Atheism, theism and agnosticism

Sure, but they understand incorrectly.
While language and definition does tend to dumb down to pander to the simplest, philosophy is still an area where accuracy of definition is retained... and in that regard Agnosticism is simply NOT merely the middle ground between Atheism and Theism.
I, as are many here, am an Agnostic Atheist.
Whether or not "most" understand the distinctions is, frankly, irrelevant... as "most" do not frequent the philosophy section of this (or any other) forum.

I agree with this.

Simply inaccurate. Agnosticism is not a question of ontology but epistemology. Theists can be Agnostic... it is a matter of whether you know, or consider the matter knowable.

Simplistic. While it is quite possibly what "most" might understand the term to mean, it is a slippery slope to pander to those who do not frequent philosophy forums or even consider philosophical topics.

Yet this precludes the existence of agnostic theists: those who consider God unknowable yet still believe that God exists.
Given that it precludes a portion of theists that do actually exist, your definitions must be lacking... which to me stems from a simplistic understanding of the terms.

But Agnosticism is NOT a sliding scale of belief - but a matter of epistemology. It is an entirely different scale.

Simplistic and flawed, even if it is what "most" might understand.

 

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wynn,

That subtlety is post-theistic, i.e. an issue of theology once someone has decided a god exists. And as such is outside the scope of this thread.

For example in Deism God simply started everything in motion and then left the scene leaving issues of morality etc to people to define and work-out for themselves, it was not a personal God like the Christian concept. But both are theists - both believe a God exists.

 

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Sarkus,

I have argued elewhere as you have and got nowhere, the debate on these terms is tiresome when rigidity of meaning becomes a central platform. For practical purposes in real life it is much simpler for religious debate, rather than purist philosophy, to go with the popular usage of the terms, and in fact dictionaries do also tend to update themselves based on popular usage and give usage defintions as alternatives. It is not that I am arguing that dictionaries define what terms mean rather it is people who choose a meaning based on actual usage and dictionaries catch up later. Meanings of terms morph over time.

An example is the term "faith". It clearly has two distinct meanings (1) absolute convinction of the truth of a proposition without evidence, and (2) confident of a proposition based on inductive reasoning. Both definitions are correct and very different, but both meanings are often misused in religious discussions.

The word "gay" now seems to have 3 meanings - (1) happy, (2) homosexual, (3) stupid. What it means at any given time is entirely contextual.

In my post above the usage of the terms theist, agnostic, and atheist, are widely and popularly accepted. They are entirely accurate given actual usage and popular understanding. I could argue that my usage has mass support and that it is you that has the alternative meanings, although purists would find that perspective very irksome.

While the history of the term agnostic revolves around epistemology, in actual usage it has come to mean undecided or skeptical. Continuing to argue for historical accuracy and ignore popular usage is a losing strategy. Accept that there are two definitions.

 

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I accept that there are multiple definitions, and in casual parlance I might agree and even use the simplistic versions you propose. But if we can not retain the more precise (and dare I say accurate) philosophical usage in one of the few places where we gather to discuss that very philosophy then we are at the whim of those that have no relevance to our discussions. And that, to me, is profoundly idiotic... like asking an Arts student to define what Science is, or an American to decide the rules of Cricket.
It is not a route I intend to go down.
And I will vehemently argue against such definitions and understandings within the very halls that attempt to promote discussion on such matters.

 

sarkus,

But your argument is not more precise or more accurate, just simply more confusing.

The argument here is the combination of two distinct variables which would be useful if there was a correlation between the two but there isn't. The variables are degress of belief and degrees of knowability. The matrix of combinations becomes -

1. Gnostic Theist.
2. Agnostic Theist.
3. Gnostic Atheist.
4. Agnostic Atheist.

Knowing that someone holds a gnostic view tells us nothing about whether they are theist or atheist, similarly knowing that someone is theist or atheist tells us nothing about whether they are gnostic or agnostic. In short the relationship while perhaps interesting is of no practical value. An alternative or additional combination would be gender and belief. So here we would have -

1. Male Theists
2. Female Theists
3. Male Atheists
4. Female Atheists.

Knowing either gender or belief tells us nothing about the other. So the discussion is somewhat pointless as we gain nothing of value from combining the variables.

