What the atheists are avoiding is that their position, no less than that of theists, rests squarely on faith. There is no way to reach by reason the proposition that there is or is not a god. The only position compatible with reason is that we do not know.Very true...and also trivially so. There is, in fact, no way to reach by reason the proposition that anything either exists or does not exist. There must always be some unprovable supposition - such as, "My memories of all past experiences were derived from an external reality in some reliable fashion" - as Kierkegaard and others have long said. This fact, though, does not reduce us all to equivocating daubs of jelly. We make some basic assumptions, hopefully the smallest ones possible, and move along.
In fact, I used to call myself an agnostic because of this very argument. But then I realized that I do not label myself agnostic on the existence of dragons or Superman, among many other things. I believe that they do not exist and never have. I believe this in spite of the fact that much has been written about them and large numbers of people have actually believed them to be real (at least in the case of dragons). Why should the hypothetical deity receive any kinder treatment? There is not enough reasonably reliable and suggestive evidence to make me consider the case for the existence of these things to be in some doubt. So I'm an adragonist, an asupermanist, and an atheist.
Meanwhile, I am definitely a burmist: I believe firmly in the existence of Burma despite never having seen any more of the place than of God or Superman (check that: I've seen movies about both of them, and none about Burma) because there is an awful lot of evidence for it being over there next to Thailand. I presume that Mr. Sullivan's reader is unsure about all of these things.
Update: The trackback URL for the post linked above appears to be broken, so here it is direct-like.
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