Harmless poll - with discussion and clarifications

I'm going to take a somewhat controversial stance and state that the answer is atheist, only atheist, and using labels like "agnostic atheist" like you do in the OP is problematic in and of itself.

I take an atheist to be someone who would define their confidence that God exists at a probability of less than 0.5. That is, they think it is more probable that God doesn't exist than he does. The reason this kind of characterization is more useful than "agnostic atheist" is it actually reflects both the way we tend to evaluate beliefs the standards of knowledge that we use in our everyday lives.

To start with knowledge, many critics of my position will point out that we can't be absolutely, positively sure that a God doesn't exist. They might point out possibilities like the fact that God might have been hiding, used natural laws to make humans, or any kind of skeptical hypothesis that manages to appear to make God unprovable.

But consider if I pose a different kind of skeptical argument. We can't be absolutely, positively sure that we aren't a brain in a vat. However, most of us are pretty damn sure that we aren't. If we buy this skeptical argument, however, we should be agnostic about everything. We should be agnostic heliocentrists. We should be agnostic atom theorists. Hell, we should be agnostic that the human race exists. But we aren't. Clearly, while we still hold these beliefs to a very high regard, even to the point of claiming to know these things, we still can't quite meet the standard of the skeptical argument. However, if we take knowledge to have a definition that doesn't require this absolute, infallible, 100% level of certainty (say, for example, a justified and true belief), then we can pretty reasonably say that we know God doesn't exist.

In terms of belief, try to reflect upon how we treat things that we say that we "believe." While we tend to lump all of these things into one category of belief, things that fall into that category tend to get treated pretty differently. Consider 2 statements: "I believe the sun rose this morning," and "I believe Plato lived in ancient Greece in the fourth century BC." Now certainly most people would say that they believe these statements, but with what would appear to be varying degrees of confidence. Sure, it seems like Plato probably lives in ancient Greece, but what if our historical records are flawed and he didn't exist as a person? What if our dating is off? There are plenty of questions we might ask here to potentially shake our confidence. But we are all pretty much certain that the sun rose this morning. Using a scale of confidence as opposed to "believe and not believe" can help us capture and reason about this fact. Thus, I think it helps us in reasoning about the belief in God.

To address your other question, I would consider agnosticism to be a kind of middle ground. I'll take a page out of /u/shiredragon's book and suggest that it is possible for someone to be a kind of weak agnostic while transitioning (they can't definitively decide one way or the other), but if someone is a kind of hard agnostic (it's fundamentally impossible to decide either way), they are simply mistaken. I won't go into too much detail, but generally I find that these people make the same blunder about knowledge that I noted earlier, or they fail to recognize that we can reasonably make predictions about the world given various God concepts.

/r/TrueAtheism Thread