Agnostic-Atheism is the most logical position on religion.

I will reserve counter arguments to Pros rebuttal until the next round. In this debate I think there are deep problems with Pros understanding of what Theists mean when they refer to a God, and what it means to have a theory of concepts (all knowledge is conceptual. To deny that you need to use conceptual knowledge, which is a stolen concept fallacy). So I urge Pro to be a little careful here and investigate this a little deeper before the next round. But in this round my task is to rebut the Pros opening. I will continue to press the case for Gnostic-Atheism, it remains the most logical position. The debate is: which out of Gnostic and Agnostic Atheism is the more logical. I have made a case involving logical arguments for the consistency and coherency of Gnostic-Atheism. I have not seen the equivalent in Pros opening arguments. Instead Pro has merely asserted that his position is true, without making an argument to support his case. I can of course following his reasoning, which in short appears to be: P1 Atheists cannot disprove a God P2 Theists cannot prove a God P3 There appears to be no evidence for the existence of a God C Ergo. .so there is no evidence for the existence God (P1 and P2 cancel each other). If this is the argument I agree with Pro on P2 and P3. However, I do not agree with P1. This is merely asserted by Pro and I do not see an argument as to why Atheists cannot disprove God, nor an argument proving the Agnostic Atheism is true. His approach seems to be to agree with Theists that "you can"t disprove God". OK why? This cannot just be asserted. In his rebuttal Pro seems to build on this motif a little by suggesting that Atheists cannot disprove God because the definition is malleable, ie God may only have x attributes, x-1 attributes or y+1 attributes. Who are we to know? Computer scientists would call this a "bug" and not a "feature" of Theism. "This is not a point in favour of Theism nor Agnostic Atheism. It is a point in favour of Gnostic-Atheism, as it underlines the meaninglessness of the God concept and supports my first argument (The meaninglessness of Religious Discourse). It has a further implication. If you rob the God concept of attributes in order to keep it alive, its meaning becomes so denuded, that the generalised perfection envisaged in a God (something all Theists would subscribe to, see Anselm), is no longer contained within the word God. In short if God is not perfect, why call it God? It could just be a highly evolved life-form for all we know. I think denying the standard Theist understanding of a God is a semantic game employed by Pro to make Agnostic Atheism seem more plausible, this is bound to fail as it just deepens the success of Gnostic-Atheist arguments (see above). Herein lies a further problem with Agnostic Atheism. I agree there is no evidence to support the concept of a God, but I think that is a true statement because Gods do not exist. But why do Agnostic Atheists think there is no evidence for God? It maybe that the Atheist wants to reserve judgement that there might be a hidden God. But then 2 further problems emerge 1) Why call yourself an Atheist? , 2) The problem of divine hiddenness is further evidence that there is no God. Given the definition of a theist God includes the act of creation specifically to interact with humanity, why hide? Whichever way you look at this you end up at the same conclusion that Gods do not exist. The common out here is to evoke a Deist conception of a God. But that is changing the game. Are we talking about Theism as practised or are we talking about the broader definition of Theism (including Deism). In any analysis I am not sure it helps that much. A Deist God is one that does not know or care of our existence, but somehow acted. For the Agnostic Atheist to argue successfully here against the Gnostic-Atheist, they must propose a meaningful definition of the concept and show ways in which it could exist, given those attributes (even though they don"t believe it actually exists). But I have not seen that done, it has similar problems: 1) It suffers from similar definitional issues e. g. timeless causal creation, intentionality/infallibility conundrum. 2) At best it seems indistinguishable from the physics of the Universe. At worst it seems to invoke the image of a footling, tinkering fool that cannot create a stable system. 3) It is so lacking in knowledge it doesn"t even know we exist. So if it lacks even those basic levels of perfection why call it a God? What standards are you appealing to in your concept to allow you to leave this possibility open? Again we can only conclude that Gods do not exist. This was summarised well for me by Francois Tremblay in his strongatheism. net blog. He argues that there is not as much difference between the Gnostic (strong) and Agnostic (weak) forms of atheism as may initially seem to be the case. But the position held by weak atheism, namely that there is inadequate evidence to believe in a god, necessarily entails affirming that god does not exist. For example we do not claim that there is no evidence for the existence of a supernatural witch with magical powers (like the Wicked Witch of the West)". Instead we are comfortable with declaring that "there are no such things as witches". We are not Agnostic-Awitches, but Gnostic ones. Anyone representing the view that witches may exist, would pay a price immediately in terms of their intellectual standing, because of the absurdity and contradictions inherent in that concept. So then why is this not the case with the God concept? The major differences are: 1) the Theist has a lot more sophistication with their argumentation 2) Theism is represented by some severely talented minds and presented with rhetorical flourish 3) the Theist has a small army of believers that do not laugh when the existence of said entity is proposed, and 4) As Goebbels once said: "The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed". Most tellingly the God concept is an even bigger lie with even more incoherency and implausibility than the witches concept. Let us not be fooled by the smoke and mirrors of Theism and its clever arguments and retortions. It is, what it is. It proposes a subjective universe, then pleads that it isn"t subjective because god is super, extra special. When asked what that means we are told "who can know the mystery of God? ". "At this point we are meant to go "aah now I understand, at best I can be an Agnostic". Absolutely not, you can declare non-existence on the grounds I argued for in my opening. I think there is something of a fashion among atheists to declare in support of Agnostic Atheism, as somehow an intellectually superior position and an invincible position to argue from. But too often it leads to a retreat behind global philosophical skepticism when challenged. This generalised defence of Agnostic Atheism was alluded to by Pro in his opening. The implication in his opening was that we cannot be certain of anything without adequate evidence. This is a dangerous path, it becomes a slippery slope towards absurdity (like having to deny existence). But infact this is not only false (we can be certain of our own existence, axioms, logical contradictions being false etc), it also undermines Pros entire worldview. If Pro adopts this stance, he cannot be certain that Agnostic Atheism is true, there is no evidence for its truth (insofar as his opening statement goes). This weakness in the generalised defence is exploited by the Christian Presuppositionalist attack on Atheism, who challenge the Atheist to defend anything they know for certain and entrench a discussion in the epistemic crisis of the skeptic. It is a problem I do not have in my worldview, because it is essentially positive, metaphysically non-skeptical and strongly atheistic. And so I return to my opening in this round. The contention in this debate is whether Agnostic or Gnostic-Atheism is the logical position. It is not whether Agnostic Atheism is "probably" the most logical, or the most reasonable. Pro must prove that Agnostic Atheism is the logical position, he has to move onto my ground and provide deductive arguments. Until he does that Pro cannot carry the debate, because he is not offering deductive (or even inductive) arguments as to whether Agnostic Atheism is coherent and logical. Currently we have mere assertions. As one famous evidentialist said "what can be asserted without evidence, can be rejected without evidence". The position in this debate is that Agnostic Atheism has been asserted as true without evidence (or reason for that matter), and therefore Gnostic-Atheism is the most logical. To aid Pro in his rebuttal I attach a link to another Gnostic-Atheist explaining the argument from the fact of existence in more detail. Pro has stated that he doesn't grasp it, nor its devastating implications for Theism. . http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.de...