God is an entity that exists, or it doesn’t.

Christianity is either true, or it isn’t.

There is no gray area. No amount of belief or faith is ever going to sway the central true or false of these propositions.

So, you start false and prove true. Or you can set out to disprove the idea of a god. Either way, That is an honest inquiry into the matter. You do you need to accept assertions that god does not exist, because its quite possible to see the total lack of evidence without using faith. If you can’t show it in quantifiable and falsifiable way, then you have to reevaluate your methods or abandon the pursuit all together and conclude that a god does not exist or, if you’d like to persist, you can insist of calling whatever god you worship immaterial, but then again, that is the same as saying non-existent.

“I think that both Theism and Atheism are beliefs about the ultimate NATURE of reality, while Agnosticism is a belief about the LIMITS of of our knowledge about that reality. If that’s the case, then agnosticism can be perfectly compatible with (at least most forms of) theism AND atheism. Faith and Doubt have a long, long history as theological partners. I myself live perfectly happily with doubt. It’s people who have “certainty on their side” who REALLY scare me.”

Can the scientific community emperically prove that the “big bang theory” is exactly how the universe and all the complex life forms that live in it came to be? Of course not. At best, it’s a likely story, and in reality, just a theory.

I would ascert that the key differentiation between the faiths is the values we judge each other by when engaged in theological debate. The unfortunate problem with our society is that we allow for all peoples to engage freely in their own flavor of religion, largely without anyone playing the role of traffic cop to regulate the differing opinions and faiths. Exacerbated by this problem is that the few extremely passionate (read extremists) appear to lack the tolerance for anyone else having a differing view point.

If only every person’s faith allowed for the tolerance for another’s faith to co-exist without encroaching on their existence, then a truely utopian experiece might be experienced by all.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Bob. And for asking for my humble, yet deadly accurate opinion.

To make progress in a world of semantic representation, I often ask the following questions to those of religious faith:

1) Does faith have doubt?
OR
Is the definition of faith to be certain in the face of uncertainty?

If the answer is “no” (or for the second one “yes”)

2) Are you certain that God exists (ie do you have faith that God exists?)

If they say no, in my opinion they are not theists.
They are agnostics.

(Definition: Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable)

Anyone who is certain is a theist.

But, my definitions could be wrong. As I said earlier, wading through semantics is a tough thing to do.

With those definitions in mind, Clayton, it seems, is an agnostic.