Global Skeptic
King
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Well, can someone be an agnostic deist??? Rather is deism outside theism versus atheism?
Why I am agnostic rather than atheist.
- Thread starter Eukaryote
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Well, can someone be an agnostic deist??? Rather is deism outside theism versus atheism?
Interesting question. I do think that Deism is a specific form of theism, i.e. you think a supernatural creator exists, and ascribe certain characteristics to him (not intervening and so on). So it falls on the theism side of "theism vs. atheism", without being a special category of its own.
And you probably can't be an agnostic deist, at least not as far as I understand the term. Deists think that we can be sure of a deity's existence through rational observation of the universe, while agnostics believe that the existence of a deity is inherently undecidable.
(It's hard to avoid the word "believe" in this context because it carries so many misleading implications.)
On the OP, while I understand the desire to find a term for a more reconciliatory "middle ground" position, intentionally misusing a word that means something else entirely only leads to misunderstanding. And on a more personal note, I always get the impression that people who hesitate to label themselves atheist (even though strictly speaking they are) do so to placate a theist majority or to distance themselves from false and slanderous stereotypes of "fundamentalist atheists" or whatever. That you think Richard Dawkins is the epitome of atheistness just adds to that impression.
vypernight
Warlord
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Agnostic here. While I'm open to the idea that some kind of higher power may exist, I see nothing that makes one more or less real than another. Also, while I lean toward, "No," about believing in an afterlife, I'm not dead so I can't say for sure. If someone else wants to believe or not believe, that's fine with me. For all I know, they could be right.
But the only way I can be honest with myself is if I say I don't have a $^$#^&# clue.
But the only way I can be honest with myself is if I say I don't have a $^$#^&# clue.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
You're right. I was wrong to only use the most common occurrence.
Change to: "Agnostic instead of atheist or theist"
I do count deism to be a form of theism. The lack of an organised religion doesn't take away the belief in God.
Agnostic. If you haven't decided to believe, it's atheist. The decision to believe is a conscious one, an active one. You can't maybe believe in God, or not know whether you believe in God.
Okay, if you want to think of it that way.
Sure it does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
ArneHD
Just a little bit mad
Yes, gnosticism refers to knowledge, not belief. Thus someone can believe in god without professing any knowledge of god.
That's a wholly different metric that cannot be applied to the same kinds of questions. There is no confidence interval for if Justice Roberts rules if the Supreme court mandate was constitutional, but you can give a statement to the effect of how sure you are. There may be some correlation between personal confidence, and statistical confidence, but they aren't the same thing.
Personal confidence is irrelevant then - saying you're 100% confident that a coin will land heads is exactly the same as simply saying a coin will land heads 100% of the time, the syntax is just slightly different.
But the least confident you could be by this metric is 50%.
Eukaryote
Deity
I assigned their probabilities to be 50/50 because it maintains the fact that their probabilities are equal. In actuality, the probability of any first cause, conscience or not, is zero. All first causes violate causality and therefore are impossible. Therefore the existence of the entire cosmos/multiverse is impossible. Due to the fact that the odds of a conscience first cause is zero, and the odds of a non-conscience first cause are zero, if I must assign them probabilities under the knowledge that one of them happened, I assign the probabilities to be 50/50 in order to maintain equality between them.
Central to my argument is the idea that the existence of the cosmos is impossible, and yet it exists anyway. I know it's a strange idea.
By your arbitrary rules that don't have any relevance to probability.
The fact 50/50 odds maintain equal probabilities between 2 choices is irrelevant. You have no idea what the probabilities are.
duckstab
Child of Noble Family
It's not a strange idea at all. Your argument is simply contradictory, therefore it is false. If I make an argument that takes it as axiomatic that 6*9=42, then any conclusions I reach have no logical basis whatsoever.
If no first cause is possible, then there is no first cause. Therefore the cosmos has always existed in some form. There is no effect that was not preceded by its cause.
Alternately, a first cause might be possible -- there could be events that take place completely spontaneously, for absolutely no reason at all. Indeed, it wasn't so long ago that the widely accepted version of quantum mechanics supported this view: two atomic nuclei in exactly the same quantum state could decay at different times, for example. That view is no longer current, but it shows how it's quite possible to have a theory of causation that allows for truly accidental events.
But in any case, neither of these possibilities says anything about the probability of the existence of a deity.
You said yourself that this metric correlates to probability. I'm just pointing out that it also measures certainty.
There's a reason that people sometimes assign such numbers to legal burden of proof such as "beyond a reasonable doubt", and "Clear and convincing evidence." Now various courts have rules that such mapping to probability is not set in law, however this does not imply that for a given person, in a given context, that these standards of proof cannot be mapped to the percentage scale. Indeed the fact that some people claim that such standards do standards do map to probabilities, despite the lack of legal argument in favor, suggests that not only is a percentage a metric of confidence, but that is is a more clear one than the legal definition; it suggests it's a superior metric.
More colloquially it's not hard to imagine mapping phrases like "almost positive" and "pretty sure" to a range of probabilities; we could say that almost positive usually means a person is at least 95% sure.
Now all the examples above are of high confidence, but if it is truly a metric of certainty, then presumably it could just as easily be applied to lower degrees of certainty. Is it not meaningful to say you're 60% sure of a game-show answer? And cannot "an inkling" be expressed as a percent?
You posit that having "no clue" does not map to a probability, but then what's the lowest degree of confidence that can be? And more importantly, Why?
I am agnostic because I do not know and never will know, simple really. But that is not a 50/50 thing, more like a "well yeah probably not, but I can't say for sure." Like I said in an earlier thread in response to Winner calling this stance cowardly:
I still feel this way.
I still feel this way.
I agree that his position in this scenario is rather absurd, but if we approach probability as a measure of uncertainty his reasoning isn't that far off.
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