Quote:
Originally Posted by pylon
But if you are even .001% open to the idea that there may be an unexplainable form of afterlife, does that disqualify you from Atheism?
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I don't think so, for a couple of reasons.
First:
Agnosticism and Atheism aren't on the same axis of description of position, agnostic-atheist, gnostic-atheist, agnostic-theist, gnostic-theist are all legitimate positions.
An agnostic-atheist doesn't believe, but doesn't know and can be 100% open to the idea of a spirit world (given sufficient evidence hopefully, but some atheists believe in all kinds of wacky unknown physics).
Second:
I don't think being an atheist would preclude one from believing in some kind of afterlife, it just means one doesn't believe there's a god. One could believe that the pattern of consciousness exists in one or more higher dimensions that are usually inaccessible to us, that doesn't require spirituality or belief in god. I think explaining it would be difficult as it would require new physics that we haven't found yet, and for it to interact with brains and people it would certainly be easily detectable.
But maybe the kind of belief you are looking for is what Einstein talked about
: Spinoza's God, or pantheism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism