Agnosticism is possibly the laziest, and most error-prone of the three theories. Theism requires the most effort, as true theologians are assaulted by everyone; atheism is just faith-based assertions of there being no god, instead of there being whatever type of one. So all the same stuff applies applies, just in a negation.
Agnosticism requires no effort. Like when discussions break out you just kind of sit there and repeat the same thing over and over; and not only that, you somehow seem to -know- that you cannot know with certainty there is a God. I mean look at the sentence: ‘I cannot know [this] with certainty’ – see how that is said with certainty? So certainty is not a problem, obviously. Either that, or you’re having faith in your believed non-ability to apprehend data.
depends on what kind of agnostic. there are two: the “i don’t know” types and the “we can’t know” types. the latter…how can you know you can’t know? the former…if you don’t actually know the answer, “i don’t know” is the best answer.
btw, an idea doesn’t gain merit by requiring more effort to defend.
what’s funny about that more than anything is that, if that’s a bad thing about atheism – which they seem to claim it is – then it must equally be a bad thing about religion. so they’re kinda accidentally admitting that faith is not necessarily a good thing.
It is only in its strongest version that agnosticism says you can’t know. Regularly, it will just say the data we have cannot be used to justify either position - consequently there is no knowledge. This weaker agnostic position requires a look at the same data both theism and atheism works with.
Atheism and theism are primarily ontological positions. Agnosticism is epistemological. It can’t be ontological. A case can be made that there’s three positions only if you construe theism and atheism as epistemological. As far as an ontological take on this issue is concerned, one is either an atheist or a theist. If one has a belief among their ultimate set of beliefs that God exists, then they are theist regardless of how they arrived at that belief or whether they are justified. If the belief is lacking, and if one consequently believes God doesn’t exist, then they’re atheists, regardless of justification.
Actually, the truth is just the reverse of what you stated. I was an agnostic and I approached it this way. If there is a “God” it could be found just like anything else. Now a wise man once said, We testify to what we have seen, and speak of what we have known." However, the so-called believers, inverted that to, we can run off at the mouth all day long and don’t need to have experienced or known a thing at all. The same is true of atheist.
Now it is a fact that since predication is the inverse function of abstraction, there is no difference between asserting existence or denying existence–both are the same grammatical fault–i.e. gibberish. The realization of this goes back at least as far as Plato–and Plato was deeply religious.
Only by being agnostic does one have the possibility to actually learn the truth of the matter. The religious and the atheist alike are so in love with the sound of their own voices, that they never develop the wit to listen to what is in front of their face.
It’s not faith based if you say there is not enough evidence too convince you that Gods exists, but it is when people say things like “Gods fake” or “there’s no such thing as gods”.
Which I have heard before.
Then again in a way everything could be said too be based on faith, depending on ones interpretation of the world.
i don’t know anything with 100% certainty - but, for practical purposes, i’m sure the sun will rise tomorrow - in the same way i’m sure that the beliefs which say there either is or isn’t a god are unprovable.
it also depends, i suppose, on one’s definition of God (Aletheia alluded to that point earlier), and of “knowing” - but i think with most common theological notions of what God is, and the scientific definition of what it means to “know”, it’s a safe bet to say we can’t know, we can only have faith / or not, depending which side you choose.
Most theological notions of god make it such that you can’t know? I’m not so sure. I’m fairly sure most theological notions of God are derived from stories in which people somehow DID know. The Abrahamic religions all involve stories of people actually knowing that God exists, for example.
So no, I wouldn’t say that they are defined in such a way as to make them unknowable when the mythology about them specifically includes instances where they are known.
my argument would simply be that in those instances nothing was actually known
just because they say in stories that they know some God or other doesn’t mean they can, or ever could, even by their own notion of what God is (that being a creator of the universe and an active force within it)
That’s exactly what it means. Their notion is derived from the mythology. The mythology explicitly says that God that was known, and therefore that God that can be known.
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