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Originally Posted by shakran
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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Agreed, that was a poor choice of example. I got carried away on a wave of literature.
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Because hobbits were made up by JRR Tolkien. God was not.
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Isn't this begging the question though? No, we can't verify the true origin of the God 'myth', but by the same token, can we say with absolute certainty that Tolkein
isn't recounting some long-forgotten history of an age out of memory? It's presented as a chronicle, after all, rather than a straightforward fictional narrative.
In any event, just because you can't say
who invented God, doesn't mean that he wasn't invented.
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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.
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We have very strict definitions of the terms to work with though, which mischaracterise the debate. Atheism, strictly interpreted, means one will not admit of even the possibility of a god. I think very few people can reasonably take this stance. Agnosticism, meanwhile, puts one in the position of saying knowledge of a deity is impossible. There isn't really a label for the middle ground, which is where I think most 'atheists' realistically fall.
I certainly wouldn't say angnosticism is impossible, but I would assuredly take issue with the notion that all agnostics are, by defnition, completely ambivalent about god's existence, and I'd go further to say that in the absence of better terms for their position, those who veer away from total ambivalence might as well be called atheists or theists, according to the direction they go. It would likely thin the numbers of declared 'agnostics' considerably.