I like the way y’all are going with this line of reasoning. There are a few things that usually have in response to this issue:

I think most skeptical/rational people are well-equipped enough to admit that:

“I don’t know…”

isn’t a badge of shame. This seems to add veracity to Richard’s perspective.

However, as a professional scientist who respects philosophy from a distance, I am much more practical, but a bit self conscious about it. Personally, I think it is not shameful to append the following:

“…but the glaring paucity of evidence and absence of any plausible avenue for collecting evidence leads me to conclude provisionally that, not only don’t I know, I don’t care.”

This starts to fall pretty firmly into Pyridine’s perspective, with my own lens imposed on top of it. As for people that are truly “strong” atheists as well as people who are “fence sitting agnostics”, I tend to find their internecine conflicts peculiar. It seems as if they are arguing over trifles, and are dignifying religion with serious acknowledgment that it hasn’t earned. Of course, I see the importance of engaging religion, but ultimately, I come up with the practical solution that Richard argues, but it appear by very different means.

And regarding the “verification of every experiment” that Richard alludes to… Of course, scientists do have something that might be called faith, but I think that is misleading and ignores the distinction between provisional faith (that may in principle be verified, but in practice might never be verified for any given individual) and dogmatic faith (in this case, verification isn’t relevant, as the truth is incontrovertible).

What this leads me to espouse is the following:

Science is a community endeavor that offers and encourages the skeptical verification of every principle. Each religion is also a community endeavor, but each one consists of incontrovertibly true tenets or dogmas that can neither be challenged on the individual nor the group level. Thus, while every practicing scientist may indeed die without having verified every tenet that comprises modern scientific knowledge, the scientist is at least permitted and indeed is encouraged to do so. On the other hand, believers who question or reject certain tenets of their faiths are branded heretics.

Although a good Cthulu cult might suit me better. Cooler holy scripture that way.

If humility consists in a disposition to recall that human belief formation is complex, messy, and frequently having to do with things other than reality — and therefore we come up with all kinds of goofy ideas — and, therefore, many of them are likely to be wrong…

It seems to me that this could qualify as humility, as long as it is evenly applied. I would think we would also need to remember that we are predisposed to bias. We tend to hold ideas that may or may not have to do with evidence and logic. E.g., we often say in the skeptical community that one of the reasons people believe religion is simply that they were brought up into it. Well, we’re as human as they are, and so that sort of thing applies to us too. *We* might be disposed to accept some ideas with less criticism than others.

So, yeah, I think I would tenatively agree that a high level of skepticism based on an awareness of the intrinisic irrationality we all have — so long as we do not reject some ideas out of hand, while giving others a free pass — would count as humility.

I think that may be hard to apply in practice though. How many of us can describe in a lot of detail the experiments that led to, say, the discovery of DNA, and its role in biology? Can we honestly say we have **personally** been as skeptical of that idea as we are of religious ones? As in personally reviewing the experiments to see if we agree with the conclusion? Again, Im just thinking out loud here.

And I do also still think that holding our ideas with something less than certainty is necessary for humility, for the same reasons.

So, what do you think?

… But what I like about the philosophical/empirical distinction is that it explains why there is disagreement about the proper null hypothesis even purely among skeptics. As a philosophical question, god does/doesn’t exist are nearly symmetrical claims. As an empirical question, X doesn’t exist is always the null hypothesis.

To me, the significance of the discussion isn’t the in-house discussion of agnostic v atheist. The significance is how to respond when believers ask why I’m an atheist, as opposed to a non-Christian.

My response to “but how can you be certain?” always begins with something like: “if atheism requires absolute certainty, then I’m not an atheist.” I’d rather communicate clearly within another’s definition of terms than correct their understanding of a term.

My favorite way to define atheist is “someone who holds the position that there is no god.” You don’t need certainty to hold a position. I’m also a capitalist – I might be wrong so I’m not certain I’m right. But I also know a thing or two about economics, so this lack of certainty doesn’t prevent me from holding a position. So when I say I’m a capitalist, this is not in tension with my lack of omniscience. My definition of an agnostic is someone who doesn’t hold a position or doesn’t know what position they hold.

The virtue of this approach is that atheist and agnostic now have definitions that are both tenable positions and are different from each other. With other definitions that I’ve seen, atheism either requires an unreasonable level of certainty, or agnosticism becomes “atheism without balls.”