The classic idea of the agnostic is of a person who is indecisive and cannot commit to any one belief. Some interpretations (not those made by actual agnostics) are based on the idea that agnostics are forbidden to believe.

That’s an oversimplification. Agnostics are not forbidden to believe – we simply choose not to believe without proof. Now, if your entire belief system is based on belief without proof, I can see where this is a fine distinction that may seem unimportant to you. But the story of St Thomas is an excellent illustration of how important it can be.

Thomas is mentioned only one time each in the Gospels of Luke (3:18), Mark (6:15) and Matthew (10:3) – and in each of them, it is in a listing of the calling of the twelve apostles. Only in the Gospel of John does he get much time on stage.

His first mention is in John 11:16, when he persuades the other apostles to go with Jesus to resurrect Lazarus. Interestingly, it’s Jesus who in this story wants the apostles to witness the miracle so that they will have proof.

Next, in John 14:5, Thomas tells Jesus that despite his assurances to them, the apostles do not know what will happen to anyone after death. Jesus responds with a complex explanation of how the afterlife works, and no more is said on the subject. (In Australian political terms, Thomas fed Jesus a dixer here.)

Finally, in chapter 20, there is the story for which Thomas is best known, when Jesus begins appearing to people after his resurrection, and Thomas keeps missing him. It would qualify as a running gag if it were better told. Thomas refuses to believe that Jesus has come back from the dead – not an unreasonable position, although given that he has already seen Jesus resurrect Lazarus, and the lack of any history showing the apostles playing practical jokes on each other, his doubt is somewhat obdurate. One gets the impression it has less to do with rigid adherence to proof and more with feeling left out.

In any case, Jesus finally appears, and tells Thomas to examine his scars – and how I love that every analysis I can find makes a point of mentioning that it is not clear whether or not Thomas touches the scars, because touching scars is, y’know, icky and all. Thomas does, and is convinced, and Jesus reverses his earlier position on proving resurrections, telling Tom that he should have believed without proof.

So, given all this, why do I think Thomas can be seen as an agnostic? First, he wants to see the miracle for himself when Lazarus is resurrected. Next, he is the only one to point out that no man knows what the afterlife is like. And finally, of course, he demands proof of the resurrection of Jesus. In the first and third cases, it’s made clear that he believes after seeing. In the second, it’s less clear what he believes, but the fact that Jesus successfully predicted his own return to life surely lends credence to his other remarks on the subject.

And despitethe remarks made by Jesus about belief without proof, it’s clear that requiring proof for one’s beliefs is no disqualification for sainthood. St Thomas may not be the most popular of the saints, but there is still no shortage of churches named for him. By implication, the church does have a place for those who adhere to a higher standard of evidential proof – although there’s very few Christian sects who’d come out and say so.

There is, and need be, no contradiction between doubt and belief – they can be seen as the absence and presence of proof, respectively – and as such, I think it’s no great stretch to claim St Thomas the Doubter as a proto-agnostic.

But I feel it misses the point of its own arguments.

McGrath argues quite convincingly that modern atheism is very much a product of its Enlightenment roots.  He reaches from this to say that now that the project of the Enlightenment either has been achieved or has failed (he does try it both ways), atheism has lost its way and serves no further purpose.

He goes on to propose that there is a cyclical movement from belief to atheism and back to belief again, without stopping to consider what his own choice of metaphor implies, i.e. that the cycle will only continue.  Interestingly, he does note in an offhanded remark that there will be some people who will choose agnosticism as a means of breaking free of this cycle – but the idea that as the cycle continues throughout history, those people will only grow in number (as each iteration of the cycle makes the pointlessness of the whole thing ever more obvious) is also one he cannot reach for.

Ultimately, this is a book that makes some very interesting points about the origins of atheism – points I have yet to see any atheist address, I might add – but which is a little too willing to engage in wishful thinking in drawing its conclusions, or indeed, in thinking that the argument between belief and disbelief will ever be concluded.

There would be no particular sense of orientation to it.  No door at one end, altar at the other.  I suspect that there would be multiple doors and no altars. The floor would all be at the same level, unless there was a conversation pit.

The design would not centre around concepts of shriving minimalism (there’s nothing to abase ourselves for or before), but neither would it be overly decorative (there’s nothing to glorify).  In fact, the colour schemes and such would aim for soft neutrals, and the roof, I think, would be clear glass panels.

There would be seats.  An assortment of them, not necessarily all the same.  They’d all be movable, so that they could be arranged as circumstances and numbers dictated. And they’d all be comfortable, if utilitarian.

There would be no priests, and thus, no need for any of their secretive chambers out the back.  In fact, the only side rooms would be toilets.

