Guardian’s Jonathan West discusses the use of the “A” words

No, not that word. Get your mind out of the gutter.

West writes:

Disagreement over the definition of atheist and agnostic has cluttered up various threads here, scattering confusion in its wake like a muckspreader in autumn.

The cause of the confusion is that atheists and theists have different definitions of the words agnostic and atheist, and adamantly refuse to accept the validity of each other’s definitions.

Here is a short form of the definitions from the two separate points of view.

Theist version: An atheist is certain there is no God, an agnostic is not certain.

Atheist version: An atheist believes there is no God, an agnostic doesn’t know.

The two versions are only subtly different, but a great deal of hot air has been expended on this difference.

I think if you’re an agnostic, you’re probably an atheist who feels threatened by the word “atheist,” who feels it’s an extreme and somewhat untenable position. The rationalist in you would say that “We don’t have incontrovertible proof that God doesn’t not exist, I just don’t happen to think he does.”

Except that it’s a simply ridiculous proposition in the first place to think that everything was created by some omnipotent being. It’s so obviously a thing that we’ve manufactured to assuage our existential fears, that when you look at in the stark light of day, it just falls apart, like a bad poltergeist story.

Same goes for all you wonderful Secular Humanists out there. Let’s just take it back, already. None of us believes in a big dude who lives in the sky. We are essentially all atheists. Be done with it already. We can’t continue to have 8 million sects of non-belief. That’s just about as ridiculous as the whole god thing.

From one of the comments on that piece, citing this piece:

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, “shamefaced” materialism? The agnostic’s conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe.

Now, this might hold good at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon’s question, why, in the great astronomer’s Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly replied” “I had no need of this hypothesis.”

But, nowadays, in our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people…

As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is. He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other.

But if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable laws, and so forth.

Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.

Discuss.