(no subject)

[proximoception]

A trouble I have with agnosticism: If you just mean you can never be certain that you are certain, and need people to take special note of this, why not just write that on all your shirts under a big asterisk and then--since everyone's now aware of your qualm--live your life making the necessary or most appropriate assumptions, including ones pertaining to whether or not God is a lie? This kind of agnosticism applies to every question at once, after all. You don't just not know about God, you don't know about ice cream or Uruguay, about knowing, about not knowing. If, on the other hand, your agnosticism finds God to be a special kind of metaphysical question: why? Why the special treatment? Because of what people have said? Because they say it's a category to itself, as prior to other questions as those of knowledge's nature and possibility? Once you're age, say, six, you should probably have figured out that what you're told needs to be screened, i.e. subjected to criteria of logical consistency and empirical appropriateness. Not that you'll know those words for a while, or yet realize they should be applied to what you've already soaked up as well as what's incoming. I can understand universal doubt (though not going on and on about it), but specific protests of doubt are always loaded. You're enclosing something. The six-year-old missed a spot.

Comments

[ex-commonpl.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think I agree with this. I always want to say to agnostics, and even some Unitarian types, Come now, you do not believe in God and you're sure of it. And thinking that there is an Immanent Will or a force that through the green fuse drives the flower is not at all the same as believing in God. You can think you perceive these things and still call yourself an atheist.

I think one explanation for the popularity of agnosticism is the prominence in the media of atheists who are bigots about it, who act terribly superior (Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Madeline Murray O'Hare back in the day). People, rightly, don't want to associated with them.

And P.S. If I may recommend, I think you might appreciate M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, which I wrote about (poorly) here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/commonplacebook/2005/10/31/). China Mieville, when I interviewed him, said that in his experience most people rather neatly divide into those who love M. John Harrison and those who love John Crowley. The Course of the Heart covers some of the same thematic territory as Little, Big, but it's a lot darker and tougher (though also a lot shorter). Mieville says it's about the frustration of the fact that the numinous always leads right back here where it started from. A very painful book, but not cheaply so; I almost feel bad wishing it on anyone, but you might get a lot out of it.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Hopefully the Triumph of Life/Young Goodman Brown/Lost Ones sequence has innoculated me against real-life overflow of visionary despair. I'll look for this.

I glanced at one of Mieville's books recently. Seemed very much in the shadow of my teenage favorite Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (which in turn had touches of Crowley's Engine Summer in it, I see in hindsight, as well as half-digested elements of most of the High Lit tradition from Homer to Proust). Presumably less confused cosmologically. Wolfe is also a favorite of Gaiman's, I believe.

[ex-commonpl.livejournal.com]

Because of Gaiman, I've read one book by Wolfe, Peace, which was, in a word, extraordinary. And that means something coming from me because I don't usually enjoy unreliable narrators. Maybe Wolfe can't digest the Homer-Proust sequence, but he had no trouble at all turning Nabokov into manure. (But then I hate Nabokov.) Of course, it was pretty Catholic, which somewhat sucked, but also leant it a visionary edge along with a kind of naive conservative/agrarian anti-capitalism that, um, redeemed it.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Well, this seems mostly right, except that God is a special case. The true appeal of agnosticism isn't that it gives any kind of credence to theistic claims, but that it doesn't deflate the truth value of scientific claims; in other words, agnosticism preserves the hard rationality that atheism ostensibly but somewhat ineptly uses as a foundation.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I argue that God is not a special case. He's part of what's been said to us, and has over time tried to sneak His way in through the actual trouble areas.

Here are the special cases:

1. As mentioned above: the unknowability of whether (or to what extent) knowledge can happen, beyond the basic Cartesian knowledge that a difference is in progress.

2. Granted that a more articulated knowledge is possible because of an "internal" reception setup (we're at Kant now, where experience is refracted through his organizational categories): the unknowability of whether (or to what extent) the complexity that we know we perceive relates directly enough to a source to give us knowledge of that source. Forgive my hideous phrasing, but I assume you're familiar enough with this one.

