Has Atheism Become a Religion? A Response to David Lose

 In short, no.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/atheism-religion_b_867217.html

   Lose makes his non-argument (this is an oft-recycled canard more than anything else) based on what he considers four pieces of evidence. In the interest of fairness, we'll consider them.

1.

As recently reported in the New York Times, military personnel who identify themselves as "Atheists" have requested chaplains to tend to their spiritual needs. 

   This is the only thing he states that makes me question, and it doesn't make me question long. Demanding equal representation under the law, even in the military, isn't the same thing as being religious. I do wonder what the 'spiritual needs' of other atheists might be, but this seems more a play to legitimize a position that isn't accepted in military doctrine than anything else.


2.

The U.S. Government reports that in 2008 those identifying themselves specifically as "Atheist" composed the 18th largest group of 43 possible categories of "self-described religious identification."

   Where else are we supposed to self-identify? The question deals with religious belief, and our lack of it. I'm not going to write 'atheist' under my profession, age, or other demographic questions. As Lose grants, this is also one of the options listed under the 'none' response. So you ask religion, we say we have none, we're atheist, and you say we're religious? Spectacular reasoning there.


3.

Similarly, it's worth noting the degree to which Atheists routinely, strategically, and often vociferously position what is often described as their "secular-humanist" views against religious traditions.

      Vocally speaking out for rational thought, and aligning it against magical thinking, doesn't make rational thought a religion. It's offering an alternative to that religion. Some that espouse secular humanism couple that with a set of what they consider core values, but having an ethical philosophy is likewise not a religion. If you take the magical thought out of, say, Buddhism, you're left with something that still isn't religious despite it's roots. We'll get to why shortly.


4.

Finally -- and you probably knew this was coming -- consider all the comments made by self-identified Atheists on articles published in the Religion section of the Huffington Post. Seriously. Either Atheists have way more time on their hands than the rest of the population or they've got something to prove.

    Yes, we certainly have something to prove, in the sense that we're a denigrated minority in much of the world, as well as a minority that has been expected to sit quietly and pretend that we don't exist. The assertion that being assertive in an us-against-them fashion is a feature of new religions ignores that it is also a feature of civil rights movements and tribalism in general. We're loud and resistant to religious thought because that religious thought is an all pervasive feature of the societies in which we live, and often based solely in one religion. Thus we speak not only for ourselves, but for the numerous religious minorities that also don't want your faith installed as an official part of public life. Granted, those minorities may want their faith installed instead, but seeing to it that all are excluded levels the playing field.

Laws of Nature: Nomic or Gnostic?

Some of the issues with Foster's argument have been left alone due to the instructions of the professor for whom the paper was written. These are apparent in any case.     




 John Foster, in The Divine Lawmaker, believes that he has made headway on a philosophical account of natural laws by taking natural laws as causal regularities that are (or were) enacted by a universal creator.  While this may be satisfying to the theist, both as a teleological proof of a deity and as an account of natural laws, it is lacking in the way of parsimony and explanatory power. There is utility in Foster’s nomic account of laws as causing regularity in the universe: it is possible to present an account of natural laws that properly describes what the laws of nature are and excludes those regularities that are accidental. After a careful examination of Foster’s views, along with some pertinent criticisms of them, this paper will attempt to make sense of Foster’s account of laws without the need for the involvement of a supernatural agent.

I'll give this a try...

It's been a while since I read The God Delusion, so I'll have a go at something that was brought up in my philosophy of natural science class on Thursday: The ontological argument.
It reads something like this (Anselm's original, as taken from wikipedia):

1. If I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable, then I can think of no being greater
1a. If it is false that I can think of no being greater, it is false I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable
2. Being is greater than not being
3. If the being I am thinking of does not exist, then it is false that I can think of no being greater.
4. If the being I am thinking of does not exist, then it is false that I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable
Conclusion: If I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable, then I am thinking of a being that exists

Wen the Eternally Surprised?

My first post in a month, and it's pure, unadulterated fluff. Literally.



Then again, the cat is exhibiting the only correct reaction, as we have never experienced each moment until it occurs. Buddha has claws...

