Agnostic what is

Indeed, many atheists are only vaguely aware of the variety of concepts of God that there are. For example, there are the Gods of classical and neo-classical theism: the Anselmian God, for instance, or, more modestly, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good creator-God that receives so much attention in contemporary philosophy of religion. There are also the Gods of specific Western theistic religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism, which may or may not be best understood as classical or neo-classical Gods.

There are also panentheistic and process theistic Gods, as well as a variety of other God-concepts, both of Western and non-Western origin, that are largely ignored by even the most well-informed atheists. Philosophically sophisticated theists, for their part, often act as if refuting naturalism establishes the existence of the particular sort of God in which they believe.

Diller distinguishes local atheism, which denies the existence of one sort of God, from global atheism, which is the proposition that there are no Gods of any sort—that all legitimate concepts of God lack instances.

Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify Diller 11— Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities.

Global atheists might object that, even if atheism and metaphysical naturalism are not identical, a belief in the former can be based on a belief in the latter; in other words, if one has good arguments for the view that nature is a closed system, then that removes any burden to consider each God-concept separately, so long as all legitimate concepts of God imply that God is a supernatural entity—that is, an entity that is not natural, yet affects nature.

This is no easy task, especially given recent work on naturalist forms of theism e. The crucial point, however, is that no one has yet made that case. Concerning the issue of what exactly counts as a legitimate or religiously adequate concept of God, various approaches might be taken.

See, for example, Le Poidevin 52; and Leftow 66— In some religions, especially but not only certain Western monotheistic ones, worship involves total devotion and unconditional commitment. To be worthy of that sort of worship if that is even possible when the pool of potential worshipers are autonomous agents like most adult humans requires an especially impressive God, though it is controversial whether or not it requires a perfect one.

For example, even if the ancient Egyptians worshipped the Sun and regarded it as worthy of such worship, the global atheist need not deny the existence of the Sun. Instead, the global atheist can claim that the ancient Egyptians were mistaken in thinking that the Sun is worthy of religious worship. If we examine, without prejudice, the ancient heathen mythology, as contained in the poets, we shall not discover in it any such monstrous absurdity, as we may at first be apt to apprehend.

Where is the difficulty in conceiving, that the same powers or principles, whatever they were, which formed this visible world, men and animals, produced also a species of intelligent creatures, of more refined substance and greater authority than the rest?

That these creatures may be capricious, revengeful, passionate, voluptuous, is easily conceived; nor is any circumstance more apt, among ourselves, to engender such vices, than the license of absolute authority.

And in short, the whole mythological system is so natural, that, in the vast variety of planets and world[s], contained in this universe, it seems more than probable, that, somewhere or other, it is really carried into execution.

Hume [] 53, emphasis added. There is much debate about whether Hume was an atheist or a deist or neither, but no one uses this passage to support the view that he was actually a polytheist. Perhaps this is because, even if there are natural alien beings that, much like the ancient Greek and Roman gods, are far superior in power to humans but quite similar in their moral and other psychological qualities, presumably no one, at least nowadays, would be tempted to regard them as worthy of religious worship.

One possible flaw in the proposed account of global atheism is that it seems to imply overlap between deism and atheism. Of course, not all deists would count as atheists on the proposed account, but some would.

For example, consider a deist who believes that, while a supernatural person intentionally designed the universe, that deity did not specifically intend for intelligent life to evolve and has no interest whatsoever in the condition or fate of such life.

According to one relatively modest form of agnosticism, neither versatile theism nor its denial, global atheism, is known to be true. Robin Le Poidevin 76 argues for this position as follows:. This probability depends solely on a priori considerations like the intrinsic features of the content of the proposition in question e. Le Poidevin defends the first premise of this argument by stating that, while intrinsic probability plausibly depends inversely on the specificity of a claim the less specific the claim, the more ways there are for it to be true and so the more probable it is that it is true , it is impossible to show that versatile theism is more specific or less specific than its denial.

