Thoughts in a Haystack

PZ Megahertz has a (mostly) good rant on some inane arguments that atheists commonly float.

He goes wrong here, however:

The "I believe in no gods/I lack belief in gods" debate. I have heard this so often, the hair-splitting grammatical distinctions some atheists think so seriously important in defining themselves. All you're doing is defining yourselves as anal retentive freaks, people! Get over it. Either way, you're an atheist — and that goes for the over-philosophized fussbudgets who insist that they're agnostics, not atheists, because they aren't 100% positive there aren't any gods, only 99 44/100ths positive. Atheism is such a general club, and it's so easy to fall into the definition, that it's silly to sit around arguing about how close to the fence you're sitting.

First of all, PZ's post, whether he realizes it or not, is one long exercise in analyzing arguments and trying to drill down to their actual meaning and utility ... in other words, philosophizing. Whether he is 'over-philosophizing' is a matter of perspective. Certainly, denying the utility of philosophy while engaged in it yourself is the worst sort of anti-intellectualism.

And, of course, his claim that agnostics believe what they do only because they "aren't 100% positive there aren't any gods" is every bit as much an attempt to define agnostics by (his own) dictionary as the "Dictionary Atheists" he deplores, who are trying to ignore "the practice of atheism."

I am an "agnostic" because I don't believe that there is any human ability -- science, reason or any other -- that can address the question. I don't practice any religion because I see no evidence that it makes any difference to what goes on in the universe and, furthermore, I can't see how anything that I would consider a god would think it would matter whether or not I did. But I really, really, don't think I can know whether or not god exists. It is not that I demand 100% certainty before I'd consider atheism. As PZ says:

If I ask you to explain to me why you are an atheist, reciting the dictionary at me, you are saying nothing: asking why you are a person who does not believe in god is not answered when you reply, "Because I am a person who does not believe in god." And if you protest when I say that there is more to the practice of atheism than that, insisting that there isn't just makes you dogmatic and blind.

If PZ thinks that my failure to practice religion or my denying the possibility of knowledge about god is the same as atheism, how is that different than what the "Dictionary Atheists" do? If not, he'll have to do better to show that we agnostics are the same as atheists.
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