Re: From Atheism to Islam

[Bruno Marchal]

On 03 Feb 2017, at 19:53, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 2/3/2017 1:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 02 Feb 2017, at 17:50, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 2/2/2017 1:40 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

Initial remark: I am not a theist! It is possible to reject both
theism and atheism. It's called agnosticism.

On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 9:20 PM, Brent Meeker  
 wrote:

On 2/1/2017 3:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I agree with the video. You might also like this:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/a6/a9/9f/a6a99fb6a3ad81cefc08ba8a67dab9e0.jpg

The narrator says: "putting god ahead of humanity is a terrible
thing". I agree, but what I meant from the beginning is even more
general. I would say:

"putting absolute belief ahead of humanity is a terrible thing"
But that is exactly what theism demands - God is the ultimate  
arbiter of all

morality and is to be worshipped and obeyed.

I oppose most organised religions for this very reason, but I don't
agree that theism "demands it" (as we've discussed before). The
problem with atheism is that it defines the side it opposes  
(which is

inconsistent), and thus engages in the fiction.


Inconsistent?  Would you have people who oppose fascism not have a  
definition of fascism - so that they were just opposing some  
undefined, amorphous ideology?  And theism is not a fiction - it's  
something that can be defined ostensively.  It's the common core  
beliefs about God held by those who call themselves Muslims,  
Christians, and Jews, which constitutes a large portion of the  
Earths population.  It is disingenuous to pretend that it means  
what the first person who used the word meant.  Meanings are  
detemined by usage - unless you want to be misunderstood, as Bruno  
does.


But anyone with a slightest interest in the field can see that the  
jewish, christians and muslims have, on the rational subject  
matter, oscillated between Plato and Aristotle theology, and  
eventually converged to a strongly Aristotelian view of reality,  
like Atheism.  Metaphysical naturalism is mainly Aristotle theology  
(simplifying things to be clear on the key difference).


Now, yes, we can say that the christians, or muslims, or jews, and  
perhaps even the atheists, which kept the idea of Plato are closer  
to the truth than the Aristotelian, and in science, we know that  
this matter is simply not decided, and even still taboo in some  
university based in part on the gnostic atheist "confession" (the  
belief, more or less explicit that matter exist in some primary  
sense, and that physics is the fundamental science.


Brent, if you have a physicalist theory of mind, let us know it.


Mind is the processing of information between sensors and actuators  
to achieve goals.  Consciousness is a relatively small part of mind  
(at least in humans) which is the creation of an internal narrative  
to be remembered for future reference in learning to improve the  
scope and efficiency of achieving goals.


I can agree with that, and in the simple case of the ideally correct  
machine, it is described in the machine terms by the (corresponding)  
provability operator. But its self-referential logic, this obeys  
already two different logics. G and G*. G is the rational part, G*  
gives the true part, and G* minus G, the surrational part.


That say nothing about the soul, which, if we accept Theatetus'  
definition ([]p & p), is given by the logic of knowledge S4Grz. But  
the machine cannot name either Truth nor her frist person point of  
view "the 1-I". We can do that for "simple" machines, as all machines  
can do that for simpler machine. It is that soul on which the  
universal consciousness differentiate.







It cannot be computationalism, as this needs non Turing emulable,  
nor FPI recoverable, actual infinities to keep an identification of  
person and body.


Why are atheists not jumping of joy when seeing that we can do  
theology with the scientific attitude? Why do the atheists defend  
so much the theories of God that they claim to not believe in?
  er the world mean when they use the word "God" to mean a  
supernatural creator who defines morality and demands obedience and  
worship.  Just because an atheist knows what he doesn't believe,  
that doesn't make it a defense.   I don't believe in fairies at the  
bottom of the garden either - is that a defense of fairy power?


I might as well ask, as I have, why you want to appropriate the word  
"God" (including the capitalization) to refer to a class of  
arithmetical propositions - which not one person in a million would  
recognize as denoting a god, much less God.



