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

[(Anonymous)]

I like this post: I think it's well thought through.

I'd probably call myself an agnostic, too, but for different reasons. I don't think faith is important, as neither do you I think, but I think spiritual practice is important, and I get a little frustrated with atheists who are definitely protestant christian atheists concentrating around the ideas of a (lack of) faith and (lack of) personal salvation, or whatever as evidence for their denial of belief. Also, their choice of zero-point never seems to be well justified (as it isn't in the active-act/passive-forebearance debates around assisted death, and the philosophical "train signalman" though experiments).

The existence or otherwise of gods seems largely incidental in religious practice for me (which gives me a hard time engaging with mainstream [or most other kinds of] christianity or other Abrahamic religions unless very mysticalised), neither does any kind of coherence, tradition, nor internal consistency of metaphysics. I do get frustrated with a lot of new-age nonsense, I think because I can't find a way that it matches what I feel.

Over the years I've taken an interest in Feri and even some of the late Victorian Golden Dawn influenced stuff [the latter is full of silliness and the whiff of patchouli, but most religion is]. Both of these I have found immensely powerful, but their communities almost universally unhinged (I believe "swivel-eyed loons" is the term de jour). I've taken an increasing interest in Buddhism over the years, and that kind of coexists with essentially Feri practice and some Golden Dawn and O.T.O. exercises. But I'm as likely to put atheist down in a form or discussion because it's often the option that most closely matches all that in treatment and consequence. Interestingly, Buddhism and Feri make very cantankerous bedfellows, but you know, we're people, full of flaws and tectonics, and I seem to sit on that plate boundary. I've never really been able to take Wicca all that seriously for myself (though I realise that folk do get a lot out of it) -- it's alarmingly heterosexual and 1950s-caravan-holiday for me.

I think the divine is knowable but in all essential aspects incommunicable. I don't know whether it assembles into some consensus reality or not. How could I?

[(Anonymous)]

-- dps

(forgot to sign, sorry).

[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.

[(Anonymous)]

A 'religious belief', as far as I am concerned, is defined as 'an ontological hypothesis about the essential nature of the universe'. So of course 'atheist' is one.

Interesting, though, that you write: '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". '

That seems to rest on an implicit premise hidden in that 'told me'. Is this the 'told me' of a parent who tells a child, 'if you don't stop playing with your food, I'll take it away and you'll go to bed hungry?' or is it more like the 'told me' of a parent who tells a child, 'I'm not going to stop you eating all the sweets, but if you do, you'll be very sick and regret it later?'

In the second case, is the child's resultant stomach upset really 'on' the parent? The parent did, after all, do their best to warn the child.

(I understand this is hypothetical, but I thought it an interesting implied premise to make explicit.)

S.

[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.