Teapot Agnosticism (General)

by Mark, UK, Wednesday, February 06, 2008, 16:03 (5921 days ago) @ whitecraw

Perhaps it would be useful to separate out the two uses of the word 'agnosticism' used so far. - 1 - "Philosophical" Agnosticism - A philosophical position that holds that truth claims regarding the existence of God are unknown (or unknowable). - 2 - "Popular" Agnosticism - A "middle-ground" position situated somewhere between atheism and theism. It is most used in this sense by individuals who erroneously attribute absolute certainty to the positions of both atheism and theism -- hence, given (1), the only intellectually honest response is to remain "open-minded" about God's existence, without committing to a judgement either way. - As mentioned previously, without something close to omniscience we are all agnostics in the first, philosophical sense (theist and a-theist alike). Agnosticism is a plain statement about the imperfect nature of subjective experience ... it has little bearing on the issue of how reasonable (or ethical) it is to believe in certain things. - My point here is that the second use of the word 'agnostic' to denote someone who is functionally neutral towards the issue of God's existence is intellectually impoverished ... either you believe, or you don't, there is no middle ground. Given your previous posts on this subject, it seems that we are probably in agreement on this one. This was the point I was trying to address with Russell's Teapot (although not featured in Russell's text, the interpretation I gave has be described by large number of prominent atheist commentators, so I felt it worth addressing).