proximoception | (no subject)

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.

Threaded | Flat

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.

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.