Patriotic Jackassery

Someone will disagree with this, but, hell, someone disagrees with everything else I write as well. At the outset of a school pep rally today, our athletic director threw out two male Hispanic students who refused to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They weren't disruptive or disrespectful, in fact they weren't even speaking, they simply didn't stand and say the pledge. I was told, by the athletic director, to take them to our version of in-school suspension for that "offence", which I refused to do. Rather, I let the students stand just outside the gym doors and watch until I could get the attention of an administrator who promptly took them back in to be seated. The AD is furious that I went over his head (and that I took the students' side on this).
As I explained to the AD, I also refuse to say the pledge, although not for the same reasons as the students. Unless our government sees fit to remove the blatant and unconstitutional endorsement of religion from that document, I will continue to refuse to say the pledge, and if that were to happen I would still have reservations in publicly swearing allegiance to a piece of cloth and the nation. I have no intention of betraying the nation in which I live, and there are a number of things about this country that I admire and support, not least the fact that I have the freedom/right to decide whether or not I wish to say something like the Pledge of Allegiance because of the way our government was constructed. The students actually refused because they aren't yet citizens of the U.S., although they are here legally. That two adolescents (17 and 18 respectively) chose not to swear allegiance to a nation, of which they are not citizens (and that, at times, treats those of their ethnicity rather unjustly, to say the least), does not offend me in the least as a citizen of that nation. The athletic director, on the other hand, was absolutely incensed both with their conduct and my failure to condemn it.
A little research turns up this gem: 1943 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, in which the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government, schools included, to compel speech in the manner of the Pledge. This at the height of World War Two, no less. Attempts since then to challenge the constitutionality of the words "under God" in the pledge, as they expressly support monotheism as a religious belief, have not resulted in Supreme Court rulings ( Newdow v. California was dismissed because the plaintiff was deemed not to have parental standing in the case). There are a number of more recent rulings that uphold the opinion that coercion of speech is not constitutional.
Basically, Wake Co. schools should be thanking me for saving them a lawsuit. Somehow I doubt I'll ever hear that thanks.

Review of The New Atheism, Victor Stenger

The New Atheism fills a needed gap in the literature begun by Sam Harris in End of Faith, in that it actually addresses all the fleas, and attempts at legitimate rebuttal, that have surfaced in response to the books by Dawkins et. al.. Stenger begins with a solid summary of the works of the "Four Horseman", as well as those by himself and Dan Barker, that also incorporates census data on just how many nonbelievers exist worldwide. This portion of the book, and those dealing with suffering and morality, aren't novel, although they serve to round out the scope of the material.
The key portions of Stenger's book are the rebuttals of Haught, D'Souza, and the ilk who have made legitimate attempts to address the arguments of the New Atheists (at least tried to blow enough smoke in front of them so as to create doubt in those arguments). As I had no interest in purchasing or reading the drivel perpetuated by religious apologists, it is useful to see from whence their arguments might come, as well as to have those arguments examined in clear language. Stenger is concise to the point of almost being too brief in some parts, but manages to address a number of apologetic claims. One can almost imagine a Gish gallop of religious argument that demands rebuttal as the author replies to them. Perhaps more importantly, and more interestingly, Stenger addresses the fine-tuning arguments from physics that previous atheist authors have not touched, ably eliminating that from the viable apologetic arsenal. For clarity's sake, Stenger's refutation amounts to pointing out the the apologists' argument fails to take into account that varying one physical constant actually varies the others and leads to conditions that are still suitable for the organisation of matter and life in some form, although not necessarily life as we know it. The assertion of the theists is thus reduced to special pleading based on the anthropic principle. Furthermore, Stenger poses the multiverse theory, among others, as a manner to resolve the problem of fine tuning. He also points out that the idea of a pre-Big Bang singularity, the point where theists like to insert a deity as a first cause, has been dis-proven in physics since Hawking's Brief History of Time in 1988. William Craig Lane and Dinesh D'Souza still cling to this argument, as do many of their supporters, so Stenger's submission of quantum tunneling from yet another universe as the cause of this universe, supported by publications of both his own and Hawking's, serves as an important nail in that coffin. By simply citing a zero energy beginning to the universe, which is empirically supported, much of the fine tuning argument evaporates of its own accord.
Stenger also devotes a chapter to the mind, as he believes that may be the last real battleground where theists seek to insert god. While scientific notions of mind still have explanatory work to do, Stenger asserts that, as with the evidence of an interventionist deity, the presence of a dualistic mind, that is a mind that arises separately from the matter of the brain, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. The latter phrase is useful in maintaining an agnostic stance toward natural phenomena, however the author makes the valid point that the absence of evidence that should be there if a hypothesis were true disconfirms that hypothesis. This holds true both for a deity that intervenes in the universe and the existence of a (insert religious term for soul here).
The remainder of Stenger's book is devoted to explaining the nature of science, debunking Mormonism and explaining the history of religious phenomena, placing Christianity and Jesus in the proper historical context of an axial age (wherein numerous cultures at the same stage of civilisation had thinkers who professed moral codes), and, surprisingly, agreeing with Sam Harris that Eastern philosophy, once stripped of supernatural pretence, serves as a viable source of morality. In particular, the author seems to admire the eightfold path of Buddhism as a moral code, although he also supports the aspects of Hinduism and Taoism that demand a reduction of ego as a means of living a morally fulfilled life.
While not entirely novel, Stenger's work is concise and well-written, with enough newly presented notions to be worthy of a read. Thanks for the early birthday gift, Mom.

