OJB has posted a comment on my article about atheism saying:

To begin with, I completely disagree with his assertion that there is no good, objective evidence for a god. I have previously posted simplified versions of the cosmological and moral arguments for the existence of God, and hope to post further on this in the near future. I think the evidence for God is actually quite compelling.

But anyway, that's not what I'm talking about today. Instead I want to focus on OJB's differentiation between "a lack of belief in the existence of God", and the "belief that there is no God". To be honest, I struggle to find much difference between these views unless I make the first equivalent to agnosticism. Otherwise, we end up with OJB having the following views:

1) A lack of belief in the existence of God.
2) No view of whether or not there is a God.
3) Does not claim to not know if there is a God (or else he would be an agnostic rather than an atheist).

Views (2) and (3) seem to be contradictory, and so I suspect that OJB is really an agnostic rather than an atheist. An atheist believes that there is no God. An agnostic does not know if there is a God, and so obviously is lacking belief in God's existence, yet at the same time does not categorically deny that there is a God.

Therefore I do not think that my original argument is a strawman. There are many people who absolutely deny the existence of a God, including philosophers Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx (and most communist countries), and Friedrich Nietzsche. My article on atheism was intended to counter this view - not agnosticism in general. We'll get to that some other time.

Posted by Dave Bryant at 7:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)