovable (and unproven), but is 100% certain about its non-existence.
7. Strong Gnostic Atheist – Disbelieves in God, holds God’s non-existence as provable (or provable), and is 100% certain about its non-existence.

Note that there are no places for Weak Gnostic Theism or Weak Gnostic Atheism, since to “know” something immediately nulls any form of uncertainty on it.

In case any of you were wondering, I rank myself a 6 on this scale. Any comments concerning my arguments on the philosophy of knowledge are most welcome. I know (at least in the non-absolute sense) this is a well debated problem amongst philosophers.

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.