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.
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 11:07 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-24 09:02 am (UTC)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.