Agnostic: a pointless term?

[robvalue]

Apologies if this has been done to death before.

I think a lot about definitions and uses of words. And I've come to think that the agnostic/gnostic distinction isn't worth the confusion it causes. I've lost count of the number of people who think agnosticism is mutually exclusive to atheism.

The first problem is the definitions. If you're gnostic, you know your belief is true. If you're agnostic, you're not certain your belief is true. So the next thing is to look at what "know" means.

It's useless to say that you can know something if and only if it is actually true. By that definition, we have no idea what we actually know out of the things we know. I believe that in general usage, to know something is to have a justified belief that it is true.

So, how much justification do you need before you say you know something? I would put forward two standards.

The first is that you are claiming it is impossible that your conclusion is wrong. You may still be actually wrong, but you are definitely correct given all the available information, and considering what other information you do not know that might affect your decision. That is a bit long winded and convoluted, so you can pretty much equate it with saying you are definitely right, what you actually know is fact.

The second definition is that you are convinced beyond reasonable doubt that you are correct, (given the information you have or do not have).

In my opinion, the first definition is almost worthless. The only cases in which I think it applies is in abstract cases, where you correctly use the laws of logic to draw a conclusion from a premise, or demonstrate the premise is impossible. But in reality, most claims that are worth debating are not going to be so clear cut. So you are giving a confidence value. If I say I know something, say for example that when I drop an object it will fall, I'm saying it would be ridiculous to expect otherwise. But it's not impossible that I am wrong. The degree of confidence your give is up to you to decide. In this way, saying you know something is a claim. To demonstrate that your claim is true, you need to show how you arrived at that conclusion. Another person may then evaluate the claim, and then either agree or disagree based on their own degree of confidence.

So if we agree that for the most part a claim of knowledge is a claim of a justified belief beyond reasonable doubt, then I think the terms gnostic and agnostic are redundant. By this definition, I know there is no God, in the same way I know an object will fall when I drop it. Absolute certainty is an almost useless concept, so to insist on it at any point is to render all discussions meaningless or to hide behind solipsism.

Weirdly though, you don't really need either term when dismissing some of the most common God claims. Any claim of omnipotent, omniscient and/or omni benevolent can be defeated simply by pointing out that such a think is a logical impossibility. It contradicts both itself and reality, and to accept it could be possible would be to accept that actual contradictions can exist in reality. If you go down this route, you can again hide behind solipsism and other mental defences, but you're really just admitting you're not interested in what is possible in reality.

But towards any general God claim that isn't going the omni route, i would say that agnosticism and Gnosticism are essentially the same thing to most atheists. Saying there is an extremely tiny minute possibility that a book written 2000 years ago might in fact be all true and that the characterises in it actually exist, is just the same as saying there is a tiny minute possibility an object will float away rather than fall when I drop it.

Thanks for reading! (Sane) feedback welcome.