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You'll often hear an argument to the effect that atheism, as opposed to agnosticism, is (at least) as unreasonable and dogmatic as theism, since, of course, "you can't prove" that God doesn't exist. This is stupid.
First, technically speaking, a-theism just indicates the absence of a belief, rather than a positive denial. Someone who'd never encountered the concept of god could be described as an "atheist." But I don't really want to nitpick semantics. The more important point, I think, is that this is a stupid burden to impose, and one we'd find ludicrous in any other arena of belief. Indeed, you can be sure someone's arguing from a weak position when the best they can do is attack the opposite position as not being succeptible to a 100% deductive proof.
I can't even prove with apodictic certainty that the keyboard I'm typing on isn't some elaborate hallucination, or that I'm not in the Matrix right now. I can't prove that we're not surrounded by invisible, intangible flying monkeys. And every scientific law is open to falsification by a new counterexample. In no other arena of human knowledge do we suppose that absent this kind of irrefutable demonstration, there's nothing to choose between giving a proposition a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Indeed, if a perfectly analogous argument were deployed with respect to the existence of, say, fairies, or the Easter Bunny, it'd be laughed out of court without a second thought.
Which brings me to my second, and slightly more offensive main point: agnosticism is a weak-kneed copout. We can't know with absolute certainty whether God exists? Well golly gee, what a fucking revelation. There's precious little we can know with absolute certainty. But in most other arenas, we bite the bullet and make a choice based on the available evidence. And here, too, we do the same thing for practical purposes. You either live your life as though you expect there's an afterlife and a grand design an all that jazz, or you don't. Unless you address nightly prayers "to whom it may concern," that makes an agnostic operationally indistinguishable from an atheist.
"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."R. Zelazny, "The Agnostic's Prayer", from Creatures of Light and Darkness
I do, insofar as the discussion (and it was a good one, IMHO until it was derailed) was about a need or propriety of a political movement to fight public religion in the US, and 111 managed by sheer trollish delight to turn it into just another stupid MeFi atheism thread.
posted by norm at 1:45 PM on July 15, 2003