Well, Last Time it Was Sarcastic

... but apparently I am a bit too harsh. A professor in the PhD programme chose tonight to discuss what she terms "professional discourse". I'll boil down her points as I understood them, and then I'll give my take on them.
1. It's not OK to directly confront wrong notions, ideas, and statements. Instead, you need to phrase a rhetorical question or frame the response in such a way that you sound as if you're only giving your view on the subject.
2. Asking for evidence to support an assertion is unreasonable because "we don't have the books in front of us."
3. You need to refrain from using big words, or if you do you should explain what they mean. Using big words make you sound like a know-it-all.
4. Don't dominate the discussion, but don't sit there silent either. By dominating the discussion you're silencing someone else who might want to talk, and sitting silently isn't contributing.

To be fair, I see nothing terribly wrong with #4 provided that other people do actually want to talk. The other three are a bit of an annoyance, and rely upon some poor reasoning.
It's perfectly acceptable to confront some one's wrong ideas with empirically supported ideas of your own. This is called debate, and in the absence of being directly handed information, it's how we might actually learn something from a course web discussion. I agree that it's a logical fallacy, and counterproductive, to attack the person themselves. However, since when does professional discourse have to include deference to absolute horseshit? (oops, I just broke #3, again). Calling the idea horseshit is a bit rude, I'll admit, but demonstrating that it's not correct is another story. We have a style over substance fallacy working here, and apparently it's the dominant culture in the course.
Evidence is how we, as rational human beings, actually support what we're saying and manage to establish some measure of veracity for our assertions. Operating under the assumption that I can just assert something and that should be good enough leads to the submission of personal experience and anecdote as proof of (insert concept here), and just doesn't work. These people are PhD students in Science Education, surely they grasp the idea of evidence? All that aside, how frackin' difficult is it to Google something?
The last sentence applies heavily to #3 as well. You don't know a word I used? Really? All right, I can accept that, now open another browser window and use OED to figure out what it means. Still don't get the concept? Wikipedia is full of entries on just about everything; Not necessarily ones that contain loads of perfectly verified information, but I'm not discussing anything particularly controversial here. Alternately, you might try something like searching the name of the person I just cited, and it's just possible that the very source I used will pop up, or something that at least summarises the ideas espoused in that source.
/rant. Perhaps I should have stuck to the actual sciences, or looked into Philosophy despite my scant background in it if I wanted to be able to have real discussions with people in my programme. Or perhaps these people need to grow a thicker skin, take Sagan's advice and not get so attached to their hypotheses, learn to look things up they don't understand, and possibly provide something to back their assertions beyond "Well, in my experience..."

I've been too harsh...

Robert Wright destroys my worldview in an essay in Sunday's NYT. What else could possibly come of such a well written opinion piece that so greatly differs from the views of a "new atheist". Wright states in his gospel:

I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.

