Atheist-agnostic doesn’t believe in God but can’t disprove His existence

I’d like to continue a discussion I began with my last column. Let’s look a bit deeper at agnosticism, since I just jokingly defined it like this: I. Don’t. Know.

That’s true enough, and I certainly can’t say for certain that God, or even Russell’s teapot, for that matter, does not exist. (I’ll explain the teapot in a bit.)

So why discuss it further? Easy. Because questions of belief and disbelief and who’s God is best cause all kinds of grief.

And because people tend to label other people because of the kind of belief they profess – whether they have the slightest clue as to what it actually means – and how they behave as a result.

During my questioning for jury trial selection a few years ago, one of the lawyers (who said he read my column) asked me to define what it means to be an agnostic. I said, “Well, it’s probably easiest just to call me an atheist.”

And, honest to God and for heavens to Betsy and for cripes and Pete’s sakes, I heard a loud gasp from at least one of the other potential jurors. Say what?

But then, electing a known atheist to any office, at least one of consequence, is even less likely than voting for a Muslim. Good old America, land of religious tolerance, as long as you at least have some. Religion, that is. Even the wrong one is better than none.

So, you ask, “How can you say that you’re both agnostic and atheistic?” Well, I’m a peculiar breed of agnostic, holding to a position known as “hard agnosticism.” I don’t believe in a personal god, which is just the root meaning of the word atheist: a-theism, i.e., without theism.

And since theism, of course, traditionally means belief in a personal god, that’s easy for me to reject. I doubt like sin that such a Fellow exists – which is not to say that I can somehow disprove the notion. That makes me agnostic, rather than a straight atheist, since atheism traditionally means “the theory or belief that God does not exist.”

And I’m a so-called “strong” agnostic because I would say that the nature of ultimate reality (whatever that is), sometimes called “God,” is unknowable by virtue of the limitations of our senses and the subjectivity of all experience. Which is to more to say, “I can’t know” rather than “I don’t know.”

But even that’s not cut and dried, since many atheists would no doubt disagree with the straight-from-my-dictionary definition of atheism that I just gave.

I know atheists who just say that they don’t believe in God. Period. This says nothing about the actual existence or nonexistence of God, which they may think of as a silly thing to argue over, a point of view that I’m sympathetic toward.

And all this gets me back to good old Bert Russell’s teapot, which the philosopher postulated to be in cosmic orbit, just hanging there somewhere between, say, the Earth and Mars.

Can you disprove that it’s there? No, he said, at least if he made sure to add that it is too small for anyone to see by telescope.

“But if I were to go onto say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense,” he continued.

However, if the existence of such a teapot were to be affirmed in the sacred texts and taught in Sunday school, that would be a different thing altogether. No?