Atheist to Agnostic

The atheist's position has been generally realized as being untenable, at least by those atheists who could be bothered to actually think things through. If you actually consider what we know, there's just no way to credibly
say "There is absolutely no true God."

The next place of refuge, for those who flee from the one true God, was the agnostic position >"well, there might be some kind of a God, but if there is it can't really be God".

I realize I've taken a little license in describing the agnostic position, but that's what I've gotten every time I've conversed with a hardcore agnostic about their beliefs.

 

Then there's no way to credibly say "There is definitely a true God."

Soo really we should all be agnostic.

 

Yeah, it's just like the Bible teaches, all things are ultimately of faith, that's what the true Christian will admit and most agnostics/atheists refuse to admit.

You should only be an agnostic if you're willing to ignore what the awareness of your own existence is saying to you

 

To be fair, according to Christianity it doesn't matter if Im a theist, Im not a Christian so Im going to hell anyway.

If you think about it in terms of faith, I'd say all things are of faith.
You switch on the radio to hear the traffic reports, you're putting faith in the fact theyre telling you the truth.
Same with the news.
You put faith in the manufactuers of the products you use.
etc etc.
Atheists use faith as well. They cant prove it, but they believe it to be true.

 

I agree with you, and find it refreshing that somebody else on Hip Forums thinks of this the way I do. I've encountered a lot of resistance from atheists to the idea that faith is necessary and that science is based on it. On the other hand, as a thinking Christian, I'm bothered by frequent comments from my co-religionists that faith is a form of knowledge, a shortcut to truth, or a substitute for reason and evidence. Faith is just a decision to believe, and believing in something doesn't make it so. I don't regard blind faith as virtuous. I think faith, to be worthy, should be consitent with reason and the weight of evidence, and should be supported by substantial evidence.

 

Wow! is intellectual honesty refreshing, or what?

Jaitaiyai just in case you might be interested in what I believe the Bible teaches about who's going to Hell:

Only if you've ever done anything wrong, will you have to go to Hell. Even if you have done wrong you don't have to go to Hell if you accept the "gift" of eternal life from God.

Everything man has ever done will be judged, as to whether it's good, or evil. All evil has to be paid for, either the person who's committed that evil will pay (in the eternal lake of fire), or the atoning sacrifice of the Son of God will pay for it.

Oakiefreak:
You've hit the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned.

I do think faith, by its' nature, is ultimately blind, but I agree about basing that faith on evidence and reason. I think there's more reasonable evidence to suggest that there must be one true God than any other explanation of existence that I've heard. It's a different matter as to whether that one true God is the God of the Bible, or not; but that being said I again think that there's plenty of reasonable evidence to suggest the one true God is the God of the Bible (the history of the Jewish people comes to mind).

 

Yeah, I totally get what you are saying. I was actually wondering the same thing last week, because my friend is agnostic and she explained the meaning of it to me, because you always forget haha

But I really personally think "God" is just a product of the human mind, it doesn't mean much. I'm not one of those atheists that say THERE IS NO GOD. PERIOD. I just don't really... how can I say this -thinks-

Well, really, I can only repeat what I just said. It's a product of the human mind. Some people may believe in it, some people don't, or cannot determine that. Some people can get so absorbed into their religion that they may actually feel like they come in contact with "god". But that can also happen with medical disorders.. where they think they have a problem so much, that they actually develop it. [I forget what that's called] So yes, I personally think it's a product of the human mind. You can feel it so much, you believe it or think it is right. Just like any other opinion.

personal thoughts, just saying. you can have your beliefs, I have mine.
It's just that humans can come up withthe craziest ideas, and so many questions come with it. just like the one ktc wrote


PS: I'm only 15, I'm not very intelligent, so don't tell me I'm an idiot.

 

Agnosticism is probably a more logical poistion to take because god can't be proven definitively either way. However, people shape their beliefs in a variety of ways; facts, experiance or a lack of (god) etc. I base my athiestic beliefs from agreeing with Sartre and Dawkins, they are both extremely intelligent and rational people and i'm proud of my beliefs. My atheism does not equate to immorality. Hell is other people.

 

Oh, it's just that I don't believe in other books for the suffering of the heaven or hell of It. It is that the world holds the true mystery to the experience of suffering to me. Maybe Sartre was a hokosexual who demanded that he bevae according to the dictates of his social involvement of frustrated Women (wasn't, for instance, Simon de Bwauvoir a frustrated woman).

My psychiatrist is just a paid for individual.

 

Hold the phone!!!!! Substantial evidence?? Your not describing faith, your describing scientific knowledge. No faith is required to "believe" in proven or confirmed knowledge. Knowledge is just knowledge and facts.

Faith is a dirty word to any self respecting atheist or agnostic. Faith IS the unwavering belief in something when faced with contradictory evidence! Faith is closing your mind to all other possibilities. Faith is a conviction of ignorance!

True Agnosticism is the rejection of all faiths. Atheism is often accused as a faith in disbelief but I do not see it that way. In the scientific method, if experiments fail to produce predictable results, if absolutely no logical explanation can be sustained, if all evidence brought forth can be debunked, then the answer is very clear! And the answer in this case of God is very clear. He is a product of mans imagination and nothing more.

 

You've not so much taken a little license as totally misrepresented it. I'll accept that a hell of a lot of atheists/agnostics are annoyingly inarticulate, but I'd say the position is fairly easy to understand.

