Topics Religion

Question Are theism and atheism mutually exclusive positions? This would seem to be the case if theism is understood to be the presence of a belief in god and atheism is the absence of a belief in god - there is no middle ground. So where does agnosticism fit in? Even Bertrand Russell sometimes couldn't decide whether to call himself an atheist or an agnostic.

Accepted:
January 19, 2006

Comments

Both theism and atheism presuppose that there is some clear meaning to the word "God." However, this does not seem to be true. For Spinoza, God has none of the personal characteristics that the God of various religions is supposed to have. Spinoza has been called a pantheist, and another view of God in which God does not interefere with the world at all, is called deism. Many theists regard pantheists and deists as atheists.

The term "agnostic" seems to have clear sense only when talking about whether there is particular kind of God, e.g., the Christian God. I doubt that Bertrand Russell was an agnostic in this sense. The only sense in which I can imagine Russell being an agnostic is that he might have thought that there could be some concept of God that was plausible, perhaps a concept like that of Spinoza.

I should point out, contrary to what I suggested in the previous paragraph, there is not even any clear concept of a Christian God. Aquinas thought that we could not make any positive statements about God, while many Fundamentalist Christrians claim that the statements about God that are made in the Bible are literally true.