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Originally Posted by flamingdog
But you also can't prove or disprove the existence of allsorts of other things that are nevertheless unreasonable to believe in, such as hobbits, elves, fairies, men on mars, Cthulhu, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
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Hobbits, elves, fairies, the Flying spaghetti Monster, and Lovecraft's Cthulhu are all fantasy creatures invented by fiction writers. We certainly can say that they don't exist - at least not on earth - except in the minds of their creators and those who read the stories. As for men on mars - we have direct evidence that there aren't any. We've photographed the planet, and there is NO indication of any sort of macro-scaled ecosystem which would be necessary to support a life form analagous to us.
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So to be agnostic about god is to be agnostic about anything we don't have direct evidence for.
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True, but your examples all involve things we don't have direct evidence for. A better example would be the sasquatch. Photographs and filmstrips taken by known practical jokers aside, we have no concrete evidence that sasquatch exists. Yet it is possible that somehow a giant primate has managed to avoid our detection. Not likely, but possible. So sure, I suppose you could put me as being "agnostic" about sasquatches.
And if you want to be technical the breakdown of agnostic is a - gnostic. Gnosis is an early christian term for spiritual knowledge, and therefore it is not technically possible to be agnostic about anything but a diety.
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If you, as an agnostic, accept that it's unreasonable to believe in hobbits, then why not god?
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Because hobbits were made up by JRR Tolkien. God was not. Unfortunately, the god legends start so far back in history that we cannot reliably assess their veracity. Because we have not proven it to be impossible, we must accept that it is possible that the bible describes accurately the supernatural events surrounding god and his kid. However for the same reason we must also accept that it is possible that the bible is pure fiction.
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If you then go on to accept that it's unreasonable to believe in god, then you're pretty much an atheist.
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Here you're correct, but this statement is built on a very shaky foundation. It is certainly possible to be agnostic. I find that generally only those with fervent beliefs that there is or is not a god find agnosticism to be impossible.
It's also worth pointing out, I think, that absolute atheism is as much a position of 'faith' as hardline theism is, since I don't think we can honestly discount the possibility of a god.[/QUOTE]