Theists - how certain are you that a God exists?

[robvalue]

It's pretty simple.

If you claim to be absolutely certain about anything, you are implicitly claiming that you are infallible. You're saying it's impossible for you to make a mistake or be deceived.

Everything we know about the human mind shows that not only can be the mind be fooled, it can be done so incredibly easily.

Admitting that our minds are fallible is not a weakness, it's called being intellectually honest. Claiming infallibility instantly shuts down any and all sensible conversation. It is the definition of closed mindedness.

And before the tu quoques come flying in like they always do, atheism by default isn't even a positive claim. A weak atheist doesn't even believe there is no God. (If this statement makes no sense to you, then please read the quote below from my article. It's an important point. Some members have been on this forum for years and still do not understand this.) Only a small proportion of atheists take the gnostic position, even among those who take the strong position. And even then I've never heard a single atheist ever state that they cannot be wrong.

There's actually three distinct positions, two of which are atheism. These are sometimes called weak and strong atheism. (Strong atheism sometimes gets used to mean gnostic atheism too.) For more discussion on the meaning of agnostic and gnostic, please see here. Notice that there are actually two different questions that can be asked:

Question 1: Do you have an active belief there are one or more gods?
Question 2: Do you have an active belief there are no gods?

Position 1: Y, N: Theist (could be agnostic or gnostic)
Position 2: N, N: Weak atheist (agnostic) - since this position makes no claims of belief, it cannot claim to "know for sure"!
Position 3: N, Y: Strong atheist (could be agnostic or gnostic)

Everyone is in one of those 3 positions by definition. People who say they are "just agnostic" are almost certainly in position 2. So essentially they are agnostic atheists but prefer to drop the "atheist" part. This may be because of the stigma attached to the word, or it may be because they are using different definitions for words. By the definitions I use here, agnostic is not a middle ground between theism and atheism.

Position 2 is the default position. It is undecided.