Why are agnostics unsure

Atheists do not believe in god. I would add that agnostics also do not believe in a deity. My argument is that to 'believe in' a deity is actually to trust that deity, and not just acknowledge the deity's existence. So in traditional belief systems Satan believes that the deity exists, but you wouldn't say that Satan 'believes in' god.

Satan believes that a deity exists, but Satan 'believes in' himself. Atheism if you state there is no God , or Agnosticism if you state that there is no way to know whether God exists.

Buddhists are able to believe in a god but Buddhism takes no stance on whether a god exists at all or not. He said he is a agnostic, who is not sure whether god exists. An agnostic is somebody that is not sure about a god or higher being. This does not imply the lack of a religion as by this classification Buddhists are atheists. How this may lead to agnosticism or atheismScience can explain where the world came from and where humans came from without any reference to God.

This may lead some people to be agnostic, that is, they are unsure whether or not there is a God. For them, the argument that you need God to explain why we are here is no longer valid. Other people may be led to become atheists, that is, they are sure there is no God.

They believe that, if God exists, he must have made the world and he must be the only explanation of the world. The scientific explanation of the world and humans without any reference to God is proof to such people that God does not exist. Monkeys exist, as do giraffes and elephants: I have seen them. Whether God exists is a matter of faith, and faith alone. People have been waiting for proof that God exists for at least two thousand years. Many have chosen to believe in the absence of any proof, but increasing numbers ask where the proof is.

These people can be called realists. They know that just because others take the unthinking way of following the crowd it does not mean there is a God. They ask, Where is the proof?

God exists to people that belive in him, now I don't know whever he exist or not but the most important thing is that YOUbelive in God. People who actually try to look and find out whether he exists is a person who is acting faithlessly. A true christan doesn't need proof that God exists because they belive his word. Agnostics are one group that meet this description. They don't know if there is a god or not.

Non-theists also meet this description. Groups like Buddhists,Confucianism, Jains, Daoist, deism and pantheists, have no gods or no"central god figure like Christianity. Log in.

It seems, then, that when it comes to evidence favoring omni-theism over source physicalism, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Further, when combined with the fact that what we know about the level of well-being of sentient beings and the extent of their suffering is arguably vastly more probable on source physicalism than on theism, a very strong though admittedly controversial case for premise 1 can be made.

What about premise 2? Again, a serious case can be made for its truth. Such a case first compares source physicalism, not to omni-theism, but to its opposite, source idealism. Source idealists believe that the mental world existed before the physical world and caused the physical world to come into existence.

This view is consistent with both ontological idealism and ontological dualism, and also with physical entities having both physical and mental effects. It entails, however, that all physical entities are, ultimately, causally dependent on one or more mental entities, and so is not consistent with ontological physicalism.

The symmetry of source physicalism and source idealism is a good pro tanto reason to believe they are equally probable intrinsically. They are equally specific, they have the same ontological commitments, neither can be formulated more elegantly than the other, and each appears to be equally coherent and equally intelligible.

For example, it adds the claim that a single mind created the physical universe and that this mind is not just powerful but specifically omnipotent and not just knowledgeable but specifically omniscient. In addition, it presupposes a number of controversial metaphysical and meta-ethical claims by asserting in addition that this being is both eternal and objectively morally perfect.

If any of these specific claims and presuppositions is false, then omni-theism is false. Thus, omni-theism is a very specific and thus intrinsically very risky form of source idealism, and thus is many times less probable intrinsically than source idealism. Therefore, if, as argued above, source physicalism and source idealism are equally probable intrinsically, then it follows that premise 2 is true: source physicalism is many times more probable intrinsically than omni-theism.

Notice that the general strategy of the particular version of the low priors argument discussed above is to find an alternative to omni-theism that is much less specific than omni-theism and partly for that reason much more probable intrinsically , while at the same time having enough content of the right sort to fit the totality of the relevant data at least as well as theism does. In other words, the goal is to find a runner like source physicalism that begins the race with a large head start and thus wins by a large margin because it runs the race for supporting evidence and thus for probability at roughly the same speed as omni-theism does.

An alternative strategy is to find a runner that begins the race tied with omni-theism, but runs the race for evidential support much faster than omni-theism does, thus once again winning the race by a margin that is sufficiently large for the rest of the argument to go through. The choice of alternative hypothesis is crucial here just as it was in the low priors argument. Another would be a more detailed version of source physicalism that, unlike source physicalism in general, makes the relevant data antecedently much more probable than theism does.

Thus, it may be stipulated that, like omni-theism, aesthetic deism implies that an eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, and omniscient being created the physical world. The only difference, then, between the God of omni-theism and the deity of aesthetic deism is what motivates them. An omni-theistic God would be morally perfect and so strongly motivated by considerations of the well-being of sentient creatures.

An aesthetic deistic God, on the other hand, would prioritize aesthetic goods over moral ones. While such a being would want a beautiful universe, perhaps the best metaphor here is not that of a cosmic artist, but instead that of a cosmic playwright: an author of nature who wants above all to write an interesting story. Further, containing such a line is hardly necessary for a story to be good. After all, what makes a good story good is often some intense struggle between good and evil, and all good stories contain some mixture of benefit and harm.

This suggests that the observed mixture of good and evil in our world decisively favors aesthetic deism over omni-theism. This makes no difference as far as the inference from step 4 to step 5 is concerned. That inference, like the inferences from steps 1 — 3 to step 4 and from step 5 to step 6 , is clearly correct. The key question, then, is whether premises 1 , 2 , and 3 are all true.

