Not so, Don. If you consider what I said, there is only one further step beyond my position, which would be to declare that there is definitely no God. You won't even get Richard Dawkins to say that. He places himself on his own 7-point scale of certainty about the non-existence of God at 6.9. The problem is that neither word, atheist nor agnostic, is very useful. Fence-sitting "agnosticism", the usual kind, contains a spectrum within itself: it can cover the truly uncertain (a rare breed, I think, as the genuine article), the spineless who fear the consequences of invoking the wrath of a God they don't even know for sure exists, insurance-seekers and the don't-give-a-shits. The kind of "agnosticism" you accuse me of is a very different beast to all of those. My dismissal of God is based purely on my consideration of the evidence (I threw "faith" out of the window decades ago). I have a bust of Beethoven next to me on my computer desk. I'm now going to reach out and pat Ludwig on the head. In the split second it takes my hand to reach him, there's chance he'll vanish in a puff of busted atoms (I understand that quantum theory allows for the possibility of this). The chances of it happening are hundreds of trillions to one against. That allows to me live my life assuming it won't happen. It does not allow me to say that it will definitely not happen. It allows you to say to me that I don't know that it won't happen, but it's a hell of a stretch to then accuse me of being "agnostic" about it. See above on lack of usefulness of the word. That's about where I am with God. What I'm saying is that you seem to be telling me that the only true atheists are those who, mistakenly, declare that there is certainly no God. If the word "atheist" is to be of any use at all (and I don't like it much at all myself), then you have to apply it to people like me. Otherwise, let's ditch it. It's a bastard word in any case, defined only by the existence of the delusional believers (if no-one had ever come up with the God notion, there would be neither believers nor atheists). Paradoxically, applying the word "atheist" to myself immediately puts me into believer territory, as would the term "non-believer". Those words beginning with "a-" or "non-" define me in terms of God. Seems rather unfair to me.