Teapot Agnosticism (General)

by dhw, Sunday, February 03, 2008, 14:32 (5924 days ago) @ Mark

I hope you won't mind my joining in, not to comment on the immediate disagreement, but to put a slightly different handle on the teapot. First, though, I have to say that whitecraw's conclusion to his 2 Feb. entry echoes my sentiments precisely, and I found myself mentally ticking all his comments on Clifford v James. All of this amounts to an illuminating discussion on the problem of believing/disbelieving propositions that can't be proved or disproved, but I wonder if in some ways it doesn't distort the main issue. - My starting-point is not whether to believe in a god (or an orbiting teapot). On the assumption that we and the world around us are real ... debatable I know, but we wouldn't be communicating with one another if we didn't share this assumption ... I begin with the question "How did we get here?" By this I mean the origin of life itself ... Darwin's few forms or one, Dawkins' "first hereditary molecule" ... and not evolution, which I do believe in. I then ask: "Could it have been by chance?" I ponder the fact that it has taken the most brilliant conscious minds to unravel the code of an organism that came to life, reproduced itself, and held within itself the potential for infinite variations ... even now we can't replicate it ... and I find that I am unable to believe that unconscious chance could create such a mechanism. My next step is to look for an alternative explanation, and it can only be some kind of design. And so I look at as many versions of design theory as I can find. They are a rich source, since they entail looking at areas of human experience beyond the purely physical, but ultimately I find that all the versions that are offered by the various religions have great gaps in their reasoning and in their plausibility. They demand from me a faith that I cannot muster. At this point, I opt for agnosticism. - The teapot analogy leaves out all the initial stages of my reasoning, and makes us focus exclusively on belief in God, thereby emphasizing the weakness of the theist case and distracting us from the problematical nature of the alternative. It's unbalanced ... hence my misgiving that the teapot discussion provides too narrow a focus. It ties in, of course, with Mark's description of an atheist as "simply someone who has applied probabilistic reasoning to the question of God's existence" and decided that he has "no need of that hypothesis", which seems fair enough if we stick rigidly to the dictionary definition. But I would like to ask if you have also applied probabilistic reasoning to the question of whether unconscious chance can create a mechanism so complex that our conscious minds have only just begun to fathom it out. If you can honestly answer that this hypothesis is acceptable to you, then there is no more to be said. That is your belief. I might even say your faith. But I can't see why this judgement in itself should be regarded as "reasonable". - In passing, there is one other point I would like to raise in relation to the Russell article. He says: "practically all the beliefs of savages are absurd", and goes on to say that "all theological opinions" have only prevailed in "certain geographical regions". Even if in Russell's day his reference to "savages" might have been acceptable, this seems to me a misleading generalization. The stories, details, names and rituals may vary enormously, but from the fence on which I am sitting, the basic belief in supernatural powers that have put us here in the first place seems remarkably similar from one region and from one historical age to the next. It is not "presumptuous" to doubt something long held to be true, but the fact that the same powers are called God here, Allah there, Jehovah, Zeus, Madonna or Babagaga doesn't alter what they stand for. Belief in some kind of deity or deities, even if it's irrational, is common to many if not most human societies.