I would venture to guess that most scientists especially are agnostic because it fits the scientific method better - we can not presume to know what we cannot measure, and all that.

Atheism is the idea that we know that there is know higher power. Any scientist has to know that it is impossible to have that absolute knowledge because we have no tests to prove or disprove the hypothesis.

Conversely, I think that intellectually honest believers have a similar but opposite belief. Although, as a nonbeliever myself, I have a hard time putting myself in their shoes, or my brain inside their skulls, so maybe I'm mistaken here.

Look at the digg survey this article links to: there's no option for "agnostic". Did the agnostics choose "atheist" or "other"? Either way, they're hidden.

Look at the photo spread: it lists "Famous Agnostics/Atheists", as if they're the same thing, but at least half are arguably agnostic:

- Darwin: self-described agnostic; claimed he had "never been an athiest"

- Einstein: "My position concerning God is that of an agnostic."

- Edison: apparently a lifelong agnostic

- Gates: can't find a clear statement, but said in an interview "I don't know if there's a god or not"

Look at the article itself: there's no mention of agnosticism at all. They're simply using a photo of a famous agnostic to bolster an argument about atheism.

I believe that a lot of us who are (and rightfully claim to be) agnostic are being labeled "atheist" by people who don't know or care.

I think an agnostic is somebody who doesn't know whether god exists, but considers it a 50/50 situation. Both sides are equally plausible. A fence-sitter, if you will. An atheist thinks extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that the evidence for god doesn't stack up. Therefore atheists are forced to conclude there probably is no god. Or simply said: there is no god. Even though we all admit we may be wrong.

In fact, I'm pretty sure not a single person reading HN is an atheist by your definition. Even Richard Dawkins is an agnostic by your definition. I can only conclude that your definition does't make sense.

Challenge: find me an atheist who fits your definition.

You'll find none.

The very definition of Athiesm is to deny the existence of a god or a higher power.

As soon as you admit there is a real possibility that there may be a god or a higher power; bam, you're an agnostic.

Which is the crux of my point - the definition of Atheist is often misused, as in this article. There are far more Agnostics than Atheists, it's just that Atheism gets used more frequently.

This page discussing the differences far more eloquently than I ever could:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/intro.html

I made the argument earlier in this thread that not only do we have no tests to prove or disprove theism, we cannot have any such tests, because theism and atheism are statements about what's beyond our (philosophical) universe. Any god you can formulate a test for isn't really God-the-Creator-of-All in the first place.

So, belief in God, or the lack thereof, is just an assumption. This assumption will influence your actions, of course, and belief or the absence of it may well be beneficial or harmful. Either you live your life as if God exists, or you don't. If you don't, you might as well call yourself an atheist... and that's why I do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

And largely an exercise in classification. Still, it's handy knowledge to have, should you enjoy that sort of thing.

This is why you should not comment before your first coffee of the day.

Some people find it impossible to accept or not accept all manner of things, but whether or not you accept or do not accept something does not change whether or not that something is true.

Using newton's models we have figured out how (and why) planets orbit the sun, why objects fall equally quickly in a vacuum, etc. The scientific method has nothing to do with finding absolute answers. Still we're able to accomplish remarkable things simply by testing what works and what doesn't. Man on moon. Proves pretty conclusively that it's not about having ultimate answers, it's about having a model of the world that's so awesome you can stick people on a giant rocket and hurl them into space without anything going boom.

For every answer a scientist gives you you can answer a more specific question, until the scientist answers; "I don't know". Always. The ultimate answer is always "don't know". But every decade or so we have one extra answer in the chain of knowledge before we have to admit we don't know.

long story short, gravity is the curvature of spacetime. objects of mass cause the curvature, and the curvature in turn causes objects to move locally along geodesics (shortest-distance paths), which causes the curvature to shift

when you throw a ball and it's moving through a parabola, that curve taken with time in a riemannian space is actually the straightest line possible from one end of the throw to the other

this is Einstein's magnum opus General Relativity

The problem with gravity is that, as a daily experience, it fades out into uninteresting routine (except perhaps for rocket scientists and other specialists.)

