A brief conversation

[demiurgent]

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.

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

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.

[mazlynn.livejournal.com]

"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.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

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.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

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.

[mazlynn.livejournal.com]

"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."

In which case you're arguing that there is evidence against the hypothesis, not that there isn't any evidence one way or another. I've got no problem with that!

"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 I think I've said this a few times nowm, that I DON'T argue that.

I think the point where you and I are disagreeing is on the difference between improbable and impossible. If you want to say that based on lack of any positive or negative evidence, it is highly improbable that there isn't a flying spaghetti monster controlling our lives and therefor act as if there isn't one, then I have no problem with that, and would agree with you. If you say that it's impossible for there to be one, then I say you are acting on a belief. Or if you'd prefer to avoid semi-religous language, a "base assumption".

There's no problem with acting on base assumptions. We all have to operate on them. Scientific method operates on several base assumptions, including that the world is measurable and knowable. You have to have some base assumptions to be able to make any sort of decisions about anything. But there's always a possiblility (note, I didn't say probable, just possible) that the base assumption is wrong. That doesn't mean you should operate as if it is.

In an infinite world, it is possible that there's a flying spaghetti monster someplace exhibiting godlike powers. Not probable, and the possibility may be just this side of 0, but I don't say that I know it's not true, because I don't have any evidence that it does or does not exist. That doesn't mean I'm going to live my life as if it does. There's also a possibility that I could win the lottery. An actual measurable possibility. I don't buy lottery tickets either.

I know people who say that they are able to recieve telepathic communication with their cats. I don't say that's impossible. I don't think it's likely, and I think that it's probable that what they attribute to psychic communication is really subconcious interpretation of body language. But in the absence of meaningful evidence one way or the other, I'm not going to say it's impossible. Neither am I waiting for my cats to start communicating with me psychically though.

The possible presence or absence of a god doesn't really influence my life any more than the possible presence or absence of monitarium. The underlying philosophical causes of the way the world works don't really matter - they're fun to speculate on, but I live my life the way I do because I think it's the right way to do so. If tomorrow I were to experience something that convinced me of the presence or absence of a god, I wouldn't look back on my life and go "If only I'd known that, I'd have done this differently."

I'm just not arrogant enough to believe that I can definitively say that a given thing isn't possible in the lack of strong evidence that it isn't possible.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

So, what you're fundamentally saying is that since no proposition can ever be disproven, you maintain a state of "neutrality" with regards to all propositions.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

There are whole categories of propositions that can be disproven: x●~x is not always trivially obvious.
There are also propositions that are provable, unless you buy the strong Cartesian skeptic's position.

The rest fall into three broad categories:
With weak evidence against a proposition:
Provisionally against

With no compelling evidence for or against a proposition:
Provisionally neutral
and
With weak evidence for a proposition:
Provisionally for

If it turns out that the evidence in any case above is false, belief in the proposition should probably shift toward the center.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

To which, again, I ask why it is you're not "keeping the question open" about Thor and the Space Werewolves (which, incidentally, is now my band's new name)

No evidence of any sort for a proposition, and proposition is not testable = proposition is useless crap.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I'm almost positive that I hit post on the entry about being willing to provisionally accept the Space Werewolves as a possibility. And the question is at least as open on Thor as any other god. Hell, given the way that myth grows from generation to generation, Thor could very well fall into the Naturalistic Deity camp (as opposed to supernatural deity, which the J-C-M god distinctly does.)

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

As a side note? I would totally buy a "Thor and the Space Werewolves" album.

(As a second side-note, a non-trivial number of my friends actively believe in Thor, so as an example it's either perfect or all wrong. On Thor, I personally remain neutral, beyond having seen one a very large, powerful friend of mine scream in rage and get a thunderclap accompaniment once. But then, I have a terrible tendency to write stories that include the pathetic fallacy, too.)