Agnostic: a pointless term?

[bennyboy]

I'm kind of disappointed that afaict (having just browsed the thread) not one person has raised the actual philosophical position of Agnosticism.

There are three major types of agnostic:

"I don't know if there is a god." This is the position most people think of.
"I don't know and I don't care." This is the cop-out position of those who don't want to be bothered to think.

But neither one is the type of agnostic for whom the term was originally coined. That position is:

"I do not know, nobody knows, because the answer to this question is, by its nature, unknowable."

This is the Russell's Teapot position. It's the answer to theists who claim that there is a God, but that God cannot be measured, tested, confirmed or denied. A God who does not interact with the Universe in any meaningful or predictable way is unknowable. It cannot be known that such a god exists or does not exist, and if it does exist, it is irrelevant to us because it is unknowable. It may as well not exist.

So remember, whenever you answer some silly "gotcha" question (like Kalaam) with "I don't know and neither do you," you are flirting with the "hard agnostic" approach - you do not know if there is a god, and you cannot know if there is a god.

Good points, but I think there are a couple more ways in which one might at a position of not-knowing about God that is distinct from atheism.

-the person is honestly evaluating a claim, and has not arrived at a conclusion yet. In other words, the person is taking a long time to "access" the reality of their view on the God claim, and have not yet resolved the question to an answer. They have not yet discovered whether they are theist or atheist.

-the person is divided, because people are not in fact single agents, and answers do not always resolve to single answers. Take out the cat from Schrodinger's box, and put in one of your kids, and I think you'll find it's possible both to believe the child is dead, and that it is alive.

-The answerer considers the question ambiguous, and "I don't know" is the only answer to an ambiguous question. For example, if A defines God as "whatever created the universe" and B defines God as "Sky Dadding clucking in disapproval when you masturbate," I'd say A necessarily exists (though is not a very good definition), and B necessarily does not exist. By those two definitions, I am both a theist and an atheist, but my ANSWER, which must be singular, is therefore that I don't know.

-There's also the possible that "something" is out there (or hiding behind QM or whatever) that would be variously interpreted: theists saying "There's God, we've found it," and atheists saying "That's physics, we've disproven God." If I believed in the reality of this "something," would I then be claiming a theist or atheist position?

In all these cases, I dislike the atheist semantic of saying "You lack an active belief, therefore you are an atheist." This makes philosophical and pragmatic assumptions about WHY someone takes the agnostic position.

My own agnostic (not agnostic atheist) position is a combination of many of these: I think the God idea is ambiguous depending on who's asking, I think I've seen too little evidence to fully resolve the question and suspect I'll never have enough, parts of "me" still have residual active beliefs in God (apparently, based on some of my dream content), and I suspect that an actual God would be intangible to humans.

So my position is this: I'm a hard atheist or anti-theist about every mainstream definition of God. But I'm an agnostic about the general possibility of some entity, dimension or philosophical property which one might call God.