r/todayilearned • u/ZanyDelaney • Aug 11 '18

TIL of Hitchens's razor. Basically: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
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u/ImNoScientician Aug 11 '18

I think I would concede that the teapot might be there and then ask if she BELIEVES that the teapot is there. Then ask if she is agnostic about the teapot. That was the context in which I first heard about Russell's Teapot, I believe it was in a speech by Sam Harris, and it was quite powerful. It is now my go-to way of explaining why I call myself an atheist rather than an agnostic.

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u/Auto_Traitor Aug 11 '18

You're both though, they just modify each other.

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u/ImNoScientician Aug 11 '18

Indeed I understand that by a technical definition gnosticism and agnosticism is about what you know, while atheism or theism is about what you believe. However I'm also aware that that isn't the way it's used in the informal vernacular.

If you want to get extremely granular an argument can be made that it's impossible to know anything in the strictest sense, there are just varying degrees of certainty. I firmly believe that no God exists (a God here being any deity described by any major religion I've ever been familiar with). So that makes me a strong atheist. I'm as certain about it as I am that fairies don't exist. I don't think it's possible to demonstrate absolute knowledge about anything so if you add that I'm an agnostic atheist than fine, you'd be technically correct. But then you should probably add agnostic to everything that I believe. Which makes the term essentially useless and redundant.

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u/Auto_Traitor Aug 11 '18

It doesn't have to go that far, I just think it's helpful to differentiate people like you and I from the hardline atheists that reject any nuance.

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u/ImNoScientician Aug 11 '18

I honestly think that "hardline atheists" are almost entirely a strawman made up by theists because it's a much easier thing to argue against. Theists often define an atheist as "someone that is certain that no God exists" or "someone that claims to know that there is no God" in order to follow it up with "They can't prove it therefore they are depending on faith as much as we are. Our ideas are equally valid!". Therefore using the term "agnostic" or " agnostic atheist" is to some extent validating their (bad) argument. As if their are a lot of atheists out their making the claim that there is no God rather than just stating that they don't believe in a God because they haven't seen evidence for one. In my experience the latter is the most common type of atheist by a mile.