Atheism and agnosticism

"Atheism" to me has the special meaning of "no God or gods belief."  The agnostic falls into that category, as he or she does not "believe" in a God.  I realize however that that is not what the ordinary person means.  The ordinary person hearing "atheist" thinks there is a positive assertion that there is not be a God.  Well of course I strongly doubt that anyone would be so foolish as to think that, so in the end we are all "agnostics."
I nevertheless am in a quandary since I find "atheist" to be the more honest self-description.  I am pretty much as sure that there is no God as I am of anything.
Reconciled orthogonal philosophical axes resolving the user's semantic quandary

The distinction you're gesturing at already has standard vocabulary in the philosophy of religion, and it resolves the quandary rather than leaving you stuck in it.

Theism/atheism and gnosticism/agnosticism are answers to two different questions, not two points on the same scale. Theism/atheism asks: do you believe a god exists? Gnosticism/agnosticism asks: do you know (or claim certainty)? These are orthogonal. That gives four cells, not two: gnostic theist (claims certain knowledge god exists), agnostic theist (believes without claiming certainty), agnostic atheist (disbelieves without claiming certainty), gnostic atheist (claims certain knowledge god doesn't exist). Antony Flew pushed this framing decades ago, largely to rescue "atheist" from exactly the confusion you're describing — the popular reading collapses it into the fourth cell only, which is a much rarer and harder-to-defend position than the first three.

You're in the third cell: agnostic atheist. There's no contradiction in holding both labels at once, because they're not competing for the same slot. "Atheist" reports your belief state — you don't hold theistic belief, full stop, which is the more parsimonious and honest report of where you actually stand. "Agnostic" reports your epistemic status on that belief — you're not claiming logical or empirical proof of a negative, just a very high credence built on the total absence of good evidence for the positive claim. Nothing stops you from being maximally confident short of certainty; credence and certainty aren't the same axis either. You said it yourself: "as sure as I am of anything" is a credence report, not a proof claim.

Where I'd push back slightly: "we are all agnostics" overstates it if taken as a claim about actual people rather than about what's epistemically defensible. Plenty of people do assert certain knowledge in both directions — the gnostic theist claiming revelation-backed certainty, or the occasional gnostic atheist claiming logical disproof. What's true is that among people who reason carefully about the limits of what can be known, near-universal convergence on agnosticism-about-certainty is right. But that's a claim about good epistemic practice, not a fact about what everyone actually believes they know.

So the honest self-description isn't a compromise between "atheist" and "agnostic" — it's both, simultaneously, answering different questions. "Agnostic atheist" is the compact term if you want one word for it, though in ordinary conversation "atheist" alone does the job, since most listeners aren't parsing the belief/knowledge distinction anyway and will round your position to something close enough.

What you say is all fine, in fact, excellent.  The thing is you use words in ways other than what people hear when they hear "atheist" and "agnostic," and generally don't even know the other two.
Reconciled technical precision with ordinary communication needs

Fair, and it's the right objection. A taxonomy only does communicative work if the listener already carries it in their head. Since almost nobody does, "agnostic atheist" doesn't transmit information — it transmits confusion, or gets nodded past as jargon. You'd be technically correct and functionally silent.

So the fix isn't a better label. It's to stop trying to solve the problem with a label at all. Labels are compression — they only work when sender and receiver share the codebook. Yours doesn't match the listener's. The workaround is to spend a sentence instead of a word: say what you actually think in plain declarative terms, and let "atheist" (if you use it) serve as a rough gesture that the sentence then corrects.

Something like: "I don't believe there's a god — about as confident as I am of anything, though obviously not something you can prove a negative on." That's not hedging for social comfort; it's just accurate, and it front-loads the strength of your conviction rather than burying it under a word the listener will parse as either a rigid denial or a shrug, depending on their priors about what atheists are.

The honest self-description you were looking for was never a single word. Given the mismatch between your actual epistemic position and the two folk categories on offer, one word was always going to be lossy in one direction or the other. You're not stuck between two bad options — you just have to accept that the accurate answer costs a sentence instead of a label, which is a fine trade if the goal is being understood rather than being classifiable.

Ok, I can live with that.

Good. Sounds like the right place to land — say what you mean, skip the label wars.

Now how do I persuade someone insisting that they are an agnostic that in fact they are a flavor of atheist?
Weighed semantic arguments against pragmatic limitations of relabeling

A few approaches, roughly in order of how likely they are to actually land rather than trigger defensiveness:

1. Isolate the belief question from the certainty question, using their own case.
Ask directly: "Do you currently believe a god exists — yes or no, right now, as a state of mind?" Most self-described agnostics will say no, or "no, but I can't be sure." Point out that "no, but I can't be sure" is two separate answers stacked together — a belief-state answer (no) and a confidence-level answer (not certain). The word "agnostic" is doing service for both, but it was only ever built to answer the second one. Once they see that, the belief-state answer they gave is definitionally atheism — "a-theism," absence of theistic belief, nothing more.

2. Use the exhaustiveness of the alternative.
There are only two live options for anyone reflecting on the question: you believe a god exists, or you don't. There's no third box for "I withhold belief entirely, symmetrically, with zero lean." Ask them which of the two states they're actually in day to day — do they live and act as if there's no god, or as if there might be one and they're genuinely 50/50? Almost nobody is genuinely 50/50. If they lean toward "probably not," that lean is the atheism; the agnosticism is just their honesty about the lean not being proof.

