Technically, is agnosticism the only valid option?

Great Debates
361

Not quite so big as you seem to think. Most crucially, I don’t define agnostic/atheistic/theist based on what is known. I’ve always thought it was about what you believe. What we think we know certainly has a big impact on what we believe…

To put it another way…I can’t say I know with absolute certainty that Jesus was not God and did not die for my sins. But based on the collection of things that I think I know, I find the idea ludicrous. Therefore, I firmly believe that the Christian God does not exist. There are a great many conceptions of God(s) that I find equally ludicrous.

I also think that I know that science has pretty much found nothing in the universe that requires the existence of a God(s) in order for it to exist. So, I don’t see it as a hole that needs filling, per se. My understanding of atheism has been that, based on these things, they’ve pretty much dismissed the idea of God(s) and believe that none exist.

However, the fact that humans have a history of imagining inane gods doesn’t convince me that there are no PGBs that exist. Of course, there’s nothing that makes it/them particularly likely either. For me, if I think about the subject, my internal processor just throws up its hands and says, “Not enough information.” So, I simply don’t have any beliefs one way or another.

This whole thing about God(s) being “unknowable” seems to be a sticking point, and I feel like clarifying it might help: Personally, I would not say that the existence of God(s) cannot be known, but I think it’s very unlikely that it ever will be known. If there is/are god(s), its purposes are probably inscrutable to us, and I don’t have any reason to think that we would be critical to those purposes, so why would it/they need to announce itself/themselves to us?

Having said all that, I would not claim that I am any kind of canonical example of an agnostic, but the word seems to be a reasonable match to my “beliefs”; whereas, atheists tend to seem way more sure that the whole question is resolved than I am.

-VM

362

Well, coming into this, I would have said that an agnostic merely lacks beliefs, while an atheist has a positive belief that there are no gods. Clearly, at least with this group, that’s not exactly right.

-VM

363

What is it, then? A conclusion based on research?

Generally speaking, when you suggest that someone makes decisions based on fear of what others will say about them, they’re not likely to take it as a compliment.

-VM

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Atheist don’t trumpet our lack of belief for the very same reason, so any insult intended for agnostics applies to ourselves.
I mentioned Carl Sagan. I doubt many of us have too many harsh words to say about him. Maybe he was confused about the definition of atheism also, or maybe he called himself agnostic for the greater good. Getting his articles in Parade and getting Cosmos aired were important for science education in this country which needs lots of it.
Calling oneself an agnostic does not involve pretending to worship a god you don’t believe in, it does not involve supporting the religious right, and is at least ethically neutral.

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Well, knowledge is right there in the root of agnostic, so I’m not sure excluding anything to do with knowledge from the definition makes a lot of sense. Yes, what we know or don’t know may affect our beliefs, but that has nothing to do with what we know.

In trying to figure out why theists believe what they do, it is pretty clear that most Doper theists anyway are not so bold as to claim knowledge of what god is or what he wants. They may believe Jesus rose but they don’t claim to know it, not with certainty. Hasn’t anyone ever countered a question about this with the profession of faith, or the statement that if we did know these things we’d lose faith and that would be bad in some way? The level of knowledge professed by many theists isn’t that much different from yours and mine.

As you said, belief depends in knowledge to some extent, and the knowledge that the need for god to explain things keeps receding is indeed a good reason to believe that no gods exist. Dismissed may be too strong a term.
It is striking that references to god diminished sharply in scientific papers from 1500 to 1800. The old ones said that their observations are or what God created - the later ones were observations of what was.

As we went through before, if I enumerate gods you’ll throw up your hands for at least some of them and say no belief one way or another (you’ll believe some don’t exist.) None of the gods I enumerate will make you say you believe. Bingo. Weak atheist.

I think it very unlikely that my wife will win a million bucks in the lottery, but it is possible.
God by definition can be everywhere, so distance is no issue. If some god needs our love (like the Christian god seems to) he will show up. Now you could say that him not showing up means you believe he does not exist, which means you are a strong atheist with respect to that god or class of gods.
Your argument is an excellent reason to believe that no gods exist, but no one would say it is proof - and I realize it is not intended to be.

