Tag Archives: god

Defining agnosticism, atheism, and agnostic atheism

Agnosticism

What is agnosticism? There are two different things that are called agnosticism, known as strong and weak agnosticism, or positive and negative agnosticism, or hard and soft agnosticism. (All of these alternate terms, “weak”/”negative”/”soft”, seem rather connotationally unfortunate. But I figure “soft” is the least so, so that’s the one I’m gonna choose to use.)

Hard agnosticism

Hard agnosticism is the belief that it’s impossible to know whether there is a God or not. So is hard agnosticism about knowledge, as opposed to mere belief? Sort of, though it is still defined in terms of a mere belief: Whether you’re a hard agnostic is not determined by whether you have a certain piece of knowledge, but by whether you have a certain belief about knowledge.

No position regarding the existence of God, not even hard agnosticism, can be defined as knowing (or not knowing) that some particular answer to the God question is true. That’s because one of the requirements for a belief to count as knowledge is that the belief is true.

So if, say, theism was defined as knowing that there is a God, you wouldn’t be able to talk about theism without implying that you agree with it. Nor would you be able to talk about atheism without implying that you agree with that. So these things need to be defined as believing (or not believing) something. Theism, atheism, and agnosticism are about what you believe or don’t believe, not about what you know or don’t know. Even hard agnosticism is just a belief about what we don’t know.

People might sometimes describe their beliefs as “knowing”, even if they don’t really mean to assert anything stronger than belief. That’s to be expected, because if you believe something is true, then you probably also believe that your belief has all the other requirements to count as knowledge. So that’s how you might talk about what you think, but that doesn’t mean that these things are actually about knowledge as opposed to belief. Not even agnosticism, and certainly not soft agnosticism.

Soft agnosticism

What is soft agnosticism? When I look at online resources that define agnosticism, they mostly seem to focus primarily on hard agnosticism. But they also (usually rather vaguely) define the soft kind as well. And their descriptions of soft agnosticism do seem compatible with it being about belief, and not actually being about a question of knowledge distinct from the question of belief.

A soft agnostic’s answer to the question of whether there is a God is “I don’t know”. But are people really talking about knowledge as opposed to mere belief when they say that? I don’t think they are.

Answering a question with “I don’t know” would normally most likely mean something like “I don’t know which answer I should give to that question”, or “I don’t know what to believe”. I would not expect someone who gave that answer to mean something like “Whatever I might believe about that, my belief is not properly justified and does not count as knowledge”.

Because as I said before, if you believe something, that generally comes with believing that your belief has all the requirements for it to be knowledge. So it would be pretty strange to believe something, but not to consider it to be something that you know.

Unless you’re saying you have faith, but if you had faith, you wouldn’t be an agnostic, would you? Or is everyone who has faith in God an agnostic, because they merely believe but don’t know that God exists (since their belief lacks the kind of justification that would be required for a belief to be knowledge)? No, they’re not. Or at least they’re not soft agnostics, because that’s not what the soft agnostic’s answer “I don’t know” means.

If you ask people whether there’s a God, you’re looking to find out what they believe. You’re not asking about anything to do with knowledge as opposed to mere belief. And people you ask may answer using an expression that happens to contain the word “know”, but that doesn’t mean they’re randomly deciding to answer that question with something irrelevant about knowledge, instead of actually addressing the question of what they believe.

I think people who answer that question with “I don’t know” are not really saying anything about knowledge. All they’re intending to say is simply that they don’t have a belief either way. So a soft agnostic is someone who lacks a belief that there’s a God, and also lacks a belief that there’s no God.

In other words, they have no opinion. They’re undecided. They’re suspending judgment. This is (and should be) the default state for the relation between any person and any claim, until the person comes to have a sufficiently good reason to either accept or reject the claim.

Soft agnosticism is a middle ground between believing that there’s a God and believing that there’s no God. Not to be confused with a middle ground between believing there’s a God and not believing there’s a God. There is no middle ground between those things; you have to do one or the other. But you don’t have to either believe there’s a God or believe there’s no God. It’s possible to have neither of those beliefs, which is what soft agnosticism is.

