{"id":95,"date":"2009-08-14T21:24:09","date_gmt":"2009-08-15T04:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=95"},"modified":"2009-08-14T21:24:09","modified_gmt":"2009-08-15T04:24:09","slug":"atheism-and-agnosticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"Atheism and Agnosticism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Question from Pat:<\/strong><br \/>\nCan someone be both an atheist and an agnostic?<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Answer:<\/strong><br \/>\nYes.  I consider myself an agnostic atheist.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAn agnostic lacks <em>gnosis<\/em>, or knowledge of the divine (if any).  He or she does not know whether there are any gods.  Some agnostics go one step further and think it is <em>impossible<\/em> to know this.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAn atheist lacks <em>belief<\/em> in any gods.  An agnostic, who does not know, may not believe either and therefore be an atheist too.  That&#8217;s my current position.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOn the other hand an agnostic may believe in spite of not knowing, and therefore be an agnostic theist.  Most religious folks who don&#8217;t claim personal experiences of their gods are in this category.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe only atheists who aren&#8217;t agnostics are those who think they know that there are no gods.  This is a step further than &#8220;strong atheists&#8221;, who positively believe there are no gods but don&#8217;t claim to know for sure.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nMost of the time, however, atheism co-exists with agnosticism.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/SmartLX\">SmartLX<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I consider myself an agnostic atheist.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,26,24,23,25],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","tag-agnosticism","tag-atheism","tag-belief","tag-definitions","tag-faith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pB6tr-1x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","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=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}