demiurgent | A brief conversation

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A brief conversation

A brief conversation with a coworker, fortunately where no students could hear:

Him: Well, agnostics are just atheists without the courage of their convictions.

Me: Wow. That was both a lie and offensive. That's a neat trick.

He looked confused. I went on to tell him what I'm going to tell you, right now.

Atheism is not the lack of religion, despite the roots of the word. Atheism is a religion. It is the specific belief, without evidence, that the universe lacked intelligent or motive force behind its creation.

Many atheists refute this, mind. They say that they stand for science, and skepticism, and that any divine presence would need to be proven, and without that proof one must assume there is no divine presence. That, they often say, is simple science and stark reason.

And that's utter bullshit.

Science is agnostic.

Science says "I do not know, until I see. When I see, I can gather evidence and hypothesize. After I hypothesize I gather more evidence. I experiment. I test my hypothesis. I revise my hypothesis. If I and many other scientists perform these experiments and verify and reproduce my results, we might -- might -- upgrade my hypothesis to a theory, but that takes a lot of doing."

Atheism doesn't do any of that. Atheism takes it on faith that there is no god in any form, comprehensible or not. And the evidence for that is just as prevalent as the evidence for Yaweh, Allah, Aphrodite or Manannán mac Lir: absolutely none.

Guys? We don't know. We don't know who or what if anything started the cosmic ball rolling. We don't know if there's something beyond the edge of human perception. We just don't fucking know, okay?

Now, you can be convinced the Christians have it wrong. Or that the Greeks were full of shit. Or that the Wiccans are fooling themselves. You can be personally convinced that the universe is a cold place where everything is essentially chaotic and all things happened because of chance. That's fine.

But don't pretend you have an inside understanding that the religious nuts don't. You have a belief. Nothing more, nothing less. And that's fine. If it makes you happy, power to you.

And if you believe in a god, gods, goddesses, or whatever? Fine by me. Whatever helps you get to sleep, man.

Me? I'm agnostic. I don't have the hubris to think I've got the final answer. I'm still watching and waiting, and I'm keeping an open mind -- to all sides of the question.

And for the record? Don't you fucking dare say I don't have the courage of my convictions. It takes a hell of a lot more courage to admit what you don't know than assert what you believe to be true.

Sadly, it means I don't get to be nearly as smug as certain theists or atheists. But don't worry about me. I usually find something else to be smug about.

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"We are all born atheists. We seek out faith when...."

Reading through this thread, I think this nails the one underlying difference between atheist, theists, and agnostics that everyone is arguing around without defining.

People who consider themselves atheist consider "There is no god" to be the default position. If given proof otherwise, they will change their mind, but lacking proof of his/her/its/their existence, the atheist will assume that the god(s) do(es) not exist.

People who consider themselves to be theist consider "there is a god/gods" to be the default position. They may be willing to reconsider that position if proof that a god does not exist is presented, but in the absence of any proof they will assume that a god does exist.

People who consider themselves to be agnostic consider "there is no default position" to be the default position. In the absence of any proof that there is a god, and in the absence of any proof that there is not a god, they will withhold judgment on whether there is a god or not until some conclusive evidence has been reached one way or another.

At least that's my take on the issue, for the centrist portions of the argument. Of course there are also people on both sides of the argument who feel that they HAVE had proof that a god does or does not exist. You've conducted your tests, and concluded on a level that satisfies you that there is no god. Others have had experiences that satisfy them that there is indeed a god. Obviously, you would consider yourself an atheist, and they would consider themselves theists. And there are yet others on both sides of the fence who would cling to their theist or atheist positions even in the face of proof otherwise.

But for those who start the statements with "Well, there's no proof one way or the other, but...", I'd define them as atheist, agnostic, or theist based on what their default position is.

"There's no need to "assert no god" any more than there's a need to "believe in no Santa Claus, underpants gnomes, Tooth Fairy, or Zeus". Reducing things to the level of claiming "believe in the lack of" incorrectly cedes the validity of the question *in the first place* to the crazy people who demand that you talk to their invisible friend."

The problem I see with that position is that a couple hundred years ago "There's no need to assert the belief that the earth is not round. After all, it's obviously flat" in there. Or "there's no need to assert that illness aren't caused by little tiny living particles that infest our blood. Obviously it's caused by bad humours." Or so forth.

