301. Richard Dawkins on BBC 2's Newsnight

Comment #246 by johnc on September 24, 2006 at 3:51 am

While at one level the atheist/agnostic distinction is just semantics, there are some potential confusions here that can do with clarifying.

Since one "can't disprove the existence of anything", does that mean I must be agnostic about all and every preposterous proposition that can be thought of? Am I required to identify as agnostic about alien abduction or (to use one of RD's favourites) orbiting teapots? Surely not.

I think we can say that while the two positions are (at a formal level) epistemic equivalents, they have different social/political meanings, which therefore cannot be specified with the same precision because they are dependent on context and social group.

But for me atheism also describes an intellectual disposition that says not only is there no evidence for the existence of "God" but that the probability that such evidence will ever be produced is vanishingly small - equivalent to the likelihood of evidence emerging that the solar system is indeed geocentric.

Agnosticism, on the other hand, is rather more like saying that while there is no evidence supporting M-theory, some may emerge and therefore one must keep "an open mind".

I don't maintain "an open mind" about the existence of God (or the likelihood that the solar system is geocentric), so I am an atheist.