I recently engaged in an e-mail exchange with a reader who had sent me an invitation to join in a petition drive to reaffirm America’s long-time motto, “In God We Trust.” I rejected the offer in no uncertain terms, which led to an exchange of views: she is a devout Christian; I (hopefully this revelation comes as no surprise to my long-time readers) am a committed agnostic.
Our exchange culminated in her wish that God would bless me and show me how much He loves me. She also said she would pray for me, to which I replied that she didn’t need to do so, as I am content to be ignorant of the existence of the God she believes in or any other reasonable facsimile thereof.
Let me be clear: the idea of God is eminently appealing, especially if that deity is one who hears all prayers and responds favorably to those that are well-delivered, and even more especially if He (or She, but let’s stick with the male version for purposes of simplicity) also maintains a heavenly place that is open to all who live good lives in the here and now, when they depart this earthly existence.
That God, more or less, is the one I grew up believing in. He was the one I prayed to, the one I understood was all about love, the one I hoped would judge me good enough to allow entry into his kingdom when I died. He was all those things to me, even to the point that I seriously considered the ministry until wiser counsel prevailed.
That counsel, the accumulation of learning and experience, led me to question and, ultimately, to reject the beliefs I had held so dear in my youth. Forever since, I have been something of a spiritual explorer, searching for answers that will allow me to know what to this point in my life I do not and cannot know.
Agnosticism is not atheism, and as a firm advocate of the former, I earnestly reject the latter. Atheism is smug and obnoxious in its rejection of anything resembling the God in whom America trusts. Agnosticism is equally rejecting, but only from the perspective of ignorance (and it’s hard to be smug and obnoxious when you admit you are ignorant).
That the two “isms” are often lumped together (often to be joined with one or two others – like communism and socialism) disturbs me probably as much as devout Catholics are disturbed to be lumped with all the many Protestant sects in being called Christians. But as with the differences between Catholics and Protestants, the distinctions in views of matters spiritual between atheists and agnostics are significant.
Atheists do not believe in God (again here defined as anything resembling the deity of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths; we’ll leave some of the more exotic views such as the pantheist Gods of the Hindus and the humanist god of the Zen Buddhists for another day); neither do agnostics. But atheists are certain of their non-belief, while agnostics are open to all possibilities on the subject.
The evidence points against a God who hears prayers and abides over all from some spiritual nirvana. Atheists absolutely know that such a deity cannot possibly exist, and they heap scorn and derision on all who profess belief in such a concept.
Agnostics, on the other hand, accept that all evidence available to them strongly suggests that such a belief is ill-founded, but they allow that they can’t know for sure, because they haven’t been to the “other side” to observe what’s there.
Put another way, perhaps in terms that will be more accessible, agnostics accept that they don’t know what they can’t know, while atheists claim that they can know, by a process of simple deduction, what they haven’t yet themselves experienced.
The ultimate question that both those with faith and atheists claim to have the answer to is this: What might exist in the non-material world? True believers claim to know absolutely that there is a God who abides in it. Atheists claim to know absolutely that there is no non-material world and hence no God who rules over it.
Agnostics are not so convinced. True, we say, the evidence available to us indicates that a non-material world is unlikely, but, we quickly add, we can’t know for sure. How, for example, we are inclined to ask, did we get here if there isn’t a non-material force that willed us to be here? Put another way, what created all of this (the world, the universe, life in all its perfection and imperfection)?
It is these imponderables that afflict the mind of the agnostic. We’d love to know and be able to hold absolute beliefs, but we can’t, or at least we haven’t figured out how to know what we’d need to know. And so we declare in favor of the most likely result of our experiences and intellectual abilities and hold that we cannot believe in this all-knowing, all-powerful, ever-present God that our true believer friends cling to so fervently.
Faith is too easy for us, even as it is impossible for us to achieve. It is too easy, because it sweeps under the rug all the difficult questions our intellect forces us to ask, and for that very reason, it is impossible for us to achieve, because our intellect won’t allow us to hold it.
