one god further

People are so perennially confused about how to use the terms "atheist" and "agnostic." "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley gave us the latter term in 1889: 

It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant... In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith.

Bertrand Russell  addressed the issue years ago:

I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist"... I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods... all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

My student DH offers this:

"Gnostic" is relating to knowledge. "A" is the negation (not; without) what ever follows, which in this case is "gnostic." So, your agnostic--without knowledge in relation to a god or the supernatural. 

"Atheism" is the same deal. "Gimme an 'a"" (i.e., not) along with theism (the belief in gods) and you arrive a not (the negation) believing in gods. 

It's that simple. 

So we're all agnostic insofar as we don't know about gods or the supernatural. Those of us who go a short step further and assert our disbelief in gods and the supernatural on the basis of that lack of knowledge and compelling evidence are atheists. Simple indeed.


Richard Dawkins makes it even simpler:

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

One step beyond, and you're there. Dare to be bold, freethinkers. You have nothing to lose but your ambivalence.

Theistic evolution

Dad's calling himself a "theistic evolutionist" was comparatively quite enlightened, none of his peers seemed to know what it meant or that it was an improvement on the old-time fundamentalist Know Nothing religion. He said he got the idea from a Baptist minister who probably didn't cotton to it himself, but Dad ran with it as an acceptable reconciliation of the handed-down faith of his fathers and the medical science he learned in vet school. His sense of loyalty to forebears and gratitude specifically to his good-hearted pious midwestern mother took atheism and agnosticism off the table for him, though he was still a free-thinker by the standards of that time and place.

I remember him plucking Ken Miller's book Finding Darwin's God from my shelf once and musing that he didn't understand why there was any controversy at all on this topic, among the devout: of course religion and science are compatible, of course a God should be expected to work His will through the laws and processes of a rationally ordered nature. "Intelligent Design" does not have to descend to anti-intellectualist Young Earth Creationist nonsense, though as a matter of fact it has tended to do just that in the debates of recent years, in the hands of rigid partisan pious zealots.

There's plenty of intolerant fire coming fron the other camp too, among evolutionists who insist that science moots religion entirely, and do not welcome any alliance with the likes of Miller. P.Z. Myers is one of those.

I understand where they're all coming from. There really should be room in a corner of the tent for at least those theists who aspire to scientific respectability even if their synthesizing project is doomed to fail. You don't have to agree with them, endorse their faith, or even respect it, P.Z. But you should respect them. A fundamental respect for the humanity of our fellow human beings should not depend on their falling in lock-step with our respective worldviews. I learned that from my Dad.