# Technically, is agnosticism the only valid option? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 21, 2015, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460 "2015-05-21T00:49:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 8:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/101 "2015-05-22T08:37:41Z")
> [@Askance](#): > > We are told that the christian god is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent (not anthopomorphic at all). And that he constantly interferes with earthly life at every level imaginable. He supposedly cures diseases on some random basis, brings earthquakes and hurricanes upon the ungodly, … Quite right. But that’s _the Christian God_ – a 2000-year old invention of the same level of naivety as Greek mythology. And there are certainly some aspects of it that are anthropomorphic, just like the earlier mythological gods, because one sees paintings and statues of the Christian God all the time, not to mention being represented as a disembodied deep well-modulated voice coming out of a burning bush. I notice that Richard Dawkins and many other strong atheists do the same thing: they deny the existence of God by attacking the silly mythological creations of organized religions. The point is, however, that one can develop more abstract and much more rational, scientifically compatible definitions of God that are not so easily dismissed. Agnostics implicitly acknowledge this. Devoted atheists refer to this as “bullshit”. 😉 > [@Askance](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > What kind of evidence do you expect to see? > > More than none. “None” assumes that you have a basis on which to define what the evidence must look like. > [@MrDibble](#): > > Like I said - are black holes all God, then? No, they are not, but for some reason you keep bringing it up. Perhaps you didn’t claim that I ever said it (I didn’t) but you must surely be under the impression that _somebody_ must have said it, else why keep mentioning it? > [@MrDibble](#): > > Beyond the event horizon fits the definition of “unknowable and unknown” to a T. No, it does not. It’s simply not directly detectable. So are a lot of things. So is any past or future, the state of a place 100 light-years away _right now_, the presence of dinosaurs, or the state of the Big Bang at 10[sup]-10[/sup] seconds. It doesn’t stop us from building useful models to describe these things and to test our hypotheses about them. Indeed certain information not being directly detectable is deeply entrenched in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and even (arguably) in Schrodinger’s illustrious cat. > [@SenorBeef](#): > > Then you’re an atheist. You’re non-theist. You’re a-theist. Like “typical” and “atypical”. Atheism isn’t a belief system, it’s the absence of theistic belief. You’re probably a-ghostism and a-leprechaunism and whatever else we haven’t need to invent terms for too. No, that’s one common application of the prefix “a” and one meaning of “atheist”, but there are others – hence the distinction between weak and strong atheism, or what is sometimes called negative and positive atheism. Strong atheism, simply stated, is the explicit denial of the existence of any God, and it is indeed a belief system, the kind that drives one to write books with titles like _The God Delusion._ Someone with the belief that you describe should probably call themselves “agnostic” to avoid ambiguity. The term “gnostic” alludes to the possession of knowledge, usually spiritual knowledge like personal knowledge about the existence or non-existence of God, so “agnostic” means that in that respect, “I ain’t got any”. But people use words in different ways, and meanings change over time. I certainly prefer “agnostic”. ---
**Author:** ![Critical1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/3e96dc/32.png) [@Critical1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Critical1)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 8:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/102 "2015-05-22T08:47:35Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Really? So, you are saying that in no other endeavor is uncertainty, even a tiny bit given any creed? 😛 You obviously don’t know anything about science if you ‘believe’ this horseshit. Would you like some examples of scientists who were uncertain about things and went against the grain and the vast majority of accepted wisdom and theory to look beyond? Because there are myriad such examples…sometimes the scientists are proved wrong in the end, and sometimes their work overturns the current accepted theories and takes us in entirely new directions. And all because it’s not JUST the religious types who take the tiniest bit of uncertainty and push on. The one thing missing from the religious types is evidence. I would love for you to show me a scientific break through that arose from a hypothesis that there was zero supporting evidence for in the first place. The religious run their lives on belief in that which there not only is no supporting evidence for but there Cannot be supporting evidence for. > [@SenorBeef](#): > > None. Faith is the voluntary and deliberate abdication of reason in favor of something that fits what someone wants. It is an inherently negative thing, choosing to eschew the greatest feats of which the human mind is capable. The idea that faith is somehow noble or desirable is something pushed by people who have chosen faith over reason. There is no rational basis on which to believe faith has an inherent value. A tangent but you should check out [Thinking Fast and Slow](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555) The voluntary part is in question to a fair degree. I can’t remember the particular chapter but the human brain is wired to believe and it takes effort to doubt. > [@wolfpup](#): > > I notice that Richard Dawkins and many other strong atheists do the same thing: they deny the existence of God by attacking the silly mythological creations of organized religions. > > The point is, however, that one can develop more abstract and much more rational, scientifically compatible definitions of God that are not so easily dismissed. Agnostics implicitly acknowledge this. Devoted atheists refer to this as “bullshit”. 