The principle of agnosticism

So those are the two main meanings that “agnosticism” has today, but the word actually had a different meaning originally. When Thomas Huxley coined the word “Agnosticism”, he didn’t intend it to mean either of the things that people use it to mean now.

What Huxley called agnosticism was the general principle that you should not act like you’re certain about something unless you have good evidence to support your opinion. (This was in response to the principle of faith, which claims that there are things you should believe with complete certainty regardless of the evidence or lack thereof.)

Neither the hard nor the soft modern senses of the word “agnostic” really seem to have much to do with its original meaning. But if I had to pick one, I’d say the soft meaning is closer to the original intent of the word. Because soft agnosticism and the principle of agnosticism are both fairly closely related to the principle of initially suspending judgment by default (which I mentioned a few paragraphs ago). I don’t know where people got the idea that agnosticism meant that knowledge about God’s existence is impossible.

Atheism

What is atheism? There are two different things that some people consider to both be forms of atheism, known as strong and weak atheism, or positive and negative atheism, or hard and soft atheism. (Again, I’m gonna go with hard and soft.) Hard atheism is the belief that there is no God, and soft atheism is a lack of belief that there is a God.

Hard atheism was originally the only thing that the term “atheism” meant. It’s what most people understand that word to mean. It’s how dictionaries say the word is used. And it’s what most philosophers use it to mean.1 But a lot of atheists now consider the broader category that they call “soft atheism” to be a form of atheism too. Some of them even say the soft version is the correct way to define atheism. Where did they get the idea that atheism is a lack of belief? Does it make sense to define atheism this way?

Some people have been trying to redefine atheism as soft atheism since Antony Flew in the 1970s: “Whereas nowadays the usual meaning of ‘atheist’ in English is ‘someone who asserts that there is no such being as God’, I want the word to be understood not positively but negatively.” (At least he acknowledged that his definition was not the standard definition of atheism.)

Some atheist activist groups are pushing this redefinition of atheism, not because it makes more sense, but mainly for practical agenda-driven purposes like inflating their demographic numbers by including soft agnostics as atheists. Are there any good reasons to define atheism as soft atheism? Are there any good reasons not to?

The atheist website EvilBible.com argues against the idea that “soft atheists” should be called atheists at all. That website lists several mostly good reasons to reject the “lack of belief” definition of atheism, and it also gives one particularly bad reason. (Which is the one that it asserts the most vehemently.) The bad reason is that English speakers commonly use “I don’t believe X” to mean “I believe X is false”. That’s not a good reason because:

  • The fact that people commonly use language in illogical ways is no reason to accept those illogical uses of language. Normally, when the majority of people think or do a certain thing, intelligent people don’t take that as indisputable proof that the thing must be right. But for some reason, some people seem to think that the popular consensus can never be wrong when it comes to language.
  • The fact that some people fail to make a distinction between two different things doesn’t mean there isn’t a distinction there to be made. And it doesn’t mean the distinction should not be made.
  • And what are they even trying to prove with this argument? If this common usage argument was valid, what would the conclusion be? That everyone who says they “don’t believe” in God is an atheist? That’s basically the opposite of the point that EvilBible is trying to make! Their argument #6 seems to directly contradict their argument #8, or to make the same stupid error that their argument #8 calls out. Why are they arguing against their own position??