What's considered silly enough to fit into that default category of belief or non-belief depends to a huge extent on what the default belief structure of the society itself is. In a society which takes the belief in a god for granted, there would be no need to assert your belief in that god, any more than you're asked on a daily basis to assert your belief in gravity. In a society where the belief that there is no god is the default, the reverse would be true. When the society doesn't have a default belief, things get a bit messier.

There's a lot in my daily life that I'm told is science that I take on faith. For instance, I'm told that the earth and the moon revolve around the sun in an interweaving orbit, and that there are similar interactions throughout the surrounding universe. I'm told that there are various calculations about this that prove it as such. But I've never done those calculations or taken those measurements myself, so for all I know it could be a grand conspiracy. But since I don't have the time to investigate every tenet of what my society tells me is true, I haven't investigated that one. I take it on faith that, given the consistency of what I've been told by people who should know, that they probably have it just about right. But if everyone took such things on faith, then new paradigms would never be created, as no one bothers to look for new information.

And I've wandered a bit off track there - I had a point originally, I swear! I can't remember what it was. I guess I'll just close with the reminder that what might seem obviously silly to believe in (or disbelieve in) to your view might not seem that way to another society, past or present. So I guess we consider people to be asserting a believe, or asserting a disbelief, in a theory when that theory is either controversial enough to not have a default acceptance one way or the other in a society, or when the belief or disbelief they are asserting runs contrary to that of the world view of the society they live in.

Hum. You're wrong. But rather than clutter up your journal with other refutation, I've posted on mine. This comment is to let you know, for that is the polite thing to do.

Something had to exist before the big bang.

As you may know, I'm a theist. I'm also a scientist.

Untrue.

"The time before the big bang" is as meaningless a concept as "The space into which the Universe is expanding." Time and space are part of the Universe, not externals against which the Universe is measured. I'm not a good enough physicist to do the math myself, but as I understand it, time curves asymptotically back towards the "moment" of the big bang.

If your position is "there was no intelligent force involved," then you're an atheist, it seems to me. If your position is "I don't know what was involved," you're an agnostic.

It's ironic, but you're making a classic philosophical mistake that creationists make when they posit creation and evolution as an either/or choice, and act as if disproving evolution[1] proves creationism: the two are orthogonal to one another, and can even coexist peacefully.

"There was no intelligent force involved" is nothing more than a perfectly reasonable inference from the utter and consistent failure to demonstrate theoretically or empirically that the hypothesis "There was an intelligent force involved." Believing in divinity therefore has no more scientific basis than believing in phlogiston, aether, or polka-dotted unicorns dancing the macarena in your bathroom only disappear any time you look."

Also, "I don't know what was involved" can exist perfectly well alongside "There was no intelligent force involved." There are tons of phenomena we do not fully understand that have had several explanations ruled out.

[1] Or casting it into doubt

I'm still calling myself diagnostic.

The problem I see with that position is that a couple hundred years ago "There's no need to assert the belief that the earth is not round. After all, it's obviously flat" in there. Or "there's no need to assert that illness aren't caused by little tiny living particles that infest our blood. Obviously it's caused by bad humours." Or so forth.

Ah, but the difference there is that those are *testable statements*, and there are people *making the positive assertion of these testable statements*.

Even leaving aside the idea of proving the truth of whatever bronze-age comic book gave you your God in the first place, if religions stepped forward with lesser real-world claims, like "my God will prevent me from coming to harm when I run my hand through this bandsaw!" or "conversion to my religion increases your performance on standardised tests!", those claims could be evaluated and determined to be either true or false, objectively.

Also: No, nobody educated in the matter thought the earth was flat, just like nobody even remotely educated thinks Intelligent Design has any merit. That's an aside, though.

There's a lot in my daily life that I'm told is science that I take on faith.

You're misusing the word "faith", here, I suspect. And the point is not to accept things because you're told they're science, but to accept things because they *fit*. If you can't see why the seasons and the phases of the moon actually fit the heliocentric model perfectly, and why fixed-earth doesn't work with the rest of the things you can easily see, I suspect you're not looking. And if you *do* see something that doesn't fit, you can find out either why it does fit after all, or discover something new.

But, as you say, you've gone pretty far afield of the original problem.

And my problem is, fundamentally, that "well, you can't prove it's NOT" is by no means any kind of reason to act on the basis of a proposition, especially when proving nonexistence is literally impossible, by definition. The fact that it's taken to be so in the specific case of gods is, fundamentally, a failure in thinking so vast as to be damn near indescribable.

It's on a scale with Fox News' "fair and balanced" practice of taking real news, then a trivially-disproven ultra-extreme far-right stance on the news, airing both as equally valid and equally true, and insisting that the truth must *obviously* be somewhere in the middle.

