More about the Agnostic Position

A recent comment on one of my earlier posts (“Agnostic or Atheist”) arrived just as the Google blog site experienced technical trouble, and was unavailable. It appears that the comment has been lost on the blog site, but I did retain a copy in the form of the gmail notification I received.

I deemed the comment sufficiently interesting and insightful that I want to devote a new blog entry to it. The writer of the comment was one “Rufus Otis”, who has visited and contributed good comments (some tinged with humor such as his hyperbolic likening of one of his own essays to “Principia Mathematica”) to my blog on other occasions.

Here he wrote:
“I don't consider agnosticism as partway to theism or atheism -- but rather an end position. In my opinion, you can't get past the question of what it is that one does or does not believe in. As you said, it's easy to profess disbelief regarding Zeus, Odin, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Man In Robe in Clouds, etc. I also reject any "God" with whom one can talk, ask favors of, expect to intervene in human affairs, or help my team win the big game. This very concept is offensive to me. I'm not so sure I can equally and summarily reject an "ultimate reality" to which all is connected.”
“But as a human with the limits of human consciousness, I can neither believe nor disbelieve what can't be expressed in terms relative to my experience. In my essay, "What is Faith to an Agnostic", (now considered, of course, one of the primary documents of Agnosticism - much as Principia Mathematica is to classic mechanics), I can accept "that which is", without being able to enclose it in some "ism" that may be believed or rejected. All of our knowledge amounts to explaining one concept with another one, or a collection of concepts... defining words with other words.”

While there is not a lot here that I can take issue with, there are a few places where I have subtle disagreements with Mr. Otis’s position.

In my earlier blog discussing agnosticism, I believe I made the classical, long accepted distinction between two kinds of agnostics. There is one camp, which he appears to belong to, which maintains that not only do they not know whether there is a God, but they further deem that it is impossible to know. However, a second type merely asserts that they do not, at present, know whether there is a God, but they leave open the possibility that they may later decide that sufficient evidence has come to light allowing them to swing one way or the other.

Philosopher Robert Nozick has made the interesting, even to me stunning, observation that there does not seem to be any way that a Deity could demonstrate his existence within the confines of this universe. Anything such as huge writing across the heavens asserting his existence would be plausibly ascribed to some super advanced alien life forms, or to simple trickery on the part of clever humans. So maybe the second type of agnosticism is untenable, that is, no possible definitive data could ever emerge,and Mr. Otis is right in ignoring that branch of it. And as I recall Bertrand Russell, in his famous essay “What is an Agnostic” , also only considers the first type of agnostic.

Now, I believe Mr. O’s “end” position of agnosticism is that the concept of God is sufficiently lacking coherence that he cannot even ascribe belief or disbelief to the existence of such a being. To consider an example that might illustrate his position: suppose Bob asserts “I believe in the ‘Marpled Fleezer’”, and he then fails to give any of this being’s characteristics. Or maybe he does try to, but they lie well outside of any known combinations of properties that we can imagine. Or maybe the properties are nonsensical, or even seemingly contradictory, such as “The Marpled Fleezer can make an unstoppable force that moves an immovable object”. We can see, I believe, that Mr. O. would be quite right in asserting that he neither believes or disbelieves in the existence of the Marpled Fleezer. He might well say something like, “Well perhaps there is a mighty being that might be recognized as constituting the Marpled Fleezer, but I deny that he can have the contradictory and/or incoherent properties that Bob claims he possesses. But as described, I am not even going to dignify the concept by saying I believe or disbelieve its existence.”

But does this really apply to the concept of God, held by the theistic religions Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (perhaps others to that I do not know about)? They do not, to my notion, provide a detailed or definite description of God, only claiming that such a being is infinite (in some sense), good, omniscient (in some sense), and eternal. I see nothing contradictory or incoherent in this. And, it is definitely part of their concept, as far as I know, that such a being does intervene in human affairs, and can bestow certain favors on humans that entreat him to do so, and that further, this being created the universe and us humans. It is not clear to me that these added beliefs involve any inherent contradictions or vagueness (although the idea of communication with God does seem to have an element of hubris in assuming that such an august being would have any interest in us).

Now I am certainly not saying that I believe in such a being. In fact, my belief is that such a God probably does not exist. However, I am by no means certain that he does not, and it is conceivable that such a being does exist having at least some of the above properties. When i say I am an agnostic I mean that I do not know if such a being exists, and feel that I understand the general concept of God well enough to assert that. So when I state my lack of belief in the Judeo-Christian God;s existence, i am asserting something along the lines of saying that I disbelieve in the existence of purple tigers, but can sufficiently well imagine what a purple tiger would be. This is where I appear to differ with Mr. O.

