10th November 2010
“I've sworn off agnosticism, which I now call cowardly atheism. I've come to the position that in the complete absence of any supporting data whatsoever for the persistence of the individual in some spiritual form, it is necessary to operate under the provisional conclusion that there is no afterlife and then be ready to amend that if I find out otherwise.”
November 10th, 2010 at 9:52
Eh, agnosticism isn’t cowardly, it’s just not caring about world issues, and how it can pertain to them. It can even be on that teetering borderline where one or two things still hold you back from saying that He doesn’t exist (been there).
November 10th, 2010 at 11:01
This sounds like agnosticism to me.
Actually there is quite an interesting related debate about this going on between PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne and Greta Christina Where PZ says there is nothing that will convince him of the existence of God(s) and Jerry Coyne arguing that there must be some level of evidence that would. Greta’s argument is more nuanced but she leans towards Coyne.
November 10th, 2010 at 18:39
A-MC – I’ll have to watch that. I’d guess that PZ meant something more nuanced because only a fool has such a high threshold for proof. I’m an atheist because there has never been any convincing proof that there are magical beings. But to say that no proof is possible makes an objection into an ideological position. I think I agree with the disparagement of agnosticism. As I understand it, this is simply the position that we can’t know. Why not? If there were a God that made Her presence felt in the physical world, we have the tools of science with which to measure. Just because we haven’t yet does not mean we could not.
November 10th, 2010 at 22:36
Captain Zero,
PZ’s point is specific to the idea of an almighty all-present deity, and he’s saying that there’s nothing that would convince him such a thing exists given what we already know about reality. You’d have to present a set of conditions so wildly hypothetical as to be meaningless, in order to convince him (and me). We simply know enough about the universe to know that reality is inconsistent with standard definitions of “God.”