Ask An Atheist: What’s the difference between an Agnostic and an Atheist?

href=”http://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tPbTSEldxdLfnqwt8qsOV9uL9rsAUC4b9sD-Da0z9dQ/viewform”>Not believing in god(s) has a spectrum of opinion just as belief in them do. Christians, just to give one example, have fought nasty wars in the not so recent past over which version of “Christianity” is the true one and getting all judgmental about anyone who disagrees. Over in the Islamic world, the ISIS gang as we speak is showing how such dedication to doctrinal purity has not gone away or grown any less potentially dangerous.

Though atheistic Marxists indulged in a lot of idea persecution in the old USSR or the still kicking PRC and North Korea, though, I cannot recall any instance of people being persecuted over which brand of atheism they embraced, and this is because atheism has no brand or doctrine apart from not believing in supernatural entities.

More historically, an atheist can be seen as someone who does not believe in a particular god, and that was the case up until fairly recently, when people from Socrates to Thomas Jefferson were accused of “atheism” because they did not embrace the particular doctrines of people keeping track of such things on their dogmatic scoresheet.  In that restricted dogmatic sense, everybody is born an atheist, and regarding one deity or other remains an atheist to their dying day. I bet most people on earth today do not believe in the old Mesopotamian god Marduk, for example, so they are all atheists on that one.  The absence of an active Marduk lobbying group that can kill you if you don’t embrace the truth of Mardukism certainly plays a role in the current lack of popularity for old Marduk.

The degree to which someone does not rule out that Marduk might exist (perhaps being excessively shy about showing itself in the current world, and less afflicted by the self-esteem issues that prompt some other gods to be very picky about proper rituals and cultural behavior being performed on their behalf) and might come to believe in Marduk if only sufficiently impressive evidence of its existence might emerge, then that person could be considered an “agnostic” (not sure but open to maybe becoming sure if evidence warranted it) on the Marduk matter, even while not actively believing in Marduk (and hence remaining a non-Mardukian “atheist” in the meantime).

A lot of practical atheists are also agnostics in this “open to new evidence” sense, and so the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. There are, however, what might be called hardened atheists who not only do not believe in any god(s) but would not accept the existence of any no matter what evidence was presented (and might not worship them even if they did exist and got pushy about it).  Such could be seen as the non-religious doppleganger of religious believers who would not cease to believe in their particular deity no matter what the evidence was against it, and the limited survey data in this area suggests they may share similarly dogmatic dispositions in other areas (and may be equally annoying to play cards with).

I regard myself as a philosophical agnostic, in that I don’t rule out in principle that some god(s) might exist, but since the evidence that I see for all the known ones is (to put it mildly) pretty slim, with all the current mutually exclusive varieties of belief claiming everybody else’s religion lacks the strong evidence that only their own side is allowed to possess, I am a practical atheist.  But remember, everybody is an atheist in the “I don’t believe in god x” sense, and the only thing differentiating them is that the full blown practical atheist has added one more name to the list of god(s) they already don’t believe in.

Is that state of affairs (global religious proprietary conflict while atheists look on shaking their heads in dismay) likely to change any time soon?  I’m agnostic on that.