Atheism, theism, agnosticism, gnosticism, ignosticism

[Angrboda]

I'm going to "more agree" with the OP.

To believe something is to accept a truth claim to the degree that it affects one's actions or view of reality.  The confidence level of a belief has a low correlation with whether the belief affects your actions or view of reality.

If I believe that Jesus saves my sins, I may not necessarily believe that Christianity is all true.  However, believing this dogma means that I will likely go to church, do a bible study, or think about the afterlife.

I may have an extremely low evidence level for this belief, but it doesn't matter if the belief affects my life.  I believe or I don't.  One can't go around half-believing one is going to be saved, and change one's mind every other Tuesday.

Religious beliefs are usually gained through emotion, not through reason.  The claimed high confidence of a believer is usually a smoke screen for the fact that they are scared of their belief not being true (you mean I won't meet Grandma when I die?).  Most believers don't have high confidence, yet they choose to act and live as if they do.  The cognitive dissonance is crazy, but confidence is not belief.

Many atheists treat belief and knowledge as two different dimensional axes (belief vs. knowledge, with belief being mostly binary and knowledge dealing with confidence-level and evidence).  

Dawkins introduced the spectrum of belief-level from 1 to 7 (1 being high).  Frankly, I don't like that scale.  It seems to me that it doesn't measure belief.  Wikipedia says:



Belief and knowledge may be correlated, but not enough to call them the same thing.  An agnostic is not someone who is on-the-fence about whether they believe or disbelieve in a god.  It is someone who realizes the limits to knowledge about the question.  They may or may not choose to believe, for reasons other than knowledge.

I'm reminded of a poem by Mark Strand with a line to the effect that a woman is always packing a suitcase with one hand while unpacking it with the other. Even action in its concreteness seems to fail to unambiguously resolve belief because we can and do behave in inconsistent ways. One might even question whether agnosticism in atheism isn't a bit of qualifying one's degree of belief, so as to say, "I'm sure enough to suspend affirmation, but not confident enough to affirm denial." This recalls some thoughts that I had a while back, that, while agnostic atheists may not explicitly affirm denial, we all operate according to an implicit model as to what we think is and is not. That model in an agnostic atheist does not contain a god, even if it does admit of the possibility of it acquiring one. The hitch is that all these ideas, in one way or another, appeal to naive, folk models of cognition. In as much as the mind is inaccurately described by such models, the conclusions so derived will be likewise inaccurate. Things like "tacit belief" which is in a sense absent from such models, but nonetheless relevant, make reasoning about such reasoning difficult and problematic.