User talk:Madjess

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Hello, Madjess, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! Bless sins (talk) 20:43, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
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October 2020
Hello, I'm Almy. I wanted to let you know that I reverted one of your recent contributions —specifically this edit to Agnostic atheism—because it did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Help desk. Thanks. Almy (talk) 01:43, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Madjess, your additions appear to be original research, which Wikipedia can’t accept. You can’t take a source about agnosticism and a source about atheism, and combine them to support your own conclusion about agnostic atheism.  You need to use sources that explicitly discuss agnostic atheism.  (I couldn’t fully access one of your sources, so I apologise if I’ve missed something.) Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 12:40, 4 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Adrian J. Hunter, (from Sam Madden, a.k.a Madjess, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-madden-a2352340/ I corrected the missing information on my sources. If one can not take the definition of Agnostic, which clearly states from the Oxford Dictionary that an Agnostic neither believes or disbelieves in God, then how does this piece even make sense? If an Agnostic according to Oxford does not profess a belief or non belief in God, epistemologically speaking, they can't not believe in God at the same time, it is illogical.

In addition, regarding this piece it states the following at the end of the citations of the piece. "This article includes a list of general references, but it remains largely unverified because it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2017)"

Also doing further research on what Wikipedia Talk Section stated above, the following statement has been made, "Significant holes in sourcing and definitions of this page", brings us to the following from Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins defines agnosticism as going all the way up as close as you can get to 0% belief that God does not exist and at 0% is where Atheism lies. "This is the source I cited from him above, particularly his 7-point scale that differentiates between Atheist and De Facto Atheist." Now there is a lot more in this source on the problems with this page.


 * Thank you for responding. Plenty of sources find the idea of agnostic atheism coherent, including, , , and sources already cited.  So our article can't state, in Wikipedia's voice, that the concept is irrational or epistemologically invalid per WP:WIKIVOICE.  What it can do is note criticism of the concept from reliable sources.  But we can't write our own criticisms based on separate primary sources that about agnosticism and atheism per WP:SYNTH. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 13:17, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Also, thank you for responding. I don't know if you checked and read through the talk page of Agnostic Atheism, but there are two things I feel that are vital here, first off it is not my own conclusion, as I cited the Oxford Dictionary on the definition of Agnostic, and as I stated previously on the talk page Richard Dawkins himself states you have to come to 0% belief in God to be an Atheist. (Source already cited).

There are many things as spelled out on the Talk Page Agnostic Atheism regarding problems with this piece. Now I am willing to do additional research particularly when it comes to what the "Significant Problems" are as stated on the Talk Page Agnostic Atheism, to clear this piece up even further, such things as citing Richard Dawkins, among others. I hope you have reviewed the talk page on this subject which is noted under source #3.
 * A definitive statement like "an atheist must be certain God does not exist" must be supported by the consensus of reliable sources. In a dispute between reliable sources, we should place due weight on each source, summarizing the opinions of each. Thus citing only Richard Dawkins or any other single source is not enough to contradict what other sources say accepting the existence of agnostic atheism. Neither Oxford nor Dawkins is 100% accurate. The claim by Dawkins must be cited as an opinion. If and when Dawkins says "God does not exist", we cannot include that in an article as a definitive statement, but we may attribute it to Dawkins. Compare that to if another philosopher says "God does exist".


 * Yes, it is your own conclusion. You did not research the Oxford definition or reason out Dawkin's claim that an atheist must be certain that God does not exist. However, you did combine the two source's claims. The premises (the two definitions) are not yours, but the conclusion (agnostic atheist is a contradiction) is. Compare the fourth example in WP:SYNTHESIS about Jones and Harvard, which uses similar logic.


