Agnosticism, but not as we know it
May. 21st, 2013 01:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sesquipedalityIn 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-21 01:12 pm (UTC)Actually I think dealing with the 'oblivion' question is one of the easier aspects, because actually oblivion being 'one of the alternative options' seems very unlikely to me.
We're speculating, basically, on states of existence outside time, aren't we? That's what eternal states such as Heaven and Hell are about. So that presumes, ex hypothesi, that there is some part of us which exists outside time. Otherwise when the matter of our body degrades to the point it can no longer support the form, our existence simply ends and there is neither Heaven or Hell. And that's where you get oblivion.
So in order for the question of Hell to have any meaning we must assume a component to out existence that transcends time. Very well. However, now the question is: how can something which transcends time, end? What would that even mean?
Now, I can't prove that it is logically impossible for a thing which exists outside of time to end. But it seems more likely to me that a thing outside time cannot end, but will exist outside time for -- well, for ever, where 'ever' is here understood not as 'a very very very very very long time' but 'outside all time'.
Whihc swings back around the application of Occam's Razor. I'm not generally in favour ot applying Occam's Razor to metaphysics, because it's very hard in that domain to quantify 'simpler': you can often end up with both sides claiming theirs is the one supported by the Razor (ouch) depending on their opposed, and equally plausible, definitions of 'simple'.
However, in this case, I suppose it cuts the way I want because it seems to me to be logically more complicated to try to explain how we can have a component to our existence which transcends time (and therefore exists in eternity) but can somehow either end in oblivion or not, that it is to speculate that either we do not have such a component (and our existence ends when our body dies) or that the component must necessarily continue to exist in eternity.
Basically, it seems to me that the most plausible options are either: (a) none of us survive after death or (b) all of us exist (in some way) for all eternity. The third option (c) some of us exist for eternity in Heaven and some of us don't, seems much more complicated and much less plausible.
The metaphysics requiring a universe to be set up that way is the fairly simple, and I would say plausible, premise that if it is possible for something to end, it will (because it must exist in time); and therefore if it is to be possible for something not to end, then it must be necessary that it cannot end.
In other words, God could not have created being which could survive their temporal bodies, and also left himself the option to destroy some of them. It's either-or: either we are trapped in time, or we are trapped in eternity. I can't see a middle way.
S.