RE: Agnostic: a pointless term?
December 8, 2014 at 5:25 am
(This post was last modified: December 8, 2014 at 5:28 am by bennyboy.)
I think an "-ism" is just a position. If you are gnostic, it doesn't really mean you know; it means you take the position that you know. So you can have gnostic theists and gnostic atheists-- and yet most would consider those positions mutually exclusive.
An agnostic is taking the position that he doesn't know something. I do not accept this "well, anything has an infinitesimal chance of being true, so I can't claim to 'know' for sure." Of course, we are all limited, and reserve the right to update our ideas as we collect more information about things. That's more a statement of the human condition than a position, and is hardly even worth stating.
I'm agnostic because I think language breaks down long before we can reach the boundary conditions at which mysteries might be revealed. What would you call the Big Bang singularity if it were discovered that QM particles have a kind of particular "consciousness"? This would be the Prima Genitor of all we experience as humans, and that is one of the definitions of God. What if you could (maybe by integrating the human brain with all the power of the internet someday) experience a billion times more of the universe than you can with your own sense? Would this be a "religious" experience? You'd be an archetypal Man, a kind of God in your own right, wouldn't you? You might have such a massively powerful intellect that you could figure out where the universe came from, or exactly how sentience arises from matter.
And yet, even if we could have experiences which fulfill traditional definitions of Godhood, there will be those (maybe most of us these days), who would never accept that word, no matter what. I suppose you could say that reality has an infinitely higher "resolution" than language. So when asking questions about reality, the simplest answer is often "Eeep. . . errrrp. . . cannot. . . compute." And that's what I call agnosticism.
And before someone inevitably says this is actually agnostic atheism, let me preemptively call bullshit. I suspect that if a meaningful definition of God were ever coined, I would think it likely or at least plausible; but given a wildcard definition "Do you believe in _________?", the answer is "I don't know."
An agnostic is taking the position that he doesn't know something. I do not accept this "well, anything has an infinitesimal chance of being true, so I can't claim to 'know' for sure." Of course, we are all limited, and reserve the right to update our ideas as we collect more information about things. That's more a statement of the human condition than a position, and is hardly even worth stating.
I'm agnostic because I think language breaks down long before we can reach the boundary conditions at which mysteries might be revealed. What would you call the Big Bang singularity if it were discovered that QM particles have a kind of particular "consciousness"? This would be the Prima Genitor of all we experience as humans, and that is one of the definitions of God. What if you could (maybe by integrating the human brain with all the power of the internet someday) experience a billion times more of the universe than you can with your own sense? Would this be a "religious" experience? You'd be an archetypal Man, a kind of God in your own right, wouldn't you? You might have such a massively powerful intellect that you could figure out where the universe came from, or exactly how sentience arises from matter.
And yet, even if we could have experiences which fulfill traditional definitions of Godhood, there will be those (maybe most of us these days), who would never accept that word, no matter what. I suppose you could say that reality has an infinitely higher "resolution" than language. So when asking questions about reality, the simplest answer is often "Eeep. . . errrrp. . . cannot. . . compute." And that's what I call agnosticism.
And before someone inevitably says this is actually agnostic atheism, let me preemptively call bullshit. I suspect that if a meaningful definition of God were ever coined, I would think it likely or at least plausible; but given a wildcard definition "Do you believe in _________?", the answer is "I don't know."
