Proposition of New Terminology Concerning Belief

[NWC]

Hey everyone!

It's been a long time since I've posted here. I've been busy with school and work - doing both at the same time leaves little time for fun stuff, and unfortunately Reddit sneakily took the place of my go-to site.

I'm stopping by to link you guys to something I just put up on my blog - an idea I've been tinkering with for awhile and finally decided to do something about. It's about agnosticism, atheism, and belief. I think it's pretty cool and the diagram I put with it has been pretty useful for me in discussions about these kind of subjects.

So, here is is: http://chicagobelgium.blogspot.com/2012/02/proposition-of-new-terminology.html

I'd love to head what you guys think.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The Nannywall got me.  I'll look at it at home tonight.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

NWC! Yay!

I will look at it when I get home!

[Cramulus]

Hey NWC! welcome back

It's funny how the atheist and agnostic positions are slowly becoming camps. A position like atheism shouldn't need leaders (like Richard Dawkins) - I mean, it's not a church, right? It's a position about churches. And slowly, it's morphing into an institution, which is about the worst thing that can happen to it.


Penn Gilette posted a video a few years ago about how anybody who claims to be an agnostic is really just an atheist. Because, as he frames it, it really just as simple as "Do you believe that there's a god or not?"

I couldn't object more!

It's like, I've got this box. I've told everybody that there's a monkey inside of it. Suddenly there are two camps, a group of people that believe me, and a group of people that think the box doesn't have a monkey in it.

The agnostic position is "Without opening the box, I can't judge whether or not there's a monkey in it." Gillette seems to insist that EVERYBODY either supports or denies the existence of that monkey. But seriously, if we want to be really scientific about it, I can't make a statement about the reality of that monkey without opening the box. So my "belief" is a Mu-position¹, neither on nor off.


wrote about this a bit more here.



¹ You know, the same noise the chao makes

[NWC]

Thanks for reading!

The agnostic position is "Without opening the box, I can't judge whether or not there's a monkey in it." Gillette seems to insist that EVERYBODY either supports or denies the existence of that monkey. But seriously, if we want to be really scientific about it, I can't make a statement about the reality of that monkey without opening the box. So my "belief" is a Mu-position¹, neither on nor off.

I've agreed with this, before, but always with hesitation, and I recently articulated why. Simply put, there are unexplainable things in the world which the belief in a higher power explains. We can only go back so far in our retracing of the big bang, we can't find that first cause. There are things which physics, especially on a quantum level, cannot explain with any degree of certainty. Giving them the benefit of the doubt and hoping that science will one day answer those questions is tantamount to having faith in science: positing a belief in its future triumph.

There is a position which some take to the question which is similar - just ignoring it. Kind of like your mu-position (I like that term), people who are simply uninterested questions such as "What are we?", "Where do we come from?", "What does it mean to be a good person?". These questions take different forms depending on one's beliefs or lack thereof. As someone who has been poisoned with these questions, I'm unable to detach myself from asking them, so for me, the domain of the beyond has always had some interest, if only as a tool is repositioning my questions in order to play new games with them.

I don't know if those questions are worth asking - I'll take an agnostic stance there too - but I'm unable to convince myself that they're not (Maybe that's something I should think about doing next..) , and I think that's the case for most of the world.


As for the thing I wrote, what I especially like about it is flexibility - it can be adapted easily to different questions. Debates of scientific realism, antirealism and pragmatism find themselves in need of justifying their points of view as well, and where one accuses the other of having an unfounded faith in a certain scientific principle, the issue of belief comes up again. And here, the monkey-in-a-box reduction is even more difficult, as we rely on knowledge of certain imperceptible entities (such as electrons) to do many of the things we do in the modern world. The positioning is not easily avoidable (though some philosophers do avoid it, and justify their mu-position with only moderate success).

