Gnostic Atheism? WTF?

[Clueless Morgan]

Epistemically speaking, there is some non-zero chance about being wrong about everything we ever claim to know, even if that non-zero chance were 1x10^negative-trillion, so IMO anyone claiming to be a gnostic anything is overstating their claim to knowledge.

Fortunately we are not logical robots. As organisms which have evolved to act with certainty in response to certain propositions but not to others, the concept of "knowledge" is not a very good approximation of what we actually do with information.

I should have clarified that my statement is specifically in regards matters of epistemology.

In everyday parlance one can claim to know things one is very certain about (I know I'm blonde, for instance) and one doesn't need 100% certainty or 100% knowledge to act, one only needs sufficient certainty or knowledge.

I am sufficiently knowledgeable as to what range of colors of hair 'blonde' means in the English language and am sufficiently certain that my hair falls in that range of colors such that I can claim to know that I am blonde. But there is still some non-zero chance that I could be wrong about this claim. It's extremely small, I think, but it's still there.

With unfalsifiable claims such as whether there are or aren't any deities, how does one claim to know, or claim to have 100% certainty in order to take an absolute position like "I know"? We can approach a high level of certainty regarding an unfalsifiable claim, but even a high level of certainty entails agnosticism to some degree.


If we're talking about everyday parlance and the usage of the word "know" being akin to "I am very certain" then I'm a gnostic atheist since I know there is no god to the same degree of certainty that I know there are no fairies or Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot.

If we're talking about epistemic certainty and absolute knowledge claims, especially in regards to unfalsifiable claims, I'm an agnostic atheist because there is some non-zero chance that I am wrong in my claim to know there are no fairies, Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot or gods. I think the probability that I'm wrong in my assessment is pretty low, but it's still there (after all, I can't be everywhere at once and am not party to every scrap of evidence for every claim), and it's still some non-zero number.