Atheism and/or Agnocticism?

Question

I'm Agnostic but believe any sort of higher power exists about as much as I believe there is no higher power. It is, quite simply, as much a matter of faith to believe that God (or whom/whatever) exists as to believe there is nothing beyond the common experience we call life. Quite simply, there is no way to prove or disprove any sort of higher force/energy/consciousness/being.
I see a lot of people on here claiming to be Agnostic while demanding that God (or what/whomever) does not exist.
I can understand being Agnostic but still believing in a god or absence thereof. Belief does not require evidence. I could believe in God or not and still remain Agnostic so long as I admit that it is beyond my ability (or that of anyone else) to know. This is at the heart of Agnosticism. It is a philosophy based on the acknowledgement of the limit of our ability to know.
Why do people claim to be Agnostic while adamantly refusing any concept of a higher "thing" and claiming they know it to be true?

Answer 1

It seems to me that the intelligent design answer to the God question is irrefutable. It simply says that design in the universe is undeniable. The law of cause and effect says that wherever you find design you must have a designer somewhere. Since the cause must have everything the effect does and the effect(the universe) has intelligence(namely,us), the cause(the designer) must also have intelligence. The effect must have everything the cause has because you can't give what you ain't got. So you need an intelligent designer of this universe. But who could design a universe outside of a God. You call Him whatever you want to call Him. I call Him a God. That refutes ahteism since atheism says that everything came about by unintelligent random chance. It refutes agnosticism because agnosticism says you can't know whether there is an intelligent designer and I've just given you reason why you should know. The I.D. argument, it seems to me, is irrefutable. It's a simple logical argument:
Premise #1: Wherever you find design, you need a designer.
Premise #2: The universe exhibits design
Conclusion: The universe needs a designer.
The only way around that argument is to deny the second premise. Every atheist has to deny design. As I've said before, If you read Richard Dawkins two latest books('the blind watchmaker' and 'the god delusion') that's exactly what he does. He denies design. He says that there's no design in the universe, just the "appearance of design". But that's insane. You just can't logically and realistically deny that there's design all through the universe. It's all around you. You have to be blind not to see it. There are branches of science that basically just study the design in nature.........scientific disciplines such as nano-technology and bio-mimetrics. These disciplines study the design in nature.......whales,bats,dolphins... have sonar.......and try to create machines that mimic that design. There’s even a weekly program on the science channel that looks at the design in nature trying to find leads for technology. Everywhere you look there's design. Where there's design there's got to be a designer. That's just common sense. Creation is not an unproven theory. It's a common sense fact that we come to by just using a little logic and reason.
. You look at bats. They do not fly by sight. They can barely see in the day but they sleep in the day. They are nocturnal creatures. They do all their activities at night and at night they are blind. They fly by means of sonar. They send out sound waves through their nose as they are flying. If those sound waves bounce off something and come back at them, they pick them up and know that they are heading toward something and need to veer in a different direction. Somehow they know how fast they are flying and they know that sound travels at 723 MPH and as they fly they continue to send out sound waves so they continue to get updated information. Given enough info(and continued updated info) a mathematician could sit down with a pencil and paper and some calculus equations and figure out how far the bat was from the object and with the right info could even figure out if the object the bat is heading toward is stationary or moving toward the bat or away from it. But that would take time and if the bat took that much time he’d be flying into trees and telephone poles other things. We have developed computers that can do that in a second. That's what sonar is all about. The bat has a computer in his head that can figure that info out in a nanosecond. It knows what it is heading for without being able to physically see. It's flying by instruments(as pilots would say). Do you really think that the sonar equipment that is in the bats head just came about by random chance(read....luck) natural processes? You do if you're an atheist.