First, you forget the Pythagoreans, and neoplatonism which  
interrogates itself about that. There is an acute enneads on the  
numbers in Plotinus, and a whole of tradition focusing around the role  
of Number in theology.


Second, because once you work in the computationalist hypothesis, you  
don't need a bigger notion of truth. The 

Re: From Atheism to Islam

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/5/2017 3:14 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

Inconsistent?  Would you have people who oppose fascism not have a
definition of fascism - so that they were just opposing some undefined,
amorphous ideology?

It is interesting that you bring this up. Are you familiar with the
essay "Ur-fascism" by Umberto Eco? He discusses precisely how hard it
is to define fascism:

http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf


Yet he defines "Ur-fascism", the eternal fascism, and is critical of 
it.  So are you saying I should talk of ur-theism when I mean belief  in 
the God of the Bible, Quran, and Torah?  And leave "theism" to be used 
to mean the truths of arithmetic; So Bruno and I will both be misunderstood?




I was born in the aftermath of the carnations revolution in Portugal,
and was raised in a society that considered itself to be almost
religiously anti-fascist, but without a clear definition of what
fascism is. Some of these "anti-" people were as vicious, if not more,
than what they claimed to oppose. My mother received a letter from the
communist party saying that she should abandon her job, since my
father also had one. She was also told to denounce anyone speaking
against the communist party. She refused to do both, and was then
included in a list of people that were to be hanged in public. All
this was done under the label of "anti-fascism". Fortunately there was
a counter-revolution before it came to that. I am grateful to the US
for helping at that stage -- although this is an historic period that
is still not openly discussed.


And so do you think of yourself as agnostic about the value of 
fascism?...or communism?





They did. For example, the rejection of Mendelian genetics and the
insistence on Lamarkism for purely ideological reasons in the USSR.
Marxism-Leninism was based on a belief in a specific type of social
engineering, the idea that you could gradually improve society by
changing the way people act and then wait for these behaviour to be
transmitted and accumulated across generations. Scientific theories
that implied that you cannot transmit characteristics that you
acquired after birth through purely biological processes was verboten,
and overwhelming scientific evidence resisted (just like the
creationists do).


You make my point.  They had scientific rational reasons they put forth for
their policies.  It was wrong science and it was enforced by violence (as
other religions have done) - but it wasn't an appeal to supernatural
revelation and faith.

That was true in the beginning, but once you put your beliefs above
empirical evidence, like they did, I don't see where the difference to
an appeal to supernatural revelation is.


It's only a difference of degree.  Theists also try to make scientific 
arguments (e.g. first-cause, fine-tuning,...), but they also explicitly 
appeal to revelation and faith.





Then they built monuments to science and progress, made to inspire awe
and fear, just like cathedrals. An example is the Fernsehturm in
Berlin, made to resemble the Sputnik and the be seen from afar. It was
also a powerful TV signal transmitter, in an attempt to silence the
dangerous transmissions from the west. People who like facts and
reason are not afraid of debate. They don't try to silence the
opposition.


They also don't use words to obfuscate meaning.

I don't think any of us is doing that. We are debating definitions,
which is arguably 90% of philosophy.



Then why do people feel the need to crate the word "agnostic"?


I think it's a cop out to avoid the question of whether the God of theism
exists.  Agnostics were originally people who were not just uncertain about
God, they held that the question was impossible to know anything about,
a-gnostic.   So it was not a "nuanced" position - epistemologically is was
an extreme position and so deserved a name.

Yes, I tend to agree with this epistemological extreme, because I
think it is a necessary implication of Gödel's theorems.


??  Godel's theorems are about what is entailed by axioms in a formal 
logical system.  As such it has nothing to do with facts in the world.  
Do you suppose juries should always vote "Innocent" because there are 
truths that are unprovable from the prosecutions evidence?  Do you avoid 
sailing west from Portugal because we can't be sure the Earth isn't flat 
and has an edge you could fall off of?





