A large part of the people I run into in the atheist community prefers to identify as agnostic rather than atheist. Many because the term atheist has gotten a
bit of a militant vibe to it at least in the eyes of some believers. Even the majority of the people who do call themselves atheist use some term like an agnostic atheist,
to signify that even if they do not believe in a deity, they do not know with absolute certainty that one does not exist.
However, I do personally not fall into that group. The first reason for this is the special consideration religious claims seems to get. When we say that we know something, we claim that our knowledge gives us a certainty high enough not to consider other options. If you asked someone if they knew their own name practically everyone would say they did. Their certainty is high enough to justify the statement. The suggestion that they may not truly know because we could be living in a matrix or some other exotic explanation is never made. It is when it comes to religious claims. No matter what insights our scientific knowledge gives us, the agnostic atheist position is to be open to even the most esoteric of faith claims. The religious of cause go further and base their entire worldview on such claims.
So let’s take a look at the claim. The most important part of a god claim is the definition of the term god. Now obviously this definition differs between religions, however, for now let us just look at the Abrahamic god.
God in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism is an omnipotent and omniscient creator god. This means that God created the entire universe. This is obviously a bit of an issue, since in order to create something you have to exist independent of the creation. However, that means that God is existing in some kind of other dimensional alternate universe. And that would put us back to where we started from a creation viewpoint.
This is just one simple example. The real world does not work in a metaphysical way. Everything has limitations and functions based on their character., and if we have sufficient knowledge we can examine how it works and what those functions and limitations are.
Take for instance the human brain. I an not convinced that anyone knows in full detail how it works, and maybe we will never know. It does however, work in a very exact way, everything can be explained in principle. The only thing needed is knowledge .
God cannot work like this because God has no limits, and no matter how powerful or capable a being would be, he would not be God if those capabilities could be understood and their functions and limits explained, with the appropriate knowledge availible. If the mysterious ways of God could be researched in a lab and scientifically explained, he would not be God, he would just be some weird space monster dude, and nobody would pray to someone like that.
So not only am I certain to the degree that we commonly describe as having knowledge that a god does not exist, but based on the argument above, that a god simply cannot exist and that the agnostic atheists who claim that there could be a tiny possibility that there is a god are flat out wrong
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Rene Bjørnskov 