@rockfan “So do you think Merriam Webster’s definition is wrong?”
I think that dictionary definitions track actual usage rather than optimal usage, and thus cannot be used as tools for settling debates about how a word is most usefully employed.
“Honestly, I feel like you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
This is literally one of my areas of expertise, but okay.
“An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in God.”
An atheist is someone who believes that God does not exist, though lacking any belief in God necessarily follows from that.
“But atheists also admit that they can’t prove or disprove God. So that also makes them agnostic.”
First of all, not all atheists say that they cannot disprove the existence of a god or gods (to their own satisfaction, at least, even if not to the satisfaction of others—how much confidence is required to call something proven, after all, is its own epistemological debate).
Second, even those who say they cannot disprove the existence of a god or gods can still believe that no such things exist. What exists and what we can know, after all, need not be fully overlapping categories. That’s why metaphysics and epistemology are separate—though related—areas of inquiry. Terms like “theism” and “atheism” describe people’s beliefs about what does or does not exist (their metaphysical views) rather than their beliefs about what is or is not known (their epistemological views).
I understand the usage of “agnostic atheist” to mean “the sort of atheist who does not believe that they can prove the non-existence of God,” and I don’t object to using the term as one possible way of conveying that position (though I think there are other ways). My disagreement has simply been with your overly broad characterization of atheism and your insistence that all atheists are also agnostics. Because being agnostic is not about whether or not one can prove or disprove something. It is about whether or not one has decided to suspend judgment on some matter. That suspension could be about the existence or non-existence of a god or gods, but it could also be about the ability to prove or disprove the existence of a god or gods.
@Kropotkin “Maybe the classic academic definitions were inadequate to cover the actual array of beliefs and attitudes with regard to gods and no gods.”
Indeed, but nowhere have I objected to the introduction of new terms (regardless of who might be introducing them). Indeed, you might have noticed that I referred to myself as an “apatheist,” which is itself a term of modern invention. The need for new words neither requires nor justifies muddling the discourse, however, so I continue to maintain that expanding upon a clear and useful lexicon with clear and useful additions is preferable to a muddled and impractical one that is used to gain a rhetorical advantage more often than in it is used to illuminate the area of inquiry.
“Things like weak-atheist, weak-agnostic, strong agnostic, ignosticism, implicit atheist, and various more, were widely used on all sorts of fora when atheism and religion were popular topics for casual and formal debate on the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s”
As one of the many active participants in those debates, I am well aware of this. But since none of these terms were the target of my criticism, I don’t see how this is relevant. My claim was specifically about the most dialectically useful ways to understand “atheist” and “agnostic” with an acknowledgment that both have been adulterated by some for rhetorical purposes.
“And now look! Your prescriptivist obstinacy has generated unnecessary heat!”
I imagine this was supposed to be some sort of clever riposte, but I said nothing about unnecessary heat. I specifically referred to the issue of heat versus light. Heat is unavoidable, but it can be worthwhile for the chance of light.