“Soft atheism” is not atheism

I think some of EvilBible’s other arguments for limiting the term “atheism” to hard atheism are pretty good, though:

  • Some atheists say it doesn’t matter how most people use the word, because only atheists should get to define atheism.
    • EvilBible points out that that is not how words get their meanings. The word “baby”, for instance, means what it means because that’s how we all use that word, not because babies decided that that was what it would mean.
    • I’d like to also point out (though EvilBible doesn’t mention this) that this principle of exclusive self-definition can’t work, because you would have to already know what an atheist is before you would know who gets to define it.
  • When people argue that atheism shouldn’t be defined as only hard atheism because it should be defined by atheists, they are assuming that most atheists want it to be defined as soft atheism.
    • EvilBible notes that no evidence is being provided for this idea. (EvilBible then tries to further counter it with some statistics about people who report having “no religion”. But that could mean unaffiliated theists, so those stats are irrelevant and don’t really tell us anything.)
    • Anyway, like I said, you can’t solely use what atheists think as the basis for defining atheism, because you would have to already know what an atheist is before you could know who to ask and who to ignore.
  • Some atheists think it gives them a debating advantage if they can say they don’t have a belief or are not making a claim, and therefore have no burden of proof.2
    • EvilBible responds that the people making the extraordinary claim that there is a God already have a massive burden of proof, so shifting the burden of proof onto them really isn’t necessary.
    • Another response I’ve seen (not from EvilBible) is that if atheists want to be rational and to be seen as rational, they shouldn’t be trying to avoid the burden of proof just to try to make things easier on themselves.
    • Especially if we’re talking about people who do actually have a belief that there’s no God. Why pretend you don’t? Trying to avoid the burden of proof just gives the impression that you’re unable to justify your position. You do have good reasons to think there’s no God, don’t you? I do. I don’t see why atheists would have a problem with having a burden of proof.
    • If you really don’t have a belief that there’s no God, then you may legitimately have the debating advantage of having no burden of proof, because then your position really is the default position, which is soft agnosticism. But then why insist on calling it atheism? And why would you be debating the existence of God, and care about whether you have an “advantage”, if you don’t have an opinion on the matter?
  • Etymology doesn’t necessarily tell you how a word should be used today, but for what it’s worth, the origin of the word “atheism” involved combining “atheos” with “-ism” (godless + belief), not combining “a-” with “theism” (without + belief in God).
  • The EvilBible article on defining atheism concludes by extensively quoting several reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias. None of them define atheism as a lack of belief. All of them basically define atheism as either the belief that there is no God, or the “disbelief” in or “denial” of the existence of God.
    • And they define denial as declaring something not to be true. And they note that denying the existence of God is something agnostics don’t do,3 unlike atheists.
    • The dictionaries similarly define disbelief as rejecting something as untrue, or being persuaded that an assertion is not true. One of the dictionaries contrasts unbelief (merely tentatively not accepting that something is true) with disbelief (being convinced that something is false).
    • The quoted dictionaries only define disbelief this way half the time, though. And a few of them do include a definition of disbelief as “not believing”. But I’ll note that since people do often (illogically) use that to mean believing that something is false, it’s possible that those dictionary writers didn’t really mean to say that disbelief means “not believing”. Especially since one of the dictionaries that says that is the same one that repeatedly makes the point that to disbelieve something is to believe it’s false.

Here’s another problem (in addition to the ones listed on EvilBible.com) with labeling people who merely lack belief as atheists. I believe this argument was first made by atheist philosopher Graham Oppy:

If not believing that there’s a God is a form of atheism, then by the same logic, not believing that there’s no God must be a form of theism. And if you lack both beliefs (the belief in a God and the belief in no God), then it makes exactly as much sense to say you’re a soft theist as to say you’re an soft atheist.

If it’s wrong to call such a person a theist, then it’s equally wrong to call that person an atheist. Because calling yourself an atheist when you merely lack a belief that there’s a God makes as much sense as calling yourself a theist when you merely lack a belief that there’s no God. If you call “soft atheists” atheists, then you have to accept that a soft agnostic (someone who is neither a hard theist nor a hard atheist) would be both a theist and an atheist.

But you can’t be both of those things at the same time, can you? This absurd conclusion, that someone can simultaneously be both a theist and an atheist, shows that there must have been a wrong assumption somewhere, that should be rejected. And that wrong assumption is that mere lack of belief in God is atheism. It’s not. Lack of belief in God is called non-theism. And when combined with a lack of belief that there’s no God, it’s soft agnosticism.

