The simple definition is whether or not you are ready to commit to a choice.
Both the Theist (Deist, polytheist) Camp and the Atheist Camp, have reached the fork in the road and gone down the path in one direction or the other. They may argue their points back and forth, but they have both taken a leap of faith in their knowledge base and made a decision.
The Agnostic, is one that stands at the fork in the road and say’s I can’t decide, for what-ever reason, and don’t want to make a choice. The Agnostic chooses to stop exploring the question for the time being, and stands still in this part of his/her life. They may advance in other parts, intellectually, physically, socially, but spiritually they are at a stand-still, an unmovable position.
Seeing as “spirituality” is one of those words that can mean just about anything, while bringing nothing of substance to the table, is that such a bad thing?
The Crusaders were said to be pure of spirit, ya know?
Then you and I agree that it’s possible for a human to not have a belief about something presented to him/her. That’s why I think those 3 categories are reasonable, here they are with different wording:
Believes in at least 1 god
Does not have a belief about the existence of any gods and does not have a belief about non-existence of all gods
Well, that’s not at all my experience. We’re all exploring the question; agnostics, perhaps, appreciate the journey more than the destination.
This probably isn’t the place to discuss Lucretius, but since I’m a classicist I can’t resist commenting on this. True, I wouldn’t read Lucretius for physics–much like I wouldn’t read Leaves of Grass for gardening tips–but the main point of his work is the overall approach to “The Nature of Things”; he insisted the world could be explained in ways that didn’t rely on divinities. I’m not sure the analogy to random pistol fire holds up; Lucretius has sound reasons for aiming the way he did, and it wasn’t entirely a fluke he came as close to the mark as he did.
Can you expand on why you think those 3 listed options require torturing the definition of belief? It seems we both agree that there are things that can be presented to humans that we don’t have a belief about, so it seems reasonable to list option 2 (not having a belief one way or another).
I believe it’s heads with 50% certainty and 99+% confidence*. And I believe it’s tails with 50% certainty and 99+% confidence. Fortunately for me, these positions are compatible. If I have reason to believe it’s not a fair coin, my confidence will be lower - but unless I have some clue how it might be deviating from a fair coin, the certainty of my beliefs will remain the same due to lack of better information.
defining certainty as the strength of my belief, and confidence as my willing to commit to and act on my belief (taking into account the certainty thereof).
This may be getting off-topic, but why should I need to know how consciousness exists to come to a conclusion on whether there are gods? Most arguments against them don’t depend on declaring that they could exist but not be conscious.
Well that is certainly a consistent position and seems to be a reasonable mathematical approximation to our internal calculations in that situation, but I think it represents something different than what is typically meant by “belief”.
If we use our language without your math and qualifications, it would be accurate to say you believe it is heads and accurate to say you believe it is tails. Which leaves us with the following categories:
Believes (X% certain and Y% confidence) in at least 1 god
Believes (50%certain and 99+% confidence) in at least 1 god and believes (50% certain and 99+% confidence) there are no gods
Believes (X% certain and Y% confidence) there are no gods
With this approach, the word “belief” has lost some meaning and usefulness because now it’s perfectly acceptable to say “believes in at least 1 god and believes there are no gods”.
You may object to this and say that you can’t strip the qualification (certainty and confidence) from the usage of the word belief, you must use them so that contradictions can be avoided, but if that is the case then “belief” has again lost meaning and usefulness.
Talk about torturing the definition of belief! You are basically believing two contradictory things. I had originally seen confidence to be standing for confidence interval, but I see that you define it differently. If you need to go left if the coin is heads and right if it is tails, it appears that you have 99% confidence that you don’t know where you will be going. Odd, to be sure.
You really seem to be redefining belief as probability. Your belief is in a distribution of results, not on what the coin will eventually end up as in one experiment. Saying you believe the coin will be heads 50% of the time makes perfect sense, saying you have 50% belief doesn’t. Belief as it is commonly used is indivisible. It can be weighted, but not divided.
Can you give an example of your usage in the common literature?
Of course it’s confusing and unintuitive, people; I’m trying to be precise. Because only with precision can I demonstrate why this whole business with coin flips is a false analogy to agnosticism.