When Mr. O. says he rejects as “offensive” the idea that such a personal God exists I fear he may be confusing his aesthetic ideas of what a God might be like with what might actually exist. The question should be, not whether we find some particular concept offensive or appealing or agreeable, but whether it is in fact true. By the way, Mr. O. is in good company here, as Albert Einstein is on record as asserting something to the effect that he found the idea of a “personal god” as distasteful, and as representing the egotistical imaginings of “feeble souls”. But at the risk of blaspheming one of my intellectual heroes, maybe it should be noted that Einstein also rejected quantum mechanics based partly on preconceived notions of what truth must be like (“god does not play dice with the world”). So incredibly brilliant though he was, he was not always right (unless it turns out that in the future scientists find that quantum mechanics is wrong).

Oddly, a closely related mistake is made by some Christians when they seemingly convince themselves to believe Christianity because they find it comforting, that is, agreeable, not because they deem it true.

I largely agree with his claim that a concept, to be considered respectable, should relate to the common sense level that we humans inhabit. However, it should be realized that most all ideas of modern physics and cosmology involve ideas way beyond the common sense level. Of course, the experiments that must be done to verify these ideas must at some point “come down” into the realm we inhabit. That is, to verify the concepts we must measure a wiggle on an oscilloscope, a flash of light in a detector, a click in an ionization counter, trace in a bubble chamber, and so on.

Mr. O. wades into deep and troubled waters when he asserts that “All of our knowledge amounts to explaining one concept with another one, or a collection of concepts... defining words with other words.”

I do not agree with this. Consider the humankind’s understanding of quasars, laser, DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution...we could go on and on. True, these theories or ideas do have some circularity in that they assume or rely on, in our explanation or understanding of them, other ideas or hypotheses. But there is real knowledge there, it is not just a bunch of word games. While a lot of philosophy (not all!) might involve such word games, science does not. But to be fair to Mr. Otis, he may have intended his remark to apply to only to the realm of metaphysics, where we probably do not have any real knowledge, and it is indeed mostly a word game.

When he says “But as a human with the limits of human consciousness, I can neither believe nor disbelieve what can't be expressed in terms relative to my experience.”, I have to quibble. Take an electron. We have no way of even dimly comprehending what these little entities are like in experiential terms. They are believed to be point particles (having no spatial extent), and all electrons are exactly alike. We only know of these indirectly through theories that seem to hang together and make overall sense. But can I say I “believe” in them. yes, I think so---but I would not be devastated or upset in any way if tomorrow some rival theory and experimental result came along to cast doubt on their existence. My only point here is that we must be careful in insisting that our concepts relate directly to experience. In this case, the idea of an electron does relate to our experience, but in a most indirect way.

His remark “I'm not so sure I can equally and summarily reject an "ultimate reality" to which all is connected” is an interesting one, though I must confess i do not understand exactly what he means from such a short sentence. Let me try to establish a common ground with him here, and say that my own position is what atheist Victor Stenger derides as being “Something-or-other-ism”: That is, I believe in a very vague notion, without being able to prove or support it, that something is behind the universe, and there is some reason, probably least as unfathomable to us as quantum field theory is to a dog, for why consciousness (e.g., us and perhaps other forms of it) and the universe exist. I believe it did not “just happen”, though I recognize that as being a possibility. To what extent this is “wishful thinking”, I do not know, as I have trouble looking at my belief objectively. I’ll leave this to the psychologists, who might indeed, in the spirit of a certain Gary Larson cartoon, decide I am “just plain nuts”.

To conclude, I want to thank Rufus Otis for adding a provocative and insightful comment to my blog. It is to be hoped that he will make many future contributions. And I intend to carefully read his (touted as highly influential) “Principia Agnostica” essay as soon as I can locate it on the web (no success so far).

Two kinds of intelligent design

Today, there is a strange movement afoot referred to as “Intelligent Design” (ID). I say strange because the motivation behind it is to me not so clear. It appears to be culturally related to the earlier and very dubious “young-earth creationist” movement. But whereas one could perhaps understand (but not condone) the theological motivation behind that (shifting the blame apparently for animal suffering from God to mankind’s “fall”), I wonder what the motivation is for this newer movement?

Well, I know that it focuses on claiming that certain animal cells or parts could not have evolved in the gradual manner that Darwinian evolution postulates. Simply put, a principle of evolution is that for a trait or organ to evolve in stages, it must represent an advantage to organisms at each stage along the line. For example, for an eye to evolve, partial light sensitivity must be useful for organisms in the lineage (and I think it is easy to imagine that it would be useful to have even a very slight degree of light sensitivity). I believe that the flagellum is one example of “irreducible complexity” that ID proponents use, and I do not pretend to know anything about these biological systems, I find it dubious on the surface to argue that some trait can not have evolved gradually just because it isn’t clear how it could have. A great deal of info can be found on the web about this controversy, but most of it seems to claim that there are plausible ways that it could have evolved in the gradual way that Darwinism requires.

