agnosticism

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements gives us organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.

God did not create evolution--evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism--polytheism--monotheism--agnosticism--atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible shrinking god. He shrinks and shrinks until he becomes insignificant. More and more theists go about their business as if God isn't there. Some even become agnostics or atheists.

No, not at all. I__ an atheist. You could say that I__ agnostic, but that__ just a certain kind of atheist (laughs). An atheist is someone who lacks a belief in a supernatural, and that__ me. I can__ say with absolute certainty that there is nothing beyond the material world, but there__ no reason for me to think there is. If I were a gambling man I would put all my money on there not being anything other than this universe.

If you describe yourself as "Atheist," some people will say, "Don't you mean 'Agnostic'?" I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It's easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it's an opinion I hold seriously. It's funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

Atheists are spiritual slackers, right? We are the stoners of the cosmos. We think we__e all over-intelligent, free-thinking, free-spirited, uber-cool, hippy-dippy, science-minded, leaning-to-the-left, hedonistic, children of Theodorus the Atheist. We__e all like __ude, I don__ need no stinkin_ deity_ and if we came face-to-face with the Grim Reaper himself we__ say, __o worries, Bro, let__ do this! Game over!

The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible...

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief__all it what you will__han any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things.As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not __ood judges of how the deity would behave,_ then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst_

Every agnostic has a minister, Mike. Otherwise, they's be atheists.

Intellect, at its best, can make you agnostic. Being theist or atheist is still a matter of choice.

If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys.

But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either.

.....I believe in you and me. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. ...

The intellectual support for UNBELIEF is about as stable as the stock market.