The Stray World

There is one per­sist­ent con­trib­utor to the com­ments in this blog  who really wants to assert that Pharyn­gula is full of knee-jerk reac­tion­ary com­ments, and that agnostics are not cowards.

I have been mon­it­or­ing this thread, and real­ise it is quite bal­anced with a few agnostics or people arguing for the ration­al­ity of the agnostic pos­i­tion as a state­ment of belief as well.

Chal­lenge offered to kok and other agnostics to join the dis­cus­sion and under­stand why Pharyn­gula is feared amongst people unwill­ing to bend to reason.

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Update 9th Novem­ber 2010

Des­pite my nearly des­per­ate situ­ation regard­ing cram­ming for exams, I found the time to not only join the fray, but read and ana­lyse every single com­ment in the thread above.

Appar­ently Steven Novella of The Skep­tics’ Guide to the Uni­verse fame decided to chime in on the side of self-identified agnostics.

While my exam-addled mind slept, the thread has now reached 203 com­ments. But most of the import­ant stuff has already been covered, although it appears that an epi­stem­o­lo­gical argu­ment is being put for­ward in the dying end of the thread.

To sum­mar­ise, Novella was the most cred­ible per­son arguing for the ration­al­ity of agnosti­cism. There were a few oth­ers, prob­ably, but only one went far enough to show quite expli­citly what I meant by intel­lec­tual cow­ardice without any prod­ding. Words in red are mine:

I am an agnostic by vir­tue of com­plete inab­il­ity to make (any) leap of faith. Accept­able logic. It’s like not hav­ing an ear for music, but with belief. Sort of accept­able ana­logy, but could be bet­ter. And athe­ism is a faith OH NO YOU DID NOT!, since the absence of god still can­not be proven empir­ic­ally. ***bites tongue. Prove a neg­at­ive? And no, I don’t “hide” under the agnostic label to avoid say­ing that I’m an athe­ist. Even though I don’t believe in any spe­cific (or even gen­eric) god, I think that my views are very far from bona fide athe­ism. Your words say no, your logic says ‘I am an athe­ist’. I also don’t claim to be any smarter than people who do make vari­ous leaps of faith, because the dif­fer­ence is in the faith aspect and not in reas­on­ing. See­ing as you are arguing on the basis that athe­ism is a faith, claim­ing a leap of faith here is really the wrong con­clu­sion to make.

To be fair, I will default to Novella instead:

Mike wrote:“But you don’t man­u­fac­ture uncer­tainty in other fields by invent­ing a pos­i­tion not pos­tu­lated by any believ­ers in said fields. Why go through the trouble for religion? ”

I thought I addressed this but since it keeps com­ing up.

I am not man­u­fac­tur­ing uncer­tainty. Not even sure how you get there from any­thing I wrote. Agnosti­cism is about recog­niz­ing that unfalsifi­able claims are out­side of empir­ical know­ledge. Noth­ing man­u­fac­tured there.

I am also not invent­ing a pos­i­tion. First, there are deists — Mar­tin Garnder, hello.

Second — hypo­thet­ical situ­ations are used in philo­sophy to cla­rify and estab­lish prin­ciples from which you can then pro­ceed and apply to spe­cific (messy)questions.

And finally — I do not make the (what I con­sider false) dis­tinc­tion between religion-based claims and other ideo­lo­gical claims — pseudos­cientific, social, polit­ical, etc. Rather, my method is, for any par­tic­u­lar claim, is to sep­ar­ate out the empir­ical claims and treat them like any sci­entific claim. And also to identify and non-empirical com­pon­ents and point them out — whether they are unstated assump­tions or ten­ets of faith.

Agnosti­cism is not lim­ited to the­ism or reli­gion. I am agnostic toward the ques­tion of whether or not our uni­verse is a primary particle in a far greater uni­verse. I also recog­nize that is an unfalsifi­able (and there­fore use­less, if inter­est­ing) idea and there is no basis upon which to main­tain any belief about it.

And he ends it rather courteously:

All — thanks for indul­ging my agnosti­cism dis­cus­sion. I seem to go through this every 6 months or so. I know I came out swinging, but we are gen­er­ally on the same side, and we agree more than we dis­agree. There is an inter­est­ing per­spect­ive dif­fer­ence among groups in the skeptical/atheist com­munity and I wanted to see if we could ham­mer that out a bit.

I do hope that at least there is gen­eral recog­ni­tion that within the skep­tical com­munity there are self-identified agnostics who have very good philo­soph­ical and prac­tical reas­ons for being so. And we all want the same thing — to pro­mote sci­ence and reason. People can hon­estly dis­agree about the best way to do that.

Let’s get this out of the way. Even Novella, who claims that there is a reas­on­able pos­i­tion to use agnosti­cism as a philo­soph­ical pos­i­tion ration­al­ises that pla­cing a deity out­side of the realm of falsifi­able evid­ence makes it inter­est­ing but use­less (ergo unscientific).

Unless I am read­ing it incorrectly.

Plus as I have found out myself via semantic hell, agnosti­cism is a state­ment of know­ledge, and not of belief.

I can call myself an agnostic athe­ist, and it would be per­fectly and tech­nic­ally accept­able. As they are mutu­ally exclus­ive terms. The mud­dling comes from self-identified agnostics who con­fuse the pos­i­tion of agnosti­cism as a middle ground between belief and dis­be­lief, or a pos­i­tion com­pletely removed from the belief scale (which is cor­rect, they are not on the same plane of questioning).

How­ever, when I came to read through the thread above, I struck upon a rather insight­ful comment:

But to your main point, I agree. I am fine with Huxley’s defin­i­tion. I’d call myself an agnostic athe­ist when it’s appro­pri­ate. I just don’t usu­ally bother because per­son­ally I think the “agnostic” part is unne­ces­sary. It bor­ders on being a dis­tinc­tion without a dif­fer­ence, because it doesn’t seem to add much. I don’t use it for any­thing out­side of reli­gious dis­cus­sions, so why even use it there?

So while it is tech­nic­ally cor­rect to use “agnostic athe­ist” as a term, it is as good as say­ing “agnostic ateapot­ist” or “agnostic abat­man­ist”. Ulti­mately, noth­ing of value is added to the title as to be agnostic is to not pos­sess any know­ledge of the sub­ject, but to be athe­istic is to state your pos­i­tion of dis­be­lief towards the sub­ject, in this case, an unprov­able and unknown deity.

To con­clude for now, I am will­ing to con­cede that call­ing agnostics “intel­lec­tual cow­ards” may be excess­ively bel­li­ger­ent, and am will­ing instead to use the term “intel­lec­tu­ally dis­hon­est” instead when demean­ing those who attempt to use “agnostic” as a pos­i­tion of belief.

I now leave you with a bit of ration­al­ising using the term agnostic and extra­ter­restrial life:

I am agnostic about the pres­ence of extra-terrestrial life in the uni­verse because it is too large to know presently.

I how­ever accept that there is prob­ably no extra-terrestrial life as there is presently no con­vin­cing evid­ence to show that there are ali­ens out there.

There­fore, I am an athe­ist towards aliens.

I would add agnostic to it but really, it says noth­ing about my beliefs.