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Jun. 30th, 2010 01:34 pmMore reason to dislike Ron Rosenbaum: http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/pagenum/all/#p2
I've tried to shut up about the God issue here (maybe not very hard), but rage will out.
Agnostic attacks on atheism are annoying because most atheists are secretly agnostics and most agnostics are secretly not agnostics.
It's a semantics problem, involving logical versus probabilistic/relative certainty.
Most atheists do not feel that, in identifying themselves that way, they are agreeing that God cannot possibly exist or that science will (or even necessarily can) tell us how the world began. They think it likely that God does not exist in more or less the same way they feel it likely that their hand does exist: to their mind the evidence for that conclusion is compelling, the evidence for contrary ones not.
In evidential matters we can always be biased, hallucinating, imperceptive or deceived - but there has to be evidence of that too for it to be, like, evident, and therefore for the possibility to be something to worry about. What if your last seven thoughts, or even your memories of your whole life, were beamed into your brain by a SPACE COMPUTER? You wouldn't know how to prove or disprove that. I hope you wouldn't care either, until there was compelling supplementary evidence of space computer beamings.
So we're all agnostics about almost everything - believers in God included. Most self-designated believers in God would probably admit to being agnostics about God, too, if you followed a strict enough interpretation of gnosis/knowing ("are you absolutely sure you're not wrong and that there's no room to doubt he exists?"). Whatever percentage of them concede that, though, there will remain a very important difference between them and self-designated atheists, hence the call for terms like 'believer' and 'atheist'. Thinking of them as subgroups of 'true agnosticism' might be helpful, however, to expose how silly any other subgroups of true agnosticism would prove, like 'agnostic' agnostics.
Do you believe it likely that God exists (or 'very likely' if you prefer, or 'very very')? If yes, it's probably useful for you and everyone else to think of you as a believer. If you think it unlikely that he exists, enough to endorse the phrase "I am not one of those who believe God exists," it's probably useful for you to designate yourself by the term used for that group. If you simply don't know whether it is likely or unlikely that God exists, given the state of the evidence, despite the compelling need to decide either way (if God exists you need to reckon with him, after all; and if he doesn't you need to reckon with the radically different set of expectations you should have about reality), then you're not in the happy middle, you're a pretty extreme skeptic. You're saying the world is so confusing that you can't decide, even provisionally, what's going on in it.
But of course no self-designated agnostic thinks that. An agnostic, in practice, is someone who keeps alive both positions because they feel that one is stupid but that the other makes them unhappy. By not dropping either they hope to preserve both some amount of self-respect and some amount of hope (or solidarity with those who hope). You could accuse them of trying to be superior, in a Time magazine, above-the-fray kind of way, but all other positions are equally open to the smugness claim: only I and those like me can face the harsh truths of reality, only I and those like me will be taken by a special friend who is also the creative principle of the universe into realms of intense neatness etc. It's still filling another need, and that need is the preservation, at least as an option, of something crucial that they fear exists only in religion.
I think they're wrong to fear that. And I'm alogically (not illogically) certain they're wrong that there's not enough evidence to decide about God.
I've tried to shut up about the God issue here (maybe not very hard), but rage will out.
Agnostic attacks on atheism are annoying because most atheists are secretly agnostics and most agnostics are secretly not agnostics.
It's a semantics problem, involving logical versus probabilistic/relative certainty.
Most atheists do not feel that, in identifying themselves that way, they are agreeing that God cannot possibly exist or that science will (or even necessarily can) tell us how the world began. They think it likely that God does not exist in more or less the same way they feel it likely that their hand does exist: to their mind the evidence for that conclusion is compelling, the evidence for contrary ones not.
In evidential matters we can always be biased, hallucinating, imperceptive or deceived - but there has to be evidence of that too for it to be, like, evident, and therefore for the possibility to be something to worry about. What if your last seven thoughts, or even your memories of your whole life, were beamed into your brain by a SPACE COMPUTER? You wouldn't know how to prove or disprove that. I hope you wouldn't care either, until there was compelling supplementary evidence of space computer beamings.
So we're all agnostics about almost everything - believers in God included. Most self-designated believers in God would probably admit to being agnostics about God, too, if you followed a strict enough interpretation of gnosis/knowing ("are you absolutely sure you're not wrong and that there's no room to doubt he exists?"). Whatever percentage of them concede that, though, there will remain a very important difference between them and self-designated atheists, hence the call for terms like 'believer' and 'atheist'. Thinking of them as subgroups of 'true agnosticism' might be helpful, however, to expose how silly any other subgroups of true agnosticism would prove, like 'agnostic' agnostics.
Do you believe it likely that God exists (or 'very likely' if you prefer, or 'very very')? If yes, it's probably useful for you and everyone else to think of you as a believer. If you think it unlikely that he exists, enough to endorse the phrase "I am not one of those who believe God exists," it's probably useful for you to designate yourself by the term used for that group. If you simply don't know whether it is likely or unlikely that God exists, given the state of the evidence, despite the compelling need to decide either way (if God exists you need to reckon with him, after all; and if he doesn't you need to reckon with the radically different set of expectations you should have about reality), then you're not in the happy middle, you're a pretty extreme skeptic. You're saying the world is so confusing that you can't decide, even provisionally, what's going on in it.
But of course no self-designated agnostic thinks that. An agnostic, in practice, is someone who keeps alive both positions because they feel that one is stupid but that the other makes them unhappy. By not dropping either they hope to preserve both some amount of self-respect and some amount of hope (or solidarity with those who hope). You could accuse them of trying to be superior, in a Time magazine, above-the-fray kind of way, but all other positions are equally open to the smugness claim: only I and those like me can face the harsh truths of reality, only I and those like me will be taken by a special friend who is also the creative principle of the universe into realms of intense neatness etc. It's still filling another need, and that need is the preservation, at least as an option, of something crucial that they fear exists only in religion.
I think they're wrong to fear that. And I'm alogically (not illogically) certain they're wrong that there's not enough evidence to decide about God.
