As I have expressed a number of times in the past, I am a gnostic atheist. I am an atheist in the sense that I neither believe in nor worship, appease, pray to, or in any other way imagine myself to interact with personal gods. Simply lacking such belief and refraining from related practices is [...]
Don’t understand the cartoon? Understand it but don’t agree? Here are a few posts that will clear up what it means and why it is correct (to my mind at least): Distinguishing The Atheist Agnostic, The Theist Gnostic, The Atheist Gnostic, and The Theist Agnostic Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May [...]
In a post last weekend entitled ”Evangelical Atheism?“ I explored the ways in which some atheists may both be called “evangelical” with some justification and yet deserve to be spared the moral approbation aimed at the most notorious kinds of theistic proselytizers. In reply Greg Teed suggested to me that atheists could not be “evangelical” in any [...]
There are a lot of people who dislike Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, PZ Myers, and other prominent “New Atheists” (or, as some prefer “Gnu Atheists”) so much that they do not want to be called atheists. John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts had a post (and many remarks in the comments section [...]
Yesterday, Eric Steinhart pointed out that “Much entails atheism but atheism entails little”, which inspired F.O. to write to me, Now I just think about how much it took me to really admit to myself that I was an atheist, using that word and not any other alternative, and I found that funny somehow. Why does [...]
In the past, I have defended the idea that rather than classifying people simply as atheists, agnostics, and theists that we should separate the questions of the contents of beliefs (whether they are atheistic or theistic) from whether one’s atheism or theism is held as a matter of knowledge or not. If one’s theism is [...]
While I agree with, and vigorously defend, the notion that there is an important difference between lacking a belief in gods (as an agnostic atheist) and believing there are no gods (as a gnostic atheist), I also think that atheists should not, based on the best available scientific evidence and philosophical arguments, merely lack belief [...]
Yesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods). Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant [...]
Peter Brietbart defines and schematizes distinctions between different kinds of atheists, theists, agnostics, and gnostics which have been growing in popularity in recent years. Rather than misleadingly defining atheists as exclusively those who claim to know there are no gods, theists as those who claim to know there is a god (or gods) and agnostics [...]
Anderson Brown has an interesting post arguing that agnosticism is not a theological position because it is the claim that one cannot make a metaphysical assertion about the existence or non-existence of God and, therein rejects both the possible alternative theological positions (that there is a God and that there is not one): A “theological [...]
Thomas Huxley coined the word agnostic as a play on words. He was a philosopher who was irritated about the metaphysical presumptuousness of the philosophers around him who all seemed to know the secrets of the universe as though they had some special knowledge about things no one can really know about. He compared them, [...]
