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

[simont]

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.

You are no doubt aware that there are several definitions of 'atheist', confusingly similar-yet-distinct. One commonly used definition considers an atheist to be somebody who has a firm conviction that there is no god, and anyone less certain than that falls under 'agnostic'; it is presumably this one which you're referring to above.

Another much wider definition, seen in academic literature, considers 'atheism' to merely mean 'absence of theism', and classifies anyone without a positive belief in a god as an atheist – so that 'agnostic' is a subclass of 'atheist' under this definition.

Personally I feel that both these definitions are lacking something (though I haven't always taken this view). My own position, and as I understand it that of quite a few other people, is not quite certainty: I agree that, in your words, 'the realm of the spiritual is essentially unknowable', but my day-to-day decisions have to be based on some implicit assumption about it (simply to justify, for example, continuing to go to work every day and not doing something totally different like becoming a monk), and the natural default assumption which does in fact seem very likely to me is that – unless and until proved otherwise – all religions were made up by humans. I don't deny that some kind of god might in principle turn out to exist; I just don't give it any extra Bayesian weight over any of the other things I could make up on the spot that might turn out to be true merely because a lot of humans shout about this particular one.

All of which causes me to behave indistinguishably from an atheist of the 'firm conviction' type except that I say a different set of things in theological debate; in all other circumstances the distinction between 'almost sure' and 'sure with a firm conviction constituting faith in itself' is of no moment. And my feeling is that the most useful way to define 'atheist' is somewhere in between the two extremes I describe above, so that it embraces not only the firm-conviction brigade but also the people like me who behave basically like them, but doesn't extend so far as to include people who think, for instance, that God and no God are roughly equally probable options.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

In the linked wikipedia article on Russell's teapot, there's some suggestion that Russell himself may also have thought similarly. I think my difficulty is that I really don't want to be lumped in with Dawkins and his ilk - Dawkins in particular strikes me as arrogant, patronising, and guilty of exactly the same sort of fuzzy thinking he looks down upon the religious for.

Definitions are, of course, tricky, and I don't think I had previously come across the wider sense of atheist you mention here (my cosmic apathy means I've not really engaged in this debate to any great degree). There are, of course, terms like "skeptic", which in some sense I feel kinship to, but again, the very word carries (to me at least) a connotation of negativity as the the default state that I feel uncomfortable with. I don't assume that ghosts don't exist because no-one has produced convincing evidence, I start from the position that ghosts exist in the sense that people report experiencing them, and the balance of evidence suggests this is an artifact of human psychology rather than an independent phenomenon. But I have no horse in this race. I'm fine either way.

[(Anonymous)]

all religions were made up by humans

Of course, so were all scientific theories. The question isn't whether they were made up by humans, but which best explains the observations of the world.

(The difference, in my experience, between the religious and those who are not (to avoid the 'a' word) tends to be between those who see things like morality and justice and meaning and consciousness as observable (if imperfectly) features of the world needing explained; and those who see such things as the equivalent of optical illusions, which are apparently there but not, in fact, real (and therefore an explanation for the universe does not need to explain them).

Some philosophers have devoted entire careers to explaining why consciousness, for example, is merely an illusion.

As a result the two talk past each other, with the non-religious saying, 'But my philosophy explains everything, and is simpler, where is your evidence for the existence of anything else?' and the religious replaying, 'But your philosophy doesn't explain X, Y and Z,' and the non-religious shaking their heads and saying, 'But yes it does, it explains how you think you see X, Y and Z but they are not really there,' and the religious saying, 'But you haven't proved they aren't really there, you've just come up with a mechanism by which they could appear to be there if they weren't, but they are,' and so on ad nauseum.

It is hardly surprising, I suppose, that they fail to agree on an explanation for the world, when they appear to be living in two completely different ones.

S.

[(Anonymous)]

That's an interesting point. I don't think we have a good way, in a post-enlightenment world, of dealing with alternatives which people believe are sensible (in the "can be sensed" sense), present them selves as alternative hypothetical worlds, but are essentially incommensurable. I don't mean that to be a criticism of the approach nor an appeal for special pleading.

I think often the best thing to do in these situations is to keep quiet.

I get the impression that throughout much of America and maybe even Europe, we'd be goaded out of silence by belligerent religious types, whereas personally it's more often a belligerent atheist who insists on launching charges.

As faith is so occult, I think that if two pilgrims went to a shrine and felt blessed, -- describing it in common terms, -- along with an atheist who felt nothing, -- describing it quite differently, -- then there's no more reason to think that the pilgrims experience was more alike than to that of the atheist than there would be if it were two English people and a French person describing something blue/bleu.

(Another kind of religion is the belief that there are /more/ illusions than are commonly considered proper to hold).