You don’t have to be sure to lack belief. Even Dawkins said that it is almost certain there are no gods - which is hardly a dogmatic belief. Catholics don’t say “I believe with an almost perfect faith that Jesus was almost certainly the son of God and most probably rose from the dead” after all.
It would be refreshing if they did.

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It’s this definition of atheism that I’m still trying to digest.

I think there may be an important point hiding here…I would not describe someone’s belief or lack of belief in God(s) as science. For those of us that don’t believe in magic, our trust in science probably has a larger influence on what we believe, but it seems like atheists are more likely to say that the conclusions of science encompass their entire belief system.

To be clear, what I’m pointing to is how you took “reason to believe” and then used the descriptor “like all of science”.

It seems there’s a good chance you’re right about this. But I don’t like it, because I don’t like definitions that overlap this way. You may have noticed that I am persnickety about the use of which word in what context, and I have an urge to keep whittling at the words until I feel like I know exactly which one to use where.

This is exactly the point I’ve been trying to make. Primarily because I initially thought that this distinction was what differentiated atheists from agnostics.

I don’t really understand this statement.

I agree, but it sure seems to be a common assumption.

I think that referring to the Null as “the default” has a lot of potential to mislead people that don’t really understand the process.

I think the simplest course here is to broadly agree that there are a great many people who don’t really understand how to identify the Null or what it means when you fail to reject it.

I think if you take a step back, you’ll recognize that Occam’s Razor basically codifies the pragmatic basis of science.

Well, other than intuitively seeming wrong, why would you say that Option 2 is the wrong way to go? I am predicting that if you give it some thought, you’ll realize that Option 2 is the needlessly complex conclusion, while Option 1 is the simpler conclusion that fits the facts.

Since we never can totally “prove” anything, this pragmatic approach allows us to pick an acceptable amount of proof and proceed. Or–more to the point in this example–reject a lack of evidence.

I have seen people use Occam’s Razor as a way to dismiss this kind of creationist thinking. However, it doesn’t achieve much, because creationists could care less about pragmatism or Occam’s Razor. For what it’s worth, I call it “magical thinking”, which is my general term for people throwing science out the window when it doesn’t support what they want to believe.

To be clear, I trust science on every topic that it can meaningfully address, but I don’t think we can use it to address the entire question of PGBs. I’m not saying that this represents a failure of science so much as our human limitations in how we can use it.

Well, evolution invalidates an important chunk of literal interpretation of the Bible. So, if they are unwilling to accept that, then the have to find a way to refute evolution. Or they have to reject science altogether. Some do basically reject science, but others try to find a way to turn science on itself. Unfortunately for them, this simply won’t work on people who understand science. And THAT is what makes science so awesome: Used correctly, it works regardless of the biases of individual humans.

This is problematic. If I hypothesize that frying will cook shrimp faster than boiling, the null hypothesize for my experiment is NOT evolution.

It’s not a fallacy in quite the way you suggest. Creationism and evolution are mutually exclusive, so you CANNOT have both. So, they HAVE to find a way to refute evolution in order to “keep” creationism. That said, merely disproving evolution would not qualify as a “proof” of creationism.

The whole exercise is to try to find enough evidence of the experimental hypothesis in order to reject the Null. Proving your claim and rejecting the Null go hand in hand.

Rejecting the Null hypothesis is not quite the same as disproving it. It’s generally accepted that you can’t “disprove” anything, but you can get close enough to proving something else in order to reject it. Which is way identifying the Null is so important. If you reject the wrong null, you’ve just misled yourself.

You seem to be describing the Null Hypothesis as some independently existing thing. It’s not; it’s contextual. If you have no experimental hypothesis, then you have no Null, either. The Null is whatever accurately describes failing to find what you went looking for. If I hypothesize the existence of Bigfoot, then the Null is “Bigfoot does not exist.” If I find no evidence, I have not disproven Bigfoot, but I have failed to find any way to deny that “Bigfoot does not exist.”

