In a recent comment left for me here I was asked is being agnostic on the subject of god is the better choice rather than atheism. In short, no, I don't it is.
It is true, there is no scientific way to either prove or disprove the existence of a supreme being, and I think most atheists will acknowledge that fact. So in a strict scientific sense I am agnostic where god is concerned. That being said, I am in practice an atheist concerning god because the probability of a divine creator is of such an tiny magnitude that for all practical purposes he might as well not exist anyway.
I see no reason why god deserves special attention when it comes to this subject. There are so many other things in our culture that are dismissed as false, yet you can apply the same argument to these things. Here's an example, all but the smallest children know that the Tooth Fairy does not exist. Yet strictly speaking we can't with 100 percent certainty scientifically say there is NO Tooth Fairy. We should all be agnostic when it comes to the Tooth Fairy, but we're not. We all know it is false and live our lives accordingly. Bertrand Russell makes this point quite humorously in the story of the celestial Teapot, and I suggest you Google that, for he explains this far more elegantly that I.
It seems to me that there are many things in the world that we should technically be agnostic about, yet we aren't. So why should we give a special pass to god? Just because there are a few books written about him? There are more books written about Harry Potter. If J.K. Rowling were to say that Harry Potter were in fact a real person, should we then apply the above logic to the boy wizard? Of course not.
So yes, in a very strict scientific sense, we should all be agnostic about pretty much everything, including god. However we all make assumptions based on the available evidence about what we choose to believe, or rather, not believe. For me that means that I choose to live my life under the assumption that god is not real and unless some evidence to refute that assumption is produced, will continue to do so. And the same goes for the Tooth Fairy, too.
Richard Dawkins puts is so well that I'll close with a quote from him, "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
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An Atheist Libertarian's take on faith, politics, science, religion or whatever else happens to be on my mind.
- Josh Hodding
- Vancouver, BC, Canada
- Atheist, Skeptic, Libertarian and all around Shit Disturber
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1 comment:
There is some confusion here over the meaning of the term atheist and the term agnostic. Atheism can be defined two ways - hard atheism is an assertion that there is no god. This, as you have noted, is not provable. You cannot prove a negative. It is just as impossible to prove that there are no flying purple people eaters as it is to prove there is no god. In science and in logic, the burden of proof lies with the person making a positive assertion. So the burden of proof must logically fall on the theist. He is asserting there is a god so he must define what he means by the term and then prove its existence.
Then there is soft atheism. Atheism so defined is "an absence of belief in god". An atheist of this category does not assert that there is no god. He merely says he does not believe in god, which is an entirely different matter. Agnostics, by this definition, are a sub-category of atheists. (Just as a chimpanzee is a sub-category of ape.)
But you can make a positive case for atheism as George Smith has done in his masterful Atheism: The Case Against God, if you first get the theist to define his terms. What exactly does he mean by the term god? Smith argues that all the standard and commonly accepted definitions of god are self-contradictory. Since a contradiction is false on the face of it and cannot exist, god, as a self-contradictory concept, cannot possibly exist. Ergo both soft and hard atheism are in fact, true.
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