And so, when the true believer reader with whom I exchanged views told me she wept when she read of my “falling out of grace with God,” I tried to reassure her. Yes, we are troubled souls because we don’t have the assurance your faith gives you. But we are nonetheless content, because we know that if there is a God, He knows that He created in us this very ability that causes us such vexation: to think and question everything until we find the truth.
And if He doesn’t exist, then we are exactly where we should be: unknowing and content to be so.
I think your definition of the difference between agnostic and atheist is too strict. I, personally, believe that most definitions of God do not admit of proof either way. I can’t know that God doesn’t exist with certainty as a logical proposition because that’s part of the definition of God. So instead, in logical terms I can only say I think the probability of God is so vanishingly small that it is sensible to act as if there is not such a God. By your definition I’m an agnostic – but I would call myself an atheist if it were not for one important niggle. I refuse to be called not by my beliefs but, rather, by my disbeliefs. Therefore, I prefer to call myself a Darwinian Existentialist (or, occasionally, an Existentialist Darwinian :-)). I believe that Darwinian theories do a fair job of describing the mechanics how we got where we are and what drives us; Existentialism, the Universe in which that has occurred. Those with faith often profess to find such an outlook bleak. By contrast. I find it all the more miraculous that Nature is as it is in such a Universe and would be less impressed if a wrathful but loving paternalist potter had crafted us all from Middle Eastern clay.
Not certain what label you would choose to hang on me – I am not an atheist – I do believe that there is a “higher power” out there somewhere. I am not at all certain that “it” is either male or female – or even has a body like humans. But I am reasonably certain that the earth and the solar system did not create itself – something/somebody did.
I do hope that there is some sort of existence when life ends because I hope that I can be reunited with the love of my life that I lost to Alzheimer’s some six years ago.
The scorn and derision expressed in modern times by atheists toward devout believers is but a grain of sand in comparison to the infinite wasteland of murder, violence, corruption, greed and psychological slavery that true believers have used for centuries to suppress any and all efforts to suggest God’s existence is up for debate. It’s only fair that atheists have something of a chip on their shoulder. I consider myself an atheist, yet cling to the 0.000000001% shred of nagging doubt that some form of the modern notion of “God” could actually exist. I suspect this is due to the same notion you expressed: I am open to all possibilities being true, and therefore I cannot completely exclude any single possibility until factually proven incorrect. Where I differ with you is that I believe that science will continue to chip away at the universe’s many mysteries until eventually revealing answers to the questions you seek to have answered, i.e., the origin of our universe, and the existence of a non-material world. In this sense I find your presumption that certain things are unknowable to be objectionable. M theory or string theory postulates the existence of several dimensions or planes of existence co-occurring, and interacting with one another in ways that we are currently unable to perceive, understand or explain. Our current scientific understanding of sub-atomic physics is laughable. We know that if we split an atom, one of the smallest particle known to man, we create the largest explosion we are capable of manufacturing. Prior to a few hundred years ago, an explosion of that magnitude could only have been attributable to one thing: God. But God is just the space that science has yet to fill. I believe the answers exist and can be discovered over time through meticulous scientific exploration, progress and ingenuity. To that end, I will never concede that certain things are unknowable, even though I admit they have not yet been explained. In large part the scorn and derision of atheists toward devout believers is due to the aggressive efforts made by devout believers to obfuscate the scientific process with faith-infused junk science (i.e. “Intelligent Design”) and/or to propagate misguided, oppressive belief systems under the guise of reasonable social policy (i.e. Prop 8). I think atheists have a long way to go before their scorn and derision toward devout believers rises to a level that is unreasonable.
Ed,
I must protest the slander you make against atheists. You state “Atheists claim to know absolutely that there is no non-material world and hence no God who rules over it.” Atheists I’ve spoken to would never claim “absolutely”, nor would I. What we do believe, and we all believe something Ed, even you, is that current knowledge suggests there’s no reason for a god and therefore no reason to believe in one. You say atheists are smug and obnoxious. Really? So by proclaiming I don’t believe I’ve become smug and obnoxious? I protest, this is not so!
