On the Existence of Agnosticism
Offline The standard position on RRS is as follows:
Either you believe in God or you do not. If you do, you are a theist. If you don't, you are an a-theist. So there's no room for agnosticism. Agnosticism is actually a position about whether we can know God exists. If you think we can't know whether God exists with certainty, then you are an agnostic. If you think we can, you are a gnostic.
In this division, agnostic atheists and agnostic theists must believe something they do not believe they can know. But that is an odd thing to force on someone. A person could think that he will only have some belief in theism and some belief in atheism, because he does not think that it is possible to be sure either way. The RRS has artificially divided the agnostic's knowledge from his beliefs. They are saying that we may gather the evidence as carefully as we want, and place it with cautious precision on both ends of the scale - but then we have to SLAM down one side or the other. There is no room here for degrees of certainty, which is a serious flaw if this scale is going to be used to chart the positions people take on a subject where lots of people have very little certainty at all.
Pretend we lead a group of people in a room and tell them we are going to play a game. At one end of the room, we place a sign that says "stand here if God exists." At the other end, we place a sign that says "stand here if God does not exist." Part of the group will stand under one sign, and part of the group will stand under the other sign. What about the part that could not decide where to stand? Are we to understand that they are secretly agreeing with the people who say God does not exist? Of course not. So it is natural to class that group of people by themselves, not with the people who say God does not exist. When a natural division arises between two sorts of things, you should use different terms for them.
If the RRS is correct, we should push all of those people over to the side with the people who say God does not exist. It just makes more sense, says the RRS, that everyone should have to take one of the two labels. Everyone has to be pressed up against one wall or the other, and nobody can stand in between. If you saw our game being run like that, you would think that whoever set it up was pretty naive.
Q: Why didn't you address (post x) that I made in response to you nine minutes ago???
A: Because I have (a) a job, (b) familial obligations, (c) social obligations, and (d) probably a lot of other atheists responded to the same post you did, since I am practically the token Christian on this site now. Be patient, please.
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I agree with that, it makes it a lot easier to "explain" things to followers when any anomaly can be chalked up to "his mysterious ways" or knowledge that we could not possibly have as mortals, etc. I was thinking of this more as a god-figure that didn't particularly care to be worshipped but rather simply focused on the task at hand (keeping the universe in balance). I guess it would be deistic in that sense. So instead of being shrouded in mysticism they just haven't been searched for yet. Interesting.
As for the god being alien, do you mean to imply that it would have to be a physical person for the scenario to work or could it also be an intangible force (Just one that we're not familiar with yet)?
"Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven. Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads. And recks not his own rede."
Or what if our entire civilization was created, and our species was created by ourselves from the future through artificial means to hyperevolve us at a faster rate because our species naturally came into existance near the end of this solar system's life, so in order to preserve us we (of the future) had to travel back in time to create our species at a more advanced state in an earlier timeline to be able to progress technologically to be better prepared to dealing with the catostrophic end of our sun's life.
Yes, I think I'm ready to make a religion now. Worship your future time-selves, and pay me money to learn more.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
That sounds vauguely similar to ...I've said too much.