I just found this quotation again from Yann Martel's "Life of Pi". It pretty much sums up my view of the atheism/agnosticism rift:

"I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

What do you guys think? Is there virtue in the uncertainty of agnosticism?

I'm not sure I would call it "virtue," but there is a certain pragmatism in being able to accept the fact that we just don't know something.

I consider myself an atheist, not because I know there is no God, but because I haven't seen any evidence of a God, nor do I feel that there's any need for a God.

But I could be wrong.

I think the transportation analogy is seriously flawed, inasmuch as we can know definitive things about various means of transportation. There's a world of difference between the tangible materiality of a car, say, and the ephemeral nature of (what appears to be to me, anyway) a baseless superstition.

"Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is 'I do not know.'" -- Lt. Commander Data

...and...

"To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it."- Bertrand Russell

As for the 'rift', I've can't recall ever seeing it. Atheist or agnostic, we're all pretty much rebellious colonists to the religionist's Church and King of England.


-Kerry O.

Nowadays a lot of agnosticism is down to apathy.

Have you seen any evidence that there isn't a God? I mean, why does a God necessarily have to be the God Judaism/Christianity/Islam describes?






Yes!

I haven't seen any "evidence" that there isn't a 990-foot invisible mosquito hovering over me every minute of the day. How does one prove a negative?

In the absence of anything indicating that this mosquito is actually there, I choose to operate under the assumption that it isn't. I'm always willing to reevaluate in the light of additional information -- but I don't have any real expectations that this will occur.

Since I can't conclusively prove that God doesn't exist, I base my beliefs on what I've seen and experienced. I have yet to see anything indicating that there is a God -- therefore, I conclude that He does not exist.

He's more than welcome to drop by and straighten me out on this, though.

Yeah, I suppose when you put it like that, I don't really believe in God either. ^_^

However, who isn't to say that some sort of powerful being created or engineered us or at least this planet, then left. Deism comes to mind, or perhaps some sort of alien race.

If you define God to be a powerful creator, then...well...yeah, aliens or extra-dimensional beings fit the description.

Finally, though, it's not important to acknowledge such possibilities. Rather, as far as I see it, it's more important to reject religion (lol) and smile politely at those who haven't.

Well we engineer life all the time. Perhaps we would then be considered gods by that loose definition.

As someone whom would describe himself as a self-proclaimed 'Spiritual Agnostic' I will say - YES, of course there is virtue. In my opinion, atheism is very akin to say, Christianity, in the sense that atheists are saying one way or another one-hundred percent for sure that there is no higher power or anything beyond our existence on Earth. This is just like a Christian saying, Yes - I know one-hundred percent that there is a man named Jesus up there, (somewhere), and that Adam and Eve were real people that existed in the Garden of Eden hundreds of thousands of years ago. How do you know? Have you died yet? Where did we come from? How can we have come from utter and complete nothingness??? Do you have the answers to those questions...??? Saying I'm unsure I feel is a lot more logical than saying I definitely have the answer behind our existence one way or the other. That is all.

When I was a kid, I was introduced to the idea that the prefix "a" meant "without", or 'not', and since I was not a theist, and did not have a positive belief in a god, I decided I must be a-theist. I saw that the definition of agnostic applied to me, but I didn't like the word.

Turns out that my way of thinking was completely wrong relative to the historical usage of the word atheist, BUT, apparently a large group of self-proclaimed atheists take a similar view:

"Most recently, there has been a push in certain philosophical circles to redefine atheism as the "absence of belief in deities", rather than as a belief in its own right; this definition has become popular in atheist communities, though its mainstream usage has been limited."

So when you say



There are those of us "weak atheist" who would disagree, and suggest that you are really talking about 'strong atheists'.

Interesting...

Well its really a conversation about certainty.

Can anyone really have 100% certainty about most things? Id say no.

There are fundamental things like cogito ergo sum.

I think there for I am. You know you exist and think . . . everything else is a matter of certainty.

So in that respect to be intellectually honest about any particular conclusion requires an examination of the data to even judge a figure of likeliness. Just in looking expressly requires some doubt. This scares many believers, and I guess is the grip the OP's quote had with agnosticism.

I wonder how many theist get this point and consider themselves agnostic theists . . . ahha.

My guess is very few.

My philosophy is keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out.

I mentioned that to even look at something implies some at least infinitesimal amount of doubt. Would you even care to examine this idea otherwise?

If you agree, then you either dismiss any idea of a being labeled god, which could be defined in many ways, or you acknowledge some minute amount of doubt and say, sure its possible but not probable and I await data to make me interested.

That is my philosophy and I can only call it agnostic atheism.

you simply don't know the definition of agnostic. or i should say this yann idiot doesn't. agnostic is a derivative of the word "gnostic" which means "about knowledge". "agnostic" means "about the unknowable". a pure agnostic such as myself and einstein, no i'm not even comparing myself to the great one in any manner, thinks that the human mind is incapable of knowing anything absolutely. so when talking about religion it follows that an agnostic thinks that gods, the afterlife and other supernatural phenomenon are all things that can never be known. i use these descriptions when discussing religion.

theist: one who thinks that god exists

atheist: one who thinks that god does not exist. although there are atheist who think god is possible. talk about doubt huh?

agnostic: one who thinks god is unknowable. we think that neither the theist nor the atheist can ever prove themself correct or the other wrong. we never give god a thought as it's a waste of time because we can never know one way or the other.

I am delighted to see so many good and thoughtful responses. It's nice to know there are, at least a few still, rational and thinking people in the world.

As for myself, I never trust anyone who is absolutely sure of anything. For many reasons.