Are atheists being more illogical than agnostics?

Logic guides reason and agnosticism means 'My reason is not giving me an answer pro or con' soooo they aren't being anything except self-excusing

Where did you learn English?

Same place it learned punctuation.

Winner winner chicken dinner..

Yes!

However claims about specific gods , with specific personalities that did specific things on the earth are subject to rational/emotional review. Perhaps not hard proof either way, but at least there are some claims that can be subject to a rational evaluation over whether they make sense to us or not.

For instance, the idea of a loving God who destroys the whole world, finding only a few good men. Even were we to accept that death was deserved because of evil, surely the babies did not fit that category?

This doesn't square with our sensibilities of what we find consistent with love. There is no scientific argument here. More an appeal to your mature sense of what it means to love.

So, yeah, arguing against a generic non specified creator is kinda bogus because there aren't any specific claims to refute - other than being a creator. But when you assign 'God' a blue colour and it turns out he deals a lot in red, there is cause for pause and reasonable doubt..

This is my small contribution to the thread so far.

As an agnostic I have attracted spirited criticism from theists and atheists in equal measure. Am I right to suspect that these good people are two sides of the same fundamentalist coin?

No. Your interpretation is wrong. Atheist is not fundamentalism. No adjective is required. Atheist simply means no belief in any god(s).

cicerone,

I can make a guess at which side of the theist/atheist coin your own criticism comes from.

Your comment is a politely expressed claim to fundamental knowledge, although this knowledge is a different claim to the theist's. Faced with my scepticism, a theist once told me that I am 'morally sick'!

S.

Atheists are not any more (or less) logical than theists...nor is one belief system any more (or less) moral.

However, re logical thinking and practices, adhering to beliefs that are provable might be considered by some as more logical than those whom adhere to thinking that relies on faith.

There may be similarities that can be expressed far up the ideological pyramid, but here on the ground, the differences can be noted.

The primary difference as I see it is that Atheism makes no fundamental claim to Truth with a capital T. There may be individuals who do so, but the term atheism does not have inherent in it the idea that something is necessarily true.

This is not true of our major religions. Inherent in their ideology is the necessary truth of their dogma.

And ironically enough, though one need not appeal to science to be atheist, they often go together. And it IS inherent in scientific ideology/methodology that there is no Truth with a capital T. Despite the expression of recalcitrant scientists who may cling to their own dogmas, the definition of science lays at opposites and says there is truth until something else is discovered that replaces it.

If I may reify science (I know, a sin to myself!) it admits to its fallibility. Admits that we cannot know everything and are always learning, correcting, getting better knowledge - maybe..(because there are limits! So one never knows when one has reached them - gotta keep trying though!)

But science ain't no punk! You have to come with it if you want to overturn or propose something new. It does not suffer fools..and this, in my opinion, is the primary reason why religious people get rebuffed. Many of them twist, distort, abuse and otherwise do not understand scientific findings.

Like when the bible says that God stopped the sun from moving across the sky. Clearly the person who wrote that DID not think that his God stopped the earth from rotating. Clearly the people of that time did not take that to be poetic license. God really stopped the sun from moving. Yet now Christians assign that to the poetry bin because it MUST be obvious that its poetry because clearly the bible CANNOT be wrong. But people did not think this way for thousands of years. But that's not important to them. What's important is that Jesus died for our sins..fah!

Again, note the difference. Atheistic Individuals may express that they know the Truth, but that is an individual idea, not inherent in their atheism. Whereas with religion, it is inherent that their religion is inerrant.

If you want to go higher on the ideological chain, I have no qualms with you. But going up higher doesn't help us in sifting through what we actually talk about here, on the ground.

Ragman,

I'll buy your view, provided that the burden of prove applies to the belief that there is no God.

S.

catbeasy,

I've read your thoughtful post a couple of times, just to get a grip on the nuances.

Two points,

1. Maybe the term agnostic atheist has a part to play in the mix?

2. Philosophical induction. This is the scientific principle that we cannot be certain until all the evidence is in. In cases (maybe ideological high ground?) about some big questions of life we just don't have anywhere near all the evidence. So we cannot be certain. So agnosticism.

For the agnostic (at least my agnosticism) it sounds crazy to claim that there certainly is God, given the evidence, but it also sounds crazy to claim that there certainly isn't God, given the evidence.

That's where it sticks.

S.

You've not met Frank, he's a fundamentalist agnostic and no mistake.

Frank thinks that it may be possible that there are invisible elves flying around us. I think that it takes an extraordinary belief in possibilities to make that claim.

I have met Frank in NYC. Outside of his agnosticism, he's got a good head on his shoulders. He's also a good guy.

I never said he wasn't, just that his faith in agnosticism is unshakable

Hi,

I'm not certain that possibility is limited to selections from our narratives to date, however cosy such images might be. IMHO, the interest in possibility is the unforeseen, even currently inconceivable. Bertrand Russell's 'chicken' thought experiment is an inviting introduction for those of us with a philosophical interest in the current subject.

S.

I like the phrase "faith in agnosticism".

What would it be to have such a faith?

S.

I like Frank very much and think he is extremely intelligent.

You'll have to ask Frank. He's not on A2K but I've heard he's posting on other forums. He was evangelical, I'm not kidding, he insisted his agnosticism was the only reasonable thing to believe.

It got a bit much after a while, he kept repeating the same mantra.