😉 Then construct one, that there is evidence for. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 9:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/103 "2015-05-22T09:29:29Z")
> [@Novelty\_Bobble](#): > > Only if you choose to load it. Naah, it comes pre-loaded. > [@](#): > > Personally I’m an atheist. It carries no other information about me _at all_. Of course it does - it tells me stonkloads about you - such as that you’re the kind of person _who has no problem calling themselves an atheist_, which is a very informative data point. > [@](#): > > If you want to know more about my worldview we have to go far, far beyond that but “atheist” is the correct starting point and should be reclaimed as the properly neutral term that it is. It’s never been neutral - it wasn’t neutral when it was the Greek term for those who deliberately blasphemed, and it wasn’t a neutral term when it was repurposed by Enlightenment philosophers. > [@](#): > > Turn it around. If someone were to say they were a “theist” or “deist” would that also be a loaded term? Hell yes. Especially the latter. > [@](#): > > loaded with what? Baggage based on common past usage. > [@](#): > > what does it actually tell you about a person? As an example, someone who calls themselves a “deist” likely has done a bit more introspection than someone who just calls themselves a Southern Baptist… ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/104 "2015-05-22T09:35:07Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > The point is, however, that one can develop more abstract and much more rational, scientifically compatible definitions of God that are not so easily dismissed. Agnostics implicitly acknowledge this. Devoted atheists refer to this as “bullshit”. 😉 By “not so easily dismissed” do you mean impossible to dismiss, or just that it’s harder to dismiss? I’ve yet to encounter a rational definition of god. Any god that is indistinguishable from no-god _is_ bullshit. There’s no rational reason to be open to the existence of such gods except in the trivial “open to anything not impossible, if supplied with evidence”-sense. For some definitions of agnostic this is all they mean, but I agree whole heartedly with those who consider that a useless definition. You may pat yourself on the back for not falling in the “100% sure”-trap you perceive some atheist to fall into, but I’d much rather be suspected of believing that instead of being believed to be open to the capital G god of global monotheism, which is what a majority hears when you say agnostic. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 10:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/105 "2015-05-22T10:19:38Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > No, they are not, but for some reason you keep bringing it up. Perhaps you didn’t claim that I ever said it (I didn’t) but you must surely be under the impression that _somebody_ must have said it, else why keep mentioning it? Someone did. I even quoted them. > [@](#): > > No, it does not. It’s simply not directly detectable. No, it’s not detectable and never can be. It is unknowable. > [@](#): > > So are a lot of things. So is any past or future, the state of a place 100 light-years away _right now_, the presence of dinosaurs, or the state of the Big Bang at 10[sup]-10[/sup] seconds. So are all these things God? If not, do you agree that “God is that which is unknowable and unknown” is a bullshit definition of God? > [@](#): > > It doesn’t stop us from building useful models to describe these things and to test our hypotheses about them. Which we can do with definitions of God, too. So I don’t see the problem here. > [@](#): > > Indeed certain information not being directly detectable is deeply entrenched in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and even (arguably) in Schrodinger’s illustrious cat. You do realise Schroedinger’s Gedankenexperiment was intended to _ridicule_ that notion, right? ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 10:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/106 "2015-05-22T10:38:01Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > A child of _which_ god? You know Him and Her as love. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 10:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/107 "2015-05-22T10:48:18Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > I notice that Richard Dawkins and many other strong atheists do the same thing: they deny the existence of God by attacking the silly mythological creations of organized religions. I can’t begin to imagine why Dawkins et al waste their time considering the validity of religion as practiced by billions. Surely they would be far wiser spending their time pondering the existence of the type of deity no one believes in but which a tiny minority of intellectuals spend their time mentally masturbating over. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 11:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/108 "2015-05-22T11:11:11Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > The point is, however, that one can develop more abstract and much more rational, scientifically compatible definitions of God that are not so easily dismissed. By all means, go for it… “Unknown and unknowable” is not it. > [@](#): > > Agnostics implicitly acknowledge this. Devoted atheists refer to this as “bullshit”. I don’t know if you’re talking about me, as I’m the one who called “bullshit”, but I’m not an atheist of any stripe, never mind a “devoted” one. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 11:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/109 "2015-05-22T11:16:10Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > The point is, however, that one can develop more abstract and much more rational, scientifically compatible definitions of God that are not so easily dismissed. Can one, now? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 11:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/110 "2015-05-22T11:50:18Z")
