{"id":156,"date":"2009-10-01T15:32:41","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T22:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=156"},"modified":"2009-10-01T15:33:24","modified_gmt":"2009-10-01T22:33:24","slug":"misuse-of-agnostic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=156","title":{"rendered":"Misuse of “agnostic”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Question from Pritchard Hotpocket:<\/strong>
\nI see a common error perpetually appear on this site. You misuse the term “agnostic” a great deal. You seem to treat agnosticism as some sort of middle ground between atheism and theism. This is incorrect. Atheism and theism are metaphysical positions of whether you believe in any deity or lack a belief in all deities. Agnosticism and gnosticism are each an epistemological position on whether you think you “know” whether a deity exists or not. So you could be a gnostic theist and believe that you “know” that a god exists or an agnostic theist and believe you don’t know whether a god exists or not but you believe in one regardless. Likewise you can be an agnostic atheist or a gnostic atheist, sometimes described as “weak” and “strong” atheists. Do you disagree with me or have you simply never been notified of the distinctions?
\n
\nAnswer:<\/strong>
\nWhen was the last time we said something like that, if you don’t mind?
\n
\nAt times like this it’s frustrating that we weren’t able to salvage the entire body of articles from the old version of the site, because I did at least two pieces solely on this distinction.
\n
\nI’ll argue with you on one point: I don’t think “agnostic” as a prefix for atheism or theism is equivalent to “weak”, or “gnostic” to “strong”. I’ll use atheism to explain: a gnostic atheist knows<\/em> (or, more accurately, thinks<\/em> he knows) that there are no gods, whereas a strong atheist merely believes this is true. You can be “strong” without being certain. A weak atheist is any atheist who isn’t a strong atheist, in other words someone who doesn’t positively believe in the absence of gods any more than in their presence. An agnostic atheist admits to not knowing one way or the other, but despite this could either be weak or strong by believing in absence or not. I for example am an agnostic weak atheist, though I generally just call myself an agnostic atheist because that captures most of the meaning. (And frankly, who likes to be called “weak”?)
\n
\nWe could also get into explicit and implicit atheism, the distinction between those who know they’re atheists and those who haven’t thought about it, but…well, I guess I just did.
\n
\n– SmartLX<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At times like this it’s frustrating that we weren’t able to salvage the entire body of articles from the old version of the site. I did at least two pieces solely on this distinction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pB6tr-2w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}