It’s called non-theism

  • Everyone is either a theist or a non-theist.
  • Everyone is either an atheist or a non-atheist.
  • Everyone is either an agnostic or a non-agnostic.
  • All non-theists are either atheists or agnostics.
  • All non-atheists are either theists or agnostics.
  • All non-agnostics are either theists or atheists.
  • No one is both a theist and an atheist.
  • No one is both a theist and an agnostic.
  • No one is both an atheist and an agnostic.
  • Anyone who is both a non-theist and a non-atheist is an agnostic.
  • Anyone who is both a non-theist and a non-agnostic is an atheist.
  • Anyone who is both a non-atheist and a non-agnostic is a theist.

(By “agnostic” here, I mean a soft agnostic. Hard agnosticism is a separate variable, and it’s logically possible to combine that with soft agnosticism, theism, or atheism.)

Agnostic atheism?

Can someone be both an agnostic and an atheist? It depends on what you mean by “agnostic” and “atheist”…

Continue reading Defining agnosticism, atheism, and agnostic atheism
Share this post:

The Story of Ananias and Sapphira
The Communist Cult

The disciples of Jesus were given the ability to perform miracles better than Jesus, and they convinced thousands of people to join their new religion. The members of this original Christian church didn’t keep any personal property; they shared everything they had. Everything they earned had to be brought to their leaders to be distributed among the community according to their needs.

The goal was for everyone to be equally well off, with no one having too little or too much. Everyone was to be paid the same regardless of how much or how little work they did, just as Jesus (and his ancestor David) had taught.

Continue reading The Story of Ananias and Sapphira
The Communist Cult
Share this post:

The Story of the Crucifixion of Jesus
Jesus Goes Back Home for the Weekend

Mad, bad, or God?

Jesus spent a lot of time with disreputable people. He violated the sabbath law, and encouraged others to do the same. When he saw people trying to enforce God’s law, Jesus got in the way. He told his followers to further break God’s laws by refusing to take oaths, eating unclean food, drinking blood, and hating their parents.

Jesus would go on long rants against the Jewish religious leaders. He acted like he thought he was God. He cured some people’s disabilities, only to give them to others. Jesus rudely discriminated against foreigners when they begged him to heal their children. He performed exorcisms despite knowing that it would make people worse off in the end. He sent a legion of demons to massacre someone’s livestock, just because the demons asked him to. This made everyone in that town want Jesus to go away. So he did.

Jesus said he was there to save the world, but he really just wanted to watch the world burn. He went into the temple and wrecked everything and chased the people out with a whip. He promised that those who followed him would not be excessively burdened, but then he required people to do completely pointless and unreasonably unpleasant things.

Jesus insisted on talking in confusing parables, and then got mad when no one understood him. The more he talked to people, the more they hated him. But he couldn’t figure out why. He offered people a reward, but said they could only get it if they didn’t expect a reward. People thought he was demon-possessed. Even his own family thought he was crazy.

God betrays Jesus

But there were also a lot of people who were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, which the Jewish leaders were worried would get the Jews in big trouble with their Roman overlords. God inspired the high priest to point out that it would be better for one man to die than for the whole Jewish nation to be destroyed over the treasonous claim that Jesus was their king. So the Jewish religious leaders that Jesus had so often disparaged plotted to get him killed. Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples, agreed to get paid to hand Jesus over to them.

Jesus knew what they were planning, and he didn’t want to die. He repeatedly asked God to prevent his death if that was possible. But even though it was possible, God chose not to save him, because he wanted to see him suffer. God wanted to strike Jesus with a sword. How else could God demonstrate his righteousness and justice, if not by getting his innocent son killed instead of punishing all the actual evil people? Unless Jesus let himself be killed, God wouldn’t love him anymore.

