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Comment by kubrick | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many atheists are actually agnostics (depend on your definitions, naturally). No one can (yet?) prove the existence or non-existence of a god, and although there are some who claim that they can show that a god isn't necessary for all of this reality stuff to have come about (read: Dawkins), I am less convinced of that -- we (via science) don't know enough to make that argument. Yet.

Are you sure there is no god at all, or do you just doubt?

Myself, I suspect the universe itself is "god", so to speak. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

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I think most of them make it clear that they are 'weak atheists', who believe (as John McCarthy puts it) that the evidence on the God question is about as strong as the evidence on the Werewolf question. Strong atheists are much rarer -- I'm actually not familiar with their arguments.

If you were to ask me free-form about my religious views, the answer you would get would be very dependent on how you asked the question.

If you asked me, "Do you think a god exists?", I would say "no", and you would call me an atheist. If you asked, "Do you think a god could exist?", I would say, "yes", and you would call me an agnostic.

On the other hand, if you asked me "What term most closely describes your views?", I would say "secular humanist" and emphasize the humanist part. Ultimately, the question of the existence or non-existence of a god doesn't enter my life very often and that's the way I like it.

(As an aside, the term for the beliefs you describe is pantheist)

So because one cannot disprove X, then "the whole universe is X"?

I think it depends which God you ask if someone believe in.

For example, the Platonic idea of The Good is a pretty abstract philosophical concept which does not exist in the physical world - rather the physical world is some kind of shadow or reflection of this Good. You can't really prove or disprove the "existence" of this interpretation of reality, although some would say you can apply occams razor to it. Plato would argue that you cannot not belive in this, if you just consider the question reationally.

On the other hand, the biblical God Yahweh is a beeing with a physical shape and with intentions and emotions, which walk around in the physical world in historical times and interact with people (and killing them left and right!). The existence of this beeing could easily be proved if you meet him, but cannot strictly speaking be disproved as long as he remains in hiding. But the evidence can be weighed the same way we weigh evidence for the existence of mammuths or unicorns.

The christian notion of God has historically been kind of a mixture of these two ideas (and to a lesser degree many other). Due to this complexity of the concept "God", it is not even clear what it means to believe or don't believe in God.

Minimally, I would say a conscious being in control of all of reality.

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