The Hayter-Braeloch Scale

[Purple Rabbit]

I agree that classification is not a bad thing per se. And if your holy grail is to rate everyone on a scale from 1 to 5 please do so (it seems from what I've seen here that people are actually rather eager to rate themselves this way). But don't expect it to be accurate and complete and don't pretend there is added value for the human race or some usefulness in formal debate in a situation that is littered with such classifications and endless redefining of terms.

[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.

[Purple Rabbit]

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.

Of course what I meant with it hardly being new for you was the discussion we had on the strong agnostic stance as a valid stance on existence of god(s) not found in the scale you presented at that time. However I was not really surprised to find it left out again.

The strong agnostic position (in short the belief that it is impossible for humans to know whether or not any deities exist) is undeniably a position on the existence of gods and one that differs completely from weak agnosticism for it assumes absolute certainty about knowability whereas your usage of the term agnosticism (see your notes) refers to "questionable strength of the arguments". Lumping it in again with agnosticism, as you do in the above, is not consistent with the notes you supplied with your scale.

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.

Theological non-cognitivism is not just an argument but a position on the god question, stating that the god word cannot be properly given any meaning and therefore that the question cannot be assessed in any meaningful way. If you don't want to hear that position, fine. But here your personal preference shines through. I doubt that a good researcher on this subject would choose knowingly to leave out such a position for his research.

[SleepingDemon]

I would call myself a 4.99. It isn't up to me to prove the non-existence of god/gods. I don't have to disprove the flying spaghetti monster, bigfoot, the chupacabra, or the leprechaun that steals my left socks. It is the responsibility of those making wild claims to prove the validity of said claims. I can say that a flock of flying toasters lives in the jungles of Brazil, but without any evidence to back up my claim, then it is as viable as any other ridiculous claim that we humans have made in the last 10,000 years.

[tavarish]

I think Apatheist should be taken out. The sheer fact that you said "They may sometimes 'believe' and other times 'not believe' that gods exist, and question whether the issue has ultimate consequences." leads to the notion that they can switch sides and be persuaded in some fashion, which isn't an accurate description of the position.

When someone believes in God, they are a theist. You can't still be an apatheist while still retaining a belief in God, and the inverse is also true. If you have no belief in God, you are an atheist. The amount of time between belief and non-belief is ultimately inconsequential.

It's like being pregnant. At the time of pregnancy, the woman is in fact pregnant. It's a true dichotomy (pregnant, not pregnant). There is no in-between. You either believe in God or you don't. Being uncertain and changing your mind doesn't warrant its own name - nor does it translate in a sliding scale, as it can apply to literally anyone with a brain and a standard of persuasion.

[Tiberius]

@Purple Rabbit

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.

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

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.

[Welsh cake]

Apatheists are by definition agnostic in the first place, so your first objection is flawed. To illustrate, if we suppose the contrary (i.e. that you can have gnostic apatheist) then such apatheists hold that the existence (or non-existence) of gods can be conclusively established, then these people must have either a belief or non-belief in God, and are therefore either Gnostic theists or Gnostic atheists.

So then we are left with what you term "apatheist theists" and "apatheist atheists". However, these are both covered in our description of apatheism (i.e. "they sometimes 'believe' and other times 'not believe'"). The point of apatheism is to be undecided, so I reject the labels of "apatheist theist" and "apatheist atheist" as actual labels, since they show a level of decision that is simply not there.

Apatheism describes the manner of acting towards a belief OR lack of a belief in a god or gods, its an attitude towards belief in concept for a deity, not a position in of itself as such. Apatheism is not Agnosticism, although it is possible to be either a pragmatic atheist, a pragmatic atheist or a pragmatic agnostic. Again, these aren't my definitions:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/apatheism.htm

Agnosticism is the separate issue of what is knowable, not what we believe, so for the sake of argument let's not focus on that on the scale for now. Basically Adrian, from what we've gathered so far if someone asks you an honest question "Does God exist?" there are a limited number of responses that determine what you are with regards to the concept.

If you answer "Yes", you're a theist.
If you answer "No", you're an atheist.
If you answer "I don't know" and/or "I don't really care", then you're an apatheist.
And finally, if you answer "Define God", you're ignostic.

[Dotard]

Neat. I'm an ignostic.

[leo-rcc]

4. Agnostic Atheist
Those who do not believe that gods exist, and hold that the non-existence of gods cannot be conclusively established (for the moment, no idea if that could change in the future).

[Caecilian]

Something that remains unclear to me: what is the scale for? I agree with Adrian that a scale would be useful for surveys of religious belief. I also agree with purple rabbit that a scale adds nothing to debates about belief, and in fact would tend to muddy waters since it is impossible to fully capture peoples' often complex religious/ philosophical positions on a scale (of however many dimensions).

With regard to a possible survey question, I don't think that asking people whether there are arguments that conclusively (dis)prove god is the way to go. Unless you're going to survey a very specific group like priests or philosophers, the vast majority of the people who make up your sample simply won't know what arguments you're talking about. Much better to focus on certainty of belief.

For similar reasons, positions like ignosticism could probably be ignored for survey purposes- after all, how many people have even heard of ignosticism, let alone know what it is?