Judas “betrays” Jesus

The religious leaders sent soldiers to arrest Jesus. Judas had arranged to let them know who they were after by kissing Jesus. But Jesus told them who he was himself, so Judas didn’t actually have to do anything. But he kissed Jesus and got paid for betraying him anyway. Later, Judas decided he didn’t want that money, and gave it back to the religious leaders, and he also used it to buy a field.

The soldiers took Jesus to the high priest. After he was questioned by the high priest, Jesus was sent off to the high priest, who for some reason wanted to know if Jesus was the son of God. When Jesus replied that he was, the high priest was shocked that Jesus would say such a thing, and the Jewish religious leaders said Jesus should be put to death for blasphemy. But though the Jewish law said Jesus had to be killed, the Jews didn’t have the right to execute anyone under Roman law.

So they handed him over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who for some reason thought Jesus was the king of the Jews. Even though no one but those astrologers had ever called him the “king of the Jews” before. And even though the Jews didn’t recognize him as their king. And even though Jesus had refused to become king of the Jews. And even though Jesus, being a descendant of Jehoiachin (AKA Jeconiah), wasn’t even eligible to be king of the Jews.

Pilate didn’t think Jesus had done anything wrong, and he wanted to release him. But the crowd insisted that he should be executed, because the Jewish leaders had somehow gotten all their people to suddenly stop liking Jesus.

So Pilate handed Jesus over to his soldiers to be crucified, while blaming the Jewish people for his decision and proclaiming himself to be innocent, as if he couldn’t overrule the commoners. (It was really God’s fault, though.) The soldiers stripped Jesus, stole his underwear for themselves, beat him, mocked him, and nailed him to a cross. He died, and was put in a tomb.

The totally convincing account of the resurrection

Continue reading The Story of the Crucifixion of Jesus
Jesus Goes Back Home for the Weekend
Share this post:

How to keep God from killing you

God kills people a lot. If you want to make sure God won’t kill you, maybe the stories in the Bible can help you figure out what you should or shouldn’t be doing. Here are some Bible-based tips for staying on God’s good side:

Things to avoid

How to stop him when you think he’s going to kill you

Continue reading How to keep God from killing you
Share this post:

Had David killed Saul’s relatives against God’s will?

In 2 Samuel 16, Shimei accuses David of having murdered Saul’s relatives, and says God is punishing him for it. David makes no objection to this claim, and accepts that this message and curse are from God. But what Shimei claimed David had done is not at all what the Bible says actually happened.

Continue reading Had David killed Saul’s relatives against God’s will?
Share this post:

God has no excuse for punishing people

When the Bible describes God “punishing” people, most of the time he’s actually harming innocent people instead of the person who actually did something wrong. But even when he does manage to target the right person, is it right for him to be harming people?

If you’re going to be inflicting harm on people, you’d better have a very good reason to do it. There are several purposes that punishment is meant to accomplish, that are said to justify the practice of punishing people. But those justifications are questionable, and particularly if you’re God, none of the justifications apply. God has no excuse for ever punishing anyone.

Continue reading God has no excuse for punishing people
Share this post:

The Story of the Birth of Jesus
The Massacre of the Innocents

Over a hundred years after the time of Esther, Judea (the home of the Jews) was taken over by the Greeks when Alexander the Great arrived. And three hundred years after that, the Roman Empire took it over.

A carpenter named Joseph, who was descended from the kings of Judah, was engaged to a woman named Mary. Then God impregnated her, which nearly caused them to break up. But God insisted that Joseph should marry Mary anyway, so he did. But he didn’t have sex with her until after she gave birth to God’s baby, which they named Jesus.

While Mary was pregnant, Joseph decided to go to Bethlehem to take part in the governor Quirinius’s census of Judea. Even though Joseph didn’t live in Judea, and even though the census wouldn’t happen till several years later. And Jesus was born there.

Continue reading The Story of the Birth of Jesus
The Massacre of the Innocents
Share this post:

The Story of Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel
Daniel in the Lions' Den

Fake fortune tellers exposed

After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon captured Jehoiakim (the third-to-last king of Judah), the four smartest aristocratic young men in Judah were brought to Babylon to be Nebuchadnezzar’s advisers. Their names were Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel, but king Nebuchadnezzar renamed them Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Belteshazzar. (Apparently one of those new names wasn’t so catchy.)