Girlfriend says it's dinner time - I'll check out your link later tonight

[LMNO]

Simply put, there are unexplainable things in the world which the belief in a higher power explains. We can only go back so far in our retracing of the big bang, we can't find that first cause. There are things which physics, especially on a quantum level, cannot explain with any degree of certainty. Giving them the benefit of the doubt and hoping that science will one day answer those questions is tantamount to having faith in science: positing a belief in its future triumph.

I think that's known as the "god in the gaps" gambit, where "God" is the name for the shit we haven't figured out yet.  The beauty (or failure) of this argument is that there will always be stuff we haven't figured out yet.  As soon as we figure out, say, the first cause of the big bang, you can say, "well, what about dark matter?  That's where God is."  And when we figure that out, you can simply retreat just beyond the latest frontier of our knowledge.

And the "faith in science" argument is also specious -- the belief that we can usually figure things out stems from the fact that we have figured things out.  Faith is belief without proof, and the belief that science progressively solves the mysteries of reality is proved by the history of science.

[East Coast Hustle]

I was trying and failing to think of how to articulate that. Thanks for doing such a killer job of it!

And I tend to agree with Penn Gilette about agnosticism in regards to "God". If belief in God requires faith in the existence of God, I don't see how being "unsure" whether or not God exists is functionally any different from not believing God exists except as a matter of semantics.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Agnostics are fence-sitters.  Me, I KNOW there's a God, so faith has nothing to do with it.  And there's none of this "God of the Gaps", business, either.  It's more like "Hannibal Lecter is hiding, and you can't see him."  Remember the Canaanites?  Neither do I.

[LMNO]

I was trying and failing to think of how to articulate that. Thanks for doing such a killer job of it!

And I tend to agree with Penn Gilette about agnosticism in regards to "God". If belief in God requires faith in the existence of God, I don't see how being "unsure" whether or not God exists is functionally any different from not believing God exists except as a matter of semantics.

There is an argument for agnosticism that simply says that God is not a scientfically testable concept, so it cannot be proved true or false; making it "scientifically meaningless" -- however, just because you can't test for God's existence, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, either.  You literally can't prove or disprove it.  And you can't say "because I can't prove it, it's false," nor can you say "because I can't disprove it, it's true".

However, the inability to test for God does imply that it's functionally disproven.  But that's more of a philisophical argument.

[East Coast Hustle]

Indeed, but along those lines there's no real way to disprove the existence of Leprechauns or MHADJICKQUE or the Boogeyman.

I mean, at some point you just have to say "OK, that's so preposterously fucking STUPID that whether or not it can be proved or disproved is beside the point".

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I like your proposal, and I particularly appreciate your alignment of "refusing to state that there is, conclusively, no God" with science. People have a really, really hard time with uncertainty, and a particularly hard time reconciling the idea that it is often scientific to refrain from stating a conclusion. They tend to push "I have no evidence or reason to believe that this exists, so my default is that it does not exist until there is evidence that it does" into a box labeled "DEFINITELY DOES NOT EXIST" or a box labeled "I SECRETLY BELIEVE IN GOD". They simply cannot accept the scientific position of "no evidence means no evidence".

[East Coast Hustle]

If God does exist, he waited an AWFULLY long time after the development of human language to make his presence known.

[Xooxe]

"Theism" and "atheism" are nice and simple. I find it strange that people who actually don't believe in the existence of deities want a labyrinth of definitions for positions on something that no one knows anyway, but if that's what we gotta do to avoid being intellectually and socially foolish then realistically we need as many as possible. The more overlapping and vague the better.

[rong]

i keep reading this thread title as "Proposition of New Terminology Concerning Beef"

[Salty]

What if the idea of God, certain conversations with random unfortunates aside, just isn't something that enters my mind? If someone else doesn't bring it up to me, what should compel me to think about God at all? If I don't then how can I believe or disbelieve?

I just don't care if there's a God any more than I care about a monkey I don't have anything to do with and never will. It's like I was carrying this puzzle for years, twisting it over in my head, looking for cracks and clues. Then I put the fucker down started taking care of things that had an actual impact on how I live my life.

I don't care what Penn Gillette thinks about God, or what he thinks people who think about God think about, either.