3. Granted that some degree of reliable knowledge of an outer world is possible: the unknowability of whether (or to what extent) that world is itself a mediation or distortion of something prior (e.g. the past, laws of physics, something entirely foreign).

The assumption of an organism, personality, intelligence or what-have-you as being responsible for the presence of absence of these uncertainties is completely impossible from these premises. Though the existence of a cause has to be part of the flowchart of possibilities we keep alive, there's nothing in any of this to indicate the nature of such a potential cause.

Traditional understandings of God are tossed onto the menu of unhelpfully-infinite possibilities because we've heard so much about them. And it's rather clear, from the empirical end, that these understandings have come about because of their imaginability, as compared to most of the rest of that menu. Given an absence of sensory, logical, or conceptual resources, we take the route of honest silence or we end up treating the world like a Rorschach test.

To the extent the evolution of a God-lie makes empirical sense to you, to that extent his menu entry shrinks down in proportion to the infinite others. Hence any time you're posed the question, do you believe in God, and by someone who gets the basic "dude I know nothing" thing, the information you'll want to convey is the extremer than extreme unlikelihood of His existence. It is crucial to distinguish among levels of certainty. Probably more crucial than keeping the reminder afloat that we're ignorant of the degree of our own ignorance.

The day you claim the NOT symbol (the a- in atheism) for rationally absolute denial you have to give me a new one for absolutely-absolutely-absolutely-almost-absolute. Maybe "u", "utheism". Swing this in the language at large and I'll go along. Until then, since in speaking at all we're breezing right through the 3 uncertainties listed above, I am going to appropriate that a- with no qualms whatsoever. My asterisk is written on the bottom of my shoe.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

It's not a question of likelihood. The existence of God is not a probability, and we don't really communicate anything when we tell people that his existence is extremely unlikely. The concept of a God, and of purely metaphysical entities in general, establishes an order of logically possible beings that are by definition epistemologically inaccessible. To that extent it would not only be superfluous to say anything additional about them or their properties (existence included); to do otherwise would be to commit an error which is effectively similar to those made by theists, that is, to claim knowledge of that which by definition can never be known.

And of course, it's perfectly rational not to believe in what is epistemologically inaccessible. And again, the problem here is not one of probability. We need not say that this disbelief be absolute (as if there were a chance that we could know whether or not God existed -- there isn't) in order for disbelief to be valid. But you get into trouble when you go from claiming "I do not believe in God" to "God does not exist". If you accept using convention as a standard -- and if I interpret the end of your last message correctly, you do -- then I think we can agree that most atheists would not limit themselves to the former claim, no?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Assuming your awareness of distinction is accurate, that your sense of that distinction's articulability as experience is correct, and that experience's link to externality is real, and that that externality's apparent dynamism in relation to something beyond itself (such as its own past self) is genuine, is a necessary precondition of speaking. You're already choosing among possibles, to even put the question of possibility. You have already decided what does exist. Saying "I do not believe in God" is going as far out on a limb as "God does not exist".

Our right to go out on this limb is, I think, secured by our participation in existence. Disbelief in a positive can fairly be translated to belief in a negative if one has examined the whole rest of the circular closet of positive, negative jackets. Experiential appropriateness isn't a good measure until the logic has been straightened out, but at that point it becomes the whole world. At that point, when honest (testable by our consistency), we are capable of a sense of what does not exist.

What to say after that? I refer you back to the last paragraph and a half of my previous reply, which you didn't address. Obviously I sympathize with what you're saying, and it's exactly what I'd say myself in a world where people never gave a thought to God, but as it stands I just think my pet peeve is better. 'Agnostic' has a much more harmful set of connotations than 'God does not exist'. Which has some damn good ones.

More of a lark: The existence of God also may be appealable to probability, actually, as the formulations of Him that have any interesting impact on one's view of reality hold His existence incompatible with the existence of most other "purely metaphysical entities", the which He supplants. These thus outnumber Him, outproportion Him. Of all the possible ways things might be that minds can imagine or intuit, His is but one. (I see the strict argument against this one--proportion is not a property of something without limits--, but I still find it interesting. Perhaps people attacking metaphysics itself can do more with it.)