[biohacker42]

There's nothing shy about me, trust me.

Agnostics are mathematicians. Or at lest very close to being mathematicians.

There's the old joke of a biologist, a physicist and a mathematician on a train in Scotland.

They see a black sheep and the biologist says: Hey Scotland is full of black sheep!

The Physicist responds with we have evidence of one black sheep in Scotland.

And the mathematician concludes, there exists at least one sheep, at least one of whose sides is black, in Scotland.

So when agnostics say you can't disprove anything, we mean it. We mean it in the literal mathematical sense of negatives not being provable.

Oh but you don't live your life according to such extreme ideological purity, if somethings darn close to a duck you call it a duck.

That's great if it works for you, but my mind is much stricter then that.

[Herring]

So what happens when they don't see a black sheep?

[biohacker42]

As Dawkins puts it, if there were a teapot orbiting the sun, we'd have no way of detecting it.

It is too small for our telescopes, so we have absolutely no evidence for a teapot orbiting the sun.

You don't believe in that teapot, do you? That's silly.

But Dawkins is a biologist, and I'm a computer scientist, I don't believe in the teapot, but I also don't KNOW it's not there.

And that has nothing to do with shyness.

[olavk]

The shyness part is probably when people treat the question of belief in certain supernatural beeings as "special". Nobody is "agnostic" about their belief in the Tooth Fairy. They just plain don't believe in him (her?). Beeings from still living religions are treated differently since the issue is more sensitive.

[TrevorJ]

I'm a 3D animator for my day job, I definitely believe in the teapot, I saw it in the Cornell box so I know it exists. (apologies if this is way too much of an inside joke)

[dfranke]

That argument originally came from Bertrand Russell, not Dawkins.

[gravitycop]

Wikipedia says "Yes": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

[Herring]

What would a proof of "not there" consist of?

What I mean is, how can you claim to know anything if you allow the possibility of supernatural things interfering with your experiments?

[lst]

Sorry to correct you, but you're actually kind of shy (that is, not really determined):

You simply confirm that if 3 persons of human species are exposed to the same reality (yes, reality, because the impressions may be different, but the reality is well defined and precisely one):

So, if 3 persons of the same species are all concluding more or less different things, then you have the definite answer that none of them is seeing absolutely everything, that is: the whole reality:

So: you can't be God, because:

If you were God, you would know it (together with the exact reality of all things...)

[biohacker42]

Either you're WAAAAAAAAAY smarter then me, or you're babbling.

[lhorie]

For whatever it's worth, I think your line of reasoning makes more sense. I see the difference between atheism and agnosticism as analogous to the difference between conclusiveness and inconclusiveness.

I don't agree with the "refuted yes" idea. In logic, "no" is not necessary equal to "not yes". For example, "not black" could be "white", but also "green". "God" does not have a well defined enough definition: it's very likely that God is not a bearded man on a cloud, but questions like whether omnipotence or omnipresence exist (and their correlations) are a whole new can of philosophical worms :)

[yters]

He seems to be saying your thought experiment only shows reality is too complex to be viewed the same way by multiple people, and your claim assumes too much.