RE: Atheists, what are your thoughts on us Agnostics?
June 23, 2017 at 2:14 pm
(This post was last modified: June 23, 2017 at 2:16 pm by bennyboy.)
Okay, this has been 20 times, but I'll go for round 21.
"Agnostic" means "not knowing." There are many reasons why you might take not knowing as a position, and not all of them fit well with the 2-axis semantic that people here insist on.
The first issue is whether a question is being posed. If someone asks, "Do you think the Biblical God exists?" I will say, "No way, that's an incoherent idea!" If someone asks, "Do you think an intelligent Creator exists?" Then I might fall into a semantic quaqmire-- what IS intelligence? What is order? Was the Universe EVER created? There are so many kinds of not-knowing here that the answer to the question varies mainly with semantics, not with one's world view.
Another is a recognition of the process of arriving at a decisions. If someone asks me whether the hundredth digit of pi is a 7, I'd answer that I don't know. If they said "Okay, so you LACK a belief that it's 7. You'r an a 7-ist!" that would seem pretty strange. I need time to follow through my decision-making process, and making belief statements while that process is ongoing doesn't really make sense-- the answer is wait-and-see. The God question is complicated for some-- they go through rational processes, emotional experiences, philosophical inquiry, and so on, and under whatever definition, do not feel they've arrived at that point in the process at which they can formulate an answer.
Related to this is a false belief we have about the unity of the self: "Do YOU believe in God?" implies that there is one agent; the truth is that the mental processing of people is very complex, and parts of one's mind can simultaneously hold a belief and have a lack of it.
There's also a philosophical position-- that human beings cannot, ever, collect enough evidence to make a sensible answer of the God question. This agnosticism isn't a statement of belief about God, but a statement about the human condition-- it is one intrinsically filled with mystery and ignorance. I'm similarly agnostic about the Big Bang. I've heard arguments for and against it, and in the end, saying that I'm a-Big-Bang-ist, or a-eternal-expansionist or whatever is just not as sensible as the much simpler answer: "I don't know."
"Agnostic" means "not knowing." There are many reasons why you might take not knowing as a position, and not all of them fit well with the 2-axis semantic that people here insist on.
The first issue is whether a question is being posed. If someone asks, "Do you think the Biblical God exists?" I will say, "No way, that's an incoherent idea!" If someone asks, "Do you think an intelligent Creator exists?" Then I might fall into a semantic quaqmire-- what IS intelligence? What is order? Was the Universe EVER created? There are so many kinds of not-knowing here that the answer to the question varies mainly with semantics, not with one's world view.
Another is a recognition of the process of arriving at a decisions. If someone asks me whether the hundredth digit of pi is a 7, I'd answer that I don't know. If they said "Okay, so you LACK a belief that it's 7. You'r an a 7-ist!" that would seem pretty strange. I need time to follow through my decision-making process, and making belief statements while that process is ongoing doesn't really make sense-- the answer is wait-and-see. The God question is complicated for some-- they go through rational processes, emotional experiences, philosophical inquiry, and so on, and under whatever definition, do not feel they've arrived at that point in the process at which they can formulate an answer.
Related to this is a false belief we have about the unity of the self: "Do YOU believe in God?" implies that there is one agent; the truth is that the mental processing of people is very complex, and parts of one's mind can simultaneously hold a belief and have a lack of it.
There's also a philosophical position-- that human beings cannot, ever, collect enough evidence to make a sensible answer of the God question. This agnosticism isn't a statement of belief about God, but a statement about the human condition-- it is one intrinsically filled with mystery and ignorance. I'm similarly agnostic about the Big Bang. I've heard arguments for and against it, and in the end, saying that I'm a-Big-Bang-ist, or a-eternal-expansionist or whatever is just not as sensible as the much simpler answer: "I don't know."
