For one to confidently assert that there is a God requires that that person be omniscient.

“But it doesn’t! I just need faith!”

OK, then call atheists “people of faith”. It’s a faith that doesn’t require any evidence or belief in a supernatural being though. And an atheist wouldn’t call refer to themself with that label – you might use it to refer to them. Similarly, someone who has a belief in the supernatural (spirits, witches, “Jesus” as the Son of God, fairies, etc.) might consider it a completely normal belief, but an atheist may refer to that person as delusional.

And what’s this? “That would by definition make them God.”

By whose definitions? If someone knew everything about the entire universe (and even beyond) it wouldn’t make them “God”. It would make them someone who knew everything about the universe (and beyond). You need a belief in a God to come up with that definition (a “God” being “omniscient”) in the first place.

Thanks for playing.

If someone wants to call themselves agnostic–not being able to prove the existence of God–then that’s OK.

I know about the super/subset angle, but I’ve talked to a number of developers who are very adamant about being agnostic, but not atheist. It felt like there was enough of a distinction to make there so I made it. I wish I’d split up the Muslim category more, and had a few more choices, but there are people putting things in ‘other’ so it’s not the end of the world.

Thanks for the feedback.

One more thing: satanist would be an important and interesting option to see. Some people would certainly turn it into a joke, but it’s worth a try i guess.

I wrote elsewhere that the original idea was brought about because I was wondering if ’strongly typed’ vs ‘weakly typed’ languages had any correlation to religions – absolutism vs relativism, perhaps. The end result survey doesn’t quite do the best job of capturing that particular data set, but it’s ended up being open ended enough such that I think the results may still be interesting anyway. Or not – no real way to tell until later. I may start doing some ‘dynamic’ view of the data before the survey’s closed, but I have no firm plans for that yet.

Thanks!