  When Dawkins, who is often castigated as
a radical atheist, was asked, on a scale of 1 to 7 how certain was he that
there is no God, he said "6".  And since you like to credence original usage
of words over current usage you should know that agnosticism was originally
just considered a form of atheism - since it implies not believing in God.

I don't have such a preference. I am trying to apply reductio ad
absurdum to your argument.  You accuse me of obfuscating meaning by
going against the current use of a word. If that is not permissible,
anyone who did it before me should also be 

Re: AI apocalypse

[Bruno Marchal]

On 05 Feb 2017, at 06:53, Brent Meeker wrote:


I wonder if Bruno's theory of mind can help with this:

http://www.sciencealert.com/experts-have-come-up-with-23-guidelines-to-avoid-an-ai-apocalypse

I remember Marvin Minsky once said something like, "In the future  
there will be machines more intelligent than human beings and they  
may come to compete with humans beings.  I'm on the side  of more  
intelligence."



In a nutshell, the universal machine is born (= exists in arithmetic)  
maximally conscious, in a plausibly quite dissociative state, which  
can seen as the of consciousness which initiate the differentiation on  
the infinitely many states belonging to the infinitely many  
computations.


So the singularity belongs to the past, and belongs also "out of time"  
in the arithmetical relations. So the virgin, unprogrammed universal  
purpose computer, I mean here the physical implementation of a  
universal system, like a physical boolean graph, or like the  
implemented interpreter of a universal programming language, is  
maximally conscious and I would say maximally intelligent, in a large  
sense of the term. It is not competent, and is still in a dissociated  
state, in which we maintain it by "conventional programming" most of  
the time (the human made universal machine is born slave).


Now, when you add some application, the machine is the slave, and loss  
in potential freedom, and its intelligence and consciousness get more  
filtered, and differentiate. But today's application are not yet at  
the "Peano Arithmetic" level. We don't interview the machine, we just  
give order, and avoid letting her to reason about herself or take  
initiative, but of course, that is changing, by economical pressure,  
notably.


There is a new singularity: it is when the human-made machines will be  
as much stupid as the humans. If that is possible. But stupidity is  
needed for feeling so good when it stops, and is part of the  
exploration, at least for those able to keep notice and not repeat too  
much the previous errors.


If we let the corporatism into power, the machines of tomorrow will  
find the humans a bit too expensive to afford. Yes, there are some  
risk, especially when free-markets are disintegrated by prohibition  
laws.


Bruno






Brent
When a natural resource is in short supply, that's when artificial  
substitutes are invented.


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google  
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,  
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Re: Brainwashing by atheists

[Bruno Marchal]

On 03 Feb 2017, at 23:52, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 2/3/2017 5:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 02 Feb 2017, at 20:38, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 2/2/2017 9:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


I do think the greek get the "correct" mystical insight, which is  
that Truth is bigger than Reason.


It's also bigger than logic


Of course. Reason by itself is already bigger than logic. All  
theories are bigger than (first order) logic.





- something which every scientist and engineer knows.


Engineers? I guess so. But scientists? Perhaps, but not so much the  
Aristotelian believer, who are not aware that even just elementary  
arithmetic is not unifiable in a complete theory. Many scientists  
are just unaware of the impact of Gödel's discovery, and have  
sometimes a reductionist conception of machine, numbers, and finite  
things in general. It took Gödel's ingenuity to kill the the  
Leibniz-Hilbert Dream of making the base of mathematics consistent  
and simple. For many, when they understand this, they realize for  
the first time that there is a mathematical reality beyond the  
theories which try to study that reality.




It is only mathematicians and logicians who think all knowledge  
can be reached by reasoning.


OK.

But you need to make such mistake to understand that they are  
*scientific* mistake. Today, many scientists continue to do that  
mistake with respect to arithmetic. That the arithmetical reality  
is not even axiomatizable


You write that as though it was an important revelation - but no  
Milesian philosopher (a term I will invent to describe those of  
scientific mind, neither Platonic nor Aristotelian) would have even  
entertained such an outlandish idea that reality might be  
axiomatizable.  However, arithmetic is axiomatizable and in fact  
that's how it's defined - by a set of axioms such as Peano's.