This is why I believe in God: based on some unusual personal experiences that made it difficult to reject the supernatural, I came to the conclusion at one point that, in fact, consciousness is not an illusion, and that there is no such thing as randomness, and that our course along the quantum "tree" is chosen by some being for a purpose (or purposes). This doesn't mean that we live in a deterministic world, but that we live in a physical one that is constantly taking "pushes" from a spiritual beings. This seems supernatural and unlikely, but if we believe that the spirit (consciousness) is not an illusion, then we accept that a complex physical system, the brain, can be affected by a spiritual entity, human consciousness, and so it doesn't seem implausible that there are other spiritual beings among us, doing things like rigging the seemingly "random" collisions of particles so that 10^-20000 improbabilities (life) actually happen. This, coupled with the direct experience of mystics, makes it likely that there are vastly superior spiritual beings in existence, which could be construed as gods or facets of God.

"Human consciousness" doesn't need to be something metaphysical. The brain is basically a big petri dish. Chemical reactions everywhere. Our understanding of it is poor, but we're making lots of progress. We know which regions serve which purpose, and we can make people laugh or cry by sticking electrodes in somebody's head during brain surgery. We can see people enjoying music, by watching electrical activity, and we can see how brains of savants differ from ours. The more we learn, the less of a mystery the brain becomes. But we still have 95% to explain.

As you make computer programs more complex you realize that sooner or later you have to start meta-programming. Only by making a program introspect itself or the system around it can you give it additional functionality. Windows Vista is a good example - it's all about processing watching other processes work. Watching memory patterns, to improve cache efficiency. Monitoring which programs are run often. Watching which clusters on the hard drive are suspiciously unresponsive. Meta. Meta meta meta.

Windows Vista is conscious in the sense that it feels when programs are unresponsive, or when the system has trouble shutting down. And it will try to take measures to fix it. Isn't this just basic consciousness? Nothing spiritual about it. And when you can explain consciousness by just saying it's a function of complexity of a brain we have a pretty plausible answer.

Does your cell phone have consciousness? Yes, but very little. Less than an ant, probably.

How about babies? Yes, but only as much consciousness as a cat.

How about a rock? Yes, about as much consciousness as a "Hello World" program. That's simply no consciousness at all.

Consciousness doesn't need to be a binary switch. A spark that people get at some point. A "soul" doesn't explain anything.

You probably don't agree with the way I frame my answers. So what's do you think the difference is between the capacity for introspection (think about self) and consciousness?

I disagree. Experiences are not always under your control and therefore you can't always repeat them even if they are true. This is true in relationships with other humans and it seems likely that it would also be true with a personal god.

Let's say your girlfriend does something nice for you and you feel like you love her for it. Let's say she then dumps you for hottie that doesn't even know how to code and never talks to you again. You can't repeat that experience with her because her free choice made it possible. That doesn't mean that the experience was fake, it just means that it is outside of your control.

I'm sure there are some wholes in that logic, but hopefully it was able to shed some extra light on the subject.

I was talking about paranormal experiences I've had, such as the ability to predict dates and details of major events. I don't believe that anyone (certainly not me) is "psychic" and I can't reproduce this at will, but there have been enough paranormal events in my life that I cannot ignore the likelihood of a conscious will directing the things we consider "random".

In October 2005, I predicted that I'd meet a girl at a very specific place (a particular coffeeshop) on a specific date, four months into the future, and had a rough vision of her appearance, knew her ethnicity and about six other details about her, all of which turned out to be correct. This ended up leading to a relationship that lasted over two years. There could be a "self-fulfilling prophecy" at work, but the mind-boggling number of details that matched leads me to find it unlikely. Although I cannot possibly explain why, I've had 5 or 6 occurrences like this (and a couple that didn't come true). I've also had limited success in drawing on past lives to develop talents that I never thought I had, although I haven't seen enough strength in this department to rule out non-paranormal explanations.

Frankly, my opinion is that "the paranormal" almost certainly exists, although 99% of it is complete bunk, and the remaining 1% is nearly impossible to control or contain.

More like 99.99 % to explain, but we are working on it (neuroscientist here.)

As for consciousness: the ghost in the machine. That is, one can explain the machine with and without it -- the ghost is just one's perception of the other self, one's generalization and oversimplification of the other self.

what's more reasonable from a survival point of view, that that cut you just received on your left arm from a knife show up in some sort of terminator-like HUD...

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[DAMAGE TO LEFT ARM]

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[AVOID RECURRENCE IF POSSIBLE]

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or that you are made to "feel" the cut as intrinsic to you? which are you more likely to heed? that's basically what i think consciousness arises from -- the need to internalize sensations so that you respect them. so that you respect the fact that some maniac with a knife just took a slice at your arm, or that your fingers are burning on the stove while you're standing there being absent minded and you NEED TO GET YOUR FINGERS OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW

a HUD would be very poor for that sort of thing. i see consciousness as the best solution

    10^-20000 improbabilities