They failed to prove that “lightspeed is constant”, which did not prove that it wasn’t. It took Einstein to come up with a better hypothesis, which subsequent experiments were able to find evidence in support of.

-VM

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I think that’s the point. If he misrepresented himself in order to get more people to listen, I think we understand and even admire him for it.

However, if you suggest that agnostics are misrepresenting themselves because of fear of how theists will treat them, that sure doesn’t sound very admirable.

Carl Sagan was trying to educate the masses using popular entertainment. Most of the rest of us are not.

-VM

368

You said in #218 that “even Dawkins doesn’t profess knowledge that there are no gods” and you more or less repeated the same assertion just now. Here I think is an opportunity for a basic delineation of what I and many think of as “atheist” vs. “agnostic”.

Dawkins wrote a book with the title “The God Delusion” which can hardly be considered a neutral starting point, can it? What if someone wrote a book called “The Science Delusion” claiming that everything that science tells us is “almost certainly false”? Would you excuse that as a reasonable viewpoint because of the cameo appearance of the word “almost”?

Here’s the thing. Dawkins’ book includes a big section called “Why God almost certainly does not exist” in which I interpret his use of “almost” as being simply a scientist’s inherent cautiousness about ALL statements of knowledge, a fact corroborated by the damn contents of the book and the subject of his lectures. Dawkins assumes “God” to be the traditional God of institutionalized religion, and relentlessly attacks it. To me, that’s atheism.

Whereas an alternative position to accept that people should be able to hold whatever concept of God they see fit – any spiritual abstraction they wish – and they don’t have to explain it or justify it to me or anyone else or even necessarily be able to articulate it, and they shouldn’t be accused of having a belief that is “meaningless” or “stupid” or any other disparagement one might feel like heaping upon it. To me, that’s agnosticism. There’s a reason that the word exists. The essential difference from atheism is that it doesn’t lend itself to proselytizing.

As long as I’m here, I may as well clear up this little matter…

So it is. I never said otherwise. But that isn’t the question. The question is whether all of reality can be described by natural laws, or ever can be. Since we already have hypothetical conditions that cannot be – the origin and nature of the Big Bang, various hypothetical concepts of the multiverse – it seems reasonable to conjecture that science will always be incomplete, and moreover that there are specific bounds on what it can explain.

It really wasn’t necessary to provide a grade-school level interpretation of quantum fluctuations. The problem is that “perfect vacuum” doesn’t mean what you think it does. Empty space isn’t “nothingness” – it has dimensional geometry, obeys relativistic laws, and is teeming with fields of all kinds. It was created by the Big Bang and continues to be created today between the galaxies. The Big Bang did not occur in space or time. To equate quantum fluctuations with the Big Bang itself makes no sense.

No, the nature of the singularity at t=0 isn’t taught in any basic physics class. You are also contradicting yourself. You bring up (incorrectly) quantum fluctuations as an example of how something can allegedly be created from nothing. Then you bring up (incorrectly) alleged mass-energy conservation as an example of how it never needed to be created in the first place, because everything was already there.

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If it can be supported, sure. Of course there are a couple of problems.
Theists believe there is some thing called God. Science on the other hand, is a process. Saying there is no such thing like science is like saying there is no such thing as religion - clearly nonsense.
Now if the Science Delusion claims that science does not work, it needs to invalidate all those cases where science has worked. We can show those. Showing instances of God interfering in our affairs is slightly harder.
Dawkins never pretends to be starting from a neutral point. He makes it quite explicit that his reason for writing is all the nasty mail he got from fundamentalists for having the nerve to write as if evolution happens.

