Atheist or Agnostic?
Posted by Brandon | Filed under Articles
How many of you have heard the argument: “Well it’s just as biased to be atheist as it is to be deist. The only one that truly makes sense is to be agnostic.”
This is an argument that I think is a pretty valid one and can appreciate what agnostics are trying to say. I technically can’t disprove God so why am I an atheist? I suppose this comes down to semantics and philosophy. People often get absolute fact and beliefs mixed up and it can lead to this sort of argument.
Being agnostic is a philosophy; it is not a middle-ground between theism and atheism, as many people would like to believe. To be atheist is to believe there is no God based on the available evidence. Here’s a good example and one that I have used before. Many of you probably have seen The Matrix. Where perception is relative and that reality was not as it seemed. Everyone was connected in a giant network to believe they were living in modern times but were actually living in a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
Now, I want you to prove to me absolutely 100% that this is not the case right now. Using science and reason, give me unquestionable evidence that we are not in some sort of computer virtual reality at this very moment. The answer is you cannot. In every perception there is an inherent uncertainty of which you can’t prove 100%. Now tell me if you believe this? I hope that most of you would answer no. None (most) of us do not truly believe we live in a computer generated world because of probability. When you really think about it, if you are going to be agnostic about God then you have to be agnostic about everything. Nothing could be ever certain and thats why I do not subscribe to that type of existential philosophy.
I do not technically know 100% that God does not exist and I cannot disprove it but based on evidence I find a supernatural being highly unlikely. I base my life in perception, probability and patterns. If you have eaten 2000 oranges in your life, you can safely assume that orange number 2001 will taste like an orange. Were you to take a more agnostic approach toward it you would have to say that you could never know if that next orange will taste like an orange.
So to sum things up: I am atheist not because I am absolutely certain, but because I believe there is no God based on what we currently understand of our universe. To be technically precise I am an “agnostic atheist”. There are people who are true atheists and know for certain there is no God, but this is not me. No good scientist can that they are certain about anything. But you have to take a stand somewhere and have beliefs based on your own observations. There’s an infinite number of things you cannot know for sure, but choose to believe them anyways. So why take God a step further?
The question of God’s existence is an odd one. I, personally, am frustrated with it. It is because, really, it cannot be either proven or disproven, and even then, it’s such a small question. Yes or No, does God exist? It seems like the more important questions concern how we should act. One of the weaknesses of Atheism, I think, is that it can only negate certain ideas, or try to. But as soon as it says that we should move forward in any direction, as soon as it tries to answer value judgments or ought questions, it cannot plausibly do that without doing much of what a theist would.
A further frustration is that God’s existence gets attacked more than other puzzles we have that are just as crazy. Like we can’t prove that individuals outside of ourselves exist. We can’t prove that our mind and body are one. We can’t prove that induction is valid. We can’t really understand how we get out of the problem of the criterion. There’s a lot of stuff that’s more fundamental to how we live than this question, and I feel that this question is one that gets rallied around for no other reason than popularity and hurt that’s been caused by religion and not God.
** Certainty is certainly unnecessary **
The notion that empirical knowledge would have to be “certain” in order to be knowledge is an old error — a hangover from xian, platonic idealisms. Kant tied himself in knots trying to pull a priori empirical knowledge out of some transcendental top hat.
The word ‘belief’ applied to statements allows degrees (more, most believable) — ‘knowledge’ applied to statements does not allow degrees. In the shorthand of logic Kp –> p, if a statement p is known, then it is true. Thus if p is false, a knowledge claim has to be withdrawn. [-p --> -Kp] (Notice it’s not the proposition which is certain, but the *relationship* between two propositions which is logically necessary.)
If knowledge were limited to topics about which certainty could be obtained, no empirical statement could be known. That’s a stringent requirement which science need not apply to its statements. There is empirical knowledge. It’s the certainty requirement that gets dropped. (Why this is a legitimate move would require more words than I intend to use here.)
Also, the sentences (statements, propositions): ‘God exists’ ‘God does not exist’ are not statements at all. Existence (as elementary logic shows) is not a predicate; that is, it is not a property like ‘is blue’ in the statement ‘the sky is blue.’ (Of course, non-existence is not a predicate either.)
So . . . the atheist asks “according to your concept of God, is there any empirical evidence that would count for or against there being a God?” For example, does this monotheist from the big-4 near eastern religions hold that God (Allah, Yahweh, Ahura Mazda) is all-knowing/benevolent/powerful? Is this God located somewhere in space-time — or has God left footprints (evidence) of omnipotence behind — as fundies claim.
If all the theories, methods, data of science can’t play any role in determining the truth of a statement that ‘a unique god of such-and-such attributes exists’; then what kind of claim is the monotheist making? (At this point theologians and religious philosophers hold hands and merrily chant the usual apologetic pap.)
Anyway, it’s easy to show that the so-called “God” of the big-4 near eastern religions does not exist. And this “He” is what counts to true believers — and “It” counts for nothing.
Now, is there some god or other? . . . But, that takes us back to all that’s gone before. So. . . just what kind of “being” are we talking about?
‘Certainty’, like ‘exists’, is a red herring —
bipolar2
© 2008
@bipolar2: Well-stated, sir. That’s the kind of logic that Kant is talking about, but I’m just drawing attention to other issues of the God debate and why we’re asking that question in the first place. I understand that you can define different faculties, with different functions and levels of certainty, all to reason, but both sides have to be extremely careful when judging the other because they are basically doing the same thing. Moreover, when we poke holes in an idea like God, I cannot see how useful that is, for theists and atheists alike. It seems like the more interesting, and easier to talk about, issues are the ones that come secondary to the question of God’s existence and any ambiguous and vague labels like Theist, Atheist, Agnostic, Christian, Catholic, whatever.
Well, as far as I know atheism is merely a lack of belief in the existence of a god. It is functionally the same as a lack of belief in the existence of fairies or elves. It doesn’t lead to anything, it is merely a symptom of an individual’s personal philosophy about life.
Generally, to be an atheist is to concern yourself only with that which has some evidence to back it up. To me, the agnostic puts too much emphasis on the fact that we cannot disprove things, like the existence of god. Our mental resources would be better used simply to focus on what we do know and can prove. Maybe elves do exist, maybe fairies too, but unless some hard evidence avails itself to us, our minds will be more profitably used dealing with the facts we do have, and go from there.
Actually, it depends on who’s god you are trying to disprove. The christian god cannot exist by definition. Their god is omnipotent and omniscient. How can one know the future if one can change it? If one can change the future, one cannot know the future. The christian god cannot exist.