Jings! (Introduction)

by whitecraw, Thursday, January 24, 2008, 17:27 (6146 days ago)

Not being a religiousy-type person, I don't give a tinker's cuss whether God exists or not. I suppose that makes me neither an atheist nor an agnostic, but some kind of 'indifferentist'. I honestly see no difference between Dawk the Dork and any other evangelist, other than in the particular content of the 'good news' they respectively bring. It's the proselytistic nature of their evangelism that turns my stomach, the crusading zeal they put into their mission to effect my spiritual rebirth through converting me to their particular take on things theological, while all the while I simply couldn't give a damn. Each is as bad as the other in this respect. - Anyway: enough of pushy door-to-door double glazing salesmen... - Agnosticism, in contrast to atheist assumption and religious dogma, only believes what is known, and admits to ignorance of the rest. - 'Agnosticism' has a very specific meaning. It was coined to denote the attitude of disbelief premised on the epistemological claim that the existence or non-existence of God cannot be known and the moral claim that, since it cannot be known, one ought to suspend one's belief in relation to the matter. - Agnosticism thus hangs its coat on a couple of shooglie pegs. Believers can reply to the epistemological premise that, while the existence or non-existence of God might not be knowable in the same way that 1+1=2 is knowable or that the fact Earth only has one moon is knowable, it is knowable in other ways; for example, statistically or existentially. And to the moral premise those same believers can reply that, while such complete scepticism is perhaps the best moral policy to adopt, one may nevertheless still be justified on pragmatic grounds in believing something that isn't knowable. - Which raises the interesting possibility that agnosticism is dogmatic in relation to certain canons of epistemology and ethics. Which, in turn, makes it something of a nonsense. For those canons are no more knowable than is the existence or non-existence of God.