wuliheron said:
The word agnostic originated with someone who believed it impossible to know whether God exists. Why bother creating or using a new term if all it means is "undecided" or "don't know"? This is exactly the kind of political doublespeak militant atheists have promoted since the origin of the communist party in the Soviet Union. Richard Dawkins, an evangelical militant atheist, insists that he is technically an agnostic for having .00001% of doubt. This is the height of absurdity and not in any way, shape, or form a reasonable argument. It is nothing more than equivocation and blatant prejudice as your first statement so clearly demonstrated.
I read one book by Richard Dawkins and it seems that he is merely stating that the existence of a God has no scientific basis, that there is no empirical evidence of a supreme being and no scientific theory requires one as a hypothesis. Personally, I know of no scientist that uses the hypothesis of a diety to frame experiments or to formulate scientific theories.
Having grown up in a Marxist home, I would say that Communists, much like Richard Dawkins, also believe that there is no scientific basis for belief in a deity. Perhaps they differ from Dawkins in that Dawkins may believe that the tendency to religious belief was selected for in biological Evolution while Marxists believe that it is somehow a product of social evolution. The genus, maybe not the species, of thinking seems the same though.
I think that when Dawkins says that he has a tiny bit of doubt, he is merely making a scientific statement that some evidence for a deity could possibly be found someday but in light of the enormous body of evidence so far accumulated, he doesn't give it a high probability.
I do not think that scientists believe that it is impossible to know whether there is a God. If empirical certainty were found, they would admit it. For instance,if verifiable and repeatable observations of events similar to those described in the Bible were found, they would gladly admit it.
The strange thing is that this doesn't seem to happen and even more strange it seems that patterns in Nature can not only be described consistently without need for the idea of a Deity but models can be found that actually predict the results of new experiments. To me this is the great mystery.
If one replaces the idea of a Divine being with an idea of a grand unity to Nature, then my small experience talking with scientists is that they believe that this unity exists and might even be discoverable. I do not recall if Richard Dawkins discusses this, but my Marxists aquaintances certainly believe this and I have often kidded them that they really are theists.
In science, there are many questions that can not be answered, but many of them still have scientific meaning because it is at least conceivable that an experiment could be devised to answer them. On the other hand, there are questions which are untestable and therefore have no scientific content. I do not think Dawkins is talking about these questions. I think he means notions of a deity that could be tested for with an experiment - but correct me if I am wrong on this.