(March 15, 2018 at 12:35 pm)VanessaUSA Wrote:(March 15, 2018 at 9:10 am)Succubus Wrote: Excellent post Vanessa and welcome to the forums. I never could understand the agnostics position, as you say belief is binary, you either believe in god or you don't. There is no third option.
That is what is meant by agnostic atheist or agnostic theist. Modern terminology sometimes substitutes ''weak'' for agnostic, (and ''strong'' for it's polar opposite) which obscures the issues and leads to mistaken assumptions that agnostics/weak people on either side of the atheism/theism line can be easily swayed to the opposite side of the belief line. So called strong atheism / strong theism, are often used to refer to atheists and theists who make claims of existence well beyond their actual powers of human knowledge and language. It might be said then that ''strong'' atheists (much like strong theists), are rather religious, subjective, faulty in their logic, and somewhat less intellectually honest, albeit perhaps not intentionally. For my purposes here, the word religious applied to an atheist is in reference to rigid thought characterized by highly subjective and passionate mental operations, rather than more objective and dispassionate consideration of what knowledge is and how far a human being can go in making claims about knowledge and facts from a particular point in time and space of human development.
Well, there's a difference between knowledge and belief. Strong atheists don't always make claims of knowledge regarding God's existence, so they too can be agnostic atheists as well, as opposed to gnostic atheists.
The strong atheist says they believe God does not exist, which is a fairly reasonable claim to make, considering the utter lack of evidence for such a grand being. It's the gnostic atheists who say they know God does not exist.
And of course, we need to keep in mind that when we're discussing "God", we're usually referring to a certain type of God believed in by many deists and/or adherents to any of the Abrahamic religions. So atheistic positions can vary per individual based on which god is being debated.
