See here for the original post. To clear up any confusion, it’s important to make the distinction between gnostic and agnostic atheism. Gnostic atheists—the specific ones I addressed in the post—specifically claim knowledge of God’s non-existence. I take “knowledge” in the vaguely epistemic sense. Agnostic atheists claim a non-belief in deities but are open to possible evidence to defeat their non-belief, similar to “friendly atheists” who claim no knowledge or belief in the supernatural but allow for others to justifiably claim knowledge of the opposite. The agnostic/friendly atheist position is far more reasonable if we are going by the current trend of a posteriori, “show me evidence of God”, criteria for true religious belief. Gnostic atheism is almost always inherently contradictory since it claims knowledge via means that are a priori and non-scientific.
2 Comments
“Gnostic atheism is almost always inherently contradictory since it claims knowledge via means that are a priori and non-scientific.” Yes, good point.
I’m assuming that gnostic atheists are also scientific rationalists (forget if that’s the right term)…that science can, or could in some point in the future, give a full account of everything able to be known. There may be some GA’s that aren’t like that but I don’t know what that would look like, honestly.
1 Trackback or Pingback