Simply put, people aren’t agnostic in the sense that they think it’s even-odds that a god exists, the way they are with a coin flip. They simply aren’t - as I said earlier, if they had that much belief in the possibility of a god, they’d be theists and act like it, due to (as I eloquently put it) Pascal’s wager kicking in like a mofo. No, with the average agnostic they don’t have a shred of belief there’s a god - they’re just not confident that their lack-of-belief can be supported by evidence.
Using my admittedly tortured but precise terminology, the situation of the coin is a question of “certainty” of your belief, and agnosticism is a question of “confidence”. The terms sound darned similar because in both cases you’re talking about something which effects your lack of committment to the conclusion, but for orthogonally different reasons. But if we want this discussion to avoid spiralling of the rails, we have to keep them straight.
So again, nobody who calls themselves an agnostic has a 50% ‘certain’ belief that there’s a god. Them people call themselves theists. Your categories are:
Believes (X% certain and Y% confidence) in at least 1 god
Believes (~0% certain and ~50% confidence (or less)) in at least 1 god
Believes (~0% certain and Y% confidence) in at least 1 god
(Presuming X and Y to be high in most cases, to stick with your examples.)
Note the changes - I corrected the point of contention for atheists from ‘certainty’ to ‘confidence’, and I also corrected atheism to be relative to “in at least 1 god”. I did the latter because there is only one continuum of belief in question here, and it’s the same one for everyone - do gods exist or not. There’s no reason to obfuscate it by speaking in terms of the negative for just one category.
So you have two categories - thems that say yes and are pretty conifident they’re right, and thems that say no and are pretty confident they’re right. And then you have a third category, who say they’re not confident about whatever they might say. But by their actions, if they were confident, they’d say NO.
And you can hardly blame them - it is the null hypothesis after all, they claim to be short on arguments that might take them away from the default.
I have purposely avoided the term agnostic because you and I disagreed about the the term belief and it seemed the term agnostic was getting in the way. I still think it’s valuable to first define categories and then either give them names or agree/disagree as to whether existing terms apply. My point is that we should separate those 2 activities.
If we can at least agree on the coin flip situation , then we have a basis for our usage of the term “belief” and we can more easily say why or why not the god question should use the same terminology. The default assumption is that the term “belief” does not change meaning as we change topics, but maybe it does.
I don’t see how you can reasonably assert this.
Maybe the average agnostic thinks one way or another, I’m not sure. But talking about averages does not remove the possibility that some percentage of people do not have a belief about gods existence (using the std definition of belief as something accepted as true (with all kinds of certainty caveats)).
Not really. I literally asked and wanted to know if you believed it was heads and whether you believed it was tails. I didn’t ask about your certainty. You can provide all kinds of additional information about certainty, but that in no way changes the question asked and the hoped for answer. If you don’t answer about your beliefs then it is simply a question unanswered.
You seem to be saying that the question of the coin toss is different than the question of gods existence, can you explain why you think those 2 questions are different form a belief standpoint? (Other than saying that in general agnostics believe X or Y because I more interested in the underlying differences in the question, not a specific group of peoples point of view).
There are those in that third category that would say they are quite confident that they simply have no belief one way or the other.
Well, as I said, there are two orthogonal ways you can “have less belief” in something, in that you’re less likely to positively assert it. I put that in quotes because I (arbitrarily?) think of one as “having less belief in it”, and the other as “having less confidence in your belief in it” I’ve been using “certainty” as the measuring unit of ‘belief quantity’, if you will.
Because people obviously aren’t talking about the same thing - that’s the whole reason people are bringing up coin flips - to try to underscore that there’s some unique and separate status that agnostics have. The thing is that the situations don’t model the way they hope to imply they do.
There’s a better place below to discuss this; I’ll cover it there.
