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i agree with janey in general on the distinction between atheist and agnostic, but not on the explanation for it:
one can be an agnostic if you take seriously one of the basic assumptions of judeo-christian theology: that god is infinite, man finite, that a finite mind cannot know the infinite, so god is unknowable, the name god is just a name, a surrogate fashioned by finite understanding to plug the gap in its being-in-the-world generated by the simple fact, which follows from the most basic aspects of the belief system, that you worship what you can never know.
you could say that pascal was an agnostic simply because he, like most nominalists, followed the actual logic of this tradition to its obvious conclusion.
of course this position makes the universe huge and human beings rather tiny and puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of this sense of scale being otherwise. which of course freaks out many people.
so they choose to think otherwise.
usually this otherwise involves a watered-down notion of grace, which at least retained something of its strange relation to finite understanding in luther, for example, but which subsequently became an empty category mostly therapeutic in function that served to erase this scary division between human beings and the god to which some attribute everything and nothing.
so there is a rather terrifying element in this tradition. no wonder that folk try to erase it, replacing it with absurd notions like that the bible is at once the word of god and can be understood literally. whcih has the effect of being a patronizing pseudo-understanding of god, the making of the notion of infinite into an unnecessary rhetorical flourish, replaced with a god rooted in projection, who is just like you, who thinks like you do and who speaks like you do--but at the same time has a certain distance from you and immense Authority--a child's relation to the Father, to Authority dressed up as a theology of liberation.
the nominalist line at least has the advantage of making the Incarnation back into the paradox it was framed as being from the outset, and not into a form of salvation delivery which makes of salvation something like a type of pizza that you order in.
so i think you could end up an agnostic by simply following the logic of the judeo-christian tradition in anything like a strict sense. it also follows that you could be quite deeply religious tempermentally and be an agnostic.
it also follows from the above that an agnostic could make every single argument about the god that most folk carry around with them as an atheist would without sharing anything of the assumptions that would inform atheism.
but the pace where this view would split far from janey's view would be in the status of proof: for an agnostic who followed this trajectory, proof of the existence or nonexistence of god would be impossible by definition. i mean that they could be logically consistent--be true formally--without that truth correlating to anything outside itself. so the question of proof is out. following the same logic, no amount of evidence would enable you to get around the basic division between finite and infinite that shapes the startingpoint for this whole system.
it would seem to me that it would be easier to persuade an atheist with proofs because the startingpoints are otherwise.
what is funny is that anyone would argue that empricism in any of its variants plays any role in any of this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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