They may be willing to reconsider that position if proof that a god does not exist is presented

Which is a trick, because
1) proof of nonexistence is impossible. Logically, factually, take your pick. You can't prove nonexistence. You can only disprove existence of a specific thing in a specific testable form.
2) "proof" of anything at all outside of abstracts like mathematics is impossible. There's specifically no such thing as proof in science.

Yes, I misspoke there. Technically it should have read "strong evidence in support of" instead of "proof of". It's a common shorthand that even I tend to slip up and use, no matter how often I scold my students for doing the same thing. Doing that edit doesn't change the underlying meaning of my definitions though.

Despite that, you seemed to hit the nail I've been flailing around all day.

"And my problem is, fundamentally, that "well, you can't prove it's NOT" is by no means any kind of reason to act on the basis of a proposition, especially when proving nonexistence is literally impossible, by definition. The fact that it's taken to be so in the specific case of gods is, fundamentally, a failure in thinking so vast as to be damn near indescribable."

And I didn't say it was. I just said that's the difference between agnostic (I.E. there's no evidence in support of but there's also no evidence against) vs atheist (there's no evidence in support of therefore it must not exist.)

You seem to work from a base assumption that if there is no evidence for something it must not exist even if there's no evidence against it. But sometimes lack of evidence for something just means that no one has looked for it before, or that the right tests haven't been done. Of course, if people have been looking for evidence for something for a long time and it's still not been found, then odds are pretty good that it's not there. That's a stronger argument for the lack of a god if you wanted to make it. I'd have no problem with you saying "people have been looking for evidence of this for a long time and haven't found it, therefor I don't think it exists" vs the blanket statement that anything that there isn't evidence for must not exist.

Of course, I'm getting back to combining science with philosophy, and this is why that doesn't work. Because even if someone were to make a claim based on a religious perspective, if the test failed, they could find ways to explain it away. If the test succeeded, the "other side" could find ways to explain it away. (And there have been some interesting efforts to study whether prayer really is effective. I seem to recall there being some evidence that prayer did speed healing, although I don't remember the details of the study. But it could very well be a placebo effect - I don't recall if the people being prayed for knew they were being prayed for or not. But it's an example where even making a testable hypothesis (If there is a god, then prayers to that god to heal someone should result in faster healing time) could be explained away. If the study showed no significant difference, non-believers would say it was evidence there was no god, believers would say there was lack of faith on the part of the patients or something. If the study showed significant differences, believers would say it was evidence of god, non-believers would say it was a placebo effect, or positive social reinforcement, or some such.

I'm a firm proponent of science being science and philosophy being philosophy. I don't think that just because philosophical questions aren't testable makes them useless questions to consider. I do think it's interesting when some questions that had been philosophical are able to be brought into the realm of science when technology advances to the point of being able to look at the next level of detail. For instance, questions of consciousness have definitely crossed from the philosophical to the scientific. But I don't think that every philosophical question will reach that point.

Yeah, but how many things are you going to "withhold judgment" on? And what's your criteria to distinguish between "has no evidence in favour and no reason to believe, discard" and "has no evidence in favour and no reason to believe, withhold judgment"?

What is it about belief in God that makes it special in ways that belief in Space Werewolves isn't?

And if you're going to go with the God Of The Gaps "we don't know what's there, so it might be God" argument, I'm okay with that. I can also present you with a dozen explanations as to why it's logically indefensible.

But yeah. Why do you "withhold judgement" about the existence of God, and not about the existence of The Great And Powerful Space Werewolf?

I just said that's the difference between agnostic (I.E. there's no evidence in support of but there's also no evidence against) vs atheist (there's no evidence in support of therefore it must not exist.)

So, why aren't you agnostic about Thor?

Or about The Great And Powerful Space Werewolf?
Or about the Monetarium particles that are *really* the source of value in objects, and that's why they're worth money?

Why aren't you agnostic about every other cockamamie half-assed nonsense that's ever been created? After all, there's no evidence even *possible* against most of them. Shouldn't you be taking your carefully considered and only-logical "neutral" position in the middle and arguing that they MIGHT be true?

You seem to work from a base assumption that if there is no evidence for something it must not exist even if there's no evidence against it.

That's pretty much exactly right: If there's absolutely no reason to believe a hypothesis *might* be true, there's absolutely no reason to behave as if it *was* true. And before you come back with first-year philosophy sophistry, there *is* such a thing as testing a hypothesis by assuming it is true and seeing if the expected results appear.