The point I’m making here is that I think that the claim that most agnostics as a class believe “50/50” on the theism question is pure unmitigated bullshit. Belief-wise, these puppies are atheists. So why didn’t I just say that? Because there’s a separate breed of animal called the agnostic theist, who does have a positive belief in god; possibly even near certainty. They merely are also aware that actual certainty is unattainable. But these really aren’t the people who primarily self-identify as agnostics, so I don’t focus on them. Yet my damnable addiction to accuracy requires me to qualify my assertions to account for them anyway.
I have a 50%-certain belief in the assertion that it’s heads, and a 50%-certain belief in the assertion that it’s tails. If you don’t like the idea of percentage beliefs I don’t care - that’s the way it works.
If you insist on snapping things to pure yes/no, this can be done - but at a loss of accuracy an information. Which is to say, I’d have to lie. I’d have to either say that I don’t believe it’s heads or that I do, when actually both statements are equally (in-)correct. The agnostics would have me say that I don’t believe either statement - yet I do believe the statement “It is either heads or tails” - and I believe that with absolute certainty. So the agnostics would have me adding 0% belief in A to 0% belief in B and get 100% belief A-or-B. This is obviously wrong; the agnostic way of describing belief is obviously wrong.
“But wait!” the agnostic may say, “the right way to describe this is that you have no belief whatsoever either way, and that 50% is actually your confidence! You can then add the confidences and it all works!”
Right.
Now let’s talk about a fixed coin. 2 times out of 3, it lands on heads. 1 out of 3, it lands on tails. Flip it - do you believe it’s heads? I say yes, you have a pretty strong belief it’s heads, and a somewhat weak belief that it’s tails, simultaneously (the two statements being opposite sides of the same coin, as it were). The agnostic postion, however, doesn’t account for probabilities in belief; it must therefore remain that we have no belief either way that the coin will land heads or tails; merely a 66.6% confidence for the one statement of belief (which you don’t hold) and a 33.3% confidence in the other.
Now let’s talk about this other coin, called “the sun will rise in the morning”. We can roughly estimate the odds of it landing heads at 99.999999999999999%. I say we have a nice strong belief that the coin will land heads. The agnostic phrasing… still doesn’t account for percentage beliefs. So if they want to maintain any semblance of consistency in their use of the term, they don’t have a belief that the sun will rise in the morning. In other words, they only use the term “belief” where I would use the term “logically certain knowledge” - which is to say, math, logic, and absrtactions only. No beliefs about the real world are allowed. And I’ll add, when talking about logical certainties is exactly when I am least likely to use the term “belief”.
There’s your example of usage in the common literature, Voyager. The term belief is virtually always used to refer to beliefs held divisibly.
I have explained the difference. With precision. You just don’t like the precision.
There is one other difference which I haven’t covered, mind you - in the coin example we all know and agree on what the level of justified certainty is. In the god example, that’s not as clear. The agnostics say there isn’t a justified level of certainty due to there being no information - but they’re clearly wrong. There’s lots of information that informs our confidence or lack thereof in the assertion “gods exist”. Pascal’s wager is an excellent one - it informs us that for any given god, there are a million other equally likely possibilities that are mutually exclusive to that one. This slices down the probability to a sliver of what it was, for each specific god. Then there’s science - whoops, miracles are suddenly pretty unlikely, as are any dieties that do them. Claims that god exists? Well, most of them are conflicting and all of them are less reliable and verifiable than the National Enquirer.
All of this is evidence that effects our level of certainty. Any given god is just astronomically unlikely. Whole classes of gods are… astronomically unlikely. Even aliens with godlike physics-defying technology are…astronomically unlikely.
And the agnognostics, at some level, realize this. That’s why they don’t go to church - or start one.
And I say they’re wrong. Admittedly, the distinctions involved here are subtle.
This is an incredibly interesting thread.
I’m a beleiver, so atheism/agnosticism it’s not my thing, but I’m learning a lot about the shades of (un)belief.
Extremely enlightening.
When you say “that’s the way it works” which of these are you asserting:
That is how begbert2 thinks it works
That is how all English speaking people that use the word “belief” think it works
Regardless of who thinks it works this way, this is the accurate description of the mapping of the word “belief” to the processes in the human brain
I think you may have forgotten the start of this. You stated it’s binary, 2 options, either theist because you believe in a god or, atheist because you didn’t answer “yes” to believing in a god.