Eureka! I have underestimated the creative power of natural selection! Why, if Wright hadn't pointed it out, I might never have considered that God could have begun the universe, and then stepped back to let it all run through the process that we can detect. When I was a strident, militant, neo-Atheist, I would have simply examined the evidence for natural selection, abiogenesis, and the Big Bang , and posited that they can work without a designer of any sort. In my hasty militaristic scientism, I'd have put down the teleological appearances of evolution as nothing but that: appearances. Yet Wright, by citing that wonderful scientist William Paley, points out that the apparent design is there because life, the universe and everything must have been designed! That's right, Paley was a wonderful scientist, as Wright notes:

There are two morals to the story. One is that it is indeed legitimate, and not at all unscientific, to do what Paley did: inspect a physical system for evidence that it was given some purpose by some higher-order creative process. If scientifically minded theologians want to apply that inspection to the entire system of evolution, they’re free to do so.

What a poor scientist I am, blinded so by my strident, militant, evangelical fundamentalist Atheism as I've caught it from the likes of Dawkins and Dennett! Proof of a designer was there all the time, all I had to do was examine the evidence with the intent of finding evidence of a designer. This, of course, is science at its purest: rifling through all the available evidence to find that which supports your hypothesis and discarding that which does not. Why, any common citizen could tell me as much.

Wright does an even more thorough job with his other salvo: that of destroying my (our, to include other fundagelical militant atheists) strident pretensions that I'm subscribing to pure logic in failing to attribute a designer:

They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism. (Darwin himself, though not a believer, said as much.) And they might even grant that natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god.

. In my slanted materialistic worldview, coloured as it is by staunch atheism and an unjust tendency to root my tenets in evidence, I've overlooked an important fact; The evidence from evolution and the natural world doesn't entirely rule out the possibility of a deistic, non-interventionist deity. How stridently narrow-minded of me (and all other neo-militant, scientific thinking atheists) to act as if there isn't a behind-the-scenes designer, who obviously could have set all this in motion and is now completely apathetic and non-interventionist towards his/her/its creation.
Wright's dismantling of the evangelical militant mantras of the New Atheists continues:

And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained [sic] in it.

Why yes, Robert, we've been far too close-minded to see the concept of "higher purpose" embedded in in biology. It's clear, when looking at parasites, predation, and how a population can be culled through simple starvation, that there is a grand design: a power greater than simple selection of the best adapted is in play. How else could such a wonderful array of life come to be on our planet? How could life come to be at all, without a designer? After all, our best and most recent lab experiments are only able to create self-replicating molecules that consist of a simple nucleic acids surrounded by proteins, nothing at all like early life might have been. We can only hope that the others who are so trapped by their narrow beliefs in neo-fundamentalist atheistic science can be freed from their intellectual chains by Wright's sparkling logic and fair open-mindedness towards the possibilities inherent in the evidence.

RESPONSE TO COMMENT 1:
Here I was about to remark that there must be some sort of law about committing grammatical errors when snarking about the errors of others, and I find that my usage matches OED. (Really, go look).

Nice reponse to the article... the (deliberate?) misunderstanding of the more common "there's no evidence so who really gives a fuck" atheist position is irritating, Wright should know better... And you're right... ruling out the possibility of deities would destroy our favourite hobby of arguing with creationists and such.

Thread from Sandwalk (well..maybe)

If you were part of that discussion, or have something to add, feel free to continue it here.
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I'll have to address responses here, because there's something screwy with the comment box, at least here at work.

