The Case for Agnostic Atheism
I (Ron Brown) spent close to 20 years being an agnostic atheist.
- Agnostic atheism can be described as follows: it constitutes a lack of belief in God, but not any claim of certainty of knowing that there is no God. What distinguishes it from agnosticism can be summed up by the statement “Agnostic in theory, atheist in practice”. What this means is that the agnostic atheist doesn’t know that there is no God, but sees no reason to act as if there is one. Likewise, it’s conceivable that New Zealand could crumble into the ocean tomorrow, but unless we have reason/evidence that this will happen, it would be silly to rearrange our day around this conceivable possibility.
- This, I still think, is a very strong position. As strong as any other, and quite possibly stronger. Some people accuse atheists of arrogance, but this is actually a very humble position.
- There are plenty of arguments that religious folk have made for the existence of God, and atheists have great responses:
- The argument from design, or organised complexity. Any biological organism is a highly intricate, complex system. How could they be so intricate without a designer? Likewise, there’s the fine-tuning argument: that is, the Earth’s physical features lend themselves to the origination of life here. Were things even slightly different, e.g., if ice didn’t float in water, if it wasn’t a carbon-rich planet, and so forth, life as we know it could not have happened. How do we explain this lock-and-key match between the Earth and life on Earth? And then there’s the question of “why is there something rather than nothing?” and “how could something come from nothing?”
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