A brief conversation
Dec. 3rd, 2007 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
demiurgentA 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.
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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a late arrival
Date: 2007-12-04 05:31 am (UTC)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:And then here's the relevant entry from dictionary.com's definition of agnostic: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. :)
Re: a late arrival
Date: 2007-12-04 06:02 am (UTC)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.)
Re: a late arrival
Date: 2007-12-04 03:39 pm (UTC)Atheist could mean:
I don't believe there is a god
I believe there is NOT a god.
It is impossible for there to be a god.
Agnostic could cover the three positons in my other comment:
I don't know
I can't know
It's impossible to know.
Theist could cover the same range of gradations:
I belive that there is a god
I know that there is a god
There MUST be a god for X to work the way it does.
Re: a late arrival
Date: 2007-12-04 03:35 pm (UTC)The definition Eric is using is the first one. And from that definition, science is indeed agnostic about anything for which there isn't strong evidence for or against.
But I'd agree with you that using the third definition, science is not agnostic about anything.