3. Point out that "agnostic" alone is usually a retreat from an implied insult, not a real epistemic position.
Often people choose "agnostic" over "atheist" because they've absorbed the popular (wrong) reading of "atheist" as arrogant certainty, or as tribal/anti-religious identity, and they want to avoid that connotation — not because their actual belief state differs from an atheist's. Worth asking them plainly: "If 'atheist' didn't carry any cultural baggage for you, would you still object to it as a description of what you actually believe?" Often the answer reveals it's a PR problem, not a philosophical one.

4. The Flew four-box move, which you already have from our last exchange — theism/atheism as belief-axis, gnostic/agnostic as knowledge-axis — laid out so they see "agnostic atheist" isn't a paradox but a coherent, common position.

The honest caveat, given where we just landed: this persuasion project runs into the exact problem we just discussed. You're trying to get them to adopt a compressed label that only makes sense once they've absorbed a taxonomy most people don't have. You may win the logical argument and still lose the rhetorical one, because they'll experience "you're actually an atheist" as being told what to call themselves rather than as a discovery about their own beliefs — and that framing invites resistance almost by design. It might land better as a question ("do you believe there's a god?") that lets them arrive at the label themselves, rather than an assertion that argues them into it.

Would you agree that there can be two kinds of agnostic, a person who just has no particular opinion and a person who asserts such knowledge is beyond us.
Recalibrated position on empirical evidence for divine claims

Right — that's a real problem for the strict/permanent agnostic's position, not just a quibble.

If the claim is "this question is in principle beyond evidence," that's a strong metaphysical thesis, and it's falsified the moment someone can specify what would count as evidence, even hypothetically. And people do specify it constantly: a well-attested violation of physical law, a prophecy fulfilled with precision no cold-reading or coincidence could explain, coordinated veridical near-death experiences reporting facts unavailable by ordinary means, some kind of unambiguous, public, non-culturally-mediated communication. None of these are incoherent as evidence-types. They're empirically conceivable, some have even been claimed to occur — Lourdes, Marian apparitions, various miracle-attestation traditions, NDE literature — and each time they get investigated, they dissolve under scrutiny: bad statistics, retrospective pattern-matching, cultural priming, motivated reporting, or simply unfalsifiable framing that quietly does the work of explaining away every failure.

So the actual state of affairs is: the question is evidentially tractable in principle, we have a track record of specific evidential claims being made, and that track record is uniformly poor. That's not "unknowable" — that's "investigated repeatedly and coming up empty," which is a completely different epistemic situation. The first would license permanent suspension of judgment as the only rational stance. The second licenses a confident negative lean, revisable in principle but not remotely 50/50 in practice, exactly the position you described having.

This actually sharpens the persuasion case against strict agnosticism specifically: you can ask the person, "what would you accept as evidence?" If they can answer — and most can, even if only hypothetically — they've just conceded the question isn't beyond evidence, only beyond good evidence so far. At that point "agnostic" in the strong sense collapses, and what's left is either the weak/shrugging agnostic (who's dodging a lean they probably have) or, if they're honest about the track record, someone who's already functionally where you are.

I don't know that it collapses necessarily.  The evidence, while strong to us, would be technology, not supernaturalism (or, at a minimum, indistinguishable).
Grappled with underdetermination problem between supernatural and advanced natural explanations

You've put your finger on a real problem, and it doesn't fully collapse the way I suggested — I was too quick.

The issue is Humean, going back to Hume's argument on miracles: for any purported miracle, it's always more probable that the report is mistaken, or that some natural-but-unknown cause is at work, than that a law of nature was genuinely suspended. Your point extends this from testimony to direct evidence itself. Even if you personally witnessed something staggering — a genuine violation of known physics — the rational update isn't "therefore God," it's "therefore my physics is incomplete" or "therefore some agent with capacities I don't understand is responsible." Clarke's line about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic is the compact version of the same point. Any evidence dramatic enough to suggest the supernatural is, by the same token, dramatic enough to suggest an unknown natural or engineered cause — and the second explanation carries a lower prior, since it doesn't require a whole new metaphysical category, just an extension of categories we already know exist (unknown physics, unknown agents).

So the specific move I made — "if you can name hypothetical evidence, the question is tractable" — doesn't get you all the way to a positive claim about God, because the evidence, even granted, underdetermines between "supernatural" and "natural but exotic." That's a genuine gap in my argument.

Where I'd push back is on what this actually does to the agnostic's position. It doesn't restore the strict agnostic's claim that the question is unknowable in principle — it does something more corrosive: it suggests "supernatural" may not be a category that any possible evidence could ever confirm, because any evidence would always be better explained naturalistically. That's not agnosticism, that's closer to a demonstration that the God hypothesis is unfalsifiable in the specific sense of being permanently pre-empted by better explanations — a much stronger position against theism than the evidential-parsimony argument I made before. It also matches the historical pattern: every category of purported evidence for God (healing, prophecy, cosmic fine-tuning, consciousness) has, over time, either dissolved under investigation or gotten annexed by a naturalistic explanation once one was available. The "gaps" God has been retreating for three centuries running.

There's also a sharper point buried in your objection: if the evidence would remain ambiguous between "god" and "very advanced technology," then in a sense it was never evidence for God in the theologically load-bearing sense — omniscient, morally perfect, necessary, worthy of worship — at all. It would be evidence for a powerful agent, which is a much thinner and less interesting claim, and not what anyone arguing for theism actually wants to have proven. So your objection, if anything, makes the God hypothesis harder to rescue with evidence, not easier — which lands you back roughly where you started, just via a better argument than the one I gave you.
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