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[quote=Anonymous]What is clear from everything here, and what has been said explicitly several times, is that different posters understand the terms differently.  We could have a much clearer discussion if we just asked each other to explain how we view the world, especially with respect to religion.

I would explain that I think the universe is amazing, and the fact that life developed despite the apparent tendency of things to go from order to disorder (entropy is the term, if I recall) would be incredible to me if I did not see it all around me.

I can understand why many consider that proof of the existence of God.  But to me, it's hubris to think that people, even with today's knowledge, let alone the level of knowledge that existed thousands of years ago, have any hope of doing any more than slowly chipping away at understanding, as scientists continually try to do.

As to the terms at issue here, I'd say that we all ought to be agnostics, in the sense of recognizing that this universe, whether at the scale of galaxies or the scale of electrons, defies our limited intellects, and that we cannot KNOW what it's all about.  At the same time, it is human to try to make sense of things around us, whether through religion, through belief in human rationality, or through an acceptance of life as we find it without a meaning beyond what we see day to day.

So to me, a Catholic, for example, who says that through the grace of God s/he has faith is an agnostic who believes in God, while I, on the other hand, would call myself an agnostic atheist, because although I don't believe there is a god in any sense that most people use the term, I would not claim that I believe that for any reason other than that it seems totally obvious to me (with emphasis on "seems" and on "to me").[/quote]

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