The title of your column states ‘believe only what you can know”. I doubt that even you Ed follow that rule. There are many things we can’t know for certain but we move forward with a certain amount of belief. Neither of us will ever visually see radio, X-ray, or gamma rays but I believe in them. Are you agnostic to them? Belief or non-belief in a god is binary, one believes or doesn’t. Though you might tell no one, somewhere inside you believe or don’t believe. Saying your agnostic is simply saying you don’t want to publicly put any skin in the game.
I invite you to read the many definitions of atheism, there are several. Here’s one I favor. An atheist is a non theist, period. There’s nothing smug about that.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/sn-definitions.html
I had a lot of fun with your column Ed!
Much of this issue turns on definitions, of course, but my point was to distinguish those who have settled their beliefs to a point of intellectual satisfaction (atheists and theists) from those who have not and admit to being unconvinced of anything so definitive (agnostics).
You are free to claim you don’t know for sure and still be an atheist – that makes the issue definitional. Or you can state that you are certain based on what you know, which, in my book, makes you smug and obnoxious.
In the vanguard of the so-called smug and obnoxious are some of my favorite authors. I can recommend Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith” that shows why it’s important to have a view here (and his follow-up, “The Moral Landscape” which shows that science does have a role in morality that it must not abdicate to religion). Also Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” which cries out for atheists to be accorded the same respect for their beliefs that the religious are accorded for theirs. And I also like Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell,” an attempt to study religion itself scientifically and imagine its evolution in human culture. The religious find all these books smug and obnoxious. Personally I find their insistence that this is a Christian nation, their beatification of the founders (largely non-existent) Christianity and their insistence on applying their beliefs to everyone through public policy to be not only smug and obnoxious but dangerous and a threat to the actual core beliefs of the founders (fortunately enshrined in the Constitution).
Furthermore, the notion that atheists can’t possibly know there’s no God is logically problematical. Suppose I tell you that a flying spaghetti monster created the universe and she wants us all to eat spaghetti on Fridays. I also posit that although she’s omniscient and omnipresent you can’t see her (unless she wants you to) and you can’t expect all the conflicting things that are said to be true of her to cohere because she transcends mere human understanding and contains myriad contradictions. Oh, and by the way, she has talked to me and considers you an infidel who should be stoned to death.
In this fanciful concoction I have so defined the flying spaghetti monster as to be improvable. So, strictly speaking, you can’t prove I’m wrong. Would it be smug or obnoxious of you to suggest that perhaps I need psychiatric help or am a mountebank or charlatan? Or would it be wise? We atheists are in the same boat. If we claim to find such fairy tales so highly improbable that we won’t order our lives around them we are accused of insufferable smugness for claiming to know that which we cannot. I call this unfair.
It also seems to me that many so called agnostics are simply taking Pascal’s wager but not really putting their money where there mouth is. If you think there may be a God because you can’t prove there isn’t one, oughtn’t you to obey His rules? Else you face the freezing flames of eternal damnation, don’t you? And how do you know whether he really prefers the rules of the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Manicheans or Zoroastrians? I don’t think agnosticism is, therefore, truly an intellectually honest position. It is rather like the position of the pacifist in Sartre’s “Huis Clos,” a refusal to engage; an attempt to stay outside the fray. But the battle must be joined. Harris’ “The End of Faith” makes that abundantly clear.
To be clear about my views, I do not believe in God in any form, but I do not have proof of the non-existence of a spiritual entity that is the primal force (God, for want of a better word) behind our existence. And to be agnostic, for me, is to acknowledge only what I can empirically prove to my own intellectual satisfaction.
To not believe in God is easy; to justify that non-belief intellectually is, for me at least, more difficult. If we cannot know how “we” got to be here – “we” meaning the universe – or know what existed before it or where it ends and what exists where it doesn’t (and I don’t think science will ever be able to answer those things), then intellectually, I’d be a fool to claim to KNOW to a point of absolute certainty that there is no primal force that is indeed the answer to those questions. In the end, infinity is an irrational construct, but it seems to be all we have to answer the foregoing questions. Until, if ever, we are able to define infinity with scientific specificity, I am intellectually frozen in a state of unknowing, which I define as agnosticism.