They don't.

Ever.

What gets *really* clever is when you discover that supposed "real effects" of religion, such as the tendency of recent converts to change for the better and make improvements to their lives, is that it's been proven that religious conversion itself does this.

As in, NO MATTER WHAT RELIGION IT IS, you get the conversion effects. And it's addictive, too - which is why you get people who are actually addicted to the emotional sensations of being "born again", and so they change religion over and over and over again to make their brains produce that same new religion feeling.

But anyway.

I seem to recall there being some evidence that prayer did speed healing, although I don't remember the details of the study.

There was such a study. However, their results were not duplicable, AND further examination revealed that their study was quite deliberately "gamed" to produce the pro-prayer result - they'd chosen their subjects and determined control-vs-test knowing, in advance, which patients would go to which group, meaning they assigned the ones most likely to recover into their test group.

If the study showed significant differences, believers would say it was evidence of god, non-believers would say it was a placebo effect, or positive social reinforcement, or some such.

Bullshit. The placebo effect is *measurable*, and well-known. The whole point of a drug study is to determine if your results are better or worse than placebo, after all, and that's why there's such a thing as control groups.

And, fundamentally, with *every single question* except the existence of God, a complete lack of evidence in favour combined with no reason to believe combined with millenia of failure to produce even one result combine to the conclusion that the hypothesis is meaningless. And I want to know why *that* question gets the special pleading you're so eager to do, accusing me of poor thinking and logical failure when you yourself make that exact same "logical failure" with regards to the Space Werewolves.

Agnostic here, and a scientist, but only a dilettante in physics and cosmology, but yeah, that's my understanding of cosmology. Time is a property of the universe, so before and after are reliant on the existence of said universe. Before the beginning of the universe is a null concept.

This does not lend itself to nice simple analogies, but neither does any of physics in the last century and some change. Even beginning physics books these days are full of things to which there are no good analogies in the macro-scale world. (Definitely in the micro scale, and I am pretty sure on the mega scale, there are things that don't fit cleanly into planet orbit and bread box analogies.)

I really liked your answer, and was drawn to the comparison with phlogiston and aether (not the polka-dotted unicorns).

I think that's the PERFECT comparison. Those elements were thought up as WAYS to explain phenomena, as theories that made sense and in some cases were close enough to the 'real' thing (where the real things is the current theories, which are not so much 'truth' as 'much better models'). This is why theism isn't 'silly' as flemco is trying to state. It might be very very wrong, but it does attempt to explain something. It's not a spontaneous thought out of someone's head, it's a non-scientific theory that is easy to believe and that will remain strong until a scientific theory comes out that is stronger and understandable.

But this may never happen: We have a very VERY hard idea of grasping the relationship of time and space. The relationship only visibly appears in thought experiments and in scales much greater than our world. It is downright impossible (for now, I guess I should add) for us to get a third-person view of the Universe.

So all in all, it's nice to enlighten theists that the answer to "how did it all start" may be "perhaps it never did", but science is in no position to ridicule theist beliefs. It may be prudent for science to shut up and nod until science has a nice theory on the improbability of God existing.

What's wrong with space werewolves? I mean, depending on what traits you are assigning them, the universe might be a bit small or a bit young to expect them to have had time to come about, but nothing we know about life specifically rules out a critter that fits the werewolf description somewhere out there. Admittedly, a proper werewolf would be much easier to engineer than evolve, and if the shape change is dramatic, they are going to have huge food bills, but they aren't impossible. Of course, if you traits like "able to infect humans with lycanthropy, the universe is still a bit young for that one to come about naturally, and if you want them to visit, you're going to need a hell of a cheap energy society (which would probably be able to engineer werewolves to any specifications that kept to the rules of thermodynamics.

Your definition of atheism is both a lie and offensive. Neat trick.

Unless that was merely a rhetorical flourish not worth including in the text,

RHETORICAL QUESTION MOTHERFUCKER

DO YOU SPEAK IT

You really don't think Eric believes his definition of Atheist? Or were you just being clever? His definition fits the atheism that is referenced in the Biercesque definition of Agnostic. Eric is talking about those who hold Atheism as a faith, which group is easy to misidentify as all atheists. There have been very few self identified atheists in this thread who have made convincing arguments that their atheism isn't a matter of faith, and to those, he might owe an apology. Or at least an acknowledgment that his definition didn't include them (which he has actually done in at least one case, if in different words.)

I call it Aloysius.