What would be more interesting is a discussion of each of the two variables independently. We can construct sliding scales for both.

Degrees of BELIEF

Theism........................................skepticsm......................................Atheism

Degrees of KNOWABILITY

Gnosticsm...................................skepticsm....................................Agnosticsm

I've used the term "scepticsm" in each case to reflect the mid point in each range. In the latter case skepticism would reflect the state of not being able to decide whether something was knowable or not.

I would argue here that viewing each independently as a scale tells us much more than the 4 quadrant diagram. The scale reflects the wide sliding range of conviction or comprehension by real people rather than they be pigeonholed into a few discrete extreme buckets.

 

You seem to be assuming that Agnosticism should be on the same scale as Theism/Atheism in order to have practical value??
That is your error (and possibly the error "most" hold), since they are different matters entirely. One is a matter of Ontology, the other Epistemology.

If the discussion is a matter of beliefs held among genders then it is of importance.
Agnosticism generally describes WHY someone is an Atheist... but an Atheist that does not hold the belief that God exists. But it could apply to Theists as well.
It would be incorrect to state that Agnosticism is someone, for example, who thinks that God existing is a 50/50 proposition, which is where you seem to have Agnosticism on a sliding scale.

The main issue is whether Atheism is a statement that God does not exist, or merely one of not holding the notion that God exists (while not going as far as to say God does not exist).
To force Agnosticism in to the scale between the two is flawed from the outset, since it DOES relate to a different aspect of the question, not quite to the extent that gender does, but it is still separate.
That is why people do qualify themselves as Agnostic Atheist, and some even Agnostic Theists... the Agnosticism describes their position on knowledge, not on belief.

Agreed - so why try to force the two variables together onto the same scale when you seem to concur that they are separate?

Again I agree, so I am confused by your insistence to promote Agnosticism as a mid-point between Theism and Atheism.

The main issue you seem to be trying to resolve is that most Atheists who discuss such matters are merely those who do not hold to the belief that God exists, whereas "most" (of those who do not discuss such matters) view Atheism as holding the belief that God does not exist.
I would concur that this is an issue, but not one that we should be looking to resolve by throwing separate variables onto a single scale.
Instead we should just accept that there is a difference, and adapt our language / meanings to accommodate those we are speaking with - once we have clarified the meaning they understand.

 

Ben Goldacre used an excellent term in an interview the other day; "apatheist", as in he just doesn't care.

 

Not at all, and it is not a mere "subtlety."

"To believe" and "to believe in" are simply two very different concepts, and this needs to be acknowledged.

That is your projective speculation about how believers proceed.

I seriously doubt that anyone first decides that God exists, and then decides to believe in God.

Sure, a frequent rationalization of the phenomenon of belief in God is that this is how people go about in matters of their belief in God, but I see no persuasive reason to believe that this is indeed how actual believers proceed.

 

Wynn, do you consider it possible to "believe in" something that you don't believe exists?

 

And that seems like a decidedly atheistic take on the matter.

How many theists actually think of theism/atheism that way?


The story goes that Satan and the demons not only believe, but know that God exists: but they do not believe in God.

Do you have confirmation from theists that the above are adequate distinctions?

Because if theists themselves do not find these distinctions adequate, then why use those distinctions anyway?

 

Do you believe in free will, equality of all people, a better tomorrow, ...?

 

I sometimes try to tell Christians that believing "in" Jesus doesn't just mean believing that he existed or that he rose from the dead or that he's the son of God; it means believing in what he stood for. I find that a lot of athesists believe in Christian principles more than most Christians do.

 

They believe, and they don't believe? I realize that 'believe' is being used in two different senses, but wording things like that still sounds unnecessarily problematic, too close to being a contradiction.

I think that I'd prefer to say something along the lines of: 'Satan believes in the existence of God, but lacks faith in God'. Or maybe, 'Satan acknowledges the existence of God, but fails to acknowledge God as the lord'. Or whatever it is that one is expected to do with gods.

Nobody could properly call Satan an 'atheist'. But you do have a good point that that it doesn't sound entirely right to call him a 'theist' either.