 * Other problems in your edit include informal writing (use of "we", contractions, redundancies common in speech) along with errors in capitalization and spacing. In fact, these errors were the first thing I noticed about your edit and the first reason why I considered reverting it (though I would have fixed the errors, not reverted, if your edit was otherwise fine). Wikinights (talk) 01:50, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

I continued to work on fixing these issues last night, which initially were not accepted by Wikinights, but then finally were, only to be reverted by the user Saucy

The term "Agnostic Atheism" is clearly contradictory, the only place it is found as an accepted term in today's society is here at Wikipedia. If one looks at the original draft's sources they are primarily Archaic. Now if Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not accept it, (with numerous recent sources cited), The Oxford Dictionary does not accept this term, nor does the Encyclopedia Britannica, nor any University that I have found teaches this term as acceptable, why is Wikipedia, allowing this term to be used, which then in turn people on social media cite Wikipedia as their source, yet no formal education would allow Wikipedia to be cited as a source. All Wikipedia is doing is to help spread information from the uneducated, to support the positions of other uneducated individuals on social media.

Apparently no one did full research on my cited sources. Calling them opinions. Now I ask how is the Stanford Encyclopedia an opinion? When I cite from it, and the Stanford Encyclopedia lists the following sources: (Note: If a Professor from Purdue University who has his PhD is not credible, but users here at Wikipedia are, when they want to use a term that is not accepted today, that makes no sense at all).

"Bibliography Baggini, Julian, 2003, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bishop, John C., 2008, “How a Modest Fideism May Constrain Theistic Commitments: Exploring an Alternative to Classical Theism”, Philosophia, 35(3–4): 387–402. doi:10.1007/s11406-007-9071-y

Buckareff, Andrei A. and Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), 2016, Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198722250.001.0001

Bullivant, Stephen, 2013, “Defining ‘Atheism’”, in Bullivant and Ruse 2013: 11–21.

Bullivant, Stephen and Michael Ruse (eds.), 2013, The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199644650.001.0001

Darwin, Charles, 1859, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, London: John Murray. [Darwin 1859 available online] Dennett, Daniel C., 2006, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, New York: Viking Penguin.

Diller, Jeanine, 2016, “Global and Local Atheisms”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 79(1): 7–18. doi:10.1007/s11153-015-9550-1

Diller, Jeanine and Asa Kasher, 2013, Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, Dordrecht: Springer.

Draper, Paul, 2002, “Seeking but Not Believing: Confessions of a Practicing Agnostic”, in Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser (eds.), Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 197–214. –––, 2016, “Where Skeptical Theism Fails, Skeptical Atheism Prevails”, in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, volume 7, Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 63–80.

Ellis, Fiona, 2014, God, Value, and Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714125.001.0001

Flew, Antony, 1972, “The Presumption of Atheism”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2(1): 29–46. doi:10.1080/00455091.1972.10716861

Foley, Richard, 1992, “The Epistemology of Belief and the Epistemology of Degrees of Belief”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 29(2): 111–121.

French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), 2013, “Special Issue: The New Atheism and Its Critics”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 37(1).

Garvey, Brian, 2010, “Absence of Evidence, Evidence of Absence, and the Atheist’s Teapot”, Ars Disputandi, 10: 9–22.

Gutting, Gary, 2013, “Religious Agnosticism”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 37(1): 51–67. doi:10.1111/misp.12002 Hume, David, [1757] 1956, The Natural History of Religion, H.E. Root (ed.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, originally published in 1757. [Hume 1757 available online (1889 edition)] –––, [1779] 2007, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Dorothy Coleman (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [References are to the part and paragraph number.]

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1884, “Agnosticism: A Symposium”, The Agnostic Annual, Charles Watts (ed.), pp. 5–6. [Huxley 1884 available online] –––, 1889, “Agnosticism and Christianity”, reprinted in his Collected Essays, Volume 5: Science and the Christian Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894, pp. 309–365. [Huxley [1889] 1894 available online]

Kahane, Guy, 2011, “Should We Want God to Exist?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82(3): 674–696. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00426.x

Kenny, Anthony, 1983, Faith and Reason, (Bampton lectures in America, no. 22), New York: Columbia University Press.

Le Poidevin, Robin, 2010, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780199575268.001.0001

Leftow, Brian, 2016, “Naturalistic Pantheism”, in Buckareff and Nagasawa 2016: 64–87.

McLaughlin, Robert, 1984, “Necessary agnosticism?” Analysis 44(4): 198–202. doi:10.1093/analys/44.4.198

Morris, Thomas V., 1985, “Agnosticism”, Analysis 45(4): 219–224. doi:10.1093/analys/45.4.219

Morriston, Wes, forthcoming, “Protest and Enlightenment in the Book of Job”, in Paul Draper and J.L. Schellenberg (eds.), Renewing Philosophy of

Religion: Exploratory Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, chap. 13.

Mulgan, Tim, 2015, Purpose in the Universe: The Moral and Metaphysical Case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646142.001.0001

Murphy, Mark C., 2017, God’s Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument from Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nagasawa, Yujin, 2008, “A New Defence of Anselmian Theism”, Philosophical Quarterly, 58(233): 577–596. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2008.578.x

Nagel, Thomas, 1997, The Last Word, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0195149831.001.0001

Oppy, Graham, 1994, “Weak Agnosticism Defended”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 36(3): 147–67. doi:10.1007/BF01316921

Pike, Nelson, 1970, God and Timelessness, New York: Schocken Books.

Plantinga, Alvin, 2000, Warranted Christian Belief, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0195131932.001.0001

Rowe, William L., 1979, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 16(4): 335–341.

Russell, Bertrand, 1997, “Is There a God? [1952]”, in John G. Slater and Peter Köllner (eds.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11: Last

Philosophical Testament, 1943–68, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 542–548. Schellenberg, J.L., 2007, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Strawson, Galen, 1990, “Review of Created from Animals, by James Rachels”, The Independent, London, June 24.

Stump, Eleonore, 2010, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering, Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277421.001.0001

Swinburne, Richard, 2001, Epistemic Justification, Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0199243794.001.0001 –––, 2004, The Existence of God, second edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199271672.001.0001

van Inwagen, Peter, 2012, “Russell’s China Teapot”, in Dariusz Lukasiewicz and Roger Pouivet (eds.), The Right to Believe: Perspectives in Religious Epistemology, Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag, pp. 11–26.

Wielenberg, Erik J., 2009, “Dawkins’ Gambit, Hume’s Aroma, and God’s Simplicity”, Philosophia Christi, 11(1): 111–125.

Zenk, Thomas, 2013, “New Atheism”, in Bullivant and Ruse 2013: 245–260.


 * You gave us a list of works. I can't read all of them due to time and money constraints, but I did look at some I could find online. Warranted Christian Belief was the only one I could find for free. I ran a CTRL+F search through it, no mentions of "agnostic atheism" specifically. Can you please add quotes from the sources that deny the possibility of agnostic atheism? Also, your claim is that one cannot not believe in God and believe that he is unsure of the belief in God at the same time. The sources that approve agnostic atheism reconcile the difference by differentiating knowledge and belief. I do not see why we should not include reconciliations of terms understood to be contradictory; compare Christian atheism and Anarcho-communism. Wikinights (talk) 18:29, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikinights, I am basically finished here. I kept trying to improve my edits, including inline citations, but the article is reverted back to the original, and mine is a permalink, and I can't go in and make any edits on the original piece. Now the original Author, who is apparently Adrian J Hunter, which if you check his sources are not only archaic, at least one comes from at least one individual who is only known as an Orator.

Now Christian Atheism is a legitimate term. One can call themselves a Christian, because they believe in Jesus Christ and his teachings, but they don't believe there is a God. That is logical, there is no issue with that. "Anarcho-Communism" I am not going to address, because I am not familiar with the term, and I am not going to waste any more time in Wikipedia, as I don't use it as a source anyway, and it is not allowed as a source in any scholarly circle, not even in middle school as a citation.

Now the reason why the term "Agnostic Atheism" is not an accepted term is actually quite easy to explain. First off it defies the definition of Agnostic in the Oxford Dictionary: "A person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God."

Now here is how smart your users are. One of them stated that I couldn't use the definition in the Oxford Dictionary because I did not research it. The Oxford Dictionary is an original source, obviously some of your amateurs here do not realize that.

Secondly, Since an Agnostic does not express a belief or disbelief in God, because it is unknowable from the Agnostic's viewpoint whether God exists or does not, so the Agnostic says, "God may exist or he may not.' Now an Atheist clearly believes that God does not exist. So the Atheist can not say, I believe he may exist, (Agnostic's position), but God does not, (Atheist's position).

