Why Agnostic?

[Tsuyoiko]

Well done, you just made an atheist's version of the Ontalogical argument, and the original sucked as badly as this one does. You cannot simply define God into existence (or non-existence as you do).

On reflection, although my argument sucked, it's not a version of the Ontological argument. It looked as though I was attempting to "define god into non-existence", but I was actually making a pathetic attempt at proof by contradiction or reductio ad absurdum.

By "incoherent" I mean "having incompatible or contradictory properties". I should have made that clear in my OP. If we can show that a particular god concept is held to have certain properties, and we can show that these properties are incompatible or contradictory, then haven't we shown (proved by contradiction) that that particular god doesn't exist?

I take Eilonnwy's point that in order to prove the non-existence of all possible gods in this way we would need absolute knowedge; we would need to define and examine every possible god-concept. But on a case-by-case basis, I think it's possible to disprove the existence of particular gods in this way.

Pondering on Tiberius's "6" last night, the use of the word "certainty" started to trouble me, so it's good to see that so many of you have similar objections.

6. Strong Agnostic Atheist – Disbelieves in God, holds God as unprovable (and unproven), but is 100% certain about its non-existence.

I could think of two ways in which you might be using the term "100% certain":

1) 100% certain as in 99.999...% certain. It is mathematically defensible to use 100% in this way, but misleading, since we would need to declare the level of approximation that is acceptable.

2) 100% certain in an absolute sense of the non-existence of something accepted as unprovable: this just equates to faith in the sense of "belief that is not based on proof".

I suspected you might have some other definition in mind, which turned out to be the case:

As for certainty, I am talking about relative certainty, not absolute. I'm near enough 100% certain about most things I do (for instance I'm 100% certain I will not get shot by a sniper when I open my door tomorrow), and that includes my disbelief in God. The key thing to remember about certainty is that it is not knowledge. You can be 100% certain about something and still be wrong. Certainty is an attitude.

As others have said, relative certainty isn't certainty at all; it seems to me to be a kind of faith, in the sense of "trust in the reliability of my conclusions".

I don't like the subjectivity of it; as you say, it's an attitude. You are making a statement about yourself, not about reality. Of course, just to say "I'm an atheist" is to make a statement about oneself, but my aim in declaring myself an atheist is to strip away as much subjectivity as possible. I can't do that if I define my atheism in terms of any attitude I may hold, so for that reason I reject your concept of "relative certainty".

First, I was wondering if you would explain something about your scale. I am confused over '2', which is supposed to characterize someone who {A} believes that God exists {B} despite the fact that God's existence is unproven or even unprovable;

I don't see a problem with this definition on the deist side; isn't that what faith is, i.e., certainty that is not based on proof?

I argue that there is no middle ground. A person is either atheistic or theistic, because there is no third option; a person either views the world as though God exists (theistic) or views the world as though God does not exist (atheistic).

I think there is a middle ground in inconsistency. Couldn't someone who's unsure whether or not god exists be inconsistent in their outlook and behaviour? Couldn't they sometimes act like god exists and sometimes act like god doesn't exist?

(iii) the impersonal pronoun "it" excludes a number of theisms with personal Gods,

I think your use of the pronoun "he" excludes some deisms with an impersonal god. I can't rate myself under a definition of atheism that refers to the concept of god with a personal pronoun.

In conclusion, I agree that Richard Dawkins' scale is somewhat ill-defined, but it's easy for me to rate myself there as a 6.

I would characterise my position in this way: the balance of evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non-existence of god.