Teapot Agnosticism (General)

by dhw, Friday, February 08, 2008, 19:13 (6134 days ago) @ Mark

You say that the issues of God's existence and the origin of life are "wholly separate", and yet we agree that the issue of God's existence is one of belief and not knowledge. The question then is not one of scientific evidence for the existence of a supernatural creator ... we both know that is impossible. The question is whether scientific evidence can influence belief. If science could show that life might have come about by chance, it would certainly influence some people to doubt God's existence ... just as some scientists have concluded from their studies that the first life forms are too complicated to have come about without a conscious designer whom they call God. The fact that "supernatural entities cannot be proven by the natural sciences" is irrelevant: on the level of belief, the two issues are interlinked. - Your question: "how reasonable is it to be sceptical about things for which there is no evidence whatsoever?" seems to suggest (if I've understood you correctly) that evidence has to be scientific. This may or may not be reasonable, depending on your beliefs, but for someone less committed than yourself, it might seem unreasonable to declare that thousands of years of cultural history, personal testimonies and experiences do not constitute some sort of evidence. Certainly many people claim that it is evidence, so why is it unreasonable to be sceptical towards it? This is where the teapot analogy (and your fairies and unicorns) becomes totally inappropriate. My starting-point remains: how did we get here? No-one would seriously argue that a teapot, or fairies or unicorns put us here. But countless generations, including some of the most brilliant minds in history, have believed in or at least not rejected the concept of a deity or deities that started it all off. And so of course the concept of a god is singled out for special treatment. It has underlain many of our civilizations, and it still holds sway in many societies. You will certainly not deny that it is also still causing enormous damage to our world. How much damage has the concept of the orbiting teapot done? To deny the special place of the God hypothesis is ... if I may quote you ... "patently ridiculous". - You say "atheism and theism are not rival schools of belief", and "atheism is not the 'opposite' of theism", and "atheism is the absence of belief, not the belief in absence." It all sounds very authoritative, but where does your authority come from? Who has laid down the definitions? We are entering into territory which makes all discussion pointless unless we can first agree on what we're talking about. Your definition of atheism would come far closer to my definition of agnosticism (your "popular" agnosticism, as opposed to your "philosophical" agnosticism). In all my arguments, I use "atheism" to mean disbelief in or denial of the existence of a god or gods; I use "theism" to mean belief in the existence of a god or gods. Unfortunately, there is no word in our vocabulary to denote the state of "not believing but not disbelieving", and that is why it has become more and more common to use "agnosticism" in this sense. Clearly, this causes some confusion because philosophers insist on the original meaning of the term, but we have no alternative at the moment. The definitions I am working with show clearly that atheism and theism are rival schools of belief, atheism is the opposite of theism, and agnosticism is the middle ground (though not necessarily as happy as you suggest). Since we are clearly talking at cross purposes, it would be helpful if you would give us your own definitions of atheism and theism to show why they are not rival or indeed opposite to each other.