I was trying to add more precision by allowing for the 3rd option in which a person doesn’t have a belief (yes/no/null).
So, to recap: begbert2 - it’s yes/no RaftPeople - it’s yes/no/null
I honestly don’t know what the agnostics would tell you, but I know that I wouldn’t have you add those two things together, because it’s your model, not mine. I don’t know how that is supposed to operate.
The sum of my position is as follows:
Belief is generally understood as something that is accepted as true.
There are things that humans do not accept as true because they don’t have enough information (or other reasons) and therefore is not found in the set of their beliefs
If you take a person that does not accept as true position X and does not accept as true position not X, and you lump that person in with those that do accept as true position X, or you lump them in with those that do accept as true not X, then you have lost information.
You are making an assumption about how this situation would be handled. It’s an interesting question what my belief would be regarding heads or tails, I’ll need to think about it.
The explanations you have given so far, if my memory is accurate, typically involve the term “agnostic” and describing what they might or might not believe on average, etc.
I’m just asking you to explain why the god question is different from the coin question. But please don’t use terms like theists, athiests and agnostics, I honestly don’t care about the terms, tell me about facts, logic and nature and why the 2 questions are different. But when answering, remember that we are talking about “gods” not God specifically. Statements about miracles, etc. may be valuable for specific gods, but not all, you need to provide logic that goes beyond the description of a specific god.
The perfect example would be a god that created the universe and walked away from it, but left enough physical evidence that one day scientists will conclude that it exists. How is the question about that god’s existence (that is not performing miracles, etc.) different than the coin flip?
Most arguments against them apply best to a god that is both worldly and interventionist. It’s pretty clear to me that evidence for an objectively observable Hollywood God is rather weak. Subjective evidence is relatively more difficult though certainly not impossible to refute.
Some arguments work off of Occam’s razor: we can explain that which we see in nature without invoking a supreme Deity. That approach makes a lot of sense if you are constructing a system of knowledge about nature: it is convenient to assemble your structure step by step after all. But (again) it seems to me that the minimally identifying characteristic of a supreme Deity involves consciousness. And until I have a working model of consciousness so that I can guess how it arises, I don’t see how I can rule Him out (subject to Voyager’s caveats previously noted).[1] If a 13th century engineer was asked to speculate on something like the germ theory of disease or whether matter was composed of atoms, the proper response would be silence.
[1] A discussion which could occur today would be to submit that consciousness does not occur outside of an evolutionary process. Natural selection might conceivably occur at some sort of astronomical scale (maybe) but it’s hard to see how under those difficult-to-imagine circumstances that consciousness or even sentience would play a supporting role. Then again, western Theists typically are not pantheists: presumably they believe that God and His characteristics reside outside of the visible universe.
I spent some time thinking about this and, as I said before, I think it’s an interesting question. But before I go through the details, this is one of the things that I realized about my feeling/understanding of the word belief: When I believe something, even without certainty, I generally do not also believe the immediate opposite (although we do hold contradictory beliefs, it seems they are at least a little bit indirect or we think they are orthogonal). It stops “feeling” like it’s a belief and has shifted over more to possibility/probability.
So, when I envision a situation like the one described and imagine myself being asked if I believe it is coming up heads, if I imagine my response as “yes I believe it” it doesn’t feel quite right. It feels like it’s in a gray area where I am getting closer to belief but not fully there. It sure seems like there is a good chance it will come up heads, but there is enough of a chance it will come up tails that when I try to take the position “I believe heads” I am left with a nagging feeling that it is not quite the right categorization.
Regarding the sun coming up, I do believe it will come up even though I fully realize there is a chance it won’t.
Your brain may work differently than mine due to physical properties and life experience, so it certainly can be a difficult thing to agree on a mapping of a word like belief to our internal thought processes.
I’m curious about other posters: anyone care to share whether you would categorize your position as “believe it will be heads” for the coin that comes up heads 2/3 of the time?
It’s true you don’t “have” to believe anything. But the question is: Do you believe it is coming up heads? Or would you not be comfortable using that phrase in this situation?