Defining Atheist And Agnostic

What is an atheist, and how is it distinct from an agnostic?

Many different dichotomies have been proposed. Some suggest that atheists say “There are definitely no gods” while agnostics say “There might be gods, but I don’t believe in them”. Another a group of people revise that to make the agnostic say “There may or may not be gods, I’m not sure yet”.

Others suggest that agnostics say “It is impossible to know if there are gods or not”, while atheists say “I know there is no god”.

Then we get to the fourth group, probably the majority, say that atheism and agnosticism are not on a spectrum, but rather description of different things — atheists lack a belief in God, and agnostics lack absolute certainty in this belief, thus leading people to describe themselves as agnostic atheists.

The One True “Atheism”

Who’s right? Which of these various definitions of “atheism” and “agnosticism” is the most correct?

In one sense, all of them are correct. Language is a social convention, and words get their meaning from social consensus. Debating definitions is much like debating which side of the road people should drive on — it doesn’t matter, as long as everyone uses the same side consistently. The formation of definitions is not actually arbitrary, but for all practical purposes it could be, and we wouldn’t really notice much difference.

Yet all of them can be correct in another sense, because none of these definitions have yet reached a wide consensus. Among self-described atheists, nearly all of them (I know of from personal experience) refer to a “lack of belief in gods”. Nothing here about absolute certainty or there definitely being no gods, or even really anything about saying there are no gods. Just a lack of belief in gods, that’s all.

Among self-described agnostics (the ones I know of from personal experiences), I’ve seen no consistent thing in common besides, perhaps ironically, lacking a belief of gods. Every agnostic I’ve seen (so far) has been an atheist using the “lack of belief in gods” definition. In fact, many people who lack a belief in gods self-identity under a whole bunch of different labels besides atheist — such as freethinkers, skeptics, unbelievers, nonbelivers, nontheists, and even the self-congratulatory “Brights”.

I’m not going to take their label away from them, but even if they desperately don’t want to be seen as atheists, the fact remains that they still lack a belief in god. However, things get a bit more complicated than merely lacking a belief in gods or not.

Likelihoods and The Many Atheisms

First, there are many god concepts, and you can believe in some while not believing in others. For example, you might believe in a polytheistic religion and thus accept a wide multitude of god concepts, yet still not believe in every god concept — for example, believing in the entire Greek Pantheon, but not believing in Jesus, Kabezya-Mpungu, or The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Additionally, you might believe that the Christian God and the Islamic God are the same person, thus believing in both concepts, yet lack belief in the Greek Pantheon.

Second, you can do more than just have or lack belief. You could believe in the nonexistence of certain god concepts, lack belief in other god concepts, and have a belief in the existence of another group of god concepts. Likewise, this need not even be on a yes-maybe-no scale, but rather could assign likelihoods to certain concepts. For example, you could say that you are 99.9% sure that the Greek Pantheon doesn’t exist, yet only 70% sure that the Biblical God doesn’t exist.

A good analogy is that of people on trial for crimes. For each criminal, you might think her guilty, not guilty, or indeterminate. You might even assert yourself to be 95% confident in her guilt. Additionally, you could be 95% confident with that defendant, yet also find yourself only 60% sure of another, unrelated criminal.

Thus, there are really many atheisms — there are a wide variety of god concepts, and for each god concept, you may have a variety of different reactions, judging that concept to exist or not exist with a variety of probabilities.

Provisional Non-existence and The Null Hypothesis

This idea of provisional non-existence based on high (but not absolute) confidence is how we already work. What position would you take for the existence of the Greek Pantheon? I’d be more than 99.9% confident that such an entity doesn’t exist, and be willing to say “The Greek Pantheon does not exist”.

Some god concepts, like omnibenevolent gods who send people to Hell, or omnipotent gods who are incapable of sinning are actually logically impossible, and thus can be rejected with near certainty. Since the Biblical God falls into this category, I’d be willing to say “The Biblical God does not exist”.

