Mathbud1
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- Jan 2, 2014
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If you are going to discuss Atheism, Agnosticism, and Theism, you probably ought to do so by first defining what you mean by the terms. Theism and Agnosticism are both relatively easy to define. Theism can be reasonably said to be a belief in some form of deity. Agnosticism is generally accepted to be the position that we either do not or can not know for sure whether any deities exist or do not exist. Atheism is much harder to define. I think this page has some good discussion of different "forms" of Atheism:
Negative and positive atheism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I've never seen a good rational arguement for positive atheism. To assert that no deities exist is to assert full knowledge of everything which would imply that you are some form of deity yourself since full knowledge of the universe would not be possible for a human. To make the assertion, "There is no deity anywhere in existence," is to implicitly refute your own assertion.
I can understand the statement, "I believe there is no deity." I can understand the statement, "I do not believe there is a deity." I cannot understand the statement, "There is no deity."
Careful philosophers note that a crucial element is missing in this kind of discussion. For a proposition such as "God exists", there are actually four possibilities: theism, atheism, agnosticism, and non-cognitivism. The last is the one that usually gets left out of the discussion, but is the most important.
To answer a question, the questioner and the answerer must have an understanding as to what the question means. For the proposition "God exists" this boils down to what is meant by "God". The non-cognitivist position is that the proposition is not sufficiently defined to allow an answer which would be understood by the parties of the discussion in the same way. Personally I am a non-cognitivist regarding the proposition "God exists". My usual response is "Which God?"
Now if I ask you "Do you believe in Jupiter?" You will answer "No" and I can confidently state that both you and I are atheists with respect to the existence of Jupiter.
In general terms, all questions of the form "Do you believe in X?" require a common understanding as to what X exactly is.
Something along those lines is brought up on the wikipedia page I linked to. Non-cognitivism is, I think, a form of Negative Atheism. A person who either chooses not to think about deities or who has never heard of any deity, does not believe in any deity. That person doesn't assert that there is not any deity, they simply do not think about deities at all (or at least not for any significant amount of time.) This is also known as Implicit Atheism as opposed to Explicit Atheism.
Anyone who does not believe that all deities exist can fit into one of these categories of Atheism with respect to any given description of a deity. To your example, I don't think many people believe in Jupiter any more. Even among Christian sects, the God one sect describes is not necessarily the same God that another sect describes. Some of the most vehement disputes I have witnessed about God were between two Christians.
That said, unless you are "Atheist" with regards to all deities (or at least every one you had ever heard or thought of) you would not describe yourself as Atheist in general.