Hello Carleas:
What I mean is that the one position requires some form of faith, less or more doesn’t matter, as the other. I would have to be pretty arrogant to say what is, or isn’t, both of which are quite beyond my possible experience. Perhaps there is, or perhaps there isn’t, that is as far as reason alone takes us. Anything beyond such agnosticism requires a jump by the imagination, for example that logic extends beyond our minds, and reveals the inner workings of reality, for then, with this logic, one is the same as God…takes a god to kill a god. Faith in the senses is no better, for we are fallible, and an is or isn’t, takes itself as infallible. True, piety can be complicated, but only when it tries to make it’s conception independent of the personal experience, and most often this is done by trying to translate the spiritual into a form of mathematics or logic, same as you would do to establish your own personal opinion into an independent truth surely revealed by reason just as 2+2=4. Logic, by itself, is not the decisive factor, but the rules, or weapon of choice, with which the combatants “play”.
Some theist do reject reason and logic, but you have others like Leibnitz, who proceed from reason and logic to their beliefs in God. Maybe he was not a “christian”, but he was still a theist. What no one seem to answer is this assumption that goes unexamined, that presumes that we go about our beliefs with the guidance of reason. Is reasoning unbiased by the appetites of the body? No. So why do we expect that an argument alone will convince someone of either the existance or non-existance of X? The people who approve of this are men who have appointed reason in the pedestal once reserved by God. It commands them, but stands independent of them. Another idol…
Logic, as demonstrated by Leibnitz, can be used both for or against the demonstration of existence, because reason in itself cannot settle what remains a possibility. What atheist do disprove, most often and more convincingly, in my mind, is the logical impossibility for the existence of the christian God, based on the adoption of christian premises that contradict one another and contradict experience. Never can they show the impossibility of any other god or gods, because any logical conclusion can only proceed from a set of premises, and these are conceivably enless.
You can disprove any “specific god”, but can you be certain that you have disprove all possibility of any god? Once you specify the premises, then it is just a matter of finding inconsistencies that come from such construction, but that is an argument more against the form of the logical argument than an examination of what is or isn’t. What you say is not, is not by the virtue of the argument, not by the actual knowledge of what happens to be the case. In your defense, other than from argument, reason cannot probe any deeper than this.
Now, I hope that my agnostic position is clear. It is not that I am waiting for the right argument to convince me, but that I hold arguments as ineffective in respects to faith in God. Belief in God is Faith in God, not Knowledge of God. What God “is” cannot be revealed by a logical argument. Any argument may echo predispositions, biases, etc., already in us and thus convince us, but all we do is translate into reason what formerly was our passions and instincts on the matter.
My quip about even God being unable to know what he truly “is” is a paradox trying to show how even God needs a bit of faith. How this universe depends on faith. I am not saying that God is the same as the christian conception of God, or Aristotle Prime Mover. Let that be left as plural and undecided as we find it. But what I am saying is that statements about what we are, or what anything else happens to be, rest on faith, thus even if God came to us telling us that He was God, he would be reporting on a belief Himself, a belief about what He thinks, or believes Himself to be. Not that He can know. He indeed might be the Cretor of this universe, but was He not created too? Or, to put it in cosmological language, even if there was a singularity that spawned the universe at the big bang, what spawned that singularity into being? Nothing comes from nothing, and something comes from something, so there is always an implied eternal something, uncreated, that voids pretty much the need of even the distinction of created/uncreated. More than this I cannot say…