Just to make things clear, I will use Arithmetic for Arithmetical  
Truth, by which I mean the set of all true arithmetical propositions.  
To be even more specific, I will identify the arithmeticl truth with  
the set of Gödel numbers of the true arithmetical propositions. That  
set is not axiomatisable. It is not recursively enumerable.


By arithmetic with a little "a", I mean either the set of G¨del number  
of theorems of Robinson Arithmetic, or Peano Arithmetic. Those sets  
are axiomatizable by construction, and that is what is denoited by the  
"[]", in the case of Peano Arithmetic, or any "rational believer" (in  
the mechanist theory).



I am not sure what you try to say. Could you elaborate on the  
Milesian's conception of reality. As I (re)defined the Platonist and  
Aristotelian view, I don't see how we can escape the alternative,  
which is either the physical reality is the One ("Aristotle"), or  
something else might be ("Plato").






(no complete theory) is quite very often badly understood. When  
working in the interdisciplinary domain, it is better to assume  
that nothing is obvious, and put all cards on the table. What is  
obvious for some can be quite unbelievable for another. Sometimes  
obvious thing are shown just wrong.


Which Leucippus and Democritus realized, e.g. the Earth is not flat.

Brent
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu  
and no food.

   --- Robert Pirsig



I tried to be less provocating using "metaphysics" instead of  
theology, but I knew it will not make down the mockery :)


Bruno







--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google  
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,  
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Re: Brainwashing by atheists

[Bruno Marchal]

On 03 Feb 2017, at 15:25, PGC wrote:




On Friday, February 3, 2017 at 2:36:19 PM UTC+1, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 02 Feb 2017, at 20:38, Brent Meeker wrote:

>
>
> On 2/2/2017 9:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> I do think the greek get the "correct" mystical insight, which is
>> that Truth is bigger than Reason.
>
> It's also bigger than logic

Of course. Reason by itself is already bigger than logic. All theories
are bigger than (first order) logic.



> - something which every scientist and engineer knows.

Engineers? I guess so. But scientists? Perhaps, but not so much the
Aristotelian believer, who are not aware that even just elementary
arithmetic is not unifiable in a complete theory.

Inform them then perhaps instead of whining about it? Or is it that  
you expect people to do the hard work of presenting your work  
because you're too busy lecturing an internet list?


Many scientists are
just unaware of the impact of Gödel's discovery, and have sometimes a
reductionist conception of machine, numbers, and finite things in
general.

Oh no! We are doomed. Everybody plug Bruno's writings immediately!  
Sell your houses, there is a world to save.


It took Gödel's ingenuity to kill the the Leibniz-Hilbert
Dream of making the base of mathematics consistent and simple. For
many, when they understand this, they realize for the first time that
there is a mathematical reality beyond the theories which try to study
that reality.


For many yes, but for many others not. Some ask: ok, but what good  
does this bring?




>  It is only mathematicians and logicians who think all knowledge can
> be reached by reasoning.

OK.

But you need to make such mistake to understand that they are
*scientific* mistake. Today, many scientists continue to do that
mistake with respect to arithmetic.

You're repeating yourself. Approach "the many scientists" more  
directly then.


That the arithmetical reality is
not even axiomatizable (no complete theory) is quite very often badly
understood. When working in the interdisciplinary domain, it is better
to assume that nothing is obvious, and put all cards on the table.

Now it's interdisciplinary that nobody recognizes arithmetical  
reality to not be axiomatizable, the next day it's a  
mathematicalism, on another day it's a point in theology, on another  
day we have the amazing result of fuzzy physics, then it's only a  
toy theology, then everybody lacks modesty, but you evade the  
question: how does all this do and feature in peoples' lives? Even  
for scientists: they would all become magically modest and not evil,  
upon realizing technical points such as that A.R. is not  
axiomatizable?


All scientist are already modest. It is just that the theological  
science are still taboo. The non axiomatizability of the arithmetical  
truth (not RA which is an axiom system) illustrate, with God played by  
Arithmetical truth, that the "antic" theology of Plotin and others  
admit an interpretation in arithmetic.