> [@Novelty\_Bobble](#): > > Only if you choose to load it. Personally I’m an atheist. It carries no other information about me _at all_. If you want to know more about my worldview we have to go far, far beyond that but “atheist” is the correct starting point and should be reclaimed as the properly neutral term that it is. > Turn it around. If someone were to say they were a “theist” or “deist” would that also be a loaded term? loaded with what? what does it actually tell you about a person? That they can be convinced that something exists without having to bother to provide any evidence that it exists, and that this “something” can do magic. ---
**Author:** ![simster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/simster/32/1047_2.png) [@simster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simster)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 11:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/111 "2015-05-22T11:51:57Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > You know Him and Her as love. Love is a god? I thought Love was a battlefield. Your answer is nonsensical. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/112 "2015-05-22T11:56:24Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > You know Him and Her as love. Is “Hate” a god too? What about “Confusion”? Is there a god of “Meh”? ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/113 "2015-05-22T12:48:09Z")
> [@simster](#): > > Love is a god? I thought Love was a battlefield. > > Your answer is nonsensical. You expect a on line description of God to someone who does not know God to make sense? :smack: Whenever you experience Love, you are experiencing not a emotion, but God working and one with His/Her child. It does not matter the faith (or non-faith) of the child, just the heart and the ability of Love to flow through it. At that moment the Father/Mother and child are one with each other. Love is also a coordinated effort of the Father/Mother. It is not disconnected from each other, but purposely and intelligently driven. ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/114 "2015-05-22T12:54:00Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Is “Hate” a god too? > What about “Confusion”? Is there a god of “Meh”? There are many gods **Czarcasm** , I do not know them all. Over the years I have seen a pattern and believe that you also have a god, what is commonly called the ‘Old Testament’ God, one of hate and wrath, which allows you to claim that you dismiss ‘God’ altogether, although you often bring this god up in your postings which sort of indicates that it is your god, as belief in this God is steering your life. So in that yes I would say there is a Hate god. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/115 "2015-05-22T13:46:21Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Someone did. I even quoted them. 'twasn’t me. > [@MrDibble](#): > > No, it’s not detectable and never can be. It is unknowable. That’s ridiculous. For one thing if you picked a sufficiently massive black hole you could safely fall into it and know. More to the point, though, a black hole forms according to physical principles, and we should be able to model it in accordance with how well we understand those principles. There are already some plausible hypothesis of what the inside of a black hole would be like, and with better understanding we could no doubt build accurate models and perhaps test them indirectly, like we do with much of science. > [@MrDibble](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > So are a lot of things. So is any past or future, the state of a place 100 light-years away right now, the presence of dinosaurs, or the state of the Big Bang at 10[sup]-10[/sup] seconds. > > So are all these things God? No, all those things are areas of inquiry which cannot be directly observed and about which we’ve made informed indirect inferences, and which for some reason you choose to keep using as straw men to conduct a “God” argument. > [@MrDibble](#): > > If not, do you agree that “God is that which is unknowable and unknown” is a bullshit definition of God? Not really, but there are better ways of putting it. I favor an approach based on the fact that any scientific description of the universe must always necessarily be incomplete. We can trace the creation of the elements and the stars and galaxies to the Big Bang but that begs the obvious question of where the singularity came from and what governed its properties. We can sidestep the question with the Hartle-Hawking proposal of a no-boundary universe existing in imaginary Euclidian time, but then we have to ask where _that_ came from. We can posit that Big Bangs are occurring forever in some hypothetical multiverse, but that raises more questions than answers. And I would even ask: at what point in this ontological escalation are we longer dealing with the natural world any more at all? One possible answer to all of those is along the lines of, “don’t bother me kid, go out and play”, but I prefer a more metaphysical exploration. I’m even more bothered by those, like Lawrence Krauss, who don’t even accept these limitations and argue that modern physics has rendered both philosophy and religion obsolete. I just think that that’s astoundingly narrow-minded. > [@MrDibble](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > It doesn’t stop us from building useful models to describe these things and to test our hypotheses about them. > > Which we can do with definitions of God, too. So I don’t see the problem here. Which we absolutely **cannot** do with definitions of God, which is the whole point. > [@MrDibble](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > Indeed certain information not being directly detectable is deeply entrenched in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and even (arguably) in Schrodinger’s illustrious cat > > You do realise