Picking apart Pascal’s Wager – Part 1
Last night I was chatting with a friend about religious belief, absence of belief, the differences between agnosticism, atheism, gnosticism and theism, and helping him determine his state of belief, along the lines of:
- Gnostic Theism: “I know that there definitely is a god(s).”
- Agnostic Theism: “I don’t know for certain, but ‘all this’ must have been created by someone or something.”
- Agnostic Atheism: “I don’t know for certain, but attributing a supernatural force to its origin is poor logic.”
- Gnostic Atheism: “I know that there definitely is no god(s).”
Looking at those four terms for a moment:
- Theism is the belief in at least one god. In Western society it nearly always refers to the god of Christianity and nearly all Western religious arguments are about this god, unless otherwise stipulated.
- Atheism prefixes the Greek a- (without) to theism, and means simply “without belief in at least one god.” It does not mean disbelief or refusal to believe; it is a position of neutrality: absence of belief. To place it in context: a baby is atheist until it is introduced to supernatural concepts at a later age; animals are atheist.
- Gnostic is from the Greek word gnosis and refers to knowledge about spiritual matters, and in this case absolute conviction. It generally discounts evidence and logical argument as it is not a position based on rational deduction and analysis, and usually has the Argument from Incredulity/Ignorance at its core.
- Agnostic was a term coined by Thomas Huxley to complement the term gnostic with the Greek a- (without) prefix, making it mean in this context “without absolute conviction.” It’s an intellectually honest position that recognises that there is insufficient evidence or knowledge to make a definitive conclusion for or against the existence of god(s).
My problem with the term atheism has generally been that it’s a term that defines itself as the opposite of another, or by the absence of something: without the term theism, the term atheism would not exist. An example might be the term slim (in the context of body weight) and me calling myself unslim (rather than overweight), or conversely fat using afat as its complement. Ultimately it’s just semantics, but defining oneself as the opposite of something is a topic worth addressing.
This article is continued in Part 2.
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“Agnostic Theism: “I don’t know for certain, but ‘all this’ must have been created by someone or something.”
I am not sure if “must have been created” is the best way to specify theism, or a belief in deity. Atheists tend to lump religion into those who believe in a creator being, and those who don’t, but it is not always that simple. I consider myself an agnostic polytheist, or agnostic pagan, or simply pagan (easiest to say, LOL) … In other words, I believe that there may or may not be deities that may be real, or may simply be constructs of the human psyche. Either way, I do not believe in a force other than “fate” that created the universe. There was a big bang, and “everything that is” was assembled by the laws of natural science after that event, whether they be planets, deities, bacteria, humans, or jellyfish.
Now, I know that you are oversimplifying here, for the sake of argument, and I am being a semantic nazi, LOL. I am kinda “thinking out loud” on your blog, if you don’t mind… but I would have defined this as:
Agnostic Theism: “I don’t know for certain, but deities may or may not exist; either way, it could never be proven rationally.”
Hmmm… As an atheist, I’m a bit wary of this claim, so common in atheist and humanist blogs, that atheism is simply the absence of belief in deities, as distinct from a belief that there are no deities. And that babies and animals are atheists. I can’t help feeling there’s something not quite right there, which I’ve tried to bring out here.
Thanks for your comment, Garic. I’ve read your blog post and find myself agreeing with a great deal of it, and I take your point about whether the atheism of a newborn or animal is comparable to that of someone who knows the options and yet does not believe. And I’m also inclined to suspect that evolution has given us a predisposition to believe in the supernatural, perhaps as a way to explain “all this” or perhaps it’s a function of the total dependence a newborn has upon its mother and the resulting need to accept everything she says as, erm… gospel. Nothing is ever as easy as we would like it.
Your comment about appealing to the etymology of a term outlines that nicely, however by taking the position that a word’s meaning is, by practical definition, determined by how it is used by the majority you run the risk of sensationalist media (but I repeat myself…) or ignorance-/agenda-driven parties changing the meaning of that word. More and more atheists who don’t fall into what some call the hard or strong atheist category are trying to distance themselves from the term atheist entirely simply because of all the negativity, propaganda and fallout associated with it, largely thanks to a combination of anti-atheist activities and the perception of outspoken atheists such as Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet and Harris. How then would you define atheism? If as I’ve written for Gnostic Atheism, knowing something that is unprovable raises serious problems.
