The Hayter-Braeloch Scale

[Purple Rabbit]

@Adrian
The response to your last post adressed at me may seem late. But the problem was that I was taken out some days by the flue. Luckily for me, my mother in law (yeah I'm blessed), notwithstanding the many clear signs I have been giving of my absence of belief, has been praying for my health and now I'm up and running again and ready to refute any theistic claims.

Lumping "strong agnosticism" in with agnosticism is perfectly consistent with getting a simple scale like the one we presented. Both a strong agnostic and a weak agnostic would answer the question "Can the existence / non-existence of gods be conclusively established?" with a 'no'. How they got to that answer is different for each, but our scale isn't interested in the method by which they answer the question, just their answer to it.

You seem to acknowledge that your scale will not do justice to some positions regarding the existence of god(s). But that seems fairly critical to me when defining a scale to plot the position on belief on in a context that is full of redefinition of terms. A seemingly small variation in interpretation might lead to completely other results. For instance, the answer to a slightly altered version of the question you present in the above: ("Can the existence / non-existence of gods ever be conclusively established?") might lead to different answers. So, is your goal to lump in opinion in simple catagories just for the sake of the simplicity of the categories or is your goal to analyze the arguments behind the positions taken?

Regarding theological non-cognitivism, I already said you could place it in the "apatheist" category.

If lumping in is your business you could. If you want to do any justice as to the theological positions, you cannot. Even on Wikipedia apatheism is considered totally different from theological noncognitivism. And when you look out for expert opinion in the field, this would certainly seem ridiculous. Why is it wrong for me to expect anything less than expert opinion and care for spectral finesse from you?

You yourself said, however, that in a simplified scale, there isn't much of a need for such positions. Again, you charge that this has something to do with "personal preference" without even mentioning how. There is nothing "personal" about this.

I've already mentioned where the personal preference comes in. It's in your choice on which dimensions to base your scale and it'in your choice to lump in different position with each other in one category. Isn't it your (and Arcanus') personal choice on these very issues that led to the presented outcome?

As I explained to you before, this was all done last year, before we'd even talked about the different types of agnosticism and theological noncognitivism.

Precisely that chronology of events could have made you decide to somehow adjust the scale. One obvious suggestion is to add a category "Other", since you acknowledge your scale is neither complete nor accurate.

This is a simple scale; it covers almost everyone regarding belief in God. It isn't meant to cover every single belief (I doubt that would be even possible), and to keep things simple it lumps positions together where the belief outcome is the same (though different methods are used of getting there).

Isn't that what I have said?

If you want to work on another scale with me, I'd be very happy to do so. My friend last night proposed that not all possible positions are available on a linear scale such as this, so perhaps a 2 dimensional model might be better. I would be very interested to see if we can get all the positions (or at least, the vast majority of them) onto a scale.

As may be obvious by now I'm not interested in working on any scale with the aim of crude classification. The main reason for that is that I do not believe in crude categorization as a means to delve into a topic with such a high personal character and high impact on people's world view. I am interested however in the dimensions of reasoning involved (e.g. knowability, provability, verifiability, intelligibility) in the different theological positions taken. I only can hope to have attributed something so far.