In spite of the nearly complete overlap between omni-theism and aesthetic deism, Richard Swinburne 96— would challenge premise 1 on the grounds that aesthetic deism, unlike omni-theism, must posit a bad desire to account for why the deity does not do what is morally best.

Omni-theism need not do this, according to Swinburne, because what is morally best just is what is overall best, and thus an omniscient being will of necessity do what is morally best so long as it has no desires other than the desires it has simply by virtue of knowing what the best thing to do is in any given situation. This challenge depends, however, on a highly questionable motivational intellectualism: it succeeds only if merely believing that an action is good entails a desire to do it.

On most theories of motivation, there is a logical gap between the intellect and desire. If such a gap exists, then it would seem that omni-theism is no more probable intrinsically than aesthetic deism. For example, a deity interested in good narrative would want a world that is complex and yet ordered, that contains beauty, consciousness, intelligence, and moral agency.

Perhaps there is more reason to expect the existence of libertarian free will on omni-theism than on aesthetic deism; but unless one starts from the truth of omni-theism, there seems to be little reason to believe that we have such freedom. For example, if open theists are right that not even an omniscient being can know with certainty what libertarian free choices will be made in the future, then aesthetic deism could account for libertarian free will and other sorts of indeterminacy by claiming that a story with genuine surprises is better than one that is completely predictable.

Alternatively, what might be important for the story is only that the characters think they have free will, not that they really have it. Finally, there is premise 3 , which asserts that the data of good and evil decisively favors aesthetic deism over theism.

A full discussion of this premise is not possible here, but recognition of its plausibility appears to be as old as the problem of evil itself. Consider, for example, the Book of Job, whose protagonist, a righteous man who suffers horrifically, accuses God of lacking sufficient commitment to the moral value of justice.

Instead, speaking out of the whirlwind, He describes His design of the cosmos and of the animal kingdom in a way clearly intended to emphasize His power and the grandeur of His creation. On this interpretation, the creator that confronts Job is not the God he expected and definitely not the God of omni-theism, but rather a being much more like the deity of aesthetic deism. Those who claim that a God might allow evil because it is the inevitable result of the universe being governed by laws of nature also lend support, though unintentionally, to the idea that, if there is an author of nature, then that being is more likely motivated by aesthetic concerns than moral ones.

For example, it may be that producing a universe governed by a few laws expressible as elegant mathematical equations is an impressive accomplishment, not just because of the wisdom and power required for such a task, but also because of the aesthetic value of such a universe.

Much of the aesthetic value of the animal kingdom may also depend on its being the result of a long evolutionary process driven by mechanisms like natural selection. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Unfortunately, such a process, if it is to produce sentient life, may also entail much suffering and countless early deaths. It is arguably far more plausible that in such a scenario the value of preventing horrendous suffering would, from a moral point of view, far outweigh the value of regularity, sublimity, and narrative. If so, then a morally perfect God would not trade the former for the latter though a deity motivated primarily by aesthetic reasons no doubt would.

To summarize, nearly everyone agrees that the world contains both goods and evils. Pleasure and pain, love and hate, achievement and failure, flourishing and languishing, and virtue and vice all exist in great abundance. In spite of that, some see signs of cosmic teleology. Those who defend the version of the decisive evidence argument stated above need not deny the teleology. Mulgan and Murphy and in particular when it is interpreted as directed towards aesthetic ends instead of towards moral ends.

In this section, an argument for the falsity of a more ambitious form of agnosticism will be examined. Because the sort of agnosticism addressed in this section is more ambitious than the sort defended by Le Poidevin, it is conceivable that both arguments succeed in establishing their conclusions. This form of agnosticism is more ambitious because knowledge is stronger in the logical sense than rational permissibility: it can be rationally permissible to believe propositions that are not known to be true, but a proposition cannot be known to be true by someone who is not rationally permitted to believe it.

Another difference concerns the object of the two forms of agnosticism. In this section, the target is omni-theism versus the local atheistic position that omni-theism is false. The previous section focused on two arguments for the conclusion that this form of local atheism is very probably true. In this section, the question is whether or not that conclusion, if established, could ground a successful argument against strong agnosticism.

This leaves premise 2 , the premise that, if atheism is very probably true, then atheistic belief is rationally permissible. One might attempt to defend this premise by claiming that the probabilities in premise 2 are rational credences and hence the truth of the so-called Lockean thesis Foley justifies 2 :. That means that any argument people make for one side or the other are using subjective arguments to try and prove their point.

Weak agnosticism doesn't mean that it breaks under pressure. It has more to do with whether the existence of God can ever be proven! Weak agnosticism—which is also known as mild or open agnosticism—agrees with strong agnosticism in that they believe no one currently knows whether a higher power exists. Germ theory is a good example of how previously unprovable ideas can become fact. In , an Italian scholar named Girolamo Fracastoro wrote that epidemic diseases were caused by tiny, seed-like organisms called seminaria morbi that were spread by touch or by air.

The third category of agnosticism is apathetic agnosticism. They point to issues like war, famine, and ecological destruction They think of the debate about God as an academic exercise rather than one that has any real-world impact. While there are agnostic groups you can join, agnostics don't worship or have services like theists or believers in God do. In that way, agnosticism is known for inclusivity. There are, however, agnostic organizations that you can join, like Atheist and Agnostic Unitarian Universalists or the Center for Inquiry.

Just like these shoes, atheism and agnosticism have a lot in common Like agnosticism, atheism can be broken down into subcategories based on why a person does not believe in the existence of a higher power. However, unlike strong atheists who actively believe that the non-existence of God s is fact, weak atheism is better understood as the absence of a belief in a higher power. Test your vocabulary with our question quiz!

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