I guess that this illustrates a subtle difference between 'theist' in a philosophical sense meaning 'believes in the existence of God or gods', and 'theist' in some more religious sense, meaning 'one who assumes the proper attitude towards God'.

A similar kind of situation seems to arise with people who believe in different god(s) than one's own. Their belief certainly seems to qualify them theists, even if like Satan, they (arguably) haven't assumed the proper relationship to the proper god.

 

Agreed. It's the atheists who use the words "to believe" and "to believe in" as if they would be interachangeable.

Of course.

Exactly.

Precisely.
And the problem then is what use are some strictly abstract, philosophical definitions of "theist" and "atheist", if few or no theists use them?


Perhaps a self-styled theist like Anthony Flew would fit the notion that one first decides that a god exists, and then believes in this god. But I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of theists throughout history have not proceeded that way.

Sure. For example, some Hindus and Christians mutually accuse eachother of atheism. Now what?

 

There is a number of assumptions in this question that will take a while to unravel.


First of all, can or does knowledge of existence precede knowledge of essence?
We've had a few threads on this over time.

I think it is impossible to know that something exists unless one also has knowledge of what that phenomenon is. If one doesn't know what something is, how can one recognize it as existent or non-existent? One can't.

But the definitions of theism and atheism as worked out in the OP seem to suggest that first one knows or believes something to exist, and only afterwards has some kind of idea what that is. That seems like a logical impossibility.


Secondly, as I've mentioned several times, trying to prove or disprove (empirically or theoretically) the existence of God is a futile endeavor for a human being. Since God is the one that is defined as the one who contextualizes all human living, thinking, feeling, doing, whatever a human thinks, feels or does, God is the one who makes it all possible (which follows from the common definition that God is the Creator, Maintainer and Controller of the Universe and living beings - "not a blade of grass moves without God's will"). So if you explore and reason about God, whatever conclusion you come to (be it "God exists" or "God doesn't exist"), as long as you work with the common definitions of God, all your conclusions about God's existence or non-existence do not apply, as they are beyond your human competence to make validly.
(So you are making the same mistake as the IDers (sic!), in presuming that a human can prove or disprove the existence of God.)


A human may arguably be able to make valid claims about the existence or non-existence of a demigod or a Mormon-kind of god; ie. beings that are defined as not being The Highest There Is, and as not being the Creator, Maintainer and Controller of the Universe and living beings.

 

Well, when people first saw an elephant, they knew then that it existed without knowing beforehand what its essence was. Knowledge of both were achieved at the same time - or at least through the same event, the observation. (As to which was processed first, essence or existence, that's a question for neuroscience, possibly).

I'm not sure the definitions do that. They merely restrict theism/atheism to matters of belief of existence... whether or not one has an idea of what it is.
Ignosticism is the position that a coherent definition of God must be put forward for the question of its existence to even be considered. This would certainly cover your argument: essence before existence. But the OP is defining these people within atheism, because they are covered by "not believing in (the existence of) God", even if their reason is that they don't have a working definition of God.

Not disputed. Not sure anyone here as said otherwise?

Well, that's one definition of God.

This is indeed a position that some Agnostic Theists take, as well as some Agnostic Atheists.

The issue of proof has not reared its head in this thread (at least not by me) before you made this post... and I would have thought you would know by now that I am an Agnostic: I think the issue of God is unscientific, unfalsifiable, unprovable, unknowable etc.

Do you consider it possible to know without being able to prove?

 

Believing God exists, or not, does not make one a theist or atheist, but it may be a reason.


jan.

 

I'm an atheist (I guess) and I don't recall ever doing that. I don't recall seeing anyone else here on Sciforums doing it, and this board is absolutely infested with atheists.

'Failing to believe in' does kind of suggest 'failing to believe' though, since a god that doesn't exist isn't likely to be communicating anything for us to believe or disbelieve. Though on second thought, we might say that even if a religious figure is believed to be entirely mythological, a fictional character in effect, what tradition has that figure saying might still be something that we would want to believe, simply on its own merits.

Addressed in the other direction, your Satan example suggests that Satan's failure to believe what God says doesn't suggest that Satan fails to believe in God's existence.

I think that part of the difficulty here comes from trying to redefine 'theist' to mean something like 'good Christian' or 'good Muslim'. 'Theist' becomes synonymous with 'proper orthodox adherent of my chosen religion'.

