Readers of Planet Atheism have probably seen this several times today:
Fundamentalists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.
“Moderate” believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go regularly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spiritual sense should make 5.
“Moderate” atheists: know that 2+2 =4 but think it impolite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.
“Militant” atheists: “Oh for pity’s sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is WRONG with you people?”
And, of course, it’s absolutely correct.
But I’d add another one in the middle:
Agnostics: 2+2 may be 4, or may be 5. Yes, it LOOKS like it’s 4, but I don’t have perfect knowledge, and I want to keep an open mind. Who’s to say the religionists aren’t correct? Who am I to know?
Yes, as long time readers of WotM are probably aware of, I really don’t like agnostics. Sorry if you’re one, but, to me, agnosticism is pure intellectual cowardice.
A fundamentalist theist believes “truth” is separate from reality, and, if they conflict, then reality is wrong. An atheist believes reality IS truth. An agnostic, on the other hand, believes reality is unknowable, and therefore evades the responsibility of trying to understand it. Anything goes. Reality is fluid, ever-changing, unpredictable. We can never truly know anything for certain, since everything we know, every law we take as true, may change tomorrow.
An agnostic — much like a New Age mystic — distorts the concept of “open mindedness” to an absurd level, where there are no laws, no rules, no hard facts, no reality — at least none that can be ever understood. To an agnostic, everything is possible, so nothing is ever certain. Taken to the extreme, nothing is ever even more likely than anything else.
Sorry, but, to me, this is no more rational than believing in an invisible bearded man in the sky, invented by primitive Bronze Age nomads, who, somehow, hates all the same people you do.
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I wonder what your feelings are on the strong/weak atheism difference. As I see it, strong atheism doesn’t make much sense because the concept of god is so amorphous even for a given god that any paradox can be resolved. Weak atheism, as I see it, is actually more common than people think it is. Even by virtue of the fact that you concede that you would be converted if God were to reveal Himself to you, you are already a weak atheist since you are not 100% sure that there is no god. Weak atheists essentially treat atheism like any other scientific theory; they are rather sure of it, but are open to opposing evidence.
Sorry if this is poorly written. It’s 10 PM over here right now.
Noam: in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins uses a 7-level scale in which 1 is “100% sure God exists” and 7 is “100% sure God doesn’t.” Much like him, I could say I’m on level 6: de facto atheist, as sure there is no God as I’m sure there are no leprechauns or unicorns, and living my life on the assumption that God doesn’t exist.
On the other hand, I believe that there are several “versions” of gods that we can really be 100% sure of not existing, using logic. For instance, an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent god is precluded by the Problem of Evil. Omnipotence itself has the Omnipotence Paradox to deal with. And so on.
We can also scratch several gods by tracing their all too human origins in history. If we can clearly show that this or that god were invented by that man / those men at that time, then, unless we believe that belief actually changes reality (in other words, gods pop into actual existence because people believe in them), we can be sure they aren’t real at all.
For instance, Yahweh started out as a tribal deity in opposition to other tribal deities; there are several places in the Old Testament where he is described as the “greatest of gods”, and so on. Early in the Bible, he was defeated by iron chariots. He was afraid of men building too high a tower. Only later did he “evolve” to be the only real god in existence, and omnipotent.
Jesus’s story and “divinity” are an amalgam of other myths at the time, such as Mithras and Hercules. And so on.
As an agnostic myself, I’m a bit puzzled as to why you dislike agnosticism as much as you do. I don’t believe in the “invisible man in the sky” any more than you do, but where is your proof that god, in some form or another, as a personality no man has ever conceived, as a part of us or independent of us, as an omnipotent, omniscient being or as a weak being that just happened to make the universe one day – where’s your proof that it doesn’t exist? It’s exactly the same as the proof of those who believe in a deity – it doesn’t exist.
I’m not saying that “we can never know anything for certain,” as apparently all agnostics do according to you. I know several other agnostics, and they all seem to have a reasonable ground in reality. Please do not fabricate such nonsense – it’s almost as bad as the famous “16 Myths about Atheism” debunked in this blog. For pretend that your faith that there is no god is as obvious as 2 2=4, use the exact same argument, the same illogical step that Christians use to justify their faith – you’re just telling us agnostics that it’s simple for a retarded kid who had never heard of calculus to integrate a multivariable hyperbolic function.
It’s in exactly the same place where I have the proof of the non-existence of unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. See the problem? It’s impossible to prove negatives (unless they’re logically self-contradictory), but that doesn’t mean one should act like agnostics do, which is to say “it’s unknowable, we can’t know for sure, and to go either way is arrogance.”
And please don’t say I have “faith there is no god”. Not only is that a theist’s common argument, but it’s also the same thing as above. Do I need “faith” NOT to believe in leprechauns or werewolves? I don’t think so.
Am I absolutely 100% sure there is no god? Nope; I don’t claim omniscience. But I am 99.99999% sure — as much as I am about unicorns or leprechauns, again — and that’s good enough for me to live my life on the assumption that no god exists, and to call myself an atheist. Agnosticism seems to imply that the chances of “god” and “no god” are 50% each, so the question is impossible to answer, and we’d better not go either way… and I can’t agree with that.
I’m not trying to peck at your atheism; sorry if I came across that way, for that’s not what I intended. Instead, I want you to respect agnosticism – or at least know that we aren’t the wishy-washy nutters that you portray in your post.
The main part of your post that irks me is your second-to-last paragraph:
“An agnostic — much like a New Age mystic — distorts the concept of “open mindedness” to an absurd level, where there are no laws, no rules, no hard facts, no reality — at least none that can be ever understood. To an agnostic, everything is possible, so nothing is ever certain. Taken to the extreme, nothing is ever even more likely than anything else.”
Which, I assure you, is complete bull. Just because we say that we don’t have an answer to one particular question – “Is there a god or gods” – doesn’t mean that we don’t have an opinion on the subject. Personally, I find most modern religions ludicrous, and anyone who things that ‘intelligent design’ actually has credibility is wrong. (Not to say that the agnostics that you describe don’t exist – it’s just that they are in no way the majority).
If you explain agnosticism as believing that “the chances of “god” and “no god” are 50% each,” well, I think you’re missing the point entirely. Here’s the gist, and I’m pretty sure that many, if not most, agnostics would agree with me:
Science still has a lot of unanswered questions. So far, all of them which we have answered definitey have been explained without a god or god-like figure, and all or almost all will continue to do so, but each question spawns new ones. But at the root of even only one of those questions, there might be an intelligence of a higher order than ours.
Does that seem solid enough?
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I’m going to quote Steven Colbert here:
“Agnosticism. It’s atheism without balls.”