@ Eugene> well... here's the thing, I don't actually have to disprove that someone who was dead for 3 days happened to rise again, walk around for a while longer, and then rose bodily into the sky, because the whole idea is preposterous. From the repeated experiences of mankind, it is obvious that this simply doesn't happen, so the burden of evidence for that is on you... one might think it would be recorded more accurately and closer to the time of occurrence that the canonical gospels (or those that are apocryphal for that matter). I can however, offer evidence that throws the whole scenario into doubt apart from "well, that just doesn't happen". There are several religions from that area, that predate Christianity, that have a deity who is the son a virgin, who also happens to be resurrected and preach salvation: Mithras, Adonis, and Osiris, to claim three that predate Christianity. The myth of Hercules also predates Christianity and shares some of the elements of the story of Jesus. The Norse legends of Odin don't predate Christianity, but hail from a time prior to the introduction of the Christian religion to that part of the world. Are all of those, particularly Osiris and Mithras (whose stories are nearly identical to those of Jesus, and in the same region hundreds of years prior) also true? Or is it more likely that early Christians latched onto existing myths of the time in order to add a certain panache to their forming religion. December 25th, incidentally, was the date of the Roman Feast of the Sun, and the supposed birthday of Mithras, recorded in Roman histories BCE... The theft of ideas is rather obvious if you can look at it unbiased. So what needs to be asked of you is simply this: why is your story more likely to be true than the ones that preceded it or mimicked it?
It can also be demonstrated that there are reasonable, natural, explanations for purported miracles... Lazarus was dead and resurrected? or had goatherds in Palestine 2000 years ago perhaps never heard of a coma, if the event happened at all?

And if a hypothetical claim of super-nature intervening in the workings of nature cannot be ruled out on the basis of the generally observed regularities of the natural sciences or abstract philosophy, the only possible evaluation left is direct examination of the phenomenon to see if it is entirely explicable with reference to purely naturalistic causes.

Correct, science lies fully in the realm of the natural and the observable. Don't neglect that observing the effect of an event is still empirical observation, and can lead to knowledge of the event itself. Science and reason, which is intertwined with science if your a scientist worthy of the name, demand that unnecessary explanations be stripped away. I don't need to hypothesize a creator if I know how, or approximately how, something came about without one. Theistic evolution is exactly that: adding an unnecesssary and logically untenable element to an explanation that stands on its own.
Smijer responded quite well to the god of the gaps argument, so I'll let that lie.

As for what can be empirically disproven, the creation story/stories in Genesis can be demonstrated to be false, Ussher's claim of the age of the Earth is clearly false, and modern day "miracles" are explainable by other means that the supernatural ones, many of which have also been shown to be flat-out hoaxes.

Smijer> When something is that far out of the realm of observation, one has to use reason rather than empiricism. However, defending an idea by saying "well you can't prove it didn't happen is making your stand on some rather shaky ground. He also can't prove it did, and I can easily call into question the validity of the Bible as a historical document, by the age of the writing and the evidence that it has numerous, unrelated authors.
So you define religion, in your sense, as the social aspect? Once you strip away rituals, you're left with a social club. A college fraternity would then be a religion, by your definition, even more so because they still include ritual of some form or other.. all they lack is a professed doctrine in the supernatural.

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Eugene Curry

On what basis, then, can one say with any sort of confidence that "[r]eason tells us" that super-nature cannot (theoretically) impinge on the workings of nature?

Because by definition, once something has a measurable impact on the natural world, it can be empirically observed, and is now part of nature.

And given an unbiased historical examination, the resurrection of Jesus proves extraodinarily resistent to naturalistic explanations.

Yes, I agree... however, given unbiased historical examination, the evidence that Jesus even lived, much less did or said anything attributed to him, is debatable. If one chooses, for sake of this discussion, to accept that he was indeed a real person, then we're left with second and third-hand accounts of his deeds, at best. Do you happen to recall the supposed miracles at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917? We had live eyewitnesses for those, and know them to be false, or naturally explainable. Honestly, how reliable would you consider a first century source, which has been transcribed and translated multiple times before reaching you, to be on a topic that was not a matter of your faith? How about if the oldest extant copy was, most definitely, a copy, with items clearly added afterward, and dated from several hundred years after the supposed date of the original manuscript?

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Smijer> The comment box is only wonky on my blog, it works on other people's... bizzare, and something I need to resolve. (Although I rarely have commenters to reply to, so it doesn't usually matter).
I understand, and can respect, the idea of using church for a social gathering if that is your only source. That is indeed the reason why many people don't completely leave religion, per se, and the UU churches I've seen are the most tolerable for me by far. I attend a couple of meet-up groups in this area that fill that role, and have previously used my rugby team for that sort of outlet (not a whole lot of thought going on there, to be sure). I'm not one to claim that every aspect of every religion is bad... I do claim that a number of heinous things are done in the name of some deity or other, and the the spurious supernatural claims of religion are exactly that. I'd love a place to sit down with people, play some chess (or air-hockey, or another game of your preference), have a nice intellectual discussion, and possibly drink a few Guiness's... Providing a setting that matches the similar needs of others apart from church involvement is something that will have to come with the growing numbers of non-believers in the country.