I think that the meaning of 'theist' is a lot broader than that. A theist may (or may not) be a good Muslim or a good Christian, or a proper devotee of some Hindu sect that identifies Krishna, Vishnu or Shiva as the Godhead. A theist could also be a deist, somebody who believes in some Hellenistic-style 'God of the philosophers'. I suppose that the many varieties of polytheists would qualify as theists in the broad sense as well.

Determining that somebody is a theist doesn't mean that we know what kind of theist the person is. Is the person aligned with a religious tradition, and if so, which one? Is the person a good and proper adherent of that tradition? We still don't know.

So I think that I'd say that yes, Satan is a theist in the big sense. Satan believes in the existence of God. But Satan definitely isn't a... whatever word is used to describe the relationship that the angels and heavenly demigods are supposed to have to the Yahweh/Allah figure. That wouldn't be Judaism, Christianity or Islam, I don't know what term tradition would apply to it. But whatever the religion of heaven is imagined to be, Satan would seem to be a theist (by acknowledging the existence of a God) who nevertheless doesn't participate in heaven's religion (by assuming the prescribed relationship to that God).

 

Most of us believe in the existence of matter, but probably none of us know what the 'essence of matter' is (or even if that phrase makes sense). I might truthfully say 'I visited the mall yesterday', without having any idea of what the 'essence of time' is or precisely how 'yesterday' is different from 'today'. All of us can recognize when there are 'two' of something, but probably none of us can give a good explanation of what numbers are.

It seems to me that we typically operate ostensively, referring to 'that... whatever it is'. Our definitions of the words and concepts that we use are often fuzzy and indistinct, serving to establish reference without necessarily defining the essence of what's being referred to.

I'm not going to entirely disagree with that. In fact, I've repeatedly argued that it's rarely very clear (to me anyway) what theists and atheists think that they are affirming and denying.

That's why I try to be specific when I'm doing my atheist thing. I flat out don't believe in the literal existence of the Bible's Yahweh and the Quran's Allah. But I'm a lot more non-committal when it comes to the universe's supposed first-cause and ultimate ground-of-being. I don't have a clue what, if anything, corresponds to those phrases.

Having said that though, many theists have thought that they have come into contact with, experienced the presence of, some ostensibly divine Being. The annals of theistic religious mysticism are filled with accounts of those encounters. Often we are told that this Being transcends our human words and concepts entirely. There's no conceivable way that a finite human being could possibly know its essence. All that we can (supposedly) know is that it exists, that it's Holy, and whatever it chooses to reveal to us in our human medium. Other than that, the divine transcends our human cognition.

I'm inclined to agree with that. That's why I consider myself an agnostic regarding knowledge of transcendent matters (should any transcendent matters exist).

The context of my life is my life, my surroundings and my experiences (including my experiences of what people like science teachers tell me). That's why I strongly lean towards a common-sense realism, despite my total inability to get to the bottom of and to fully explain the essence of what all of this ultimately is. I start right here, where I find myself, and then I work my way outwards, subjecting various things around me to inquisitive thought. But my starting point is right here, in my everyday life. I don't see how things could possibly be any different.

If "God" is completely unspeakable and completely unknowable, then why does theism exist? What is theism all about?

If we are going to persist in using the word 'God', then that word's meaning does have to intersect with our lives somehow, even if that's merely through our use of an apophatic place-holder like "total transcendence" (...not-this, not-that, for any possible finite thing or concept.)

Even if we use the word 'God' in that way, we still face the question of how that kind of 'total transcendence' differs from 'the unknown', or why we humans are supposed to worship this blank and empty object of thought and assume some kind of prescribed religious posture towards it.

If we try to reel the meaning of 'God' in from the vastness of outer space, supplying the word with some tangible cognitive content, then we are inevitably going to end up saying things about it that might be true or false, and that may or may not correspond to something that really exists.

If some of us possess the belief that the things that are said to flesh out this word 'God' with cognitive content probably aren't literally true and probably don't have any existent reference, then we would seem to qualify as atheists. If, on the other hand, somebody does believe that those things said about 'God' are true and do possess an existent reference, then they would seem to qualify as theists.