On agnosticism
by Hanlon on March 14, 2007 at 5:56 pmWell, my last entry on my lack of “friendliness” with my atheism caused a wee bit of a firestorm (though one I certainly appreciate!). So before I get back into my usual schedule of writing about current events and politics, I’ll write a little followup.
One thing that I’ve run into both in the comments, in the emails, and in discussions elsewhere of the article is that being an atheist is no better than being a theist, as both are dogmatic. Theists know there is a god, atheists know there isn’t, and thus only agnosticism is the proper stance to take since we can’t truthfully know 100% in either direction.
The problem with this, one that ol’ Richard Dawkins has gotten into rather nicely, is that it assumes that the probability of god’s existence is 50/50 and it’s up to the theists to prove it definitively or the atheists to disprove it definitively. It is never the responsibility of the disbeliever to disprove that which he doesn’t believe in, only the believer has to justify his belief. An analogy I used in the comments is if I claim I had sex with Jessica Alba. It isn’t your responsibility to track her down, find security footage, or do DNA tests on her to see if I’ve left traces on her. It’s my responsibility to prove that I did.
If a lawyer says that suspect A murdered victim B, it isn’t the defense’s responsibility to prove that he didn’t, it’s the prosecution’s responsibility to prove that he did. We do not assume that it’s true and then hope that the defense’s case is adequate to disprove it. Rather we assume he didn’t and then see if the prosecution’s case is logical (at least ideally, it seems a lot of people reverse the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra).
When someone tells you that God is real and he exists, is it thus your responsibility to prove he doesn’t? Of course not. Particularly with something as inherently out of reach as a god. A murder can be disproven by the defense simply by showing the suspect was somewhere else at the time. But God is unreachable, he exists outside of science (supposedly), and heaven isn’t a “place” that we can visit to check if he’s there.
It’s no different than if I claim that I have a genie in my house that grants wishes. It’s impossible to disprove, I just explain that he’s invisible and won’t perform for a crowd. But my simple assertion of his existence doesn’t immediately mean that it is equally likely that he does and doesn’t exist. I cannot use your ability to disprove my genie as evidence that he isn’t there. The common, and entirely faulty, phrase is “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
The glaring error is that this opens the possibility up to anything and everything, and gives theists no reason to believe in one god over the other. No Christian can disprove Allah, no Muslim can disprove Yahweh, and none of them can disprove Thor, Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, or any of the other ancient gods. As they all live in some kind of intangible ether, the inability to prove that any of them don’t exist would, it seems, mean that we are all forced to be agnostic toward absolutely every current and ancient deity.
But no one is like that as far as I’m aware. The theists who stamp their feet and cry that their god cannot be disproven do not apply that logic to any other gods, and the agnostics who sniff at atheists for being dogmatic are not willing to extend such possibilities to the ancient polytheistic religions.
Why’s that? Because there is, in all of our minds, a standard of sorts for what is believable. The agnostics, and many of the modern Christians, will scoff at those who take the Bible literally, saying it’s not that God literally created the world in six days. No, Noah didn’t have all of the billions of species on his boat, and he certainly wasn’t 950 when he died. God didn’t come down as a burning bush and he isn’t a man in a long white beard who sits on a physical throne, and there’s no literal pearly gate to walk through with St Peter sitting at a podium in front of it.
We reject the ancient gods as their claims are equally ludicrous. Day doesn’t change to night because of a chariot being flown across the sky, there’s no Poseidon lurking in the oceans and trees are not inhabited by a god specifically for them. But these other claims cannot be disproven either, combing the ocean will show an absence of evidence of a Poseidon but I’m fairly certain none of the agnostics out there are equally open to that possibility.
Agnostics are only “agnostics” toward things they believe are possible, and reject a myriad of equally un-disprovable things with the same assuredness I reject the things they don’t. Many things have never been disproven, from the previously mentioned gods to the genie in my house, to Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Yet these agnostics never sneer at people who disbelieve in them.
Or maybe I’m crazy.
Posted: March 14th, 2007 under religion.
Comment from Josh
Time March 18, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Hi Hanlon. It’s me, I’ve just discovered your new post. I’m a bit slow…
I agree with your stance on (un)belief in God, it is a binary choice. We can’t say he exists with 50% probability, he either does or doesn’t. I agree that it is not the atheist’s job to disprove God, it is the believer’s job to prove it.
I find it interesting that you resort to the trial analogy to make your point, because that’s exactly the standard that we need to apply. A trial is not carried out using empirical science, because this would require testability and repeatability. By definition, one-off events are not repeatable and therefore not testable. Rather, we apply the standard of a trial, by using the burden of the evidence to make our point. We actually do this in many fields that are considered scientific, when we can’t carry out experiments. Of particular relevance to the discussion is history.
Just as an aside, the claim “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” in a strictly logical sense is true. “A implies B” does *not* imply “not A implies not B”, direct from a math text. This says nothing at all about the truth of the claims, and it specifically does not say that “B and not B” are equally likely.
However, Christianity does claim to be provable in the same sense as in your trial, that is, on the burden of the evidence. Its claims are grounded in history, in the history of Israel and in the existence of Jesus (and indirectly in the subsequent behaviour of his followers). Show me that Jesus didn’t exist, and I will deny Christianity. I do deny Zeus et al and the ancient polytheistic religions, because I have not seen any *evidence* for them.
I need to take an aside here, to address the issue of taking the Bible “literally.” Since you mentioned the word chariot, I immediately thought of Psalm 104, where it says of God: “He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.” What does it mean to take this “literally,” knowing full well that the book of Psalms is *poetry*? I don’t think anyone would claim that the God has chariots of clouds pushed along by the wind. Rather, I would say what the poet is trying to convey is that God is in control of the weather, just as he controls all of creation. So, when we read *any text*, including the Bible, including non-fictional accounts, we don’t accept every word as “literal”. Rather, we read with the goal of extracting the *meaning* from the text.
The Bible is composed of many different types of writing; narrative, law, poetry, epistle, apocalyptic, and so on. We need to read each of these genres as they are meant to be read, and use this critical reading to guide our extraction of the meaning. (Otherwise, we can easily put our own meaning into the text.) It’s easy with the epistles, where we are told exactly what to think or do (eg, pray to God, don’t have sex outside marriage), and fiendishly difficult to do with apocalyptic literature, where we need to do things like figure out exactly what “666″ is supposed to mean. (I understand that it has to do with religion being used as a tool of oppresion, but ask more if you are interested.)
The issues that you mention from the Bible are like this, needing to be interpreted from the text. I personally don’t believe in a 6 24-hour day creation, and I don’t believe that the text claims this. I am in the process of figuring out Noah and the flood, but there is definitely evidence for some kind of flood from non-biblical ancient sources. I have no problem with God speaking from a burning bush. The ‘man in a long white beard on a physical thrones’ and literal pearly gates with attendant St Peter and podium are un-biblical fabrications. I believe in the literal truth of the resurrection of Jesus. (One point you left out which people really don’t like.)
So finally, returning to the central issue, I am trying to make the point that faith and belief, at least for a Christian, are not based on something outside the realm of facts. We believe in a historical Jesus who died on a cross and yet came alive.
And yes, agnosticism is intellectual laziness. We need to look at the evidence, think the issues through and find the truth.