Agnostic About the Cosmos, Atheist About the Doctrines
People keep trying to catch me in a contradiction. They say: you call yourself an agnostic, but you talk like a militant atheist, so which is it? Pick one. And I keep refusing to pick, because the demand rests on a confusion — the quiet substitution of one question for another. There are two questions hiding inside the single word “God,” and my honest answer to the first is genuinely different from my honest answer to the second. On the first I say: I don’t know, and neither do you. On the second I say: no, this is a myth, and everything I know about the world tells me so. The whole argument that I am secretly a “fierce” atheist dressed up as an agnostic is built on smearing these two questions together until they look like one. They are not one. Keeping them apart is, I think, the beginning of thinking clearly about belief at all. ...