Why is this hard?

Random atheist content surfing brought me to Dreamlayers where Boris goes on about Why I won't call myself an atheist. He seems confused.

Yesterday, a blog post about two possible definitions of atheism became quite popular on Digg. I didn't like the tone of the post because it seemed to attack agnosticism a bit. However, I was intrigued by the two definitions of atheism:

1. An atheist believes that God does not exist.
2. An atheist does not believe that God exists.

I always thought atheism meant the first thing. That seemed to me how people portrayed it. To me the stereotypical atheist view is that science explains everything and so there's no need for religion. I cannot agree with that because science has a big gaping hole in understanding of consciousness. (Yes, some claim to explain it scientifically, but they only gloss over it, at best only hypothesizing about related physical phenomena while claiming they have an answer about consciousness.) That hole in scientific understanding is sufficiently large and of such a nature that it doesn't seem that current science can even approach it and one cannot rule out some sort of religion-like explanation. At the same time, religion often seems ridiculous, so I can't say I believe that either. So, I say I don't know and I call myself agnostic.

Boris - I am an agnostic atheist. By atheist I mean, I do not believe that gods exist. By agnostic I mean, the existence of gods is unknowable.  You are an agnostic atheist too. You simply attach too much meaning to the word atheist. It is a mistake many people make. There are many other labels that describe us, try humanist for example, or liberal/conservative, or even naturalism.

By the way - Science is used to describe the natural world. Science actually describes a very small part of "everything" at the moment. Our body of knowledge grows with time. Religion is rejected by the assertion that there are no gods, not because science replaces religion.

Technorati tags: Atheism, Agnosticism, Belief, Religion