This first video has been popular in the blogosphere lately, but I just had to pass it along. It’s particularly funny if you’ve seen the new Sherlock Holmes.

This second one is just one of my favorites.

On the question of whether you believe a god exists, you can only be a theist or an atheist. Gnosticism addresses a different question: Whether you know, or believe it is possible to know, (gnostic) or not (agnostic). Since they are separate questions, you can mix them any way you want. When someone says they are an agnostic, they are not revealing whether or not they believe in a god. They are expressing whether or not they have that knowledge, or whether they think it is possible to have that knowledge.

Here is a rough breakdown of possible mixes. If you say:

• I don’t know if a god exists, and I don’t believe in any particular god. Then you are an atheist (agnostic).
• It is possible to know whether a god exists, and I know that no god exists. Then you are an atheist (gnostic).
• I don’t know if a god exists, but I believe a god exists. Then you are a theist (agnostic).
• It is possible to know whether a god exists, and I know that a god exists. Then you are a theist (gnostic).

Isn’t an agnostic just an atheist without balls?
~Steven Colbert

In my experience, I have found that most people who call themselves agnostics are actually atheists, but are either wanting to avoid the scary label of atheist, or don’t understand that the definition of atheist includes themselves. The latter seems to be the most common, and was my category before I learned that I actually was an atheist.

The problems I have with the self-labeling of “Agnostic” on the question of god are the following:

• It completely dodges the question of god, and answers a different question about knowledge.
• It implicitly mis-characterizes atheism as only gnostic atheism (i.e. the affirmative claim that no God exists).
• It reinforces misconceptions about atheism.

I have found that some people who label themselves agnostics or agnostic theists, believe in some sort of nebulous pantheistic divinity, many of which will describe that deity as something like “energy” or “nature” or “love.” Now agnosticism can be a philosophically interesting topic and should be the default position on any claim that doesn’t have evidence. However, it just seems silly and unreasonable to say that you don’t have any kind of knowledge about something, and then to continue conjecturing about what you think its attributes or qualities are, when you still have no reason to believe it exists in the first place. And if you are going to define god as energy or nature, then you are detracting from both words’ meaning by conflating them or making them otherwise ambiguous. Doing this is less than helpful in any conversation where you are trying to convey your belief in a god. Of course this is just my point of view, but I would honestly like to know what people who call themselves agnostic theists, really believe, and what reasons they have for believing it.