I don’t see a problem with various degrees of atheism any more than I see a problem with various degrees of theism — providing there is a distinct demarcation consisting of belief in supernatural gods and god-like entities. That’s an unmovable requirement.
To use a different categorisation method, I can term myself as a soft or weak atheist — I don’t believe in supernatural gods or things, but I don’t shut myself off to the possibility that I may be proven wrong one day. I’m confident it will never happen, but it’s more about intellectual honesty and sound logic than anything else. As I see it, choosing not to believe in a concept is not the same as believing against it, which is how I see Gnostic Atheism. I don’t know if aliens exist or not, but they might — I don’t discount the possibility (Agnostic LGM-ist?). The same with Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones. Or whatever else we’ve managed to imagine or conceive, or ever will. Some things are disprovable beyond reasonable doubt; others I remain open-minded about (ironic that because of this, I sometimes find both atheists and theists accusing me of close-mindedness).
But when it all comes down to brass tacks, we’re only talking about arbitrary labels. If a better definition were to come along tomorrow, I see no reason why we shouldn’t adopt that. After all, I suspect that’s part of what was behind Huxley’s creation of the term “agnostic” and the creation of the “Brights” movement.
Thanks for your response, Jumile.
On the question of meaning (I’ll addthis is something of a pedantic point, which comes from my being a linguist): what I was trying to say is that there’s an important distinction between the question of how a word is used and how we think it should be used. I don’t see any way in which a word can be said to mean anything other than what it’s used to mean. A word is something that exists in the head of an individual speaker or in a particular utterance (be that spoken, written, signed or whatever). The problem is that we’re so used to thinking of the language (e.g. English, French etc) as the relevant unit, and assuming that there is some sense in which a word exists on this level, in a kind of Platonically ideal form, with a clearly defined meaning. But this clearly isn’t the case; English is the product of small-scale behaviours by English speakers. It’s the speakers who are the real units, and it’s in the speakers’ brains and in specific speech events that phonetic (or written, or signed) strings are associated with particular meanings.
Now, of course speakers influence each other in how they associate strings and meanings, and people who shout louder have undue influence, and of course change happens—both on the level of the individual speaker and on the level of the speech community. And it’s perfectly to reasonable to complain that they’re not using the word in a helpful way, or to try and promote a different use. But there just isn’t such a thing as “the meaning of a word”, as a clear-cut thing, on the level of the phenomenon we call English (or any other language), except in some statistical sense (which is not necessarily quite the same as the majority usage). There are dictionary and usage-book definitions which attempt either to describe how a word is used by speakers, or to prescribe how the writers think a word should be used, but the definition itself is not the meaning.
Anyway, my (admittedly somewhat pedantic) point is that what you’re talking about is how you think people should use the word ‘atheist’, rather than what the word ‘atheist’ actually means, which is an empirical question concerning real linguistic behaviour. But provided that distinction’s clear, there’s no problem with arguing that a word should be used in a particular way—of course it’s better if we use terms clearly and agree as much as possible to use them unambiguously. But there are some arguments for why we should use a word in a particular way that just don’t work, and the argument from etymology is one of them.
That’s my linguist’s rant over:) I think I agree with the rest of your response. I agree completely that it’s a matter of intellectual honesty and sound logic. I don’t see the distinction you’re drawing between choosing not to believe something is the case and choosing to believe it is not the case. They seem to be the same thing. What I think you’re saying is that believing (or not believing) something to be the case is not the same as claiming to know something is (or is not) the case. I agree with that, but if that’s what you mean, I don’t think “believing against” is a very helpful way to put it.
And I agree that some things are disprovable beyond reasonable doubt, and other things less clear. I think we’re of the same view on such things. And, as you say thought, terms like atheist and agnostic are arbitrary labels. There are advantages to using them, but there are advantages to not categorising oneself too.
To complicate the nomenclature, the term ‘non-theist’ has been creeping in too, as a more PC alternative to ‘atheist’. I’ve noticed placatheists in particular using the ‘non-theist’ term to describe themselves.
I’ve never considered one to be a PC alternative to the other, though I can see how that may be appealing to some. My use of the term non-theist normally centres on whenever I’m trying to discuss a non-theistic issue. I suppose in a black-and-white view of things, such issues can be considered to be either atheistic or theistic, but to me that seems no different to, say, the BBC’s stated view that all non-religious programming is by definition atheistic, secular and humanistic (e.g. news, sports, Eastenders). (I wish I was joking about that last point).
As Ben Goldacre likes to say: I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.