Agnostic: a pointless term?

[robvalue]

David Mitchell did that? I'm surprised.

Exactly, yes, that is my motivation to try and show why I find it redundant. It's viewed as a middle ground between atheism and theism.

The thing is, say you address a particular God claim (if someone manages to actually make one properly). They claim they know the God exists. You evaluate all the evidence and you come to the conclusion that the likelihood of the claim being correct is 50%. Do you accept the claim? No.

You reject the claim (if you understand how claims work) because there is not enough evidence to believe the claim is true beyond reasonable doubt. They are claiming to know the God exists, but actually they could do no better than a coin toss on average.

So you are an agnostic atheist.

But you are a much weaker version than an agnostic atheist like me who may put the likelihood of the claim being correct at say 0.00001%.

Remember, you are assessing their claim that they know that this God exists, and whether that claim is justified. If you reject the claim, you are saying I do not believe YOU when you say you KNOW this God exists. I am not saying the God does not exist.

If instead you claimed a God was as likely as not to exist, I would accept that claim in my original example. But not in the second, much lower probability estimation.