Atheist or Agnostic?

[Mister Agenda]

An atheist, call him Smith, will sometimes argue, in at attempt to evade any burden of proof, that he simply lacks the belief that God exists.

A Catholic, let's call him datc, will sometimes present someone else's motivation for an argument, in an attempt to poison the well and under the assumption that if someone says their motivation is other than what he supposes, they're lying....

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I love it when theists start off a thread telling us what we must think and then re-labeling us into his more convenient strawman categories.

It never gets old, which works out really well considering how often it happens.

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I see, I did not realize that atheists do not claim that God does not exist.

That sounded suspiciously like being able to acknowledge a point. I hope you're not just getting my hopes up only to dash them. I would love to have more reasonable theists here.

Most atheists don't claim God doesn't exist, though there are a significant minority who do. Some of them say agnostic/negative/weak atheists are too namby-pamby to come out and say there is no God, but we tend to be that group that is cautious about making claims beyond our ability to support them. To complicate matters, the same person can be a strong atheist in regards to some particular version of God regarded to have contradictory attributes and a weak atheist regarding other versions that are at least self-consistent (the God of deism usually falls in the latter category). That said, agnostic atheists regard the odds of any God actually being real as low, at least under 50%. If they put the odds at 55%, they'd be an agnostic theist instead, inclined (though not strongly) to think some sort of gods or God is real.

But it's basically much simpler than that: Believe at least one god or God is real=theist; don't believe at least one god or God is real=atheist.

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Am I expected to search the whole universe for God to prove he doesn't exist before I can make a fucking sandwich?

I don't know, maybe. Maybe God is extremely valuable, yet hard to find.

For example, perhaps the unicorns' horns have a chemical that will double the human lifespan. Surely, it might be worth searching for them, despite all failures up until now.

I don't think you've completely thought this through. As it turns out, your supposition is true, unicorn horns do contain such a chemical. This chemical also provides immunity to cancer and cause cancer that is already present to go into permanent remission. Access to this chemical is why I appear to be only half my chronological age and am cancer-free. I have enough to share some for the right price. What are you willing to offer to obtain some? I am willing to take your circumstances into account.

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Oh hell, I don't know how to chop a quote up with this new formatting.  Any way ..

Welcome to my nightmare.

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That's what makes me so annoyingly smug about being an atheist, making no claims, I have no burden of proof and I can't actually be wrong.

I see, so you make neither the claim that God (such as, say, the God of classical theism) exists, nor that God does not exist.

Would you then try to show the flaws in the arguments of other people both attempting to show that God exists and to show that God on the contrary does not exist?

Are you fair in your choice of targets to shoot down?

Most atheist arguments just point out the flaws in apologetic arguments. I've never seen one that isn't fatally flawed, either in its premises or in employing fallacious reasoning to get to the conclusion. That there is no good reason to believe God is real is the quintessential atheist argument, easily shot down by providing at least one exception to that rule. I would not trust an argument that purported to disprove God, unless it was a specific version of God vulnerable to proof that it has contradictory attributes or supposed to have an effect on reality that would leave detectable evidence which it did not.

Which brings us, since the topic seems to be how the other side argues, why do Christians routinely set out to argue for the existence of their God but wind up only actually arguing from some vague Creator deity or 'intelligent designer'?

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There are two ways to assemble the three parts of the word "atheist."

1)  (a + theos) + ist: you have an "ism" about the lack of God, i.e. you believe that God does not exist.  (called "hard atheism")
2)  a + (theist): you are not a theist, i.e. do not subsribe to theistic beliefs.  (called "weak atheism")

So, for example, if you have to fill out a form in which you choose from a denomination, you'd check "atheist," i.e. that you are not a theist of any type; this is "weak" atheism.  If, on the other hand, you were asked "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?" and you thought the Bible was a collection of fairy tales and dark-age superstitions, you'd say, "Heck, no!  The Biblical God is a logical impossibility!" and would be a "strong" atheist.

I may take some heat for this, and I'm not picking on you personally, lots of people say that. I used to say that, until I realized that the actual construction of atheist is 'athe-ist'. We don't get to pick 2), because it happens not to be correct. 1) is correct, but it doesn't mean 'hard atheist' just atheist. Literally 'without God'-'person concerned with'. If I were making up a new word, like 'abicyclist', I could have contructed it 'a-bicylist', anything that is not a bicylist, which would include rocks and the like. Or, I could construct it as 'abicyl-ist', a person involved with not bicycling. The latter could only be people not into bicycling, not rocks or babies or people who would bike if they could but are physically unable to do so or can't get ahold of a bike. But since I'm not the coiner of 'atheist', I'm obliged to stick with the orginal construction, which most reasonably can be interpreted as 'a person who could hold a belief in God but does not'.

I propose 'nontheist' in place of 2), anything that's not a theist is a nontheist: rocks, babies, dogs, atheists, and so on.

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Simon, in your view, what is the natural orientation of an agnostic, theism or atheism?

Should he lean toward atheism out of some psychological peculiarity, such as, as whateverist wrote on this thread,

Whatever the existential status of fanciful things may be, they have no use to me and so I make all my plans without regard to them.

Or because, as you write,

the default position on the claim that unicorns do exist, is to disbelieve the claim...?

I know you addressed this to Simon, but although an atheist is likely to say the default should be disbelief, that's an intellectual position. I would suppose a 'believing agnostic' would believe for emotional reasons while acknowledging that rationality alone does not support such belief, or perhaps not having adopted strict criteria for belief. I could be described as being such a person for awhile somewhere between being a Pentecostal and being an atheist. People are what they are. I'm much more wary of a 'gnostic theist', because they tend to be equally sure that they know what the God they are certain exists wants, but there are many exceptions to even that.