Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

June 7, 2010 By 9 Comments

Yesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods). Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant [...]

Filed Under: Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Ethics, Evidence, Examining Conceptions of God's Attributes, Goodness, Knowability, and Existence, Faith, Featured, God, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Metaphysics, New Atheism, Philosophy, Skepticism, Why I Am Not A Christian Tagged With: , , , , , , 9 Comments

Distinguishing The Atheist Agnostic, The Theist Gnostic, The Atheist Gnostic, and The Theist Agnostic

October 8, 2009 By 22 Comments

Peter Brietbart defines and schematizes distinctions between different kinds of atheists, theists, agnostics, and gnostics which have been growing in popularity in recent years.  Rather than misleadingly defining atheists as exclusively those who claim to know there are no gods, theists as those who claim to know there is a god (or gods) and agnostics [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Epistemology, Faith, Featured, God, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , 22 Comments

On What Counts As A Theological Position

August 1, 2009 By 2 Comments

Anderson Brown has an interesting post arguing that agnosticism is not a theological position because it is the claim that one cannot make a metaphysical assertion about the existence or non-existence of God and, therein rejects both the possible alternative theological positions (that there is a God and that there is not one): A “theological [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Epistemology, God, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion, Why I Am Not A Christian Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments

Agnosticism or Atheism?

May 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Thomas Huxley coined the word agnostic as a play on words. He was a philosopher who was irritated about the metaphysical presumptuousness of the philosophers around him who all seemed to know the secrets of the universe as though they had some special knowledge about things no one can really know about. He compared them, [...]

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