The Hayter-Braeloch Scale

[Tiberius]

So here is another attempt of you to classify the belief phenomenon along the lines of your personal preferences. You even go some steps further than Dawkins in presenting it to the world as the Hayter-Braeloch scale as if the name is there to grant it some authority.

This has nothing to do with my personal preferences. As I said, this scale was a joint effort between myself and Arcanus. We debated and changed our minds a lot concerning the definitions we were using, and ultimately settled upon the scale I presented.

The name isn't there to grant it authority; it's there because the scale needed a name (shock horror).

It seems to me however that your scale is incomplete. You left out strong agnosticism and theological non-cognitivism.
This cannot be new to you since we had a fierce discussion on the strong agnosticism thing a while back that ended in your silence on the subject.

It's not new, I agree. However as I stated in the first post, this was developed a year ago. Regardless, this is a scale for belief; agnosticism comes in to distinguish between people who think God has been conclusively 'proven' and people who do not. Both kinds of agnostic do not think that God has been conclusively proven, so they both end up in the "agnostic" categories.

Similarly, theological non-cognitivism is an argument, not a belief stance on the existence of Gods. Being a theological non-cognitivist doesn't automatically put you in a specific belief position, although I suppose one could argue they are in the "apatheist" category since they choose to remain 'uncertain' until definitions for God are giving proper meaning.

If your scale is primarily aiming for simplicity than I guess some argument can be made to leave out strong agnosticism and theological non-cognitivism. But in that case the scale Dawkins provided in The God Delusion (and indeed many classification that can be found on the net), suffices for the job.

It's a scale for simplicity. We think it covers pretty much everyone in terms of belief, and allows for a suitable category to be found. It also eliminates some ambiguity by defining what we mean by the words we use.

Dawkins scale is fatally flawed, as I talked about in my original blog post. Agnosticism is not a dead centre position. He also gives more leeway to the atheist side than the theist side. Notice that with the "Strong Theist" position, the definition includes the words "I know he exists", whilst the wording for the "Strong Atheist" position is "I am 100% sure". The debate then emerges by what he means in "certainty"; can someone be "100% sure" yet not be in a state of knowing?

The definition he gives for "Agnostic" is also one I think you'd be hard pushed to find associated with anyone.

My point is that I see no merit of such classification in debate. If you are interested in religious stances of people you should hear out their arguments rather than aiming at the classification of their stances. Any framework will assume some definition of terms (as do your notes) and assume completeness that cannot be guaranteed up front.

You don't, but others do, and it was an interesting thing to do. I disagree that there is no merit in it. I was talking to a friend last night who researches intelligence, and he said that a good scale like ours is needed in order to do proper research into the correlation between intelligence and religiousity. Such research doesn't separate people in terms of belief enough, so a scale on which people can place themselves would be useful.