The Hayter-Braeloch Scale

[Caecilian]

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@Adrian
So here is another attempt of you to classify the belief phenomenon along the lines of your personal preferences. You even go some steps further than Dawkins in presenting it to the world as the Hayter-Braeloch scale as if the name is there to grant it some authority.

It seems to me however that your scale is incomplete. You left out strong agnosticism and theological non-cognitivism.
This cannot be new to you since we had a fierce discussion on the strong agnosticism thing a while back that ended in your silence on the subject.

If your scale is primarily aiming for simplicity than I guess some argument can be made to leave out strong agnosticism and theological non-cognitivism. But in that case the scale Dawkins provided in The God Delusion (and indeed many classification that can be found on the net), suffices for the job.

If your scale is aiming at completeness and scientific rigour it seems to me that it has failed.

Your attempt does not stand on its own. Discussion on the definition of these terms is raging on for many years now as anybody can witnes on the net. Somehow the need is felt by many to classify religious stances in some solid framework. IMO this is a pitfall that easily may backslide into nonsensical debate and irrelevant discussion on language rather than religious stances. My point is that I see no merit of such classification in debate. If you are interested in religious stances of people you should hear out their arguments rather than aiming at the classification of their stances. Any framework will assume some definition of terms (as do your notes) and assume completeness that cannot be guaranteed up front.

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I'd largely agree with this. Religious (un)belief is a multi-faceted phenomenon. It makes more sense to talk about what people actually believe in, and what sort of arguments, evidence and experience they use to validate their beliefs, than to pigeon-hole them. Pigeon-holing is only likely to result in misrepresentation and over-simplification.

Having said that, I'd say that some aspects of belief could be captured on a sliding scale. For example, I don't see any problem with asking people to rate their certainty in god's existence on a scale of 1 to 5. How useful this would be is another matter entirely.