What’s atheism? Not believing in the Western God or relentlessly attacking it? As I mentioned up-thread, Tom Paine attacked the Western God as vehemently as
Dawkins, if not more so, yet specifically denied being an atheist.
I’m not denying that Dawkins is an atheist - that’s pretty clear - just that you can prove he is from the evidence you mention.
Dawkins after all was writing a popular book, not an exercise in academic philosophy. Much of the criticism of the book centered around that he attacked fundamentalism, not the liberal Christianity of the writer, and since no one believes in that stuff the book was pointless. (By no one they mean no one who goes to the cocktail parties they go to.) Imagine the criticism if Dawkins refuted gods no one really believes in.

I hardly think that the opinions of the holders of a belief (or lack of belief) about people who hold other beliefs is a reasonable way of defining that belief. An agnostic who deeply thinks that god is unknowable could just as easily berate someone who claims they know god.
So, agnostics are nice and meek (though Huxley wrote lots of books) while atheists go door to door attacking religion. Do I have you right? And Dawkins had the absolute nerve to write a book. When I go to my local public library, which is not exactly located in the Bible Belt, books that are pro-religion outnumber books on atheism 100 to 1 at least.
But thanks for making why atheists sometimes don’t want to come out of the closet very clear. Some say they are agnostic, and some say they just aren’t very religious. It reminds me of another closet. 50 years ago one of my father’s army buddies edited their battalion veterans group newsletter. We knew him as a “confirmed bachelor.” Uh huh.

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You seemed to imply it. I specifically remember your question of asking me exactly how am I in possession of this comic wisdom that it’s a very natural world, and with nothing left for God to do, not that he ever had any work. So I asked you what world do you propose, and instead of stating something differently, basically just move the goalposts further down the field, saying it’s really about science being incomplete and always will be.

Science never has claimed to have all the answers, has anybody on this thread said it did? It is a damn good method of providing and revealing to us what works and what doesn’t work in the real world. So what that it is incomplete, but that doesn’t follow that these limitations cannot still have serious implications for certain phenomena. Nor does it mean that some alternative system of obtaining knowledge would be able to hold a candle to what science has already uncovered. You still holding out hope for God, are ya?

You’re being a bit prissy on once again a question you asked of me, of which I obliged and provided what was Mills take on it. And the very quote I provided showed that the perfect vacuum isn’t what most think it is, so why are you feeding me back the very quote I just gave?

Quantum fluctuations does make sense with the BB, with Mills interpretation of Hawking’s work, and others that have commented on it. I also went to Hawking’s site, as well as Giorbran’s commenting on Hawking’s no boundary proposal, and I haven’t seen yet, where you have corrected anything. So, I think I’ll still go with their version of the way I understand it.

IIRC, it was taught in my high school physics class, and it was hardly an advanced class. That was many moon ago, so I could be mistaken. But just about every book I have read for the layman does comment on it. If they bring it up there, I hardly think it would be foreign to most physics classes in high school and college. Mass-energy conservation was there, at the BB according to Mills of how he translates Hawking’s works, specific quotes upon request. I also went to Hawking’s site, and that is what he is proposing in imaginary time, which isn’t what it sounds like.

Mills states, mass-energy cannot be created or destroyed if the universe is entirely composed of mass-energy, and always existed. There was never a time, according to him when mass-energy comprising our universe did not exist, if only in the form of an empty oscillating vacuum.

In Stephen Hawkings cite, the no boundary proposal is that the laws of physics hold up everywhere, while in real time they don’t.

The no boundary proposal got some additional support when with COBE in 1992, found these irregularities in the background radiation. The form of fluctuations found in this agree with the predictions of the no boundary proposal.

Hawking says that in real time the universe has not existed forever and that would have been a singularity of which laws of physics would have broken down. But it also says the universe would have been determined by the laws of physics in the no boundary condition, and that Quantum theory can predict how the universe began with that of imaginary time, which isn’t what it seems like either, and is a very scientific concept. He says imaginary time isn’t the way we experience it, but that it is just as real as real time. He and Hartle have proposed space and imaginary time together, finite in extent, but without boundary. In this time there are no singularities, and the laws of physics would determine the state of the universe uniquely.