Now this is not my conclusion, this is supported by the scholarly community, universities across the nation, PhD's that have done post doctorate work, and so forth. Now compare the dates of the Bibliography of Professor Draper's piece against the dates and credentials of the Author's from the original piece which is now back up.

Now if you believe that you have to check every single one of Professor Paul Draper's sources when he was the following credentials, it makes me wonder why Wikipedia even exists, as in a lot of cases people use Wikipedia as a source, which many times has faulty, or missing information, and thus further drives the misinformation that is spread on social media.

Here are Professor Paul Draper's credentials.

"CURRICULUM VITAE Paul Draper 2019

EDUCATION Degrees in Philosophy, University of California, Irvine: Ph.D. 1985, M.A. 1982, and B.A. 1979.

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS Purdue University 2006- Professor of Philosophy. 2012-18 Director of Graduate Admissions, Department of Philosophy

Florida International University 2003-06 Director, M.A. in Liberal Studies Program. 2001-06

Professor of Philosophy. 2001-05 Chair, Department of Philosophy. 1997-99 Interim Associate Director, B.A. in Liberal Studies Program 1992-2001

Associate Professor of Philosophy. 1987-92 Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

Other Universities 2011-12 Skeptical Theism Fellow, University of Notre Dame. 2010-11 Alvin Plantinga Fellow, University of Notre Dame. 1986-87 Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. 1985-86 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Notre Dame.

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION Philosophy of religion and philosophy of science.

BOARD MEMBERSHIPS Editorial Board, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Editorial Board, Religious Studies. Board of Editorial Consultants, Faith and Philosophy. Editorial Advisory Board, Claremont Journal of Religion. Editorial Board, Science, Religion, and Culture.

AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AND HONORS

• Pantheism and Panentheism Project Summer Stipend, 2018. • Skeptical Theism Fellowship, Center for Philosophy of Religion, UND, 2011-2012. • Alvin Plantinga Fellowship, Center for Philosophy of Religion, UND, 2010-2011. • Templeton/American Scientific Affiliation Lecture Series Grant, 2002-2003. • Matriculation Merit Salary Award, Florida International University, 2001. • Excellence in Advising Award, Florida International University, 2000. • Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) Science and Religion Course Award with Carl Craver) for “Science and the Soul,” 2000. • Teaching Incentive Program Salary Award, Florida International University, 1994. • Summer Research Award, Florida International University, 1994. • Summer Research Award, Florida International University, 1991. • Outstanding Achievement and Performance Award, FIU, 1990. • Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Center for Philosophy of Religion, UND, 1985-86. • U. C. Regents Dissertation Fellowship, 1985. • U. C. Regents Fellowship, 1979-80. • Graduation with Honors (Summa cum Laude), 1979.

Phi Beta Kappa (elected in third year), 1978."

In addition Professor Paul Draper, has published and/or edited approximately fifty pieces, is continually doing research, but his work is not good enough for Wikipedia? Okay then, it just further confirms where Wikipedia stands in regards to scholarly research.

Since I am a writer and scholarly researcher, and have published pieces as recently as this month. I am not going to waste my time anymore in Wikipedia. I actually did my first edits, so long ago, that all the symbols had to be put in manually. In fact one of my first two edits are still in existence, but I didn't see them in my edit history.

One was one Jean Calas. The following was all specifically my edit: "On 13–14 October 1761, another of the Calas sons, Marc-Antoine, was found dead on the ground floor of the family's home. Rumors had it that Jean Calas had killed his son because he intended to convert to Catholicism. When interrogated, the family initially claimed that Marc-Antoine had been killed by a murderer. Then they declared that they had found Marc-Antoine dead, hanged; because suicide was considered a heinous crime against oneself, and the dead bodies of suicides were defiled, they had arranged for their son's suicide to look like a murder."

My other edit which I had done around the same time had to do with with the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh Tribe. But my edits there are now gone, which I had scholarly edits from Muslim Theologians, but now whoever changed the article believes that Muslim Scholars with their Phd,s are not as credible as American Scholars on this subject, which is not only false, but a logical fallacy, epistemologically speaking.