Massimo Pigliucci challenges a recent episode of the Philosophy Talk podcast, hosted by philosophers John Perry and Ken Taylor:
The trouble starts right off the bat, when Perry defines atheism: “An atheist is someone who not only doesn't believe in God, but believes, with some confidence, that there isn’t a God.” Oh no, it ain’t! That certainly describes some atheists, but not others. I, for instance, tend to stick to the etymology of the term, a-theism, meaning without a positive belief in god(s), so I consider myself an a-theist in pretty much the same manner in which most people are a-unicornists: they don’t believe in unicorns, not because they know that there aren’t any, but simply because they see neither evidence nor reason to hold that particular belief.
In the comments section, Joseph T. Lapp makes an argument for agnosticism:
Even most religious people will agree that the Bible is not literally true in all its detail. The general atheist position appears to be an assertion about the fundamentalist God. So what? Everyone thinks fundamentalists are off their rocker. It's my experience that most Americans these days believe in more amorphous, less tangible forms [of] God – forms that I find hard to argue with because little is claimed with certainty, or because the fuzzy beliefs are compatible with the world I perceive, even if they wouldn't survive Occam's Razor (which only selects pragmatic theories, not truth).
In my opinion, many of these modern amorphous, if contradictory, visions of God are potentially compatible with the universe I see. I don't find them useful, but I have no basis for concluding their falsehood, and who knows, one of these visions might possibly have some element of truth in it. It's for this reason that I prefer to call myself an agnostic. I find that most atheist can't allow themselves to acknowledge that any notion that anyone calls "God" could have any chance of harboring truth.
The Dish 