Thoughts On Atheism and Faith

[ray3400]

There's actually three distinct positions, two of which are atheism. These are sometimes called weak and strong atheism. (Strong atheism sometimes gets used to mean gnostic atheism too.) For more discussion on the meaning of agnostic and gnostic, please see here. Notice that there are actually two different questions that can be asked:

Question 1: Do you have an active belief there are one or more gods?
Question 2: Do you have an active belief there are no gods?

Position 1: Y, N: Theist (could be agnostic or gnostic)
Position 2: N, N: Weak atheist (agnostic) - since this position makes no claims of belief, it cannot claim to "know for sure"!
Position 3: N, Y: Strong atheist (could be agnostic or gnostic)

Everyone is in one of those 3 positions by definition. People who say they are "just agnostic" are almost certainly in position 2. So essentially they are agnostic atheists but prefer to drop the "atheist" part. This may be because of the stigma attached to the word, or it may be because they are using different definitions for words. By the definitions I use here, agnostic is not a middle ground between theism and atheism.

Position 2 is the default position. It is undecided.

http://robvalue.wixsite.com/atheism/what-is-atheism

I think position 2 is logically consistent with not requiring faith.
However, positions 1 and 3 do inherently require faith, due to there being a degree of uncertainty with each position. Why must there be a degree of uncertainty with positions 1 and 3? God has not been formally proven or formally disproven.

Let's suppose the amount of faith required is proportional to the degree of uncertainty involved.

For example, the strong atheist has a 0.0001% uncertainty and the theist has a 50% uncertainty, therefore the theist requires 500,000 times more faith than the strong atheist. The strong atheistic position requires faith nonetheless. The only way for the strong atheist position to be logically consistent and not require faith it to bring the uncertainty level down to 0%. This is impossible without a formal disproof of the existence of God.