On 28 June 2014 07:25, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:06 PM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Surely Atheist means 100% sure, so 99.999999999....% is still agnostic >> > > The existence or nonexistence of God is just one fact about the world, > there are lots more, so I guess we need to invent hairsplitting > distinctions for them all. We need to invent 2 new words concerning your > level of disbelief that this is Thursday, one if you're 100% certain that > this is not Thursday (Aththursdayist) and another word (Agthursdayic) if > you're only 99.999999999% certain it's not Thursday. >
If that came up often in debate then we would of course invent a word for it. It's because belief in the G word gets debated so often that we bother to give names to different categories of belief and disbelief. (Although agnosticism is of course the defining principle of the scientific method, so we really need the concept in order to understand the status of scientific theories.) > Or maybe we don't need different words for things that are that > ridiculously similar. The real reason people call themselves agnostic and > not atheist has nothing to do with ideas, it's because of a sound, they > like to make the "God" noise with their mouth. > I'm glad you know why I do things, I must remember to ask you next time I have any doubt about my motives. Just for the record, in my (no doubt wrong) opinion, the reason I call myself agnostic about certain things is because I don't have enough knowledge about them to have what I consider an informed opinion. > > And by the way, mathematically 99.99999999999999999999999999.... is > exactly equal to 100. > Oops, my mistake, I meant to say something slightly different, appropriately enough. A corrected version reads: Surely Atheist means 100% sure, so 99.9....9% is still agnostic, where the "..." represents any finite number of 9s -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
