Can Someone be Simply "An Agnostic?"

[FatAndFaithless]

No... I'm an agnostic atheist. Gnosticism addresses the epistemological quesiton, "can it be known". No, I don't think it can be known. Theism or atheism or antitheism address the theological quesiton "does one believe".

And what is a belief? It's a propositional attitude, i.e something you think is or is not the case. Here, let me reuse an earlier analogy which no one answered, aside from saying that I was cheating, because I think it clearly illustrates the problem with trying to define atheism as "lacking belief in gods":

1
0
-1

It is patently false for someone to say that because 0 isn't a positive number (and therefore "lacks positivity), that it is therefore a negative number. Yes, it IS true that zero lacks the property of positivity, but that's just something zero has in common with negative numbers. Likewise, it is true that atheists (and agnostics) lack belief in gods, but that's not why they're atheists. An atheist is one who rejects the existence of gods. That they "lack belief" is not what makes them an atheist. That's just an incidental commonality they have with agnostics, ignostics and people who have never heard of god concepts.

Check out my ET analogy on page 8 for a version of this analogy which deals with belief.

I don't claim to know about the existence/nonexistence of God(s), but I do not accept or believe the claims that they do. Agnostic atheist.

No one is saying that atheists have to claim they know that gods don't exist (even if I might be willing to go that far, perhaps). This is the thing, agnostics don't merely claim it cannot be known. They say something like "Our epistemic situation is such that I cannot answer the question 'Do gods exist?' either affirmatively (theist) or contra (atheist)." You're getting bogged down in sloppy etymology. The "a" at the beginning of the word doesn't always negate what's in front of it, i.e "afloat" doesn't mean not to float, but that something is floating.

That's exactly what I'm saying.. "atheism" isn't the opposite of theism, it is the 0 position, not making a claim either way. "Do gods exist" is a question that has a definite yes or no answer. Theists would answer yes, anti-theists would answer no, and atheism is the default, non-claimant position. Additonally, I never said that the 'a' in front of theism negates the word. I'm an atheist, and an a-antitheist (as ugly as that word looks).