On 12/22/2014 12:18 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
@Glen before diving to deep into it with numbers- do you have a working defination of Agnostic vs Atheist?
Well, the standard definitions suffice, I think. This one works just fine for agnostic: "a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God."
And this one works for atheist: "a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods."
Having argued about this sort of thing for decades, now, I find the primary denotational sticking point to be the difference between "belief" and "knowledge". The primary connotational sticking points are usually dogma and the ontological status of supernatural phenomena. Agnostics and atheists align almost perfectly regarding the supernatural stuff. An atheist claims the supernatural does not exist, whereas an agnostic claims that supernatural stuff is completely irrelevant. Dogma, however, becomes very important. Atheists tend to be more dogmatic, particularly about the structure and interpretation of evidence, whereas agnostics tend to be more willing to let the data lay around without curating or interpreting it.
So, whether you consider the standard definitions "working" or not depends on the actionable differences between a) "knowledge" vs. "belief" and b) the tendency (or not) to triage data into evidence.
Re (a) I find it useful to ask questions like "Can you know something you don't believe?" And "Can you believe something you don't know?" Re (b) it can be interesting to see how badly the social network mangles scientific research results. For whatever reason, despite most research being published with lots of caveats and hedges, most people read it as "scientific knowledge" or "proof". The same can be said about the "gossip game", where a statement at one end gets modified as it's whispered from one person to the next. There is a biological limit to iterative depth. You can't just wrap a statement inside he-said(she-said(he-said(she-said(...)))) forever. At some point you have to put in a hard stop, a triage.
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