And if all of that isn’t enough to confuse most of us mere mortals, he says that Neil Turok and himself were talking about open inflation, and that they thought it implied that the universe had to be spatially closed, and finite in size. He says that is one way of looking at it, but that it another it would appear open and infinite.
Think you got a grasp on it all? Think I’ve misinterpreted his or Mills works? Good, explain it to me how I got it wrong, or Hawking and/or Mills is mistaken.

If that is agnosticism to you, it’s one of the most absurd opinions I’ve ever heard of it being for why the word exists. Nobody is denying agnostics or anybody else their right to be entitled to their opinion, as if entitlements were in question.

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Despite the claims that we want to evangelize atheism, we mostly want to be left alone. In some parts of the country saying you are atheist could be dangerous. My younger daughter had a lot of religious friends, if she had come out she might have been ostracized.
I have an advantage that when Christians come on to me I can play the Jewish card, which is non-Christian but usually acceptable. I did this when some Baptists came to my door, and they tried to tell me I needed to be saved - and I went into my “you have oppressed us for 2000 years” rant. Great fun.

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I wasn’t quite doing that, but you can examine some religious claims scientifically. Not all, but some. Especially claims of interaction between god and man. However the God hypothesis (or at least some God hypotheses) can be examined scientifically.

The all of science referred to the fact that all belief should be provisional - specifically not like religious faith, which tries to be immune from contradictory evidence.

Agnoticism has gnosis in it, which refers to knowledge. Agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief. So there is no real overlap.

Option 2 happens after the experiment - the Razor needs to be applied to find which hypothesis to check with the experiment.
For instance, if you started from scratch with a scientific flood hypothesis, you’d predict that you’d find a layer of jumbled fossils (or just bones) from the animals killed, and no fossils in the deeper layers of the earth which got created. Now that is a simple hypothesis. The Razor could come up with no simpler. Then you do the experiment and look at the evidence and find that this prediction is refuted.
If the Devil putting the fossils there had been a competing hypothesis before the study, then you are right that it would be rejected by the Razor. But no one came up with it until after the study.
Now today, with evidence, these can be rejected because of the Razor.
So maybe we’re both right.

Quite true. The Bible says it, and they believe it. I sometimes ask them why they think God lied when he put evidence of evolution in the rocks he supposedly created.

Right, it can only address the god question when a specific physical claim is made. It has nothing to say about a deistic god, for example. Or one beyond our event horizon.

Even better - it is designed to work by understanding biases and having a way to correct for them. That’s what peer review and reproducibility are all about.

My point exactly. They’d do better “proving” creationism. Remember, even creationists accept some evolution, just not speciation.

Proving your claim directly rejects the Null, if you’ve designed your hypothesis correctly. But you only try to disprove the Null to the extent it demonstrates your hypothesis.

There are more null hypotheses than we will ever examine. Bigfoots don’t exist is one, but so is dragons don’t exist, unicorns don’t exist, gremlins don’t exist, hobbits don’t exist, etc., etc. That no one is ever going to hypothesize that hobbits do exist does not mean there is no null hypothesis about hobbits.

That’s true. As I said, there was no explanation for what they found, but there was evidence that the speed of light was independent of the motion of the earth. (I assume the experiment got repeated.) But that is an observation, not a hypothesis.

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Whatever you think you understand is wrong. Quantum fluctuations occur in time and space. The BB did not. That is all.

You’ve bunged together a string of words that make no sense. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal posits a Euclidian spacetime that is not – and may never be – empirically verifiable, any more than Everettian many-worlds may ever be empirically verifiable. It’s a mathematical model. To say that it “obeys the laws of physics” is an abuse of the English language. And the COBE results demonstrate cosmological anisotropy that tends to support the idea of an inflationary period shortly after the BB, nothing more.

