Why do people argue endlessly about his agnostic/atheism thing? What's the point? The words are used to describe what people think. People are not slaves to nuances of definitions. Words are there to serve us, not the other way round.
Agnosticism, by many peoples' common understanding, is the state of not being sure whether or not a god or multiple gods exist, or whether none exist. But the original meaning of the word, coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, was the holding of the position that it was impossible to know (gnosis) whether there are any gods. There is a subtle difference between this and the vulgar meaning of the word.
I am a Huxleyan agnostic in that I hold that it is not possible to prove or disprove unfalsifiable claims such as the existence of deities. I am also an atheist because I think that their existence is so unlikely as to not warrant any further consideration.
No comments:
Post a Comment