I've now lost count of how many times you have been able to perfectly articulate positions that I held, but was unable to explain. Thank you for all of those occasions, and the many more that are sure to come!

I'll just note that I'm not here to argue over anything so much as to just note that I've had some thoughts recently which seem to run closely enough to the current topic as to be worth sharing. But first...

About having the courage of your convictions: I get pretty ticked off when people on one side or another of an argument see those on the fence as wishy-washy and unwilling to stand up for anything. I rather like to think that the people with the most courage are those who are committed to reasoned views and are willing to stand in the crossfire between the two extremes and argue that reason.

After some recent reading (including Dawkins' The God Delusion) it occurred to me that some portion of the problem, at least from a semantic perspective, might be word construction using the Greek model for indicating when something is not. What I'm about to propose doesn't really work etymologically speaking, but it seems sensible...

If we use moral/immoral/amoral as a model, and we acknowledge that amoral means, 'a lack of morals,' (I've read 'morally indifferent' in one definition) then it strikes me that the same model applied to theism would suggest atheism is, 'a lack of belief,' which I don't think is an active position. The model would map as theistic/antitheistic/atheistic. With this model we can then grant that some claiming to be atheists might be better described as antitheists (a more active position).

The only thing about your post that specifically bothers me is the claim that science is agnostic. While I'm sure I was at one time agnostic, I've since abandoned that approach because it seems no less limiting than religion itself. Both religion and agnosticism claim, so far as I can tell, that there is something in the universe we can't know anything about. Religions, oddly enough, claim to know about the thing that can't be known (through revelation and such), while agnosticism seems to throw up its hands. I don't think science says there are things we can't know. Science might say there are things we can't know right now given a variety of limitations (physical, technological, cognitive, etc.), but I don't think science is often given to throwing up its hands. (Some scientists are. Even Einstein blew it when it tried to undercut his own theories in an attempt to maintain an orderly universe.)

Here's a quote from your post:

Me? I'm agnostic. I don't have the hubris to think I've got the final answer. I'm still watching and waiting, and I'm keeping an open mind -- to all sides of the question.

And then here's the relevant entry from dictionary.com's definition of agnostic:

a person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study.

That definition doesn't fit with your claim, nor what I typed in my previous paragraph about the proposed agnosticism of science. It seems to me your desire to maintain that open mind, to seek to understand that which others claim cannot be understood, is far more ambitious than mere agnosticism. It's the ambition of science.

I'd leave that last statement as my tagline, but I should also make clear that my definitions aren't those of others, and there's far too much flexibility in the use of these words for comfort (or at least comfortable arguing). Defining agnosticism is like trying to catch an eel with your bare hands. :)

There's nothing wrong with turning one's rhetoric back on one's self. :)

Oh indeed. It is just as time honored as taking someone's statements at face value, even if they are supposed to be rhetorical. I happen to enjoy the second more than the first, but I do see the attraction of both practices. :)

Using the Merriam-Webster definition, you'll find something that meshes well with Eric's stated position.

1: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god

Notice the second part, the broader definition. Using that definition (which I think a reading of Eric's post supports) you can, I think, see where he gets his three broad brush positions. Problem seems to be that from his grouping of Atheist, you get two different species. The philosophical atheist and the faith based atheist. The philosophical atheist overlaps position-wise with the agnostic and the faith based atheist, and I'm not sure it really deserves its own category. Problem is, there is no compelling reason to lump it with one side or the other. (So yeah, I'm wrong, we need 4 legs. Actually we need a fifth leg for the folks who aren't theists but who believe in the supernatural (and not just the unexplained natural) and probably a sixth grouping for folks who believe in some sort of theistic entities who work within the rules, naturalistic deities (I'd say arguably the later Norse, Greek, and Roman gods probably would fit there, and there are at least some Oden and Thor followers knocking about.)

If it's not scientific, it's not a theory. If it's not scientific, it's not even a hypothesis.

Phlogiston and aether weren't rejected because a better theory came along. They were rejected because hypotheses about phlogiston and aether made testable predictions that were tested, and disproven. People came up with better hypotheses because of that disproof.

Science already has you covered regarding the improbability of God existing: What testable predictions does theism make? What experiment can be performed to test those predictions? If theists can't put any of these on the table, there's no reason for science to treat theism any more seriously than a belief in polka-dotted unicorns dancing the macarena -- phlogiston and aether actually fared better as science!

Assuming theists can put together a test for whatever predictions they come up with, how many such predictions need to fail before theists would acknowledge that theism can be classified alongside phlogiston and aether?

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