Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Talking to agnostics

I keep hearing from people on an agnostic's forum that they are not atheists because they can't say they're 100% sure that no god exists. They may, and probably do, have other reasons for avoiding the label "atheist", but the one above is bogus. Here's my response to the above "reason".

The atheist's position is really as simple and easy to understand as I've made it out to be. Some people around here are making it into something it is not. As I've said: No atheist I have ever met or read has not held a falsifiable position. This is the difference between atheism and theism, and the main reason why the agnostic notion that "we cannot know" is absurd.

In other words, 1) we have been given reasons for belief by believers, and these reasons are indeed testable. If you want to say that it gives you comfort to believe in a higher power, or that the universe cares about you, and there is a purpose to it, or that you believe you'll see your dead ancestors again, then fine. But once positive claims have been put forth as facts, we've entered a new realm - my realm - one in which such claims can be tested.

2) that we can prove that many of the specific claims about specific gods are not true, or are in direct contradiction of each other, does not rule out the possibility that there may really be a higher power that has so far not been described as yet. There may well be a supreme being that simply doesn't want to be detected by us. However, this is not the god that is familiar to us in the religious literature we're most familiar with, nor would it be a being worth worshipping.

The existence of such a being would be irrelevent to us.

To sum this up - we've been given enough "evidence" to make a reasonable call on what's been claimed and laid upon the table thus far. This means, among other things, that we can reasonable claim that God doesn't exist (a falsifiable claim). What I mean by stating that I'm an atheist is that I'm aware of the claims regarding gods and, thus far, there is no compelling evidence that warrants a belief in any of the claims.

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