Essentially, you have two beliefs, one a possible extension of the other. One does not believe in a god due to lack of substantial evidence. Another then goes on to believe that there is no god based on evidence they believe disproves its existence. The latter seems to stem from the former, an extrapolation from it. But I will concede that many atheists do not appear to have gone through this process; many are merely angry at the religion they grew up in and, rejecting that religion, believe that the non-existence of one specific idiosyncratic god excludes the possibility of any god. This seems to me an irrational assertion.

Most atheists I've met do accept that the existence of a god is merely unlikely, since most religions have the sense to include some clause to make them impossible to actually disprove. This is why science rejects theories that are unfalsifiable (i.e. those which include as part of the theory some mechanism by which they could not be disproved whether they were evidenced or not).

I think the problem is, people confuse atheism and agnosticism. Most atheists are agnostics, not all agnostics are atheists, and still more will have a personal atheist conviction that stems from an agnostic reality - that is, they base their belief that there is no god on what they see as the truth undeniably that no god's existence has ever been proven or evidenced. One can hold facts to be true and still have a belief based on those facts; in that situation, one must always be clear at any given time whether one is defending the belief, or defending the facts.

 

Part of the trouble I have with the agnostic position is the idea that there might be "some" god, or gods. That line of thinking is so short as to end before you get to the end of your own nose.

The very definition of God means there can't be more than one.

The ultimate "fact" is that until the origin of this existence is proven/revealed nothing is ultimately provable. So we're all subject to faith, even those who hop up and down screaming that their position is one of absolute reason, unlike all the poor fools who'll actually admit to having faith.

 

I agree with you about the faith part, but you lost me on "The very definition of God means there can't be more than one."
Of course, there were lots of gods before there was the Judeo-Christian "God". There's nothing illogical about an agnostic thinking that maybe Baal, Dagon,Thor, Oden, etc, could exist. Is your point that there's only one Yaweh, by definition?

 

Yeah, because "god" is a singular noun. "Gods" is a plural noun. Hence, there can only be one god, but several gods.

Grammar, there.

No, sorry. Nothing is provable, but some things are more probable based on our existing understanding of the universe. Unless you believe that the universe will end with someone explaining that everything we've experience was just larks, then one can make assumptions based on amassed experience and draw conclusions from that.

In other words, you should accept that nothing is certain, but you should not accept that this is evidence of anything. If someone attempts to use uncertainty alone to push a specific model of the universe, divinity etc., you can ignore them. Ditto the "great deceiver"/flawed senses argument: if one person's senses can be flawed, anyone's can, so just as all the evidence against a specific god's existence could be bogus, so too could whatever led another to believe in that god.

Oh, also:

Tut tut. Are you hopping as we speak?

 

The only thing we can prove definitively, beyond scepticism is that we exist and we know this by the act of thinking. Thus, we exist and should embrace existence while we can, we only have one life to live and therefore we should live it how each we choose to fulfil our faculties, within the boundaries of the harm principle.

 

Yes that position is untenable but few atheists hold it. Dawkins for instance, considered one of the most outspoken and strongest atheists, most certainly does not...

 

I wouldn't go that far. Most who've really thought about their position don't, but the anti-religious types (mentioned in the "two types of atheist" thread) will often proudly proclaim that there can't be a god, and when pressed will cite something as flimsy as a few factual inaccuracies in one religious text as evidence of this; in other words, arguing against a single, specific definition of a god, and then claiming this as evidence against any kind.

While we could argue that these are not "proper" atheists, words mean what people say they mean, and few would give credence to a re-branding of them purely because "proper" atheists didn't want to be associated with them. It's far easier to my mind to just assume that, like every other demographic, atheists vary in their reasoning.

I guess what this ultimately comes down to is that declaring oneself an anything"-ist" means allying oneself strongly to an "-ism". It seems like something not to do lightly. Isms are for ideas, not people.

 

True, and it is a serious problem than the word can hold these two definitions which are logically inconsistent with one another. I think one of the ways to counter this is to challenge "strong" atheists on the basis that their logic is flawed and in doing so support an understanding of atheism which is logically supportable, focusing on the "without theism" etymology of the word. I suppose the "Brights" have tried to overcome this problem of definition by positioning themselves as proponents of "scientific naturalism" rather than the more problematic term of "athesists". However we do it, we need to refine publicly accepted definitions of what "weak" (or "true"!) atheists believe.

 

look mate that is just wrong. No one can escape faith, we can only chose what to have faith in. Otherwise you would be a skeptic and you would not believe anything at all. But you believe in 'science'. Science is a method of reducing our faiths. It is not a substitute for faith or an alternative to faith.

The only thing that you can believe without faith is, as Reefer Rogue says, that you exist. Descartes got one step up from socrates with that one. We can know that we exist as something right now. That is all. Everything else involves a faith.
Eg you have faith that you are not dreaming right now.

That is faith.

Often we dont think twice about having faith in things that seem obvious, or default. But we must have faith, because none of us have divine access to the universe, we have a little window of experience that we can poke the universe from every angle, but never embrace it in its entirety.

All we can do is say 'if we assume these points X,y,z, then we can conclude k, l, p'

But k, l, and p, can never stand alone as logical 'truths'. They must be relative to our faiths

there are various faiths that no one argues over. but they are still faith. Eg we have faith that the sun is going to rise again tomorrow. IT is a very well educated conclusion to make from our experience of the universe. But we cannot know for sure.

Skepticism is the only universal true paradigm, but it gets no where and thus is useless. But that doesnt stop it being true.

 

faith should never be a virtue - except that having faith in someone is a sign of friendliness, and thus can become a virtue of sorts. Eg if you believe in god, then it is a virtue to be faithful just as it is a virtue to be a good friend.

I think it is a virtue not to hold faiths, but to understand exactly why we put faith in things