Let me modify my statement:
[agnostics] shouldn’t be accused of having a belief that is “meaningless” or “stupid” or “one of the most absurd opinions I’ve ever heard” or any other disparagement one might feel like heaping upon it. :rolleyes:

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I think if you’re comparing atheists OR agnostics to any version of a theist, you have to go into the whole “what we know” thing. However, in trying to compare atheists to agnostics (which is what I am specifically trying to do), there’s going to be very little disagreement about what is “known”. If there is a difference between atheists and agnostics, it seems to me that it HAS to lie in the area of “what I believe based on what I know.” And so I keep trying to steer you away from it.

Glancing through our last few posts–and yours that I haven’t responded to yet–I am not seeing a great deal of real difference between what we think we know, more nitpicking on terminology.

This is all fine…I’m just not interested in talking about theists in this thread–I think it is just a tempting diversion from the whole atheism/agnosticism thing.

Interesting…I would say that “believe that no gods exist” is a stronger statement than “dismissed the possibility.”

You may be right, but I don’t feel ready to order new business cards yet.

My definition of PGBs does not include any requirements or limitations on location. This comment appears to be placing unnecessary boundaries on the notion of “god”, in that it suggests that God exists somewhere (or everywhere) in our universe. We don’t know whether there is such a thing as “outside our universe”, but if there were, God could be there, which isn’t a meaningful “where” to us. That is to say, God could be everywhere and/or God could be nowhere.

Of course, there’s also the Heinlein “Thou art God” formulation, which I found to be a fascinating notion when I was a teenager.

This is one of the notions that–to me–is ludicrous. Why would God care which neurotransmitters are flooding my limbic system when I contemplate God? Why would we assume that God has a limbic system and that the word “care” is even meaningful with regard to God?

I think that we are so trapped in our own physical perceptions of the world that we anthropomorphize any ideas we have of God even when we’re trying really hard not to.

One of the reasons I “throw up my hands” about the idea of God is that I don’t feel that I am physically equipped to think very clearly on the subject. I can’t really imagine a Being that isn’t defined by the workings of a brain, because all the intelligent beings I know have one.

I think you’re trimming these words a little too fine. If I’m almost certain that I’m going to have pizza for lunch, then I’m also pretty damn sure that I’m having pizza. If you see distinct gradations between “certain” and “sure”, I’m going to need you to explain them to me, because I don’t.

-VM

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I like it. If any flavors of Christians show up at my door, I usually give them a standard warning, “If you want to talk about God with me, it’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.” Usually, that’s all it takes. If they’re bold enough to continue, I start asking pointed questions. Usually, they wise up and flee while they still have some shreds of their faith. If we get to the soul/body dualism thing, they pretty much never recover.

btw, I grew up in the heart of the Bible belt, and I still live on the edge of it. Maybe I should be intimidated by the hordes of believers…but I’m a Southerner, and I have guns, too. FWIW, the scariest Christians in my experience are the ones that LOOK the least threatening.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t proselytize…if they leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, well, my mood will strongly influence the outcome.

-VM

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Hmmm, this is the first “should” I’ve seen in a while. I think something I said may have made you uncomfortable, because this sounds a little preachy.

Science is about knowledge. Gnosis, historically, has been used to refer to “mystical knowledge”–which is quite different from the kind of knowledge your referencing. In any case, adding the ‘a’ prefix effectively negates it, so it becomes, essentially, “without mystical knowledge”.

Regardless, I don’t think we’re going to make any progress distinguishing atheists from agnostics by dissecting the words.

I think there’s plenty of room here for both of us to be correct. That said, I think it’s interesting that you’re willing to accept such expansive definitions of “atheism” and “agnosticism”, but you insist on such a narrow interpretation of Occam’s Razor. Regardless of who uses it in what way, it seems obvious to me that Occam’s Razor is a particular distillation of the alcohol we call “pragmatism”.

I find the suggestion that we are inside a black hole to be…disconcerting.

If you have formulated your Null correctly, it and your hypothesis will be mutually exclusive.

