RE: Ignosticism?
September 2, 2013 at 8:31 pm
(This post was last modified: September 2, 2013 at 8:35 pm by Angrboda.)
It seems close to the original notion of agnosticism as advanced by Huxley. I've also heard the term ignosticism to also refer to a sort of "apathy with respect to religious questions," that ignosticism is not so much the position that I don't believe as that I don't care (an ignostic is someone who 'ignores religion'). As to the difference between ignosticism and atheism, at least as defined by Wikipedia, it would seem to be that the atheist says that she does not believe certain claims are true, whereas an ignostic says that certain claims are incoherent, and thus neither true nor false, they are just nonsense statements. (Similar to the distinction in mathematics as to whether or not a function is or is not defined at a certain value of input variables. If a function is defined, we can sensibly say that it takes on some value at that position, even if we don't know what that value is. If a function is undefined over some interval, saying so is asserting that it makes no sense to think of the function as having any specific value at all at that point. [A classic example is the function f(x) = 1/x over the closed interval between 0 and +infinity -- closed meaning that the end points are included in the interval; as the value of x gets closer to zero, the value of f approaches infinity; however at 0 itself, it becomes undefined, because the statement y = f(x) = 1/0 is not true for any possible value of y.])