Teapot Agnosticism (General)

by whitecraw, Friday, February 08, 2008, 17:53 (5921 days ago) @ Mark

'Furthermore, if God is unknowable, then the idea of God becomes meaningless, being neither true nor false; an empty concept.' - What is at issue in agnosticism is whether of not we can know (i.e. decide beyond the possibility of doubt) the truth of the claim that God does/does not exist. Now, according to one theory of meaning, if this question is undecidable, the claim is meaningless. I wouldn't go as far as this, because I think that there's more than one kind of meaning that an utterance can have; and, just because an utterance can't be meaningful in a true-or-false kind of way, it can yet be meaningful in other ways. But I do agree that the truth or falsity of the claim that God exists/doesn't exist is undecidable, and this is chief reason to be agnostic in relation to that claim: the undecidability of its truth or falsity; its being 'empty' of any truth-value. - Regarding how reasonable it is to be sceptical about claims for which there is no evidence: scepticism is the policy of suspending one's belief in relation to claims the truth of which one cannot know, the suspension of belief being a refusal to commit oneself one way or another to its truth or falsity; and this policy ... like any policy ... is just as reasonable as the validity of the inferences by which it is arrived at from the premises on which it's based. - 'Atheism and theism are not rival schools of belief. Neither do they do not exist on an imagined scale of belief / unbelief, leaving "agnosticism" to occupy the happy middle ground. This is a common mischaracterisation. Atheism is not the "opposite" of theism, just as "no tomatoes" is not the opposite of "some tomatoes". To put it plainly; atheism is the absence of belief, not the belief in absence.'

If you define atheism as the absence of belief in God, then atheism and theism are not commensurable belief positions and there can be no meaningful dispute between them. However, atheism is one of those very imprecise terms which is claimed not only by people who don't believe in the existence of God but also by people who positively deny God's existence, which is the opposite of theism or the affirmation of God's existence. - But I do agree that agnosticism doesn't occupy some 'middle ground' on a 'sliding scale' between atheism and theism. Agnosticism is a different kind of thing entirely: it's a position on whether the truth of falsity of the claim that God exists/doesn't exist can be known; as such it can be theistic or atheistic and, of itself, entails neither and is entailed by neither.