My thinking on this, more fully detailed in this comment chain[1] , is that most atheists are gnostic with respect to modern religions.

But why are we putting this emphasis on "gnostic" in "gnostic atheist"?

It seems to be a vestige of the "agnostic atheist" position, and the ill-conceived "quadrant chart."

It also seems to presuppose a misunderstanding of what it means "to know" something. To "know" doesn't mean "proved." I know that Halley's comet will come by at (x) time. The only way that will be proved is when Halley's comet comes by at (x) time. But that doesn't mean I didn't know that it would return at (x) time until it actually came at (x) time; rather, I knew it all along (because I had something like a justified, true belief, or perhaps something like Sosa's "AAA" apt-belief).

Think about it: when you believe something, you think that you know it.

I'm not saying that when you believe something, that you claim to know it.

I'm not saying that when you believe something, that you have "proof" that it is true, whatever you mean by "proof."

I'm saying that when you believe something- that is, when you think something is true- that means that you think that you know it is true.

You can believe something without having knowledge; but you can't believe something without thinking that you have knowledge. That's how man's reason works.

They are forced to adopt the "agnostic atheist" label because failure to do so often leads to shrill demands to "Prove God doesn't exist!" from many people of Abrahamic faiths,

I just don't understand the need for the "gnostic/agnostic" modifier. So what if some theist tells you to "prove that God doesn't exist"?

What does that have to do with your belief? WHY are we separating the question of belief from the question of knowledge, when knowledge is a subset of belief?! Why are we equivocating on what "knowledge" is- swinging back and forth between "knowledge" as a subset of belief, and some infallibilistic-like notion of knowledge that says that "to know" something is to be aware that it has been "proved"?

Furthermore, why do you have to change how you label yourself based on an epistemologically misinformed question?

You can't prove a negative. You can't prove that God doesn't exist. That's that. That's the end of that conversation; not a whole new reason to devise a new way of conceiving ourselves as atheists.

And if you hold the belief that logical arguments can't prove the existence of a being, what ground do you stand on to say that logical arguments can prove that a being doesn't exist? For all you know, God defies our logic- or perhaps something like Meinongianism is true- maybe illogical objects do exist; again, I'm only saying this if you're (in general, not /u/samreay) making the argument that logical arguments can't prove the existence of something. This is just something to think about.

What I think is this: I don't think anybody is "forced" to take any position. I think what is happening is that people want to claim that atheism is a lack a belief so that they don't have to defend a belief that they hold. I think people would rather say they unreasonably and irrationally are atheists, than to have to admit that they can't cogently defend their position in an argument.

When it comes to "agnostic atheism," I think that people just have a severe misunderstanding of what knowledge is. You don't need to have "proof" to know something. Things don't have to be falsifiable to know something. I know that I'm not a brain in a vat, if not just because the principle of parsimony (Ockham's Razor) says that suggesting more entities than is necessary to explain something is usually not the best explanation. Instead of thinking reality is formed by something like the matrix, or an evil genius that keeps my brain in a vat, I just assume, parsimoniously (and thus, reasonably, and justifiably) that it is true that reality just exists as I know it.

You can know things that aren't empirical. I know that there are an infinite amount of numbers, and I know there is no biggest number.

Tell me how I empirically got to that notion!

My point is to conflate "knowledge" with "proof" just doesn't make sense, and no epistemologist accepts this formulation of knowledge.

because their gnosticism cannot be rigorously applied to generalised usage of the word god found in deism or even pantheism.