From a theological angle, what does this “biological ID” solve? If young earth creationism tried to provide a way around the “problem of pain” in the animal world, this latter form seems to do nothing of the kind. Animals would seem to have still killed each other and suffered long before man appeared on the scene (it is my impression that the ID movement does not dispute the billions of years old earth idea).

For my part, I think it very likely that Darwinian Evolution (in the modern post gene discovery era where it is called Neo-Darwinism) can account for all of the life forms, given that life somehow started. Now whether we will ever fully understand how exactly living forms got started, I do not know, but again my strong suspicion is that life did begin in some natural manner. I do not believe this in a dogmatic sense, but I would be surprised if it were not true. Proving it to be true is another manner, and, short of actually producing life from non-life, it is possible that we never will.

But I want to distinguish what might be considered a different kind of ID from te biological version, one that wonders if the physical universe is somehow designed by (in some sense) an enormously subtle intelligence. It could be something like a “God”, though by no means necessarily the type of God that the world’s theistic religions imagine. Or it could be a collection or panel of supernatural beings, or some kind of entities that we cannot even possibly imagine or grasp. The point is, there might be conscious agency involved in designing the laws of the universe. Suppose that the emergence of life was designed to an inevitable outcome from the initial conditions of the Big Bang, for example. It would not be necessary to imagine that a particular form of life (such as humans) might have been foreseen by the designer---indeed perhaps the chaotic, unpredictable nature of things required something like evolution to eventually produce life forms that are conceptually aware. In this view, there could be countless billions of intelligent life forms scattered through the universe, or there could be just one (us). We have no data on this.

One can imagine hundreds of variations on this idea, some involving the eventual spreading of consciousness throughout the universe. As numerous speculative science writers have pointed out, this could be the reason for the universe having “life built into it from the git-go”.

I do not, of course, know if this any of cosmological ID is actually true, or even close to the truth. I must confess that it does seem highly plausible to me that something like it is true. But I do want to point out that such a position might be called a form of ID—perhaps, “cosmological ID” would be an apt term for it—and that it would be vastly more plausible and respectable than the position represented in the current ID movement.

Where did the universe come from?

Where did the universe come from? Why is there anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing?

Well, you won’t find out from me…..in fact, if you know, please tell me . It is a well know argument from philosophy 101 that postulating that “God” made the U out of stuff from a higher supernatural dimension doesn’t really quite cut it as a satisfactory explanation, because one must then ask the same question about where did God come from…that is, who made God? The old joke Bertrand Russell told was that someone said that the earth rested on an elephant, and when asked what help up that elephant answered that it was another elephant. On being asked what held that one, the person sidestepped with, “suppose we change the subject”. The more recent “It’s turtles all the way down” is an amusing variation on this.

For example, this website seems to confirm what I recall about Stephen Hawking giving this fictional account in A Brief History Of Time:
“A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady atthe came up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist replied, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You're very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it's turtles all the way down.’”

Here is a kind of crazy metaphysical idea that does in a sense say “it’s turtles all the way down”: Suppose that God A made the universe we inhabit. Now, let’s suppose that God A was made by, or is in some was subservient or dependent upon God B. And so on, an infinite succession of higher Gods, God C, D, E, F….on to an infinite number of Gods. Now let us imagine something analogous to “renormalization” in quantum field theory, where the infinities are not considered an absurd result, but rather lumped into a single infinite God that subsumes in some sense the infinite sequence of Gods.

Consider a sort of analogous argument from elementary particle physics. For example, some scientists have speculated that the level of elementarity never really stops. That is, perhaps there is no smallest building block: atoms are made of electrons and nucleons, nucleons are made of quarks, quarks are made of some even smaller more elementary particle, and so on…it keeps going, never getting to the bottom. Why couldn’t this be true on the other end of the scale, and in a supernatural sense, as described above, where there is an infinite succession of “Gods”, all of which can be in a sense lumped, or renormalized, into a single infinite God?

Of course, can we imagine such a “being” as the kind of personal being that, for example, the Abrahamic religions believe in? I do not know. Nor do I necessarily believe that such a succession of Gods or even a single God in any sense exists. I simply put this forward as what seems to me to be an interesting idea, and one that I do not recall seeing mentioned as a possibility in any other speculative theological writing.

