Ignosticism, or igtheism, is the theological position that every other theological position (including agnosticism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological concepts. The word "ignosticism" was coined by Sherwin Wine, a rabbi and a founding figure in Humanistic Judaism.
It can be defined as encompassing two related views about the existence of God:
Some philosophers have seen ignosticism as a variation of agnosticism or atheism,[1] while others have considered it to be distinct. An ignostic maintains that they cannot even say whether he/she is a theist or an atheist until a better definition of theism is put forth.
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Ignosticism and theological noncognitivism are generally synonymous,[2] but the relationship of ignosticism to other nontheistic views is less clear. While Paul Kurtz finds the view to be compatible with both weak atheism and agnosticism,[3] other philosophers consider ignosticism to be distinct.
In a chapter of his 1936 book Language, Truth, and Logic, A. J. Ayer argued that one could not speak of God's existence, or even the probability of God's existence, since the concept itself was unverifiable and thus nonsensical.[4] Ayer wrote that this ruled out atheism and agnosticism as well as theism because all three positions assume that the sentence "God exists" is meaningful.[5] Given the meaninglessness of theistic claims, Ayer opined that there was "no logical ground for antagonism between religion and natural science",[6] as theism alone does not entail any propositions which the scientific method can falsify.
Like Ayer, Theodore Drange sees atheism and agnosticism as positions that accept "God exists" as a meaningful proposition; atheists judge it to be "false or probably false" and agnostics consider it to be inconclusive until further evidence is met.[7] If Drange's definitions are accepted, ignostics are neither atheists nor agnostics. A simplified maxim on the subject states "An atheist would say, 'I don't believe God exists'; an agnostic would say, 'I don't know whether or not God exists'; and an ignostic would say, 'I don't know what you mean when you say, "God exists" '."
Ignosticism is not to be confused with apatheism, a position of apathy toward the existence of God. An apatheist may see the statement "God exists" as meaningless, yet they may also see it as meaningful, and perhaps even true.[8]
Drange emphasizes that any stance on "Does God exist?" is made with respect to a particular concept of what one claims to consider "God" to represent:
Since the word "God" has many different meanings, it is possible for the sentence "God exists" to express many different propositions. What we need to do is to focus on each proposition separately. … For each different sense of the term "God," there will be theists, atheists, and agnostics relative to that concept of God.[7]
As God means very different things to different people, when the word is spoken, an ignostic may seek to determine if something like a child's definition of a god is meant or if a theologian's is intended instead. A theistic child's concept generally has a simple and coherent meaning, based on an anthropomorphic conception of God.[9] Many philosophers and theologians have rejected this conception of God while affirming belief in another conception of God, including St. Augustine, Maimonides, St. Thomas Aquinas, Baruch Spinoza, and Søren Kierkegaard.
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  | Let It Be - Articles by Jonathan Rauch: Apatheism: Beyond Religion |
| | The Argument From Non-Cognitivism - The Argument From Non-Cognitivism |
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