Along the walls would be bookshelves filled with thought-provoking stuff – no set syllabus, just whatever someone got a kick out of and wanted to share with others.  The shelves would alternate with desks, and the desks would be well-stocked with pens and paper, and perhaps some computing facilities too.  The whole place, of course, would be a wireless hotspot, and one that was open to the world.

The emphasis of the whole place would be towards polite conversation, although quiet contemplation would also be encouraged.

Well, that’s what I got.  How about you?

Like I should have done in the first place. I don’t have a good general term for these, but the way I see it, there are five different ways to approach the problem of what and how to believe. Five different ways in which one can choose to see a particular thought.

The five ways are Beliefs, Ideals, Opinions, Assumptions and Constrained Beliefs,

Beliefs, to me, are absolute and uncritical acceptance of a particular piece of dogma. A sacred cow. Most people would class their religious feelings in this category. and a bunch more besides. Basic concepts of this world such as up and down are beliefs.

Ideals, on the other hand, are the things we do not believe are true, but wish were. A belief in the essential dignity or nobility of the human animal is an ideal.

Opinions are the kinds of beliefs that we admit to ourselves are purely subjective – the average sporting team follower’s belief that their team in the best (regardless of the actual facts) is an opinion (because of the facts).

Assumptions are pretty much as I described them last week – a conscious choice to act as if a belief, ideal or opinion is true despite the unverifiability of the matter.

Constrained Beliefs are beliefs that function within the constraints imposed by larger assumptions. Anytime someone qualifies a statement by adding “for a given value of”, you’re in Constrained Belief territory. Up is up and down in down – but only within a specified gravitational field. People are essentially noble – under certain circumstances. And so on.

Sorry, I’d write more,but I’m buggered.

See you next Wednesday.

But doubt can leave one with little in the way of reliable facts. And action can only be based on reliable facts. Well, those or assumptions.

So starting here, I’m going to spend the next few entries of Militant Agnostic talking about the assumptions that I, as an agnostic, find it necessary to make in order to act with any particular certainty in this world. A lot of this is going to seem like philosophical hair-splitting to a lot of you, I suspect, but I make no apology for that. After all, I don’t see very many people at all apologising for their beliefs, so why should I?

The first assumption – and boy, this is The Big One, is this:

That Reality is Actually Real

After all, this reality is only provably real within its own axioms. We cannot isolate it and run tests on it the same way we can with many of its components. In fact, the only thing we can objectively prove the existence of is subjectivity

And so we can never be quite sure that it is truly real, which in turn leads to a number of other theories about it:

Solipsism:

There is no way that I know of to absolutely disprove the Solipsist Hypothesis. No way to say for sure that everything I experience is not merely an hallucination. I mean, you might think you’re real, but that doesn’t actually prove it. And the fact that the world appears to be vastly more complex than I could possibly imagine – well, maybe I just don’t give myself enough credit for the vividness of my imagination.

The elephant in the room for solipsism is that logically, if I am the creator of all reality, then I am, effectively, its omnipotent god. And yet I demonstrably do not control all of it, or indeed, very much of it. This problem can by side-stepped by positing that the solipsist reality is created by the unconscious mind, and that the conscious mind only lives in it. But to do this makes solipsism merely realism with the unconscious mind playing the role of universe – in which case you’ve added a layer of confusion but gotten no closer to the solution of any philosophical problem.

Now, I’m not saying that I think that solipsism is the truth, not for a moment. I think there’s a very low probability indeed – one in a googolplex, maybe – that it is true. But not no probability at all, and as such, I cannot rule it out. I do, however, hope that it isn’t true, as I find it morally repugnant – solipsism is the very antithesis of responsibility.

Simulation:

It’s also possible that the reality we experience (or think we experience) is actually some sort of simulation. Yes, yes, like the fucking Matrix. (Only, you know, with a better script and humans who are actually attractive in it.) I distinguish this from solipsism in that it has an external, rather than an internal, origin. If this world is a simulation, then it is something that was imposed on us by an other of some description.

I actually find this one even less plausible than I do solipsism, as it is unsatisfying without some sort of explanation as to the motives of the other responsible. Moreover, it is, by our current understanding of matter, energy and mind, staggeringly inefficient. I do find it less morally problematical than solipsism, but I dislike what it has to say about my status as a free-willed individual.

Furthermore, both these theories suffer from the converse problem to that of the inability to prove that reality is real: they are no falsifiable. We cannot devise any test we are actually able to carry out in order to prove or disprove either of them.

And so, at the end of the day, I must assume that this is the really real world, even though I cannot prove to my satisfaction that it is. I just have to settle for thinking that it is overwhelmingly likely that this is the real world, and move on to the next assumption.

See you next Wednesday.

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.