VERSUS: Atheism and Agnosticism

I am an atheist. Most people know this. What they might not know is what an atheist actually means. In fact, I'd say most non-atheists don't have an accurate meaning in mind when they think about atheism so I'm going to clear this up. To be fair I also think a large portion of atheists are confused about the term as well. To clear this up I'll be clarifying a few terms but the main focus in this post will be Atheism Vs. Agnosticism. Don't be scared.

The first step is to break these words down to see what they really mean, not what some people assume them to be.

• Atheism – without a belief in gods
• 'a' – no or absence
• 'theo' – god or divine
• 'ism' – a practice of, belief in, condition of

• Agnosticism – without enough knowledge to know. And in this case “know” is in terms of scientific thought so it needs certainty.
  
  • 'a' – no or absence
  • 'gnostic' – know, learn, discern
  • 'ism' – a practice of, belief in, condition of

Most people have a sort of scale in regard to belief in gods. From what people say and from what I've personally experienced it generally looks like this:

atheist → agnostic → deist → theist

This is actually being generous as I find fewer and fewer people who are aware of deism. Deism is a belief in a creator who has, since creation, not interacted with the universe in any personal way. Deists don't believe in any sort of revelation from a god and tend to think of their creator as a sort of watchmaker who created the universe and then took a step back to observe. Theists believe in (at least one) god and that it/they have, since creation, interacted with the universe and communicated with humans in some way.

There are many more branches than this but I wanted to get out just the basics.

Let us say that there is a button. There is a group of people who think pushing this button is the right thing to do. There is also a group that thinks pushing it is the wrong thing to do. But not everyone falls into this dichotomy. Some people aren't completely sure. They say they currently don't know whether pushing the button is right or wrong. If you take that undecided group and look at them right now they actually fall into the non-pushing group. While undecided it would be stupid to push the button. It could do something great. It could do something terrible. But either way no one is going to push it if they're not sure.

Pulling this back over to atheism you can see that people who are agnostic are not fulfilling any sort of belief. They are not being theists. Someone who is unsure of whether to press that button is not a button-pusher. Someone who is abstaining from belief in a god because of lack of knowledge is not currently believing in any sort of god. That means they are being atheists. Agnostics are a subgroup of atheists.

Here's another way of thinking about it. Let's take a hobby, say, stamp collecting. Some people are stamp collectors. They collect stamps. I do not collect stamps. I really don't care about stamps one way or another. If I learned more I might either feel strongly that they are a good investment and become a stamp collector, or that it's a huge waste of time and become an anti-stamp collector. As it stands, stamp collecting is just something I don't do. Now replace “stamp collecting” with “believe in god”.

An agnostic isn't 100% set in either direction in regard to belief. This means that they are in a subcategory of non-believers since they are not actively believing. They could have a leaning (Richard Dawkins ranks himself at 6.5 on a scale of 1-7 where 1 is complete faith in god and 7 is complete rejection) but since even someone leaning towards belief still hasn't gotten there they are still an atheist. In fact, as long as there's any percent of uncertainty then that person is still uncertain. Inside of the term 'atheist' an anti-theist would be 100% sure and an agnostic would be 99%-50% sure that there are no gods (50% being an estimated tipping point of doubt. Actual tipping point between belief and doubt may vary). If you decide that you want to go out and buy a set of stamps to collect you're not actually a stamp collector until you do it. If you choose to press a button you're not a button pusher until your finger pushes down on that button. If someone doesn't think there's enough evidence either way to make an educated decision regarding the existence of a deity then they are an atheist.

One note on the above is that there's actually a much more complicated aspect to doubt than I put in. There is the possibility of harboring doubt and still being a theist. An example is someone who takes up Pascal's Wager, that if there is no god but you worship him then you still get into heaven but if there is no god and you don't then you go to hell. That means Pascal finds it a better bet to pointlessly worship than possibly damn one's self. Since the person might fulfill the acts of worship but not truly believe then there's the whole question of whether following the actions commanded by a religion is enough to fulfill that religion. Whether it is enough differs from faith to faith so the result of doubter being or not being a button abstainer/atheist is different from religion to religion. In most forms of Judaism the action is more important than the motivation. In Catholicism the opposite is true. So in the spirit of openness I am admitting that this post is written with the assumption that doubt stops one from pressing the god button, as this is true for the Christian majority.

Since most atheists are Skeptics you'll actually find that the large majority of atheists are technically agnostics. Skeptics use reason and the scientific method in refining their world views. This means that since the god concept has been set up to be unfalsifiable at least recognition of this has to be acknowledged. For those who don't know, unfalsifiable means "not capable of being proven false". This does not mean it is true but only that the concept has some built in self defense mechanism to negate any investigation as to its existence or not. The idea that a god created the world in 7 days but made everything to look as if it were billions of years old is unfalsifiable since the concept negates any test results showing the universe to be older The standard skeptic's atheism says “There is not enough evidence to believe in any gods, however if proof was ever found then it would have to be acknowledged and atheist belief reconsidered”.

A lot of people think of anti-theists when they hear the word atheist. The idea behind anti-theism is “against believing in a god”, usually because they think it's detrimental to the mental well being of the believers and society in general. Similarly, but different enough to make a note of, are anti-religionists. The idefa behind anti-religionism is obviously "being against religion".

Belief is an active state. If an agnostic has not taken the action to believe then they are without belief, without god, a-theist.

Since “a theism” means “without god” and all of this is without god. “With god” is JUST deism and theism. Another differentiation I have been seeing a lot recently is the term "non-theist". Often times I see it used when the author thinks that atheist is too strong a word and agnostic will open up, well, this whole can of worms that I'm addressing now. But there is already a word that means non-theist. It's "atheist".