Just to clear this up: every intelligent atheist is an agnostic atheist. [Spirituality & Religion]

@Celine to say something exists or does not exist is presumably a truth claim. one is stating the ontological status of something presumably based on observation or inference.

@Celine let's take two truth claims. you like to argue through science, so i'll use physics.

particles that have charge other than + or -. i can make the truth claim that such particles don't exist based on experiment and looking at the U(1) symmetry of the electroweak sector.

that is like atheism.

then you posit a particle that does not couple to the electroweak, strong, or gravitational forces. i can make no truth claim as there is no way for me to detect the particle.

that is like agnosticism.

personally i find the tension between science and faith as absurd.

from the science side absence of evidence is not evidence of absence-- classic logical fallacy.

from the side of faith, religious narrative has meaning precisely because it is transrational. as tertulian said, i believe because it is impossible.

it's a category error putting science and religion in the same bed.

@Celine My original comment was in regard to what I see as hard and indefinite ontological truth claims re theism/atheism and agnosticism.

As for the existence of God, it has no basis in reason. It ultimately comes to faith. Thus Tertulian saying that he believes because it is impossible/absurd.

Someone fails to believe in God simply because one has no faith. That is an atheist. A theist is someone who has faith. An agnostic has made no choice or feels the question is unanswerable at a fundamental level.

@Celine neither a belief or a disbelief.

i saw where you are going with this. it's just sophistry :)

i can say the agnostic is an atheist for having belief in god.

i can also say the agnostic is a theist for having no denial of god.

it's all boring word games.

the interesting question imho is how one makes truth claims.

@Celine well if acceptance and denial are dual, then if i have no denial then i have acceptance.

if we don't want to accept that acceptance and denial are dual, that the negation of one implies the other, then one has to accept an intermediate class of indeterminate statements-- which is where agnosticism would be imho.

Well your claim is that the agnostic is an atheist for having no belief in God.

I said that I could also say that the agnostic is a theist for having no rejection of God.

You say that's not true.

I am basically throwing your argument back at you.

If no rejection implies acceptance, and if the agnostic has no rejection then he has acceptance-- so he's a theist.

Both are rediculous.

Theists and atheists are disjoint sets.

Your claim is that agnostics are a subset of atheists. That is because your criterion for membership in the set "atheists" is a not having a belief in God.

We have a non-discussion here because I have different membership criteria. A person is in the set "agnostic" for having no decision. So the set of agnostics and atheists are disjoint, and disjoint with theists.

So we're both right of we accept our definitions.

I tried to illustrate "agnostic" as an ontologically uncomitted category.

@Celine Yes. It's a semantical difference.

Generally agnosticsm implies a non-commitment to choices.

Thus we say we're politically agnostic-- neither this party or that. We're agnostic about whether we like something.

@Celine Well.

This is why I tried talking about truth claims earlier.

I can see a man calling himself "agnostic" because he's unwilling to face his atheism. I know such people.

I can see a man calling himself "agnostic" because of an unwillingness to embrace religion. I know such people as well.

I call this "soft" agnosticism. It's about personal choices. In or out.

But it's possible to have a hard agnosticism based on one's personal philosophy. That the question is inherently unanswerable.

@Celine i think so.

back to my original example, now in a different form.

if you ask me if a racoon is a type of dog i can look at it's dna and anatomy and make a truth claim.

if you ask me if unicorn milk makes good cheese, it's a nonquestion. i can make no truth claim.

@Celine i guess for me i make a big deal out of keeping clear truth claims that can be verified and those who can not.

let X be the sentence "god exists".

the theist says X is true, the atheist false, and the agnostic shrugs or claims it's impossible to know.

@Celine Sure. I would be the first to admit that this is a semantic problem.

[i]For me personally[/i], I focus on "agnosticism" as being an indeterminate class. That's very key to my personal philosophical beliefs and process.

This whole triad of theism/atheism/agnosticism really has nothing to do with God. We would have the same triad with any truth claim that may or may not be verifiable.

Pick a sentence, any sentence. Here the sentence just happens to be "God exists" or it's inverse "God doesn't exist".