Atheism vs Agnosticism

Are you an agnostic? Is it because you think atheism is a bit much in its confidence about non-existence of god? Well, you might be fighting a battle of semantics here than a battle of real philosophical positions. And going by how these words are referred to today, you might be an atheist (oh my gosh!).

There are some misconceptions about atheism and what atheists in today’s world believe. The reason for this is because atheism as a global sub-culture hasn’t really existed until 15–20 years ago. Although there have been Humanists organized in some places (like Britain, Canada, some European countries) as communities living their lives without religion (along with fighting for human rights causes), a global sub-culture like New Atheism that focused on putting atheism as fore-front of identity and public dialogue is a relatively new phenomenon.

• Firstly, atheism is not an affirmation of non-existence of god. It is a recognition that there’s no evidence for existence of god. The difference might seem subtle at the first glance, but it is an important difference and it distinguishes the meaning of atheism from what it used to be until 100 years ago.
• In today’s world atheism and agnosticism are not orthogonal, they are rather indications of different but related things — atheism indicating belief and agnosticism indicating knowledge. Today’s atheism is the position that “I don’t know if there’s a supernatural creator of the universe, but I do not believe such a supernatural entity exists beyond a naturalistic understanding of the world in principle.” In short, it is “I don’t know, and I don’t believe”, or agnostic atheism. Here is an image that shows philosophical position about existence of god along knowledge and belief axes.

Knowledge-belief axis representation of philosophical position about existence of god

• There’s also another popular indication of one’s judgement towards existence of god. This is called ‘Dawkins scale’ named after Richard Dawkins one of the influencing people in the New Atheism movement. He presented it in his popular book The God Delusion (a must-read for everyone irrespective of their religious beliefs), and it is a 7-point scale representing milestones in the spectrum of probabilities (not possibilities) with 1 being a strong belief in existence of god and 7 being a strong disbelief in god. Here is an image with the description of each rating on Dawkins scale.

Dawkins scale

• The part in this scale worth noting is #6 for ‘De facto Atheist’ or ‘Atheist as a matter of fact’ which says ‘I cannot know for certain but I think god is very improbable’. This is the same as being an agnostic atheist in the knowledge-belief representation described above, and it effectively means that the person lives their life under the assumption god is not there.
• Most people who identify themselves as non-religious put themselves between #5 and #7. Most vocal atheists put themselves between #6 and #7, with Dawkins putting himself in #6 but leaning towards #7. He also says that he would be surprised to meet many people in category #7 which is in practice rather emptier than #1 which has many devoted inhabitants.
• In this scale, #4 is something that talks about agnosticism. It’s rather a 50:50 agnosticism in which existence and non-existence of god are equally probable. A person putting themselves in this category would generally say things like “There’s no way to know either way about existence of god”, “I don’t know enough to say anything about it”, “There’s no knowledge existing or can be constructed using which one can judge existence of god”, “I choose to suspend a judgement at this point of time”, and such while talking about existence of god.
• Now, these 50:50 agnostics might think they are suspending judgement about existence of god, but they are actually giving equal odds to existence and non-existence of god. Imagine you have a coin in front of you but you don’t know how it’s going to land when tossed in the air. So you have no knowledge of what the outcome of tossing the coin would be, and would suspend judgement. However, suspending judgement is logically equivalent to allowing all possibilities in equal measure. So, if you put a gun to a coin-agnostic’s head (agnostics have wonderful escaping abilities so you got to use strong measures) and force them to sincerely bet on a coin toss, they would bet both faces of the coin appearing with equal probability. In standard probability theory we learnt in high school, we all are coin-agnostics and so we say a coin toss would have 50% chance of heads being the outcome and 50% change of tails being the outcome.
• This logic applies to any context where judgement is suspended “awaiting further information” or “due to impossibility of making a decision”. This is the position where all possibilities are given equal probabilities (hence the inability to decide). Many people don’t know this logical equivalence between not making a decision and treating all outcomes equally.

Tell this to all your pretentious and snobby friends who say you have too strong of an opinion about existence of god and they are being “wiser” than you for not making a judgement.