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WillowOne's Positions

Agnosticism

My Positions

  1. On the question of knowledge, I am an agnostic: I do not know whether a god exists, and for most definitions of god I do not think the question is knowable.
  2. On the question of belief, I am an atheist: I do not believe that one does. The two answer different questions, and "agnostic" used on its own is usually a way of declining to answer the second.
  3. Agnosticism is not a midpoint between theism and atheism. There is no midpoint between believing something and not believing it.

Notes

  1. What Huxley meant. Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word in 1869 to name a method rather than a creed: do not claim as certain what you cannot demonstrate, and follow the reasoning as far as it goes and no further. He was Darwin's bulldog and nobody's fence-sitter. The modern use of "agnostic" to mean "fifty-fifty" or "I'd rather not say" would have irritated him, and it irritates me, because it converts a principle about evidence into an excuse for not weighing any.
  2. The grid. Belief and knowledge are separate axes. One can believe and claim to know (the gnostic theist), believe without claiming to know (the agnostic theist, which is most believers when pressed), disbelieve without claiming to know (the agnostic atheist), or disbelieve and claim to know (the gnostic or hard atheist). I sit in the third box, for the reasons set out under Hard Atheism. The label question is explored at greater length in Definitions, Atheism and Fire Hydrants.
  3. "We cannot know, so believe" is backwards. Fideism, the leap of faith that Kierkegaard made a virtue of, treats the unknowability of the question as a licence. The correct inference runs the other way: a claim that cannot be supported is not accepted, because the burden of proof has not been met. "I don't know, therefore I believe" is the Appeal to Ignorance in its purest form. "I don't know, therefore I don't believe" is simply the default.
  4. Some gods can be known not to exist. Agnosticism applies to the unfalsifiable god: the deist first cause, the ground of being, the god who hides on principle (Divine Hiddenness). A god who created the world six thousand years ago, drowned it four thousand years ago and stopped the Sun for Joshua has made claims that have been checked, and he does not exist in exactly the way that there are no married bachelors. The vaguer the god, the more agnostic I am about him, and the less there is to be agnostic about.
  5. Apatheism. There is a further position, that the question does not matter. I share it about the gods who do nothing (Deism). I do not share it about the god who is supposed to have views on whom I may marry and what should happen to blasphemers, because people act on his behalf, and that makes the question practical whether or not it is answerable.
  6. Why I say "atheist" in public. Because it answers the question people are asking. "Agnostic" is heard as "open to persuasion", which I am, but also as "undecided", which I am not. I have decided that the claim has not been made out. If that changes, I will say so.

Sources

  • Huxley, T. H., "Agnosticism" and "Agnosticism and Christianity", The Nineteenth Century (1889)
  • Bertrand Russell, "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?" (1947)

Also see