This defense appears to be incomplete, for Le Poidevin never shows that the intrinsic probability of a proposition depends only on its specificity, and there are good reasons to believe that this is not the case see, for example, Swinburne 80— Le Poidevin could respond, however, that specificity is the only uncontroversial criterion of intrinsic probability, and this lack of consensus on other criteria is all that is needed to adequately defend premise 1.

One way to defend the second premise is to review the relevant evidence and argue that it is ambiguous Le Poidevin chapter 4; and Draper Another way is to point out that atheism, which is just the proposition that theism is false, is compatible with a variety of very different hypotheses, and these hypotheses vary widely in how well they account for the total evidence.

Thus, to assess how well atheism accounts for the total evidence, one would have to calculate a weighted average of how well these different atheistic hypotheses account for the total evidence, where the weights would be the different intrinsic probabilities of each of these atheistic hypotheses. This task seems prohibitively difficult Draper and in any case has not been attempted, which supports the claim that there is no firm basis upon which to judge whether the total evidence supports theism or atheism.

The agnostic, however, might reply that this sense of the divine, unlike memory, operates at most sporadically and far from universally. Also, unlike other basic cognitive faculties, it can easily be resisted, and the existence of the beliefs it is supposed to produce can easily be explained without supposing that the faculty exists at all.

Thus, the analogy to memory is weak. For the argument also contains two inferences from steps 1 and 2 to step 3 and from step 3 to step 4 , neither of which is obviously correct. Almost all well-known arguments for atheism are arguments for a particular version of local atheism. One possible exception to this rule is an argument recently made popular by some New Atheists, although it was not invented by them. Notice the obvious relevance of this argument to agnosticism.

According to one prominent member of the agnosticism family, we have no good reason to believe that God exists and no good reason to believe that God does not exist.

Clearly, if the first premise of this argument is true, then this version of agnosticism must be false. Can the no arguments argument be construed as an argument for global atheism? One might object that it is not, strictly speaking, an argument for any sort of atheism since its conclusion is not that atheism is true but instead that there is good reason to believe that atheism is true. But that is just a quibble.

Ultimately, whether this argument can be used to defend global atheism depends on how its first premise is defended. The usual way of defending it is to derive it from some general principle according to which lacking grounds for claims of a certain sort is good reason to reject those claims.

One objection to this principle is that not every sort of thing is such that, if it existed, then we would likely have good reason to believe that it exists. Consider, for example, intelligent life in distant galaxies cf. Morris Perhaps, however, an even more narrowly restricted principle would do the trick: whenever the assumption that a positive existential claim is true would lead one to expect to have grounds for its truth, the absence of such grounds is a good reason to believe that the claim is false.

It might then be argued that i a God would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of Her existence and so ii the absence of such evidence is a good reason to believe that God does not exist. This transforms the no arguments argument into an argument from divine hiddenness.

It also transforms it into at best an argument for local atheism, since even if the God of, say, classical theism would not hide, not all legitimate God-concepts are such that a being instantiating that concept would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of its existence. The sort of God in whose non-existence philosophers seem most interested is the eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent i. One interesting question, then, is how best to argue for atheism understood locally as the proposition that omni-theism is false.

It is often claimed that a good argument for atheism is impossible because, while it is at least possible to prove that something of a certain sort exists, it is impossible to prove that nothing of that sort exists. One reason to reject this claim is that the descriptions of some kinds of objects are self-contradictory. For example, we can prove that no circular square exists because such an object would have to be both circular and non-circular, which is impossible.

Many attempts have been made to construct such arguments. For example, it has been claimed that an omnibenevolent being would be impeccable and so incapable of wrongdoing, while an omnipotent being would be quite capable of doing things that would be wrong to do. There are, however, sophisticated and plausible replies to arguments like these. Similar problems face attempts to show that omni-theism must be false because it is incompatible with certain known facts about the world.

Such arguments typically depend on detailed and contested interpretations of divine attributes like omnibenevolence. A very different approach is based on the idea that disproof need not be demonstrative. The goal of this approach is to show that the existence of an omni-God is so improbable that confident belief in the non-existence of such a God is justified.

