Agnostic Atheism? Your opinions..

[Mister Agenda]

As been said before: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Just because people say it does not make it correct. People say lots of stupid stuff. Absence of evidence is INDEED evidence of absence. It is not PROOF of absence but the fact that there is no evidence for a given thing is a fairly decent indicator that the thing claimed is false.

Absence of evidence where there should be evidence is evidence of absence.

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Agnostic atheism doesn't mean you can't rule anything out. I rule out anything that is both omniscient and also omnipotent or free-willed. I rule out anything that should have a measurable effect on reality but doesn't (like a real, earthly tooth fairy or Santa Claus). Things that are unfalsibiable might be real, but by definition there's no way to know if they're real or not: I'm slightly agnostic about them, I'm pretty sure the hidden God that intercedes--but only in ways that can't be confirmed--doesn't exist, but I've no way to prove it. I can put the probability pretty low since the number of things that could exist but don't is infinite...but some things that could exist but can't be currently verified actually do exist, law of large numbers.

I shouldn't have to bring up my agnosticism, people don't grill me on whether I'm absolutely certain the tooth fairy doesn't exist, except in conversations over semantics like this one. Theists are in the same boat, they have no way from distinguishing between God and a powerful alien: something doesn't have to be omnipotent to convince you it is God, it only needs to be powerful enough to convince you. Even if God showed up, and signed its name in galaxies, we couldn't be sure it isn't an alien with technology millenia ahead of ours capable of, say, plunging us all into a virtual reality. There is no way to know with epistemelogical certainty that God does exist, even if God does exist.