I'm going to elaborate on that, because discussions between people calling themselves agnostic and people calling themselves atheist almost always degenerate due to mere semantic and etymological differences rather than epistemological and theological ones. What's clear is that there are no definitions of agnosticism and atheism on which everyone would agree, so let me at least expand on where I'm coming from on this.
1) Theism and atheism
On the question of belief in a god, I subscribe to the school of thought that says theism and atheism exhaust all possibilities. You either posit that "god exists" - or you do not. You either hold a belief in god - or you lack that belief. Notice that the binary choice I'm describing here is not "god exists -vs- god doesn't exist". Rather, it's: "I have a particular belief... -vs- I do not have that particular belief...". It's important not to get these two comparisons muddled up.
Theism, in its fundamental sense, is no more than a belief in a god or gods.
Atheism in its fundamental sense, is no more than
the absence of those beliefs. A lack of theism. (Just as the 'a' prefix signals 'without' in a-gnosticism, so it does in a-theism). In this sense, and as has been said many times before, the answer to the charge of "Ah, but atheism is a faith too" is that atheism is a faith only in the same way that 'not fishing' is a hobby.
But of course there's a glaring omission from my description here, so let's deal with it. It's the point that, I think, makes many so-called agnostics think they have to choose (mistakenly, in my view) agnosticism rather than atheism...
There are
some atheists who go further and choose to declare a positive belief of their own. They don't settle for a mere lack of others' beliefs; they insist that, according to them, "god does not exist". Well the first thing to state about this is that it's a subset of atheism, it's not atheism itself. And the second thing is that, often, what they're really saying it "I live my life
as if there's no god, but no obviously I can't really prove it". Notwithstanding all that, then yes, this particular subset (which goes by several confusing names including strong atheism)
is essentially a belief in itself, and, taken literally, you would be right in rejecting this as being as presumptious as the theistic belief that god exists.
The problem is that many non-atheists insist on portraying this subset of atheism as the very definition, the
only definition, of atheism.
It's interesting, because in my experience, most atheists, when pressed, don't subscribe to this view. Most seem to define
their own atheism in the much less presumptious sense - simply as an absence of belief in god. A rejection (implicit or explicit) of what others are positing. Which to my way of thinking is really the only sensible way forward if you hold to the logical view that the burden of proof lies with the person making the positive claim (not least because of the impossibility of proving a negative).
So that's confusion number one - the definition of atheism as being more certain than it necessarily is - this largely, I suspect, a legacy of it having been defined historically from the religious point of view (ie. atheism = the universe with a god-shaped hole in it). Still, one interesting outcome here is that most people calling themselves agnostic could probably quite easily redefine themselves as atheist without changing their beliefs one iota (which is precisely what many of us did). It just takes a change of definition. I suppose it depends how attached a person has become to the identity cultivated around the label 'agnostic'. Anyway, this brings me on to confusion number two...
2) Agnosticism
One of the outcomes of acknowledging only this narrower and more arrogant form of atheism is that it appears to open up a space in the middle for a nice, sensible, humble "don't know" position, midway between theism and atheism - and conveniently, in plonks agnosticism. The problem here is that agnosticism and theism-atheism are fundamentally separate questions. Agnosticism can very easily co-exist with either atheism or theism, for the simple reason that it's classified according to different criteria. A theist, for example, may also be an agnostic by maintaining that an aspect of the supernatural such as God is inherently beyond the scope of human knowledge. Cultural reasons may prevent that theist from using the term 'agnostic' to describe themselves, but to take an example in this thread, if you read bryant's posts, it would be hard to deny that in between the religious content, he is actually demonstrating a certain degree of healthy agnosticism.
To confuse the debate further, we also have the question of believing in religious aspects that go beyond the mere question of god's existence - miracles, walking on water, etc. I think these sometimes motivate some atheists to over-reach in their statements about capital-G God.
Huxley held the position that because the supernatural is by definition outside nature and therefore outside the scope of human knowledge, the only logical thing to do was to suspend judgment. Well that's fine as far as it goes; it's hard to disagree with it - but we need to be clear what precisely we're merely 'suspending judgment' about, because belief in a supernatural god is more specific than belief in 'religion'. Who could possibly disagree with the statement (the tautology) that it's not possible to have knowledge about something that lies beyond the scope of human knowledge?
My point here is that we need to be clear when using the term agnostic that we're really just making a statement about the (un-)knowability of a supernatural god; we're saying nothing of the various other elements of religion, upon which we should feel more confident relinquishing our agnostic suspension of judgment.
It's surely much more reasonable to step off the fence and pass judgment about the plethora of religious stories and phenomena than it is about the existence of an entity that lies beyond human comprehension.
I'm as confident in my outright rejection of the existence of Jesus as the son of God as I am in any other mythical or religious figure (though I acknowledge that Jesus the man
may have existed). I'm as confident in the falseness of the efficacy of prayer (not counting placebo) as I am in the falseness of crystal healing or astrology - and I'm certainly not agnostic about any of those (though neither am I so dogmatic that I'd refuse to ever be proved wrong).
I reject the notion of a "loving" god or a "jealous" god as readily as I reject the notion of a "hating" god or a "crippled" god. Similarly I'm as confident rejecting the Christian version of Creation as I am the Hindu version of Creation, or, for that matter, the version of some long lost primitive Peruvian tribe.
There are many core elements of religion like this that are not necessarily a matter for agnosticism in the religious sense of the word - elements of the natural world, elements of everyday experience that science has demonstrably proven to be well within its remit (regardless of the ontological conclusions we might subsequently attach to everyday experience itself). It's quite possible to reject all these religious elements in a confident way and maintain the the agnostic view of the impossibility of knowledge concerning a god in the supernatural realm, while labelling oneself an atheist by virtue of not holding theistic beliefs. We all choose our own labels and their definitions. I'm confident that atheism represents mine. The additional (not alternative) option of agnosticism is so bleedin' obviously correct, I feel it doesn't even need to be an identifying label!