Classical Deism

However, a deity more abstract and disconnected, like that of classic deism — a being who created the universe in a Big Bang and left it to unfold according to natural law, and who never comes back to interfere with anything and just makes everything pretty much indistinguishable from a metaphysically naturalist universe — this kind of god concept is really hard to actually rule out. Suppose it were carefully constructed to dodge all the logical incompatibilities and tasked with never wanting to provide evidence of itself.

Could you rule out such an entity with any confidence? It feels like ruling out that you’re not in stuck the Matrix — if everything looks the same, how could you tell? Here, you might just have to lack belief rather than assert disbelief at high confidence.

Provisional Non-belief and the Courtroom Analogy

Of course, no assessment of any of these god concepts need be permanent, and indeed none should. New evidence could, theoretically, surface to demonstrate the existence of the Biblical God — Hey, Jesus himself could return! (Though I’m not holding my breath…)

That’s why this kind of assertion of nonexistence is provisional, open to later revision. It’s very similar again to the courtroom, where we might think the defendant innocent, but then police discover the murder weapon and the defendant’s fingerprints are all over it. Prior to the discovery of the murder weapon, it was most reasonable to refrain from a belief in guilt, but with the discovery, it suddenly becomes most reasonable to have a belief in guilt.

The Null Hypothesis

This kind of thinking is very similar to what is called hypothesis testing in statistics. You start out with a default position, called the null hypothesis, and then a second position called the alternative hypothesis, and together these two positions comprise all possible cases. You then look for evidence for the alternative hypothesis, and use that evidence to either reject the null hypothesis or fail to reject the null hypothesis with a certain degree of certainty.

In the courtroom, the null hypothesis is innocence (innocent until proven guilty), and the alternative hypothesis is guilty (together innocent and guilty are the only possible outcomes). We start with the null hypothesis until we get evidence for guilt (the murder weapon), and then we reject the null hypothesis, saying something like “We reject the null hypothesis with 95% confidence”, or rather “We are 95% certain the defendant is guilty”.

We can then encounter even more evidence that requires us to shift back — sure the murder weapon was a dead giveaway, but forensics found evidence that the murder weapon may have been planted there by someone who wanted to frame the defendant, and the defendant has an uncrackable alibi. We now may fail to reject the null hypothesis and no longer be certain the defendant is guilty. (Note that this is just a less formal version of Bayesian reasoning, which I need not go into because it is kind of complex and doesn’t tell you much more than I already have.)

Conclusion

So when I tell you I’m an atheist, what am I trying to say? Most specifically and technically, it is a whole range of probability assessments for all the god concepts I’ve currently heard (near certain nonexistence for some, mere lack of belief for others) plus an extrapolation to all god concepts (these ones I’ve heard haven’t worked, and I see no reason other god concepts would succeed) that are all provisional based on my current evidence and open for more consideration in the future.

But most generally, even the technical and specific view is best summarized as atheism being “lack of belief in gods”. Gods simply don’t feature among the things I believe exist. For every god concept, I lack a belief in it, though for many god concepts I’m willing to take the extra step and assert its nonexistence with a certain degree of confidence. As far as I can tell, agnostics pretty much do the same, though they may be less confident in their nonexistence assessments.

Followed up in: TheraminTrees’s Atheism, 6: Atheism and What’s Left

Author’s Note: This is an updated replacement version of my previous essay “A-Unicornism and The True Definition of Atheism”

I now blog at EverydayUtilitarian.com. I hope you'll join me at my new blog! This page has been left as an archive.

On 28 Jun 2012 in All, Atheism, Words. 1 Comment.

One Comment

#1 Stephen R. Diamond says:
28 Jun 2012, 3:58 pm
Here’s what Friedrich Engels had to say about agnosticism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-mat.htm):

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, “shamefaced” materialism? The agnostic’s conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon’s question, why, in the great astronomer’s Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly replied” “I had no need of this hypothesis.” But, nowadays, in our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.

Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects, or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die That. [from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves. And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.

But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This “thing-in-itself” is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant’s celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that in Kant’s time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious “thing-in-itself”. But one after another these ungraspable things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this century, organic substances were such mysterious object; now we learn to build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical constitution of no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we should not, if only after centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies.

As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is. He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.