Agnosticism, but not as we know it

[sesquipedality]

In recent years, I have discovered that my vestigial sense of (spiritual) faith has atrophied to the point where I can no longer be said to believe in any deity. I have always felt uncomfortable with the terms agnostic and atheist, and have therefore tended, when necessary, to self-describe as humanist. Today I had a conversation in which I kind of straightened out some thoughts I have about religion, and I thought they might be worth sharing.

Many atheists get upset when you say that their position constitutes a religious belief. But I think it has to, because atheism is an act of faith. Let me try to explain. Faith is a firm conviction held without evidential support. The realm of the spiritual is essentially unknowable. Everyone's relationship with the universe or the spiritual is based upon personal assertions about something which is simply outside of the purview of human knowledge. There is no way to prove that the universe is or is not an act of divine will. A belief either way is therefore an act of faith.

The atheist counter to this is to state that the atheist, unlike the religious, is asserting the null hypothesis. If there is no evidence of the divine, then belief in the divine is irrational. The atheist, unlike the spiritual person, embraces rationality. Atheism is not asserting a state of affairs, but demanding proof before accepting the assertions of others. This argument is sometimes explained using Russell's Teapot.

The problem I have with this is that as someone with a background in mathematics and formal logic, I don't actually think that's what's going on at all. I think the null hypothesis is that humanity is incapable of drawing any conclusions at all about the higher order (or lack thereof) of the universe other than through the medium of faith. The teapot analogy fails us because a teapot has properties that are testable physically or scientifically. The existence of the divine is an unprovable statement within the system of reality in a manner analogous to Godel's first incompleteness theorem. It is unknowable, and therefore a statement that God does not exist is just as much a matter of faith as a statement that he does.

So I think by default this makes me an agnostic. Perhaps that's also a position of faith, but I'm not sure it's terribly important whether or not it is. The key thing is that I simply don't have any faith. While this position is more intellectually appealing to me than any other, I have little to nothing invested in it, and certainly no feeling of cosmic certainty that it's the right one.

But the thing that bothers me about agnosticism is that the word carries certain connotations, in particular the idea that an agnostic is still searching for a greater truth - that it's some kind of stop gap. Now I've just said I'm not particularly invested in my own brand of agnosticism. but willingness to change should not in any way be confused with desire to do so. The brutal truth is that I really don't give a flying fuck whether a higher consciousness exists or not, because it makes absolutely no difference to the way I live my life. I have been a catholic, an evangelical Christian and a neo-Pagan at various times, but throughout these phases, my moral code has remained fairly consistently focused on non-maleficence and doing unto others as you would be done by. All the rest is just window dressing as far as I'm concerned.

If God turned up on my doorstep tomorrow and told me I was going to hell unless I followed his rules, I like to think I would honestly say "fine, but that's on you, not on me". I am not a good person, even by my own standards, but since that's true of everyone else to ever live, I can't see how any reasonable deity could blame me for that. And I refuse to enable an unreasonable deity, even at the peril of my immortal soul.

Cavalier words, no doubt, and I suppose that they indicate that I strongly suspect that either no deity exists, or that if they do then they simply have no interest in me whatsoever. That then must be my article of faith, but my "faith" only influences my attitude to my understanding of the universe. I understand the divine to be unknowable, but I believe it to be irrelevant.

Comments

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

I think that there's a lot of dissatisfaction with the "atheist" label generally -- I've been in a couple of focus groups and I wasn't the only person expression frustration at, for example, being defined negatively or by absence.

I have a quantity of colleagues for whom their faith is pretty all penetrating, and it the major tool they use for interacting with the world, defining their own morality, investigating society, etc. If you look at faith from that perspective, i.e. what do I use to set the rules, what do I measure goodness against, what defines fairness, rightness, fitness -- then I have a fairly obvious descriptor. I am a "scientific rationalist" -- I use science and reason to inform my interactions with society and the world. However, language and usage mean that there's a lot of judgement embedded in that term, and it's not at all polite to other people of other religions! I would opt for the far more -- well, utilitarian "utilitarian".

The focus groups, incidentally, are likely to lead to a "no religion" tick-box or similar.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

This actually brings up a point which I'd been hovering around which never made it into the original post. For me the most frustrating aspect of faith is that it is seemingly often used as a substitute for logic. Personally, it's not good enough for someone to say to me "well, I don't understand it, but my deity says so, and I trust my deity". I'm sorry, but that deity needs a reason. If a behaviour can't be justified using rational argument, then it isn't strong enough to be imposed as a universal moral code. If the divine can't make logical sense, then again, I'm in a position where I have no interest in enabling an unreasonable deity. To say "well, it is beyond our limited understanding" is a cop out, because you could say that about anything, and there's then no reason for preferring that particular moral code over any other in the absence of evidence.

[(Anonymous)]

If a behaviour can't be justified using rational argument, then it isn't strong enough to be imposed as a universal moral code

But no behaviour can be justified using rational argument, or alternatively every behaviour can be justified using rational argument: it depends on what you take as your premises.

That's why the Justification Problem exists in ethics, and why pure reason can't work as an ethical system (unless you take as your premise 'to act ethically is to act rationally in all situations', but there's no particular reason to take that as a premise.)

S.

[(Anonymous)]

Subscribe.