Each of these arguments employs the same specific strategy, which is to argue that some alternative hypothesis to omni-theism is many times more probable than omni-theism. In the case of the second argument, the alternative hypothesis aesthetic deism is arguably a form of theism, and even in the case of the first argument it is arguable that the alternative hypothesis source physicalism is compatible with some forms of theism in particular ones in which God is an emergent entity.

This is not a problem for either argument, however, precisely because both are arguments for local atheism instead of global atheism. This is said to follow because theism starts out with a very low probability before taking into account any evidence. Since ambiguous or absent evidence has no effect on that prior or intrinsic probability, the posterior or all-things-considered probability of theism is also very low.

If, however, theism is very probably false, then atheism must be very probably true and this implies according to the defender of the argument that atheistic belief is justified.

This last alleged implication is examined in section 7. The low priors argument implicitly addresses this important issue in a much more sophisticated and promising way.

Unlike ontological physicalism, source physicalism is a claim about the source of mental entities, not about their nature. Source physicalists, whether they are ontological physicalists or ontological dualists, believe that the physical world existed before the mental world and caused the mental world to come into existence, which implies that all mental entities are causally dependent on physical entities. Further, even if they are ontological dualists, source physicalists need not claim that mental entities never cause physical entities or other mental entities, but they must claim that there would be no mental entities were it not for the prior existence and causal powers of one or more physical entities.

The argument proceeds as follows:. The other steps in the argument all clearly follow from previous steps. A thorough examination of the arguments for and against premise 1 is obviously impossible here, but it is worth mentioning that a defense of this premise need not claim that the known facts typically thought by natural theologians to favor omni-theism over competing hypotheses like source physicalism have no force.

Instead, it could be claimed that whatever force they have is offset at least to some significant degree by more specific facts favoring source physicalism over omni-theism.

More precisely, the point is this. Even when natural theologians successfully identify some general fact about a topic that is more probable given omni-theism than given source physicalism, they ignore other more specific facts about that same topic, facts that, given the general fact , appear to be significantly more probable given source physicalism than given omni-theism.

For example, even if omni-theism is supported by the general fact that the universe is complex, one should not ignore the more specific fact, discovered by scientists, that underlying this complexity at the level at which we experience the universe, is a much simpler early universe from which this complexity arose, and also a much simpler contemporary universe at the micro-level, one consisting of a relatively small number of different kinds of particles all of which exist in one of a relatively small number of different states.

New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for agnostic on Thesaurus. Is "Agnostic" Only About Religion? We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms. Huxley in ; see a- 6. An agnostic is one who believes it impossible to know anything about God or about the creation of the universe and refrains from commitment to any religious doctrine.

An atheist is one who denies the existence of a deity or of divine beings. Infidel means an unbeliever, especially a nonbeliever in Islam or Christianity.

A skeptic doubts and is critical of all accepted doctrines and creeds. Huxley in as a member of the now defunct Metaphysical Society, in response to what he perceived as an abundance there of strongly held beliefs.

The original usage of the term was confined to philosophy and religion, and referred to Huxley's assertion that anything beyond the material world, including the existence and nature of God, was unknowable. Founded in , in existence for over 25 years. Save Word. Definition of agnostic Entry 1 of 2. Definition of agnostic Entry 2 of 2. It's not on. How Agnostic Differs From Atheist Noun Many people are interested in distinguishing between the words agnostic and atheist.

Examples of agnostic in a Sentence Noun Even polytheists … were in fact tolerated, as Islamic rule spread to most of India. Only the total unbeliever—the agnostic or atheist—was beyond the pale of tolerance … — Bernard Lewis , Islam in History , Supporters of education vouchers … will love what Norman Macrae has to say on the subject.

Teachers' unions and other opponents of vouchers … will deplore it. Voucher agnostics and I include myself might find that the proposal not only answers most doubts but also makes sense on issues they've never much thought about. I do not really have any faith, any coherent religious faith, and yet the one thing in my life that I feel passionate and evangelical about is poetry. I should say that I am quite agnostic about this theory, so I do not write as a shill. This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross's poem.

My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostic. An existentialist night. Recent Examples on the Web: Noun The research firm Gartner recently defined two different high-level categories of AIOps: domain-centric and domain- agnostic.

Domain-Centric Vs.