Is being a gnostic atheist illogical?

[Angrboda]

I think to answer this question one needs a good answer about what it means to "know" something, in the sense of knowledge being a certainty, once known. Unfortunately, neither modern epistemology or science has a real answer for this, and when we look at historical understandings of the term 'knowledge', it breaks down at the edges and on border cases (See Gettier problems and "knowledge" as justified true belief). This is like quantum mechanics where if you extend your description outside the micro domain for which it was designed, the equations start giving nonsensical answers. This is a hard thing to describe, but our minds are simply one part of a system of multiple feedback loops between brain, evolution, environment, and time; these loops ultimately would be expressed as some form of equation, or set of equations. Just like with other such systems in math, some of these functions will be well behaved, and converge on a certain value at the limit of infinity, others may be well behaved in different ways, such as constantly cycling between two values; others will not be well behaved, and will be "knowably" not well behaved. I think "knowledge" will be a subset of those equations involving the terms mind and brain, which are well behaved and stably converge on a value. We don't have to wonder, then, "what if tomorrow brings something different?" because we've already determined today how that specific equation will behave "over the long haul" and at the limit; you don't need to go to the future to discover that, because the equation itself will tell you if, a) there is an answer, but not a usable one, b) there is no answer (no convergence), c) there is an answer, and it's knowably certain, or d) the behavior of the equation cannot be understood, and therefore the answer is undefined. Knowledge will be those knowably well behaved "world system" equations which converge to a specific value.

What this ultimately means is that the brain and the environment are continually feeding back into each other, but some of those cycles will be stable, and known stable, and some of those will 'be' "knowledge". No Nostradamus or time traveling scientists necessary, the math will look into the future for us.

At this point in time, however, the math and the understandings necessary to look at reality at this level is a long ways off, so we must settle for less quantifiable, philosophical answers. Science, at least if I read Feynman correctly, is not about certainty. It's about probability. What's most probable, and how do we order the actions we choose according to our standards of when to act on what sort of kinds of "probability scenarios". If suggest that all the probability scenarios include one decision/choice/answer that is far and away the most probable, and that be as close to 100% probable as possible, we may find there are very few things that actually meet this standard (or none), and if we then use this standard for choosing how to live, vast swaths of our time will be swallowed up by paralysis because that standard can't be met for the things we need to do. On the other hand, if we set that standard too low, so that it is easily met, it will be swallowed up by a bunch of bad or counter-productive actions which were taken because they easily met a bar set too low. So ultimately, the question is, for now I guess, where to set that bar so we can meet it sufficiently well to act when we need to do so, but high enough so we aren't "bad actors". Then we look and see which side of the line different things fall on. i think, on those terms, we have to say that gods fall in that area where we can reasonably say that there is sufficient reason to believe that allowing or anticipating a god hypothesis to be fulfilled, and orienting one's behavior around that, will result in way too many "bad acts" to justify using that approach. I guess this is an answer from the philosophy known as pragmatism, which I'm uneasy with, but to believe that gods are, are unknowable but possible and so on, simply leads to bad solutions for existing as biological organisms; we can't have any kind of certainty, but holding out for certainty will destroy our capacity to act, live and choose. So we accept the, "there are no gods," answer, not out of certainty from an epistemological standpoint, but from the standpoint that other operating assumptions are not robust and result in positive harm, degrading our ability to function as individuals, and as a species.