To Agnostics, question for you

[Alex K]

maybe a bit paranoid lol Saying you don't know is a perfectly valid option to most questions; and sometimes the wisest.

Lol indeed. As a teacher I can vouch for how widespread the perception is for thinking IDK is a reasonable response. It rarely correlates with wisdom though.

Agnostic just means you don't know as others have said in the thread so if they are using the term correctly it's not really a cop out. They honestly just don't know either way; what they feel is what sends them in either atheist or theist directions in my opinion.

It probably is a cop out if you answer the belief question with IDK. Surely you know whether you ever do, say or think anything out of consideration of what you know or suspect about gods. If you ever reflect on how a god would be affected by your actions, you may well be a theist. If you temper your actions out of consideration of a god's judgement just admit you're a theist.

The only slack I can give you is if you think subconsciously or out of habit even though you don't literally believe in a beardy guy in the sky. Then okay, you may acknowledge that the beliefs you are running on still reflect your religious upbringing. That's honest. With time you might find you no longer have any stray theistic beliefs banging around in the basement.

---

Since I'm reading Carriers book about bayes theorem, I must object: not being able to prove that god does not exist does not mean that I do not know anything about the likelihood. I think I can confidently say that given what I know, that God exists is very very unlikely. That is not nothing, and it makes me an agnostic atheist (the only alternative being a fundamentalist closedminded atheist).

The problem with the part I've bolded is what it is you think you know about gods. Unless you have a better definition than I do, how certain can you be that what you do know is incompatible with a god existing?

I'd say incompatibleness is not required, only for 100% certainty. What figures into the equation is the priors, which are arbitrary, but you can for example set them to 1/2, the probabilities that god belief and accorsing myths would arise in absence of a deity, and what the probability for the world being what it is given that there is a deity (this can include theodicy depending on which deity). It's impossible to give exact numbers, but one can put orders of magnitude you find reasonable and see where it gets you.