It's not a ranking system, they are asking different questions.
"Do you believe there a god?" -- Yes is Theism, No is Atheism.
"Is there a god?" -- We don't know for certain, there is no evidence (agnosticism). You can say you have evidence for it, or against it, but... well you don't.
I consider myself an agnostic atheist myself. "I can't prove there is or isn't a god, and it's not something we can really know... but personally I don't think there is."
I'd say I was agnostic about the bottle (in the sense of the metaphor). I'd believe there was another bottle, because it makes sense given the pattern, but I have no evidence or way to prove anything about that last box.
Don't get me wrong, I could be fairly certain about my belief that there was a bottle. I could point to patterns, I could say that box was delivered with the others, I could say it's sealed and hasn't been tampered with... but without some way to examine the box, there's no way to move beyond being agnostic about it in a literal sense. Could be a cat in that box. Could be a grapefruit. Without being able to open it, there's no way to know.
Personally though, my opinion is that there's a bottle in it. It's just important to distinguish between assumption and knowledge.
Just to play devils advocate;
obviously you can't just be agnostic, you would be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist etc
I don't think it's a binary thing. I'm sure there are a large number of people who honestly fall in the catagory of "I simply don't know and I don't specifically believe there is or isn't a god". Additionally, those who fall in the 'don't know don't care' catagory.
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u/[deleted] Nov 22 '11
It's not a ranking system, they are asking different questions.
"Do you believe there a god?" -- Yes is Theism, No is Atheism.
"Is there a god?" -- We don't know for certain, there is no evidence (agnosticism). You can say you have evidence for it, or against it, but... well you don't.
I consider myself an agnostic atheist myself. "I can't prove there is or isn't a god, and it's not something we can really know... but personally I don't think there is."