Cocko, it's no more divisive than telling your children that ghosts and monsters are unknowable?  Get this crap out of kids minds soon as.

I'd disagree, I'd say that agnosticism is the default or natural position

When I was that sort of age, I started to realise that I wanted to know everything, in fact my biggest fear was there being stuff that I didn't know. I even created a belief structure of my own that addressed this fear. 30 years on I still choose to believe in it

Kids want to be correct, and you can teach them whatever you wish, but teach them tolerance first, no one likes a preacher, no matter what they're evangelising

edit: outta the way Skerret, but yeah I think I mainly agree

Please tell me that's tongue in cheek

edit: or that you mean mentals in some new way that I don't understand

Do you choose to believe 2+2 does not equal 5? Do you?

Math is an abstract concept created by man to describe his experience

Much like religion

Definitely live in a computer simulation. Definitely. But "I'm not sure whether there is a God or not"? Madness! 2+2 = 17!

Agnosticism is the admission that nothing is known. As something becomes known it can be integrated into the agnostics system. Rejection of any possibility without knowledge seems no less foolish than acceptance of the same

When I said earlier that Math is an abstraction for dealing with unanswerables, I meant that. It's quite a coincidence that disparate cultures all across the pre Abrahamic world all had the same questions and answered them in very similar ways

I personally couldn't care less what other people think/believe, at the end if the day these are all ideas. I'm far less keen on the denigration of people because of their ideas. Twenty years ago (and in many places still today) people would struggle to tell parents that they were homosexual due to fear of rejection. I imagine many of us are far more enlightened than that, but I wonder how we'd react if our kids came home one day and said they'd found god(s)

Vela wrote:

Agnosticism is not the default because it is the state where an equal probability is assigned to there being a supernatural world or not.

I think it is the default, but with the proviso that religions account for nothing within the position.

There's a Heisenberg-esque scientific paradox re: Jesus, in that he had to be composed of particles to be observable (and in his case, corporeal), thus mortalising him. Nothing precludes a mortal from being created by a god (except their own existence), but I think it's fair to question the efficacy of JC's campaign given his allegedly full Maradona.

Science demands that any gods exist beyond universes - beyond our capacity for understanding, or else it's wrong. And if that's true, it speaks of some right shitty garden-path gods. Any depictions or descriptions of them run afoul of the necessity for science to be wrong to make them right; to know without knowing.

And in terms of rejection you can either listen to some idea and say "no, I reject that" or you can say "I'm not listening lalalala" and reject it. Which no-one is saying is the case here except you, cockbeard. That latter one is a bit of a strawman I am afraid. 

Well, maybe not entirely.

Do you reject every Hindu deity based on believing something else, believing there is no supernatural, or have you decided instead that theyre all wrong and substituted your own supernatural explanation? An atheist can quite consistently reject the Hindu, Roman and Greek pantheons because they dont believe in any supernatural explanations. A religious person who rejects Hinduism but chooses Islam or Christianity is perhaps closer to "rejecting (a) possibility without knowledge" and is thus foolish, by your metric.

Agno's the right term, but it's misrepped by both entrenched camps: religions view it as soft disbelief, while atheists view it as soft religion.

cockbeard wrote:

Yeah this is the part where I get confused. I always have. That's why I mentioned initially about capital a versus small a. Seems to me that Atheism is belief in no gods and agnosticism is no belief, then after all that we have atheism, little a I don't understand why these atheists feel that agnosticism isn't a strong enough word, but don't want to nail their colours to the mast of Atheism

Agnosticism is, by my understanding, an acknowledgement that there is a possibility of any god or no god. True agnosticism should assign an equal probability to any possibility, shouldn't it? As in with there being a few million gods, there is about a 0.0001% chance of any of them being real.

With atheism, there is the hard atheism which says absolutely there is no god. There is also the atheism informed by Occam's Razor which suggests that any explanation invoking gods is probably not right, and the most likely explanation is that there is no god. I fall into that category: religion was one of humanity's first guesses at explaining the natural world and not a very good one.

Agnosticism means we do not know. Therefore no probability is assigned to anything as we have knowledge of it. Equal probability is like saying you have a 50-50 chance of winning a lottery, you either win or you don't

We are lucky in that we have bandaged to now assign scientific process to much of what we see, especially going backwards and thinking of creation, although we do have plenty of mysteries still, the first few tiny fractions of a second, dark matter etc

Questions about humanity however, how we had created such cities, bent the flora and fauna to our will. Admittedly nowadays we have seen behaviors we still call human in animals and the line between us and them grows smaller, but does that mean or questions are answered our does it mean we should now wonder what happens to Spot the dog after he dies, instead of just worrying about ourselves

cockbeard wrote:

Agnosticism means we do not know. Therefore no probability is assigned to anything as we have knowledge of it. Equal probability is like saying you have a 50-50 chance of winning a lottery, you either win or you don't

It depends how you frame the question. If you are asking is there anything supernatural, then there either is or there isn't. But if you are asking if any of the human-conceived gods are real then the odds of any one of them being correct are minuscule if all have an equal probability.

Dawkins uses probability similarly misleadingly IMO. I suspect somebody has read The God Delusion (which tbf I didn't think was all bad).

For me, agnosticism is "we can't possibly know", as opposed to "I don't know" (which is uncertainty/ignorance). I think i'm possibly in both of those camps.

I'm not sure equating belief in ghosts with the question of where the universe came from is hugely helpful.

acemuzzy wrote:

I'm not sure equating belief in ghosts with the question of where the universe came from is hugely helpful.

Sorry, was thinking it's cause and effect rather than the same thing. How much science fiction uses magic? If we lack the knowledge/tools to explain something them magic is the easiest answer

In many ways dark matter is magic. We have a hole in our knowledge, so we fill that gap with something currently unseeable, unknowable and therefore indisputable. Dark energy/matter is no different to God

So the rain I went to the question of creation is because it's a common question throughout human history, no matter how isolated the culture. Also the question of what comes afterwards, neither of which are knowable, so being unknowable all proposals have equal validity (validity != probability)