Paly's argument of the 1700's still holds today. He said that if you are walking through a forest and you find a watch sitting upon a rock, you have 2 possible explanations: 1)It was designed and built by a watchmaker 2) It came about the same way the rock that it is sitting upon came about.....by random chance. Which explantion makes more sense?
Do you really believe that dumb mud could somehow bootstrap itself into intelligence over billions of years simply by random chance luck?
To Dawkins, belief in God is a projection of human longings and a type of wish-fulfillment. Such an argument works against atheism as well since an atheist wishes there is no God and therefore believes there is no God.
All you need to prove God is science plus a little common sense. What science does is it goes out and finds all this design in nature and then a little common sense tells you that where there is design there needs to be a designer.

Answer 2

You're right - these people are confusing athiesm & agnosticism.
An agnostic, simply put, is one who believes in the idea that there could *possibly* be some form of higher power, but not under the terms of any specific religion because none of those religions have any direct evidence of said higher power.
Am I correct?

Answer 3

If they claim to know anything about the existense or non-existense of a higher being then they are atheists, not agnostic. Atheism is as much a religion as any other belief. True agnostics will always be skeptical of both sides.

Answer 4

Many of them are wannabe atheists who are still afraid of hell, so they consider themselves agnostics. By calling themselves that, they think they have the freedom to say whatever they want, whenever they get into a particular mood. For instance, if they are having a crappy week, that might be a week where they'd come on here and say there is no God.....if they are having a magnificent week, they'll come on here as real agnostics and say, "maybe there is a God".

Answer 5

Authentic spirituality involves an emotional response, what I will call the spiritual response, which can include feelings of significance, unity, awe, joy, acceptance, and consolation. Such feelings are intrinsically rewarding and so are sought out in their own right, but they also help us in dealing with difficult situations involving death, loss, and disappointment. The spiritual response thus helps meet our affective needs for both celebration and reconciliation. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, we have an "appetite for wonder," an appetite for evoking the positive emotional states that are linked to our deepest existential questions.
http://www.naturalism.org/spiritua1.htm

Answer 6

oph: You are correct. Since God is "Spirit" and the science thereof, deals with the spiritual. Atheism adheres to the material therefore, is subjugated to the physical, and can not prove either, way God's existence or God's non-existence. All-in-all, Agnostics allow room for either, thus, being open-minded to all possibilities.

Answer 7

No it is not. And if it is ours and not yours, who precisely is the only that gets to assert what it is and what it is not? Hmm? Who certainly lives it to understand? "A theory gadget that demands faith in human intelligence and medical concept" Absurd, because of the fact it is not. faith is your be conscious, no longer ours. i've got not got plenty have confidence is human intelligence, in basic terms the surely share who do have above person-friendly intelligence and not all atheists even care to place plenty theory into medical concept. some human beings merely stay their lives. "Evangelised by ability of a few" Um, no. "in greater extreme/aggressive varieties, sees all different religions as a risk." No it does not.. in aggressive varieties it is merely is merely too undemanding for it is very own reliable and has no concern declaring that it sees faith as stupid. (in case you think of you're so knowledgeable approximately issues that are no longer yours, then tell me, are my shoes uncomfortable or delicate? because of the fact incredibly, you're no longer in them to understand.)

Answer 8

i certainly do not claim to be agnostic, but i imagine it would have something to do with the following (now, bear in mind this is an atheist perspective)

agnosticism has a certain ring of trendyness about it, what with a lot of stupid people (most of them women, in my experience) liking to think that they're being profound and all 'spiritual' while saying basically that they don't know (hence a-gnostic) what they're talking about.

or, you could say that you're agnostic because you really think that there is a god but you're very angry at him and refuse to crawl like a worm, on your belly, like the christians advocate doing. stuff that.

it's like saying that you don't WANT to believe in god/s but admitting that the possibilities are there if you're willing to think with an expanded mind. Like saying that there WAS a god but he died or something like that. re-thinking the concept of a god, etc.

anyway, that's just my opinion, why would you care what atheists say about themselves? it matters little in the end.

vale to you

Answer 9

I'm atheist and agnostic.
What i mean is that i don't believe in god, but I'm not completely sure about it, even though the internal contradictions of its existence charge the balance to the not exist side.

Answer 10

It's called ignorance. They like the term, don't know what it means.