Okay, so last week, I covered how I got here. But I know I didn’t really say where here is.
Understand, I can’t really say what all agnostics believe (or don’t believe) – I can only say what I hold to be true.
On the plus side, this isn’t very much, so this will probably be relatively short 
If the position of the theist (by which I generally mean anyone who believes in the existence of divine entity or entities, not necessarily benevolent) is belief, then the position of the atheist is, logically enough, that of disbelief. Personally, it’s my impression that atheists do have certain beliefs, and that many of them do not stand up to logical analysis, a point I’ll be developing in the weeks to come. But agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve. (We also, quite often, resent simplistic dualisms.)
I like to think of it as a coin toss. Theists believe the coin will come down heads, atheists that it will come down tails. But to the agnostic, belief is futile and foolish – the thing to do is to wait for the coin to land, and see which side faces up then. In other words, not to race to judgment, but to accept the facts as they are demonstrated.
My own variant of agnosticism is very similar to the philosophical positions of Zeteticism and Pyrrhonism, the latter of which in particular stresses the unknowability of just about everything. I take it almost that far, but for my purposes, the doctrine I most adhere to is that a lack of proof does not constitute a disproof. I do not think we can rule out the possibility that new evidence may be discovered in the future, and thus, I can attribute certainty to very little indeed.
Related to this is an unwillingness to jump to conclusions. I will cheerfully speculate about what a given set of data might mean – but at the end of the day, I try to remain aware that my speculations are merely that. For example, I firmly believe that there is such a thing as a mystical experience, and that such experiences are powerfully moving. But it seems to me that to be too sure of the meaning of any such experience is a fundamental error. Certainly, such experiences have meaning, but since they so frequently transcend the limits of our expression, they likewise elude easy definition. Sometimes, they elude any definition.
On the other hand, a lack of belief is vastly different from a state of active disbelief. There are things I actively disbelieve, such as astrology, but they are relatively few. Just as few things have been proven to my satisfaction, very few have been disproven to my satisfaction. And so, I endeavour to regard all conclusions as merely tentative, and to remain open to new evidence. And I really do mean all conclusions – there is little accepted knowledge that I will not question, especially not my own. Dogmatic thought and absolutism are things I try to avoid at all times – it’s rare that I make an unqualified statement about anything.
Where possible, I try to seek new evidence to remedy the defects of my understandings – but we’re talking about the entire span of human knowledge here, and I am but one individual with a limited number of hours in my day. There is much I do not know more of that I wish I did.
On this basis, I believe that there is insufficient evidence to rule out almost any religious claim. Indeed, much as it pains me, I can’t rule out the possibility that, for example, the Heaven’s Gate people were right – I don’t know enough to say.
But this is not to say that I don’t believe that things can be assigned probabilities or likelihoods – all things can, and indeed, to function in life and society, must. I just try never to confuse a probability, even an overwhelming probability, with a certainty.
That doesn’t stop me – as fundamentalists of many stripes sometimes aver it does – from having morals, ethics, principles and strong opinions about them.
For example, returning to the Heaven’s Gate people, well, as much as I try to keep an open mind about these things, I still find suicide personally and morally repugnant. Not because I fear of Hell – which I regard as an unlikely possibility at best – but because I believe it to be pretty much the ultimate in self-indulgence in most circumstances. It is, after all, the one mess you can make of your life that you can guarantee other people will be stuck cleaning up all of. (That being said, euthanasia is morally different from suicide, and I strongly support that.)
It’s hard, I find, to define this position without reference to what other people believe. But rather than talk about the plethora of faiths out there, I’ll mostly be talking about how agnosticism differs from atheism. The atheists have already done a fine job of pointing out the faults in the beliefs of the faithful – I’ll be talking mostly about the faults in the atheist belief system. Because so far as I can see, atheists believe just as hard as theists. They just believe in different things, is all.
See you next Wednesday.
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