The gist here is fine, but I’m not sure why you describe Nulls as if they were things you can gather in the forest. To me, there is no Null until I formulate a hypothesis and then define the Null in relation to it. So, if you had said “more possible null hypotheses” then it would have made more sense to me. It’s a bit of a nitpick, but with all this talk of “possible gods”, I don’t think I can just let it pass without comment.

-VM

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I agree that we’ve converged. We agree on what is known about gods, and if you don’t consider what can be known, then there is no difference.

Isn’t “I dismiss the possibility of polka-dot whales” strong than “I believe there are no polka-dot whales?”

Mine say “Druid-Reformed.”

Neither of these statements is really about belief, but are a statement of plans and whatever makes you predict your lunch. I’m certain that I’ll have pizza doesn’t encompass the possibility the place will be closed. Almost certain does. It may seem like a nitpick but saying that all our beliefs are provisional helps keep us humble.
When relativity was demonstrated. physicists pretty quickly abandoned Newton as absolute truth. When it was demonstrated that there was no literal Ada, and Eve (which the Catholic Church accepts) there was no abandonment of the concept of original sin. They were almost sure about the Garden, and so could abandon belief in it with evidence - they are certain about original sin, and so can’t.

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We would all be in better shape if our beliefs were more provisional, but this isn’t directed at you. Like probably most grad students, the first time I wrote something my professor challenged all statements of certainty. So I, like many others, would be a terrible witness.

Nothing more mystical than god.

The Razor is certainly one way in which science is pragmatic, but not the only way.

We probably are. But this event horizon is 14 billion year out. We have no way of knowing what goes on in that part of the universe.

But many other hypotheses will also. “Proving” the hypothesis “disproves” the Null, “disproving” the Null does not “prove” the hypothesis.

Agreed. There can never be too many possiblys.

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I would say no, because “dismiss the possibility” suggests not giving it any thought; whereas, “believe there are no” suggests having thought about it and reached a conclusion.

Would that make you a more orthodox Druid or less orthodox Druid?

I didn’t like it earlier when you talked about “believing” something will happen, and you defended the practice. Now, you’re making a distinction that you wouldn’t accept earlier. You can’t have it both ways.

You seemed to be making a distinction between “certain” and “sure” that I couldn’t follow. I can follow the difference between “certain” and “almost certain”.

Saying it on behalf of yourself is humble. Saying on behalf of everyone is a little arrogant. I certainly know some people who have God-related beliefs that they do not consider to be provisional.

To be honest, this is part of the whole discussion that has been confusing me, because I can’t tell when you’re referring to how/what people actually believe and when you’re referring to how they should believe.

Again, you’re talking about how science works when I think the conversation is about what people believe.

-VM

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The point was in response to your statement that agnosticism is “about knowing”; strictly speaking, it is about “not knowing about mystical things (including God).”

This is about the third time in a row that your response seems to be intentionally misrepresenting what I said. Please tell me where I suggested that the use of Occam’s Razor was the only example of science being pragmatic.

Keep in mind, I wasn’t speaking of pragmatism conversationally; rather, I was referring to philosophical Pragmatism (with a capital ‘P’).

Given the density required to reach black hole status, this hardly seems likely–I would expect the universe to be collapsing, not expanding. The outer boundary of the universe is pretty much defined by how far the light from the Big Bang has travelled in the time since it happened. To suggest that there is an outer edge that light can’t escape…well, this is the first I’ve heard of it.

That is to say, I’ve never seen a universe theory where the current outer “edge” is thought of as an Event Horizon in the way that the outer edge of a black hole is, and I’ve certainly not seen anyone claim that our universe is “sucking” things into it. We can’t travel past the edge of the universe because we physically can’t go far enough fast enough (and it’s still moving away from us), but that’s way different than saying there is a boundary that gravitational forces won’t let you pass.

That being said, I’ve read theories that suggest you couldn’t pass through the edge of the universe because there’s nowhere to go. In my imagination, the universe seems to be surrounded by empty space, but apparently there isn’t even that. We can’t go there because there is no “there” to go to…one of many notions that physics has thrown at me that I have difficulty internalizing.

-VM