Schroedinger’s Gedankenexperiment was intended to _ridicule_ that notion, right? Indeed it was. Yet most of the Copenhagen interpretation that he was ridiculing, like quantum superposition and the uncertainty principle, are today widely accepted. Most believe that his attempt to present this as a paradox fails because the cat itself is the detector that triggers the collapse of quantum superposition, so there’s no paradox. Furthermore – and this was my bracketed “arguably” – according to the “many worlds” interpretation due to Hugh Everett, there is no quantum collapse at all, and the cat simply decoheres, emerging simultaneously dead and alive in different parallel universes. So not only might Shrodinger’s supposed paradox be, in a sense, literally true, but it’s another example in my list of things that are not directly detectable but about which we can build reasonable theories and models. “Many worlds” is being taken quite seriously and people like David Deutsch are convinced that this is why quantum computing works. But once again, while we might be able to demonstrate glimmerings of understanding, we are totally at a loss trying to explain the question, “how did it come to be this way?” ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/116 "2015-05-22T14:10:18Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > There are many gods **Czarcasm** , I do not know them all. Over the years I have seen a pattern and believe that you also have a god, what is commonly called the ‘Old Testament’ God, one of hate and wrath, which allows you to claim that you dismiss ‘God’ altogether, although you often bring this god up in your postings which sort of indicates that it is your god, as belief in this God is steering your life. So in that yes I would say there is a Hate god. What a petty thing to say. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/117 "2015-05-22T14:10:28Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > I notice that Richard Dawkins and many other strong atheists do the same thing: they deny the existence of God by attacking the silly mythological creations of organized religions. Dawkins isn’t a strong atheist. Or at least his conclusion in “The God Delusion”, which he repeats several times and also uses at speeches, is that “God almost certainly does not exist” - he’s specifically allowing for the possibility that our provisional knowledge is incomplete, and some sort of god is out there, but he sees no reason to believe it’s true. > [@](#): > > “None” assumes that you have a basis on which to define what the evidence must look like. You’re getting the proces reversed here. We observe something. We gather data about it. We attempt to explain how that something works. We test those hypotheses against others. We seek out alternate explanations, or reasons why that explanation is wrong. You only make new assumptions when necessary to craft an explanation. You attempt to falsify those assumptions. Once upon a time, mankind needed gods to explain why the rains came some years and not others. Why there was thunder and lightning. Why the sun moves across the sky. Those were all poor, incorrect, arbitrary explanations for natural phenomena. In the same way, “bearded guy in the sky” is a bad explanation for the existence of everything. Just as “I don’t know” is a superior explanation to weather cycles or the movement of the sun, “I don’t know” is a better explanation for the existence of the universe than a bearded sky dude, or a giant invisible turtle, or any other arbitrary unfounded explanation. The need for God as part of our understanding of the world shrinks as our knowledge and understanding of it grows. We craft the explanation from the information we have, and the thing that needs to be explained, and our ability to gather evidence and falsify that explanation. It’s not a given that there’s a god-sized hole in reality that needs to be filled, let alone that it can be filled by completely arbitrary explanations from iron age men. If “God is a sky dude whose favorite color is red” and “God is a sky dude whose favorite color is blue” are equally valid explanations, then they’re not useful explanations at all. So you would be right to say “the blue-loving god almost certainly doesn’t exist” and the red-loving god as well. > [@](#): > > No, that’s one common application of the prefix “a” and one meaning of “atheist”, but there are others – hence the distinction between weak and strong atheism, or what is sometimes called negative and positive atheism. Strong atheism, simply stated, is the explicit denial of the existence of any God, and it is indeed a belief system, the kind that drives one to write books with titles like _The God Delusion._ Someone with the belief that you describe should probably call themselves “agnostic” to avoid ambiguity. The term “gnostic” alludes to the possession of knowledge, usually spiritual knowledge like personal knowledge about the existence or non-existence of God, so “agnostic” means that in that respect, “I ain’t got any”. But people use words in different ways, and meanings change over time. I certainly prefer “agnostic”. As above, “The God Delusion” is not a strong atheist position, or such a thing is meaningless. It is practically meaningless, I think. The distinction between “strong” and “weak” atheists are mostly a straw man. Maybe some teenagers who are trying to sound edgey and rebel against their religious parents are definitive in saying god doesn’t exist, but practically all of atheism comes from skepticism, of which a core tenet is that all knowledge is provisional. Bearded sky dude has roughly the same non-zero chance of existing as leprechauns, dragons, or Russell’s teapot. As I mentioned previously in the thread, “there is no god” is almost always shorthand for “your idea of a bearded sky dude who hates gay people is almost certainly false”, not “I am absolutely sure that there’s there’s not some sort of vague subtle entity out there hiding in the gaps in our knowledge that could be construed as some sort of god-like entity” As for the