Some Skeptical Reflections on Religious Belief…Part 1

Based on personal associations and numerous conversations with religious, church-going people, over the course of my 65 years of life, it seems to me that relatively few of them believe their religion to be actually true. The tendency is to believe it useful, either as way to make one feel secure, or often as a belief that the social ethics demand some measure of lip service to a superhuman, moral code-giving being. Maybe a strong element of hope, usually for a continued existence after death, enters in. I say this at some risk of stating what many skeptics might regard as obviously true. However, let us recognize, right off, that a given religion is either true or false. We cannot, of course, know by the methods of scientific inquiry whether they are true…if one of them is in fact true, I suppose we may find out “later” (upon death).
I’ll lay my cards on the table here, and say that my strong suspicion is that they are all, in essence, false. There might be elements of truth to some or even all of them, but I am speaking here of taking any particular one of them as a whole.
I am an American, born and raised in what might be called “Christian bible belt” regions of the US, so I will also confess to having a limited perspective on all of this. I have had very limited direct social exposure to people of the Islamic persuasion, and here have to rely on what I have read. I have had slightly more exposure to those of the Judaic faith, but considerably more to those within the various Christian sects. Indeed, as a child, I was raised Presbyterian, but rather quickly, in my formative years of college, rejected it all as being largely delusional.
I have no quarrel with those who believe their religion to be true. I will refer to these as “Type 1”, or simply T1, believers, while the ones basing their association on tradition and/or usefulness, I will call “Type 2” (T2) believers. My guess is that T1’s are not the ones committing the atrocities, terror, and wars (recently so thoroughly illuminated and expounded upon by such writers of an atheistic persuasion such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins).
An important element in the faith of many people is the ethnic or family tradition associated with their particular religion. We can scarcely doubt this, can we?---just look at the world. Is it a coincidence that those raised in Christian countries are Christian, etc etc? This group-tribe-family-clan association with a particular belief, a given tradition that one is born into, has surely been a predominant factor throughout all of human and perhaps pre-human history.
It is easy to regard those of a different tradition are somehow strange, bizarre, odd, less good and wholesome than those of ones own tribal belief. Compounding this is the fact that often the religions are associated with groups of humans having recognizably different anatomical features, making it easier to view each other as less intrinsically important, or worthy of being allowed to live in peace. We humans have a very strong inclination to be “group-ish”, a phenomena well investigated by Matt Ridley in his book “The Origins of Human Virtue”, and this groupishness has bad consequences in more global contexts.
Does a T1 really want to kill or injure someone who believes a different religion? I very much doubt it. It is the T2’s, driven mainly by group identity and an atavistic hatred for groups that are recognizably “other”, that gravitate toward violence.
One very strong hint that, in the US at least, Christian T1’s are rare is that death seems to be widely lamented as tragic. Yet Christianity seems to promise, for the “good” believers at least, a blissful post-death existence. Do people grieve because they fear their lost loved one has gone to Hell? I doubt it, though maybe this is occasionally the case. Rather, I imagine, they really hold a deep-down fear that the departed loved one has ceased to exist. In effect, they are “T2’s”.
We often see books of a Christian persuasion asking “Why do bad things [e.g., death from cancer or accident] happen to good [usually read “Christian”] people”. But, come on---if death is a release from this “vale of tears” and fallen world, as they seem to maintain that it is----would they not rejoice at the “good people” being “rescued” from it? The simple explanation for this excessive lamenting—and I of course do not blame them from my point of view, since I think it quite possible that death is non-existence---is that they do not really believe, with their whole hearts, the eschatological teachings of their religion. Yep---T2’s!
Now to be fair, I recall that a Christian philosopher—it may have been Scott Peck---said that he “believed” Christianity [and Heaven] to be true, but did not “know” it to be true. An interesting, and perhaps valid, distinction. We could digress here, and consider what “belief” means, and what “knowing” means, but I shall postpone it.
I also want to draw a sharp distinction between belief in any of the world’s religions, and a suspicion that “there is something behind the universe”. Indeed, the old question “Why is there something rather than nothing” seems to me to be at least a justified emotion, albeit a question that we cannot answer by methods of science (or any other method that I can think of). It does not follow that it is a meaningless question, but I realize I need more space to establish this, and will also postpone that for now. My guess is that there is “something”, but whatever it is as far beyond our comprehension as general relativity is beyond a dog or cat. Is there any kind of continued, post death, existence?---I do not know. Do I hope there is? I am really not sure of that, especially since I cannot really imagine what form that might take. And as Woody Allen has the fantastically advanced alien say, in hurriedly departing in his spacecraft, “we may be asking the wrong questions”, but we may not be able to even comprehend what questions we should be asking.
This is “to be continued” in a later post.