I’m perfectly prepared to believe that there are some facts we would want to know that science won’t be able to pierce the veil of. Perhaps, for instance, from our perspective here on earth in this particular time-space continuum, it will never be possible to ascertain anything prior to the Big Bang (assuming the concept of “before” has any meaning before the Big Bang instigated the dimensions we’re aware of, including time).
Even if that were true, to say, “since I can’t scientifically determine the primum mobile of our Universe, I must be prepared to accept some myths, whose human creation I can definitively trace to no more than 5 – 10,000 years ago,” are unprovable but nevertheless possible explanations for our origins goes a little too far for me.
Obviously, as a purely logical concern, the fact that I can’t disprove them means they can’t be ruled out with 100% certainty. But narratives we can pretty clearly trace to particular moments in human cultural evolution, surely makes them among the most unlikely of all the possible explanations we might entertain. I don’t think it’s too smug, when we know how the Jewish founding myths were commissioned about 700 BCE and we know something of the origins of the other main claimants to “respectable” religious authority, to think that science, however imperfect, however incomplete, has the superior claim on the tools and methods to discover what is knowable.
At this point the argument is becoming circular. My confidence that our foundation myths are human creations can’t be “proved” since neither of us was around 3,000 years ago to hear a Judean King lay out his requirements for a national myth and there’s no recording of the conversation. But why I should be asked to believe that this was revealed to prophets by people who claim to “know” it and accused of smugness if I refuse remains mysterious to me. We all believe different things. Some of us smugly, others humbly, some arrogantly, some more timidly. I see no reason to smear atheists with the brush of smugness any more than the most tentative agnostic.
I don’t mean to suggest the possibility of a God in the Judeo-Christian sense when I assert my agnosticism. I agree that He is about as far-fetched as definitions of God can get in the modern age.
But I do think the possibility of a spiritual force (undefinable and unknowable from our perspective) is plausible. And if it isn’t spiritual, then give it some other means of identification. Or just tell me what existed before time, and if you say nothing, then tell me how “something” happened.
Ed,
Reading your comments above you stated “To be clear about my views, I do not believe in God in any form…”
My dear Sir, that is an atheist. An agnostic atheist, but an atheist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism
And just so you know how loved we atheists are in this country you may wish to read this article recently posted on Slate.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/ft/2012/02/atheism_in_america_why_won_t_the_u_s_accept_its_atheists_.single.html
Why does the fact that I can’t explain how “something happened” mean I have to accept it was therefore likely the Universe was started by some mystical or spiritual force? Why isn’t it sufficient to admit I don’t know how the Universe got started without having to assent to some vague, oceanic, mysterious force?
I don’t know how the Universe started, scientists probably won’t figure it out in my life time and I still reject mysticism as the most likely explanation left to me.
Ed: You are aware that “In God We Trust” is the U.S. National Motto, yes? It appears in courtrooms and other government buildings in far-left cities including Manhattan, Boston and Madison.
In light of these facts, what exactly is your problem with what Jacquie Sullivan?
She has been doing on her own time and without pay for over 8 years, while also juggling her 14-year tenure as a Bakersfield City Councilmember (the sixth-largest city in California) and her own successful real estate firm.
Please excuse the typos in my above message. BT
Ed Telfeyan’s Newsletter For Hungry Intellectuals?
Seriously intellectuals? You call this intellectual?
“Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”
Who said that?
Who said, “Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle…Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable”?
It was the guy that invented, named, defined and defended Agnosticism, He said the above in response to another philosophy stealing wanker Samuel Laing, who came up with “Articles of the Agnostic Creed”.
Agnosticism is the personal philosophy of Thomas Huxley, he invented it, named it, defined it, and defended it. If anyone wants to learn what it’s about – READ HUXLEY – not some know-it-all wanker like Ed Telfeyan.
TJ Bradders
Can you please remove the article? It’s was not well conceived, as you can see your idea of agnosticism simply feeds the Atheist who attack Agnosticism.
Just let huxley defend Huxley – he’s been doing it for 144 years and no one had even dented his philosophy.
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