Can Someone be Simply "An Agnostic?"

[FatAndFaithless]

what about "no opinion, therefore I disagree because I obviously don't agree that the HTC is better than the s5"?

Do you actually know if those are actual phones or just made up hypotheticals? Because I really don't. Therefore I really have no opinion (am agnostic) regarding Max's belief.

Why do you think I should therefore disagree with his belief? It doesn't at all follow that I don't agree. Rather, I can't agree. But it is equally true that I can't disagree. I simply have no basis for forming an opinion in either direction.

Of course a major difference between Max's example and the god question is that I am aware that actual phones exist, I just don't stay current on what models are available. I don't know if any gods exist. But I suspect the whole god question is nonsense, something I don't feel in regard to the phone question. Being a phone is a meaningful category for me; I have a reasonable chance of identifying a phone when I see one. Being a god is more problematic because I've never seen one. Worse, there is little agreement as to what the nature of such a thing would be. Since I have a working category into which I would sort many fanciful creatures and human-like beings from folklore and mythology, I suspect that the xtian god is one of these. I fully understand that such beings were or are more than that to the people for whom the bible is more than folklore. But that would have also been the case at other times for those who believed in the Norse gods or the Greek gods.

I think a better example is the jelly beans in a jar problem.

I show you a jar of jelly beans, the number of beans is either even (god exists) or odd (god doesnt exist). Those are the only two options.

I, a theist, assert to you that the number of beans is even.

You don't have enough evidence to convince you that the number of beans is even, therefore you do not accept my assertion that the number is even (god exists).

You are NOT asserting that the number is odd (god doesn't exist), you are simply rejecting the claim that the number is even.

Even if you think it's impossible to know the number of beans, or don't care about the number of beans, or think the number of beans is irrelevant to your life, you still do not accept the claim that the number is even as you don't have enough evidence for it.

If you don't have an opinion on whether or not god exists, then I do believe that makes you an atheist (as well as an a-antitheist...stupuid latin prefixes), since you are not asserting one way or another. Atheism is just the default state for the claim "God exists", like a-antitheism is the default state for the claim "God does NOT exist."