Without a meaningful relation to peoples' lives, even if just on  
some theological level, this discourse uses scientific environs to  
justify purely personal mysticisms. I fail to see evidence of such a  
relation nor evidence that there is an end to your need to justify  
what the world has misunderstood. The latter feels like a certainty,  
which does not fit well with the modest approach you keep bragging  
about, attacking in principle all scientists who don't listen to  
your sermonizing without clearly naming or engaging them. PGC



The point is technical, and of interest for people searching a theory  
of everything, or the fundamental theory. The point is that if we  
assume a certain hypothesis (Digital Mechanism), then any first order  
logical specification of a Turing Universal theory can be used (like  
Robinson Arithmetic, ...), and that a version of that idea is  
testable, by comparing the universal machine observable (machine's  
physics) with the current observation.


Bruno









--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google  
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,  
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Re: From Atheism to Islam

[PGC]

On Sunday, February 5, 2017 at 12:14:27 PM UTC+1, telmo_menezes wrote:
>
>
> > Then they built monuments to science and progress, made to inspire awe 
> > and fear, just like cathedrals. An example is the Fernsehturm in 
> > Berlin, made to resemble the Sputnik and the be seen from afar. It was 
> > also a powerful TV signal transmitter, in an attempt to silence the 
> > dangerous transmissions from the west. People who like facts and 
> > reason are not afraid of debate. They don't try to silence the 
> > opposition. 
> > 
> > 
> > They also don't use words to obfuscate meaning. 
>
> I don't think any of us is doing that. We are debating definitions, 
> which is arguably 90% of philosophy. 
>
>
> > Then why do people feel the need to crate the word "agnostic"? 
> > 
> > 
> > I think it's a cop out to avoid the question of whether the God of 
> theism 
> > exists.  Agnostics were originally people who were not just uncertain 
> about 
> > God, they held that the question was impossible to know anything about, 
> > a-gnostic.   So it was not a "nuanced" position - epistemologically is 
> was 
> > an extreme position and so deserved a name. 
>
> Yes, I tend to agree with this epistemological extreme, because I 
> think it is a necessary implication of Gödel's theorems. 
>
>
This assumes that Gödel's theorems (which one and how?) force a general 
epistemological extreme concerning knowledge that reads as though Gödel's 
theorems should force people into strong forms of agnosticism. "We don't 
know" in some unclear general philosophical sense involving the beliefs and 
positions of other folks in real life IS NOT a necessary implication of 
Gödel's theorems. Even assuming it were such a necessary implication: how 
could one even posit formal arithmetic to assume we are universal machines 
to get to Gödel in the first place? You have to assume that people are 
machines, Church Thesis etc. with Gödel.

What is implied by discussing philosophy in a general sense is not subject 
to formal rules of inference. Folks run into danger of confusing the 
results of formal rules of inference (and the precise systems to which they 
apply in their bounded study of arithmetic say), with much broader ideas 
that are much less clear. What is philosophically implied by a scientific 
theory is NOT determined exclusively by its internal rules, derivations, 
proofs etc.; it is just as much a matter of interpretation, opinion, 
argument, language and personal beliefs limited only by vast boundaries of 
the mind as with thought in general. 

When I read "convert" in your original post, it exposes a mindset that can 
appear to confuse the clarity of formal systems and their results with 
reality. Or worse, a mindset that exploits the universal presence of some 
terms, e.g. incompleteness, system, reasoning etc. to opportunistically 
frame discourse to advance the successful appearance of some assumed 
authority or narrative. Real potential for misleading obfuscation here. I 
wonder where all the humility and agnosticism went? Such lack of clarity 
should be avoided, if we're not just kidding around and if we're kidding 
around, I missed the punch line or the beauty of the thing, in which case 
the apologies are mine. PGC

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Re: From Atheism to Islam

[Telmo Menezes]

> Inconsistent?  Would you have people who oppose fascism not have a
> definition of fascism - so that they were just opposing some undefined,
> amorphous ideology?