Nebuchadnezzar had a troubling dream about a big statue being smashed by a rock, which then became a huge mountain. He decided to see if his magicians could tell him what it meant. To make sure they were really capable of interpreting it, instead of telling them what he had dreamed about, he demanded that they tell him first. The magicians said that was impossible; only a god could do that. Since they couldn’t read his mind, the king decided to have all the wise men in Babylon killed for being frauds.

But the king’s wise adviser Daniel said that wouldn’t be necessary, because his God could help him do what the king demanded. Daniel described the dream and said it was a prediction about the kingdoms that would come after Nebuchadnezzar’s. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Daniel and his friends to high positions.

Daniel obeys the king

After he had a dream about a huge statue, Nebuchadnezzar decided to make a huge statue. He decreed that everyone had to worship the statue or die. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship it, so the king had them tied up and thrown into a furnace. Daniel didn’t get thrown into the furnace, so apparently he was willing to worship the king’s idol.

God sent an angel to protect Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and they came out of the furnace unharmed. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to high positions.

God continues to communicate badly

Continue reading The Story of Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel
Daniel in the Lions’ Den
Share this post:

Does every firstborn male belong to God?

Yes.

When God killed the firstborn of the Egyptians, he decided that the firstborn of the Israelites would be set apart to be his. So God commanded his people to consecrate every firstborn male to him. He said the first son of every female animal or human in Israel belongs to him. You can never choose to dedicate a firstborn animal to God, because the firstborn already belongs to God by default.

That means the people have to give all their firstborn males over to God. You must give him the firstborn of your sons, doing the same thing you do with the firstborn among your livestock: They can only stay with their mothers for seven days, then you hand them over to God. They are to be set apart and never put to work the way others would be. This is how God decided it will be, therefore this is how it will be forever, and it can never be changed.

No.

Continue reading Does every firstborn male belong to God?
Share this post:

The Story of the Exile of Israel and Judah
The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms

Where the Samaritans came from, according to the Jews

Jotham’s son Ahaz was an evil king of Judah, so God sent the kings of Israel and Aram to fight against him and defeat him after God had promised they wouldn’t defeat him.4 After God predicted Assyria would destroy Judah, Ahaz got the king of Assyria to instead help him attack Israel, by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God.

Hoshea, the next king of Israel, was an evil traitor. When the king of Assyria found that out, he took Hoshea prisoner and conquered his country, putting an end to the kingdom of Israel. The people of Israel were exiled to Assyria, becoming the Ten Lost Tribes. The king of Assyria sent foreign pagans to settle in the former land of Israel, becoming Samaritans.

How Hezekiah used the gift of success

Ahaz’s son Hezekiah was the most righteous king Judah ever had. So God made him successful at everything. Hezekiah successfully convinced God to let his people break God’s law by celebrating the Passover in any way they wanted.

He successfully rebelled against the king of Assyria, so God told the king of Assyria to destroy Judah. But righteous Hezekiah kept the king of Assyria from conquering Judah by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God (which his father had already given to the king of Assyria). After Hezekiah successfully convinced the king of Assyria not to conquer Judah, the king of Assyria continued to try to conquer Judah, as God had commanded him, until God got him killed.

Hezekiah got sick, and God sent a prophet to tell him that he would never recover. But Hezekiah successfully convinced the never-changing God to change his mind, and so he recovered anyway.

Men from Babylon came to visit Hezekiah, and he showed them all the treasure and stuff he owned. The prophet told Hezekiah that now that the Babylonians knew about all that treasure, they were going to steal it all some day. And they would kidnap and castrate some of Hezekiah’s descendants. Righteous Hezekiah said he didn’t mind that, since he wouldn’t be around when it happened.

Continue reading The Story of the Exile of Israel and Judah
The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms
Share this post: