(February 18, 2013 at 11:29 pm)rexbeccarox Wrote: As far as I'm concerned, everyone in the entire world is agnostic. No one can know for sure whether a supreme creator/ruler exists.

Agnostics do not claim to know with any certainty that there is/isn't a God. Theists do claim to know that there is a God, so no, they wouldn't be considered agnostic.

Agnosticism sounds like a tautology to me, as if you could be sure about anything...

(February 19, 2013 at 5:07 pm)CleanShavenJesus Wrote:

(February 18, 2013 at 11:29 pm)rexbeccarox Wrote: As far as I'm concerned, everyone in the entire world is agnostic. No one can know for sure whether a supreme creator/ruler exists.

Agnostics do not claim to know with any certainty that there is/isn't a God. Theists do claim to know that there is a God, so no, they wouldn't be considered agnostic.

Just because they claim to know doesn't mean they do, though.

(February 19, 2013 at 5:28 pm)rexbeccarox Wrote:

(February 19, 2013 at 5:07 pm)CleanShavenJesus Wrote: Agnostics do not claim to know with any certainty that there is/isn't a God. Theists do claim to know that there is a God, so no, they wouldn't be considered agnostic.

Just because they claim to know doesn't mean they do, though.

You're not talking about agnosticism anymore, you're talking about a whole different ballgame. You're getting into some sort of branch of epistemology.

They claim to know. That fits the definition of a gnostic.

(February 19, 2013 at 5:36 pm)CleanShavenJesus Wrote:

(February 19, 2013 at 5:28 pm)rexbeccarox Wrote: Just because they claim to know doesn't mean they do, though.

You're not talking about agnosticism anymore, you're talking about a whole different ballgame. You're getting into some sort of branch of epistemology.

They claim to know. That fits the definition of a gnostic.

I respectfully disagree.

(February 19, 2013 at 10:29 pm)CleanShavenJesus Wrote:

Yes. Gnosticism is a claim, in this case, that "I know a god or gods exist." But no one can know that for certain. But, I would take out the red part, because I think it's a strawman.

Your title doesn't justify who you are, your actions do.

Reality and a person's expectations often don't align. These labels are given based on that a person thinks, not reality. If they think that there is a 100% possibility, then they are gnostic (despite what that real world might say).

(February 19, 2013 at 5:20 pm)LastPoet Wrote: Agnosticism sounds like a tautology to me, as if you could be sure about anything...

I'm not well read on epistemology, despite having a fondness for the subject, thus I can't produce sound reasoning for my view, but regardless. The nature of the scientific worldview, to my mind replaces questions of certainty versus uncertainty with questions of relative probability (and likely probability thresholds, as well as framing knowledge in disjunctive terms, in line with falsifiability and incompleteness). My hunch is, that once you realign along such axes, the nature and definition of what constitutes "knowledge" realign as well, thus permitting us to speak of the high probability of a proposition being true being justification for us saying that we "know" the proposition to be true. I think ultimately, the idea that we can ever "know" something in modus tollens form is a futile hope, as ultimately everything rests on unprovable assumptions, thus depriving any chain of ultimate justification. I think we need to replace the ideas of "knowledge" as in some sense being related to complete certainty with something else, or the words are going to stop being meaningful and useful. (And I haven't touched on the topics of "justified true belief," Gettier problems, foundationalism, the problems of vagueness wrt probability classes and so on. That will be in my next book. )