Can Someone be Simply "An Agnostic?"

[MindForgedManacle]

I think one can be strictly an agnostic. I think many theists and atheists online are guilty of trying to claim more people as being on their side. For example, some theists will pounce on weak or agnostic atheists and imply that those individuals are halfway back to theism, since they're not really atheists and thereby imply some illegitimacy to those individuals. However, atheists (including many here) play a similar game (and to be fair, I used to as well). You'll argue something like the following:

Atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of gods. Since agnosticism deals purely with knowledge, any supposedly strictly agnostic person is actually an atheist.


But I find this game to be silly. So firstly, what exactly is meant by a "lack of belief"? It's clearly supposed to mean "to not believe", or simply disbelief. My first irritation with that definition is that it's clearly a desperate attempt by my fellow atheists to codify the claim that atheists have no burden of proof, and there's no need to do so. After all, who the hell speaks of "lacking belief" in anything else? Do you tell people you lack belief in Santa Claus, or do you simply say you don't believe in him?

Secondly, I think I would actually characterize atheism as the belief that "no gods exist" or that "theism is false" (or most probably false). The reason for this when one considers a proposition's truth value, there are a few possible positions:

1) True
2) Probably true
3) Indeterminable
4) Probably false
5) False


So for clarity, imagine the above 5 positions w/respect to the the proposition "Does God exist?" Now, think about this "merely a lack of belief" brand of atheism and which it can meaningfully apply to. Clearly it can indeed apply to #'s 3,4 & 5. However, atheists that use this definition are often equivocating. When someone asks you "Are you an atheist?", they are clearly asking for your position on the question of the existence of God/gods. Ignoring this very obvious fact just comes up against a linguistic wall. Atheism has, like all other words, gained its "meaning" from its usage, and that usage has been that people by and large use atheism to refer to those who reject the existence of God/gods, and agnosticism to mean those individuals who abstain from assigning a truth value to the question of the divine, usually because they view it as unanswerable.

I'll say more if asked or questioned, but this is getting longer than I initially planned.