That's why people searched for categorical imperative, but the one that was feels was distinctly suspect to me. As with Marx, the diagnosis is much more convincing than the medicine.

-- dps

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I agree up to a point. I don't believe in a categorical imperative. Ethics is not algebra, after all. The problem is that if we say all rationalisations fall back upon axioms, we are being trite. The fact that at some point you hit the axiomatic buffers doesn't mean that there is no point in justifying anything. I think that route logically leads to the conclusion that good and evil are meaningless concepts, and while it's an intellectually consistent viewpoint, it's not one I find particularly attractive. I am probably oversimplyfying your (plural) position, and if so I apologise for not having grasped it properly, but it feels like the argument you are making is analogous to saying "because we can't know everything, there's no point in knowing anything". Fundamentally, if religion can't explain to me why I'm not able to work on the Sabbath, for example, then it's unreasonable to expect me not to. I am not a small child, and I require reasons not to eat all the sweets. ("The last ten times you did it you were ill" would be sufficient, but I need some assurance more than a vague feeling that God isn't just saying that because he wants all the sweets for himself.)

[(Anonymous)]

It doesn't lead so much to the conclusion that good and evil are meaningless concepts, I think, as to the conclusion that as good and evil depend on your premises then the vital question of ethics is to find the correct premises.

The problem is that you can't, by definition, prove that the premises are correct by using reason (if you could they wouldn't be premises, they'd be conclusions).

So anyway there are always reasons. Religions are all about reasons. Why can't you work on the Sabbath? Because you're a member of the people that God has marked out as special, and one of the ways we show that specialness, our distinctness from all the other peoples around, is by not working on the Sabbath. That's a reason, and it's a good reason if you accept the premises that being marked out by God as special, and doing things differently to the other peoples around in order to demonstrate that specialness, are good things. It's not a good reason if you don't accept those premises. And reason can't help you with whether to accept those premises or not. You have to decide whether they are true.

Similarly, 'The last ten times you did it you were ill' is a only a good (moral) reason if you accept the premise that being ill is bad. And there's no rational reason to accept that premise. Being ill is certainly unpleasant, but that's not a rational reason to avoid being ill, it's just a matter of preference.

When you get right down to it, all reason can tell you is how to best achieve a goal. That's your hidden assumption in the demand that there be 'a reason': you are asking, I think, for 'how does this help me achieve a goal?' You think that asking you to avoid working on the Sabbath is unreasonable because you can't see how it helps towards any goal that you consider worthwhile.

But that fundamentally depends on what goals you consider worthwhile. And you can't have a logical reason for picking one goal over another because, well, premises. So you have to decide what the true goal is (if indeed there is one). And that will depend on how you explain the existence of the world.

Is this making any sense? Basically, you seem to be asking for ethical positions to be justified on the basis of how useful they are for achieving some goal, when actually that's putting the cart before the horse: ethics is first about deciding what goal you ought to be pursuing, and then seeing what falls out of that. so you can't ask whether a given bit of ethical advice, like 'Don't work on the Sabbath', is 'reasonable' without first establishing the framework of ethical goals in which you're operating.

S.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I think you may have put your finger on the problem there. At the core of my moral position, there is a strong utlitarian streak. You're going to have a hard time convincing me something is more if it (broadly speaking) decreases happiness and increases pain. And I'm really not prepared to give up utilitarianism simply because I can't justify that axiom (lack of justification being inherent in axioms). Fundamentally any God who does not embrace utilitarianism in some form is, in my view, an evil God who can go take a flying leap. That may make ethical debate difficult for people who don't share that core belief, but I'm not sure I'm terribly interested in such debate, since it seems unlikely we would find much in the way of common ground. This is what I mean when I say that if someone can't tell me why something is good or bad, I'm not terribly interested in their opinion.

I generally subscribe to a positive existentialist view of morality, by which I mean I act as though there is no externally imposed higher morality, but this is the most awesome possible state of affairs. It means that we are able to work out for ourselves what good and bad means flexibly in response to the changing universe around us. I think that this is why I find spiritual axioms to be so problematic - I don't find the conservatism it promotes to be particularly utilitarian.

Now philosophically it might be possible to say that my world view is built on a foundation of sand, but that doesn't really change my need to have one. It's regrettable that there will be people I can't engage in constructive debate with due to lack of common ground, but I can't really see anything I can do to bridge that gap.

[(Anonymous)]

That is exactly the point at issue, yes, I think.

philosophically it might be possible to say that my world view is built on a foundation of sand

More like your world view is no more (or less) 'reasonable' than that of the Sabbath-keeper. You both have perfectly consistent reasons, starting from your own premises. So you can't, I think, criticise the Sabbath-keeper for being 'unreasonable'. What you really mean is not that they have no reasons for keeping the Sabbath, but rather that their reasons derive from premises which you think are factually false.

And yes, it's a pity that people arguing from different premises can't really have much of a debate; but it's still useful to identify when that's the case, as otherwise lots of time can be wasted with people talking past each other as if they could have such a debate, only to find out that they were arguing from different premises all along.

(How does one test the truth of ethical premises? The best way I've found is to push them to their logical conclusions and see if you can derive something clearly wrong. To believe in the truth of utilitarianism, for example, I think you need to find some way of stopping your position logically leading to you becoming Peter Singer.)

S.