Christianity Useful or True? A seeming contradiction.

More often than not, it would seem to me, people don’t discuss Christianity in terms of its truth or falsity as such. Rather, they seem to assume that the issue is one of merely social convention. That is to say, they seem to assume it false, but then want to debate its usefulness nevertheless. I doubt if they would consciously admit to that, but perhaps it is somehow assumed under the conscious surface as the starting point.
That would be an odd attitude, in my view. If Christianity is false, then “to hell” with its usefulness---who wants to live a lie? (maybe this is the point that escapes me however---maybe most people feel deep down that the best strategy is to convince themselves at some conscious level of the truth of a comforting and personally rewarding religion, and then ignore any arguments against it, at least at a conscious level). I believe we can detect a sort of “double standard” here, which reinforces my suspicion that Christianity is not really as fully believed as would be expected based on church attendance or church affiliation. This particular religion involves the promise and the belief that this world is somehow, in some sense, fallen, and that a much better world (“Heaven”) potentially awaits those who qualify it (what exactly “qualify” means here is a topic that we must defer, because interpretations of Christianity by the various sects, denominations, and theologians, differ greatly---some argue that only a tiny fraction of humanity will go on to this greater reality, while at the other end, some argue that all will be “saved”, and enjoy a wonderful, everlasting, paradise.). But, in my experience, Christians still seem to mourn and grieve over the death of loved ones and friends, as if their death is a horrible thing. If they truly believed they had escaped this earthly quagmire of moral decay, and were enjoying infinite bliss at home with God, then they would rejoice (though perhaps still allowing some sadness because they missed the departed, much as an inmate of a concentration camp might view the escape his friend into freedom. He would miss the companionship of his friend, but would rejoice that at least he was now free).

Deism-Theism-Agnosticism-Atheism (Part 1)

There is much hub bub these days about the spate of books extolling atheism. Specifically, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I very much like these books, and can go along with them for the most part. But not entirely. I call myself an "agnostic", and though I think all of these books plausibly attack that position as weak and to some extent cowardly, I want to hold to that label. I think it is justified, and believe that I can defend it..
To believe that it is justified, one might ask if there is any reason at all to say that you don't know whether something exists when there are no clear reasons for thinking that it does exist. The "it" in this case is a God, a set of gods, or a Deity...some kind of being or beings that in some way brought about the Universe.
First consider the "Deist" position. This was I believe held by Thomas Jefferson and others during that era we call "The Enlightenment". The idea is that there was some agency, or God, that designed and created the universe---but after doing so, he backed off from it, set back, and did not interfere with it. In particular, such a position rejects the organized religions, and the Abrahamic religions, and usually argues that the Creative Being does not concern Itself/Himself/Herself/Themselves with the doings of humanity.
The theist position, by contrast, adds to the Deist creation idea with the postulate that the Creative Being does continue to interact with the world, in particular, with the goings on of the human race. The Abrahamic religions would be, of course, theistic religions. Examples of such interactions might be selected "miracles", the dictating of certain rules or codes of conduct (e.g., The Ten Commandments), the Incarnation of Christianity, and so forth.
While I can not say that I subscribe to either of these positions, Deism or Theism, I do not agree that there are absolutely no reasons for considering the beliefs to be plausible.
I want to give two examples. One is the evidence, admittedly weak, for Theism. The other is somewhat stronger, to my mind, arguing for Deism.
The Deistic argument first, and I will here be very brief, hoping to enlarge upon this in a later post. This is based on the observation that the universe not only exists---itself a bizarre and vertigo-producing fact---but also that physics seems to suggest that the fundamental laws and parameters of the universe seem to be fine tuned to allow life and consciousness to form. Furthermore, the prevailing theory that the whole thing started with what is called the "Big Bang" seems to suggest that something started it. I know, of course, that there are alternative theories here to Deism---the parallel universes and such. But common sense---dubious in this context, it must be admitted--- seems to that the whole thing was created and designed by someone or something. There is no element here for me of "faith" at all, rather it is just a sort of intuitive feeeling. And I honestly don't know if the modern "Design" argument is very convincing to others, as there is some subjective judgement here.
The other argument, the one for Theism, is I admit much weaker, and much more subjective. This is based on art and music that has been inspired by one particular theistic religion, namely Christianity. The music, in particular, seems to me to be inspired beyond human capability. I think especially of the music of Bach, Palestrina, Handel, and Victoria. There are of course many others, but Bach stands out above all the rest, in my estimation. As I have said, this is a weak argument, but nevertheless it has some weight with me.