I’ve always found the claim that you aren’t “really” an atheist unless you are 100% certain that no gods exist to be really annoying. It’s such a weird confusion. I can’t think of any other belief (including beliefs in the same domain, like theism) where we require 100% certainty to qualify as a “true” believer. Too many discussions devolve into issues related to this confusion, and too often this confusion is used to justify agnosticism as being more rational than atheism. Even Richard Dawkins has famously called himself an agnostic, in spite of the fact that he believes God doesn’t exist, and is “6.9 out of 7” sure of that belief.

A little while back Dan Fincke (of Camels with Hammers fame) made this point, noting that we don’t require 100% certainty of believers in order to count them as “true theists”, and it set the idea for this comic bouncing around in my head. For that matter, we don’t require of agnostics that they be 100% certain that nobody can know whether or not God exists. Instead of trying to play this weird “gotcha” game by pointing out that atheists lack complete 100% certainty (of course they do – we all do; we’re all fallible, and it would be foolish for any of us, whatever we believe, to deny that), it seems likely that much more productive conversations can be had if we just focus on trying to figure out which beliefs are best justified, even as we all acknowledge that at the end of the day any of our beliefs, no matter how well justified, could turn out to be mistaken.

Also hey look – new comic! It’s been a while since that happened.