What is your opinion on the "agnostic" label?

For me it’s simple, i’m basically atheist but claim to be agnostic just to keep my options open come “judgement day”
This means that if there happens to be a fork in the death road pointing to heaven & hell, I can confidently claim myself as a fully fledged fence sitter allowing me access to paradise.
Okay, so it’s not as simple as I made out, but it covers my arse anyway.

I consider myself atheist but find “agnostic” is a gentler term for those that are hardcore believers. Of course I know no-thing for certain but I always look at possibility vs. probability. Anything is possible but is it probable?
In the case of “God” I think the probability of some omnipotent sky king is pretty low.

I think agnostic is mostly people who were raised with God, but now question His existence. There are people who I consider to be atheists for themselves, and how they live their own life, who will also admit there could be a God. I don’t consider those people agnostic, but some people do. I’m fine with whatever label an individual prefers to identify with.

I think it’s a valid designation. How do you prove or disprove a claim for which there is no evidence? There are those who think the lack of evidence should be proof enough. The agnostic saves himself considerable trouble with the simple and demonstrably consistent “I don’t know”.

Perfectly acceptable self description, it is honest and says, “I don’t know”, which is sometimes the best possible answer.

I like what Thomas Huxley, who coined the word, stated about it: “Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the “bosh” of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.”

Compare that with Richard Dawkins, who believes in the absolute certainty of Science as demonstrating the incontrovertible belief in Atheism.

Where agnsoticism gets hazy is that in common usage, it implies anti-religionist even if one is otherwise practicing a spiritual belief. What I like about those who express agnosticism, is that they are searching for answers, and are not convinced to any viewpoint, but still searching.

I have no problem with those who call themselves agnostic. Using “agnosticism” to mean “lack of knowledge,” however, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the term and one of the more enduring errors of pop-atheism. It fails to recognize the difference between belief and certainty. Properly speaking, one is agnostic when one suspends judgment. There are different reasons for suspending judgment. One might think there can be no knowledge regarding the issue about which they are agnostic. Or they might think that such knowledge is possible, but that we do not currently have it. Or maybe they just aren’t interested in making claims of belief or disbelief. There could be other reasons as well. The important point is that agnosticism is more than just an “I don’t know.” It is an intentional lack of commitment. And depending on one’s reasons, agnosticism could be a component of some further view (e.g. certain forms of apatheism or ignosticism).

@zenvelo But doesn’t agnosticism also accommodate “I don’t know & I don’t care”?

@stanleybmanly “I don’t know and I don’t care” sounds more like a form of apatheism to me. But as usual, the reasons matter. If one just doesn’t care about anything, it could be closer to a form of nihilism.

Oops. I see @SavoirFaire beat me to the punch.

Instead of apatheism, couldn’t it simply be a matter of efficiency “since I can’t know, why worry about it?”

@stanleybmanly Yes, it could be. That’s why I said that the reasons matter (though I added that in an edit, so you may not have seen it).

It’s there now.

Phone typing always renders me hopelessly behind in these conversations.

@stanleybmanly I’m pretty sure that edits don’t show up until you reload the page regardless of how you are accessing the site. So really, it’s my bad habit of adding afterthoughts in edits that is to blame.

I don’t mind the term. I consider the definition to be more along the lines of not knowing whether or not there is a deity AND not having the faith that there is. Nobody knows if there is or not but some choose to believe there is and go on to call it knowing.

I just figured agnostic just means you think something may be out there, but unsure of what it is. My boyfriend is agnostic and says that’s his mindset on the matter. (I’m Christian, and always felt that was what the term meant as well.)

Is there a philosophical error in the following?

Suppose I consider myself a scientific person, and find no evidence of anything “supernatural”, and therefore decide I don’t believe in any. But that’s not the same as believing that there certainly is not any, because there is no evidence, not a disproof, unless you mean disproving specific statements in specific texts. So believing there is nothing supernatural would not be based on evidence, just the lack of evidence. It wouldn’t apply to a faith that believes its supernatural things are hiding from you (or just not perceptible) until after you die, for example. Therefore being an “atheist” meaning someone who believes there’s nothing supernatural, would be unscientific or at least an overstatement. Being “agnostic” meaning not knowing for certain, would be more accurate.

No?

@Zaku I would agree with that.
Atheism is another belief system, different to Religion but still the same.
You don’t know but you CHOOSE to believe that you do either way.

We’re chicken shits! There is absolutely no evidence, none, of the existence of a God. There is no such thing as ghosts, or angels. We never look for supernatural explanations, but search for the logical explanation (this is something I did when I was a Christian, and it would frustrate my more fundamental friends. They’d want to read something mystical about XYZ. If I showed a logical cause they said I just “ruined it.”)
Anyway, if I die, and it turns out that somehow I’m wrong, wrong about that and also wrong about elves and fairies and unicorns, I’ll have hedged my bets.

I can’t imagine being sent to hell for it though.

I’m an agnostic atheist.

I have no belief in any god or gods, and I do not make any positive claim that no gods exist. This is because the term is meaningless until and unless it is defined in a testable way. I’m agnostic with regards to fairies and ghosts as well. I’m also an afairyist and an aghostist.

In my experience “agnostic” is a term used by people who are essentially atheist, but they don’t want to upset others.

Honestly, in most who use the term to describe themselves it comes across as little more than meek fence-sitting.

@Darth_Algar Better meek fence sitting than instigating war with the faith based believers. Luckily it is rare that I even have to declare my beliefs, thank “God.” lol

Meh. If anyone asks me I tell them honestly. If that upsets them that’s their problem, not mine. I don’t consider it my job to placate others.

@Darth_Algar I do too, most of the time, but not if I am under siege from the roving bands of Jehovahs Witnesses that roam the country side out here. The objective is to get them to disperse as quickly as possible so I offer no fodder to the herd. lol

I’m agnostic. I was not raised as a religious or spiritual person. I was raised to treat others how I would like to be treated.

I call myself agnostic because I think it’s a bit arrogant to claim to know all and choose anything different. I do not believe in a God or multiple gods, but I respect those who do believe.

@Zaku As it happens, I think there are two important philosophical errors in what you have suggested. First, atheism is not the view that there is nothing supernatural. It is the view that there are no gods. An example of how the two can come apart: Jains are atheists (they do not believe in any gods), but they believe in the supernatural (such as eternal, immaterial souls and spiritual powers).

Second, agnosticism is not merely not knowing for certain. It is the conscious decision to suspend judgment and not take sides. To conflate not having certainty with not taking a side is to conflate having absolute knowledge with having a belief. But one can believe something without being certain of it, and so one could believe that god does not exist—one could even think that they know god does not exist—without believing that they are certain god does not exist.

I do agree, however, that there is a difference between “not believing x” and “believing not-x.” Someone who looks into something and decides that there is no evidence for it is not thereby required to reject whatever they were looking into. But they do have a choice to make: will they take the lack of evidence for x as a sufficient (even if defeasible) reason for (at least temporarily) believing not-x, or will they simply suspend judgment and take no sides regarding x? Only the latter would count as an agnostic about x.

x marks the spot. haha

I feel “Agnostic” is misunderstood. It’s possible to not believe in religion without actively refuting the existence of god(s) the way Atheists do.

Agnostics share the Atheist’s lack of faith in religion, but that is where the similarity ends. Some have ill-defined belief in higher powers that may be called “Spiritualism”, some will believe that there is nothing but not so strongly as to KNOW there is nothing, and some (myself included) believe that humanity lacks the ability to know one way or the other with any certainty where there is a god/goddess/pantheon, or at least not enough details to write a book about them and kill the heretics who fail to acknowledge the awesomeness that is (insert higher power(s) here). (As to what an Agnostic would consider heresy, I leave tha tas an exercise to the reader.)

Unfortunately, like many sensitive subjects in modern culture, there’s not a lot of agreement about what either term means, it seems to me. I’ve rarely found people taking the time to even consider the kinds of distinctions made in @SavoirFaire‘s and @jerv‘s answers above.

I appreciate the detail of @SavoirFaire‘s answer for the purpose of philosophy, but it’s pretty complex and doesn’t match what I have long thought everyone generally (sloppily) meant by atheist and agnostic.

It also seems weird from one of my own favorite ways to get sophisticated about religion, which is to notice that it seems to me that all the theologians I know about whom I respect/understand the most, seem pretty clearly to all be relating to their various religions in metaphorical and religious ways. If I combine this with “atheism” as being disbelief in literal gods, then it seems to me that some Christian theologians and even clergy would technically maybe be considered atheists, which seems quite wrong, and I don’t know if that would be because they are two different things, or what. Maybe it’s not that they’re atheists, but that what a God is is not literally a person, but a symbol for the universe or some aspects of it, and of course they do believe in it and understand how it’s used as a metaphor. Which brings me to think that there’s not really that much of a cosmological issue about believing in God or not, between such scholarly Christians and atheists, because they’re not talking about the same things, or rather, they are talking about the same things and using different words, and the Christian has an understanding for the metaphorical messages in Christianity, and values them, while the atheist probably doesn’t understand that or at least doesn’t know the details.

”Impartial agnostics are basically saying they don’t claim know if there is a God or not. And they also don’t claim that they believe one way or the other.”

Yup, that would be me. And my opinion of myself is pretty okay.

@Zaku There have been centuries of debate over literal versus allegorical/symbolic. That’s part of why so many religions have multiple sects.

@jerv Yes, and debates about other topics, too. However it seems to me that once someone gets meditation and enlightenment and the metaphorical meanings, they tend to make a lot of sense and contain a lot of real practical value and make sense, whereas without that understanding, they tend to make about as much sense as superficial fantasy stories, or worse, just get used as doctrines that increase suffering and only provide conformity, obedience, tithing, etc. I get that crowd control, tradition and such are valuable and very important to some people, but it really seems like missing the actual point, the best value, and the original reasons for them in the first place.