rest - all of the subdividing of the term atheists, classifying weak and strong ones, dancing around the word agnostic - it’s all part of this vast elaborate undue deference that we give to religion. It’s socially unacceptable to treat religion the same way you treat other supernatural bunk - people dedicate their entire lives to serving it and the vast majority of people give lip service to believing it. So rather than treating it like the simple “Does Santa Claus exist?” issue that it really is, instead we get into flowery philosophical arguments about the nature of knowledge and certainty and all the other shit that we would never bring up if we were talking about whether ghosts were real. All of that shit is the result of straw men by religious people to ascribe beliefs to atheists “you KNOW there’s no god, that’s as arrogant and faith-based as knowing there is a god!” or people trying to avoid the backlash of not believing “oh, I’m not one of those filthy militant atheists, no… I’m agnostic. That’s totally more warm and cuddly” ---
**Author:** ![simster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/simster/32/1047_2.png) [@simster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simster)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/118 "2015-05-22T14:52:10Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > You expect a on line description of God to someone who does not know God to make sense? :smack: > > Whenever you experience Love, you are experiencing not a emotion, but God working and one with His/Her child. It does not matter the faith (or non-faith) of the child, just the heart and the ability of Love to flow through it. At that moment the Father/Mother and child are one with each other. Love is also a coordinated effort of the Father/Mother. It is not disconnected from each other, but purposely and intelligently driven. useless pablum - much like a fortune cookie or horoscope - its so generic as to be useless in any real sense. You also can’t show that its “purposely or intelligently driven” in any objective measure or manner. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/119 "2015-05-22T15:00:16Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > 'twasn’t me. Yes, I _know_. So why you think I was talking to you, I have no idea. > [@](#): > > That’s ridiculous. For one thing if you picked a sufficiently massive black hole you could safely fall into it and know. Highly irradiated smears of basic particles can’t “know” anything. > [@](#): > > More to the point, though, a black hole forms according to physical principles, and we should be able to model it in accordance with how well we understand those principles. There are already some plausible hypothesis of what the inside of a black hole would be like, and with better understanding we could no doubt build accurate models and perhaps test them indirectly, like we do with much of science. And we could use the same process on any God with ascribed properties. As we already have done. > [@](#): > > No, all those things are areas of inquiry which cannot be directly observed and about which we’ve made informed indirect inferences, and which for some reason you choose to keep using as straw men to conduct a “God” argument. Because you’re not telling me what makes “God” a different category of enquiry. _Of course_ we can make indirect inferences about the nature of God…once such is defined. > [@](#): > > Not really, but there are better ways of putting it. I favor an approach based on the fact that any scientific description of the universe must always necessarily be incomplete. I’ve never actually read anyone willingly subscribe to the God of the Gaps with such … outright enthusiasm before. It’s refreshing, I guess. > [@](#): > > We can trace the creation of the elements and the stars and galaxies to the Big Bang but that begs the obvious question of where the singularity came from and what governed its properties. Only if you subscribe to the fiction of universal causality. And that’s _not_ what “begging the question” means… > [@](#): > > Which we absolutely **cannot** do with definitions of God, which is the whole point. Of course we can. We must. Otherwise such a definition _isn’t_ “more rational” nor “scientifically compatible”, it’s _just_ bullshit. > [@](#): > > Indeed it was. Yet most of the Copenhagen interpretation that he was ridiculing, like quantum superposition and the uncertainty principle, are today widely accepted. Doesn’t make the thought experiment any less absurd, and a poor choice of metaphor for God. The “rational, scientifically compatible” definition of which, despite being supposedly so possible to give, you still haven’t done. What is _your_ definition of God? ---
**Author:** ![Novelty\_Bobble](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Novelty\_Bobble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Novelty_Bobble)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460/120 "2015-05-22T15:40:48Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > As for the rest - all of the subdividing of the term atheists, classifying weak and strong ones, dancing around the word agnostic - it’s all part of this vast elaborate undue deference that we give to religion. It’s socially unacceptable to treat religion the same way you treat other supernatural bunk - people dedicate their entire lives to serving it and the vast majority of people give lip service to believing it. So rather than treating it like the simple “Does Santa Claus exist?” issue that it really is, instead we get into flowery philosophical arguments about the nature of knowledge and certainty and all the other shit that we would never bring up if we were talking about whether ghosts were real. This is worth emphasising lest it be lost in a fairly sizeable post. I’ve yet to be given a convincing reason why a person’s religious views deserve any greater respect than those springing from, say, a political worldview. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/technically-is-agnosticism-the-only-valid-option/720460.md?page=7)