It is interesting that you bring this up. Are you familiar with the
essay "Ur-fascism" by Umberto Eco? He discusses precisely how hard it
is to define fascism:

http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf

I was born in the aftermath of the carnations revolution in Portugal,
and was raised in a society that considered itself to be almost
religiously anti-fascist, but without a clear definition of what
fascism is. Some of these "anti-" people were as vicious, if not more,
than what they claimed to oppose. My mother received a letter from the
communist party saying that she should abandon her job, since my
father also had one. She was also told to denounce anyone speaking
against the communist party. She refused to do both, and was then
included in a list of people that were to be hanged in public. All
this was done under the label of "anti-fascism". Fortunately there was
a counter-revolution before it came to that. I am grateful to the US
for helping at that stage -- although this is an historic period that
is still not openly discussed.

> They did. For example, the rejection of Mendelian genetics and the
> insistence on Lamarkism for purely ideological reasons in the USSR.
> Marxism-Leninism was based on a belief in a specific type of social
> engineering, the idea that you could gradually improve society by
> changing the way people act and then wait for these behaviour to be
> transmitted and accumulated across generations. Scientific theories
> that implied that you cannot transmit characteristics that you
> acquired after birth through purely biological processes was verboten,
> and overwhelming scientific evidence resisted (just like the
> creationists do).
>
>
> You make my point.  They had scientific rational reasons they put forth for
> their policies.  It was wrong science and it was enforced by violence (as
> other religions have done) - but it wasn't an appeal to supernatural
> revelation and faith.

That was true in the beginning, but once you put your beliefs above
empirical evidence, like they did, I don't see where the difference to
an appeal to supernatural revelation is.

> Then they built monuments to science and progress, made to inspire awe
> and fear, just like cathedrals. An example is the Fernsehturm in
> Berlin, made to resemble the Sputnik and the be seen from afar. It was
> also a powerful TV signal transmitter, in an attempt to silence the
> dangerous transmissions from the west. People who like facts and
> reason are not afraid of debate. They don't try to silence the
> opposition.
>
>
> They also don't use words to obfuscate meaning.

I don't think any of us is doing that. We are debating definitions,
which is arguably 90% of philosophy.


> Then why do people feel the need to crate the word "agnostic"?
>
>
> I think it's a cop out to avoid the question of whether the God of theism
> exists.  Agnostics were originally people who were not just uncertain about
> God, they held that the question was impossible to know anything about,
> a-gnostic.   So it was not a "nuanced" position - epistemologically is was
> an extreme position and so deserved a name.

Yes, I tend to agree with this epistemological extreme, because I
think it is a necessary implication of Gödel's theorems.

>  When Dawkins, who is often castigated as
> a radical atheist, was asked, on a scale of 1 to 7 how certain was he that
> there is no God, he said "6".  And since you like to credence original usage
> of words over current usage you should know that agnosticism was originally
> just considered a form of atheism - since it implies not believing in God.

I don't have such a preference. I am trying to apply reductio ad
absurdum to your argument.  You accuse me of obfuscating meaning by
going against the current use of a word. If that is not permissible,
anyone who did it before me should also be denounced, so let's retreat
to the original definition.

> And even deists, like Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, were considered
> atheists because they didn't believe in the god of theism.

I get that. I wouldn't be particularly offended to be labeled "atheist
agnostic", in the sense that I do not believe in any of the gods
described in abrahamic religious texts. But I know nothing about god
in general.


> Yes, I used to tell people I was an agnostic.  But the problem was that they
> assumed I was just on the fence and undecided about their God (usually
> Christian in the U.S.).  But I wasn't at all undecided about Yaweh, any more
> than I was undecided about Zeus or Baal or Thor.

I understand that, I have the same problem.

>  And although I supposed
> there could be some god-like being, e.g. the great programmer in the sky of
> our simulation, it was a bare possibility which I estimated to be less
> likely than finding a teapot orbiting