What is difficult to understand, or maybe simply to admit, is that it is us who judge whether something exists or not.
The word “exist” is nothing but a label that we attach to certain objects of experience, namely to ideas, using a certain method (defined by a certain set of rules) and with a certain purpose in mind.
The concept of existence makes no sense outside of judgment.
Many will say this is not true because “whether something exists or not is independent from human judgment”.
That statement is very popular and I have no doubt that it makes an important point. However, when taken literally it is wrong and those who take it literally make themselves stupid by doing so.
The statement does not communicate its point unambiguously.
People are addicted to this naive concept of objectivity which is entirely independent from every subjective factor including personal judgment. Such an objectivity is entirely imaginary, and therefore, not really an objectivity.
It’s also a symptom of paranoia.
Whatever is not judged as existent is quite simply not existent i.e. it is not judged as existent. Tautology is miraculous.
That’s quite simply what “not existent” means: it means you didn’t judge it as “existent”.
However, that does not mean that the judgement of something as being existent will persist infinitely through time. For example, depending on the method of judgment, it might change with the advent of new experience.
What ultimately matters is the method of judgment one is using. In other words, epistemology. Or how we know what we know.
When your method of judgment is basically “what I want to exist is judged as existent and what I don’t want to exist is judged as non-existent” then we say you are subjective.
When your method of judgment is highly dependent on evidence, i.e. prior observations, then we say you are objective.
Objectivity isn’t judgment-independence. Rather, it is evidence-dependence and preference-independence.
Most people misunderstand subjectivity to be mind- or brain-dependence so they think tastes are subjective. These folks are very annoying.
Subjectivity simply means that your judgment is dependent on your preference for its conclusion. It does not mean dependent on any kind of mental factor and/or preference.
When I say “God does not exist”, presupposing I have a clearly defined idea of God, I am simply saying that, using my method of judgment, whatever that method is, I judge the idea of God as being non-existent. I am not saying that my judgment will remain infinitely constant through time. Depending on the rules of my method of judgment, it might be possible to change my mind at some point in the future, say if new evidence appears. But my present judgment is that God is non-existent.
Agnosticism and “absence of belief” arguments represent an unwillingness to make a judgment call. Nothing more than that.
Most of these agnostics behave in a way that is very similar to the way that follows when you judge the idea of God as non-existent. They just don’t want to admit it. They are afraid of conflict.