RE: Is Lack of Belief the Best You Can Do?
March 29, 2016 at 4:01 pm
(This post was last modified: March 29, 2016 at 4:26 pm by Simon Moon.)
(March 29, 2016 at 3:33 am)robvalue Wrote: I'm expecting the next move to be that those who are withholding judgement aren't atheists, they're "just agnostics". Which is wrong. If they are not yet convinced, they lack belief. They are weak agnostic atheists. (Weak being informal for not holding a positive contrary belief.) They also lack belief that there is no God. As I said, that is the case for me, regarding a generic intelligent creator. But if you want to call them "just agnostics", be my guest. It doesn't change the actual position.
Exactly.
Agnosticism is not some sort of happy middle ground between theism and atheism.
By itself, it is not a complete descriptor of one's position on the god claim. It only addresses knowledge, not belief.
If you ask someone if they believe in a god, and they answer, "I am an agnostic", they are not actually answering the question.
Belief is a binary mental state. Either one believes a premise to be true, or they don't. Even if they say they do not know, that is a mental state of not accepting the premise to be true.
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You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