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Eugene> At the risk of making this incredibly long...

1) extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. 'nuff said. You presume that I wouldn't accept such evidence if it were presented because of my wording, I can assure you (who's opinion on the matter I frankly don't value) that I would. I know my own mind best... Flew's opinion isn't worth a whole lot to me because he's an addlepated, waffling twit; Ehrman's is generally sound and he accepts that there was a historical Jesus (yes, I did more research).
Also, something of which you are likely aware and not considering: just because it's written down doesn't mean it's true.

2) Paul was most certainly evangelising for Christianity, which, incidentally, he stood to gain a great deal from spreading. That doesn't mean that he's outright lying, but it does shed reasonable doubt on his motives. Six of the 13 Epistles aren't accepted as being authored by Paul in the first place, although Corinthians, which you quoted, isn't one of these.

3) Your analogy is off here... It is reasonable to assume that at some point a black man could be president of the US. It is an element of mythology to assume parthenogenesis in primates, because it doesn't happen in nature, but it is a common thread in a number of myths/religions throughout human culture both before and after Jesus. If we're going to discuss ideological biases, is it possible for you, as a Baptist preacher, to view Christianity objectively? Can you really evaluate its claims as if it were, say, Hinduism?

4) Can you prove the resurrection using unbiased sources? Moreover, I'd say the base of your religion is the existence of a deity at all. Thusly, please demonstrate the following:

a)The Universe was created

b)The creation was performed by a deity

c)The deity is interventionist and keeps interfering in the universe

d)The deity happens to be that of an iron-age Semitic people from one region of a small planet circling a star in a galaxy of some 100 billion others, the galaxy being one of some 150 billion others

e)All of this is documented in the "holy book" of that particular set of people

It might also be helpful to your case to demonstrate these auxiliaries:

f)The deity is omni-maximal, i.e. omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent

g)All other creation myths, gods, demi-urges and supernatural beings are false

You agreed that the burden of proof lies with you, I eagerly await your explanations.

5). You're conflating evolution with abiogenesis, and further conflating it with the Big Bang and cosmic development. If I can demonstrate that abiogenesis is possible, which some current experiments are rather close to doing, is your god then reduced to starting the universe and stepping back? Otherwise, it has been conclusively demonstrated that no outside interference is necessary for evolution to occur, so positing a designer is indeed superfluous.

6). I think I mistakenly dealt with this in 1. I don't have serious doubts the man existed, I do have serious doubts that most of what is attributed to him isn't fabricated to make him sound better. My personal view of the historical Jesus is along the lines of Gandhi, or Siddhartha Gautama (without all the nirvana hooey). Rational skepticism of anything, especially something written from an oral history, re-written, and translated as many times as much of the Bible has been would expect numerous errors; The fact that it's also prone to exaggerations and outright mendacity only compounds this problem. You accuse me of not applying skepticism to my own ideology; On what basis should I give more credibility to your particular brand of religion/mythology than someone else's?

to simply say that the traditional super-natural explanation of the early belief in Jesus' resurrection is incorrect is not to provide a naturalistic explanation. One has to actually offer an alternative positive theory. And it is here that the difficulty lies because no positive and comprehensive naturalistic theory withstands scrutiny.

It isn't necessary to provide a plausible alternate hypothesis for something that didn't happen, or can't be demonstrated to have happened. The reason this applies to evolution and not to resurrection is that one is a naturally observed phenomena (the diversityof life on Earth), and one is claimed to have occurred once and only once, and it beyond attempts at empirical observation.

My base position is this, for the resurrection, the existence of any deity, and anything else that lacks evidence: If an entity X is postulated to exist, and no substantive evidence capable of withstanding intense critical scrutiny is present to support the postulated existence of entity X, then the default position is to regard entity X as not existing until said supporting evidence materialises.

Contrary to popular opinion, this is de facto atheism, not agnosticism, and is the stance that many/most atheists with whom I've spoken take.