In my youth I called myself “agnostic” because I was only familiar with the popular definitions of those terms – that an atheist is someone who makes the positive claim that there is no god, and an agnostic is unsure. Since I was not claiming to know god doesn’t exist, then “agnostic” seemed more accurate.
That’s how most people who have not studied philosophy think of it, that majority of people who have never even heard the word “gnostic”.
Only later did I learn about the distinction between knowledge and belief and that perhaps the best description is “agnostic atheist”.
If all this still sounds weaselly to you, then I’ll put it in my other favorite way: I feel the same way about God as I do Godzilla. Perhaps Godzilla has been stomping around Tokyo all these years and just by random chance no-one has looked in his direction at the right time?
Perhaps. But in the meantime, it’s safe to file this threat with the infinity of other things which could potentially exist.
This seems to be an arguemnt about Free Will (a nebulous term that makes little sense, IMHO) not the existence of God. Unless your point is that God and Free Will each require the existence of the other? If that’s the case, I think your reasoning is skipping a few steps there.
Point to any missing steps and I’ll fill them in (or challenge the need for them, one or the other). I’d rather NOT use the phrase “free will” because it is too mired in what a bunch of other people attempted to say, but certainly the opposite of mechanistic determinism, the notion that the universe contains no volitional choice-makers.
Well, first off, there’s the fact that very obviously we do NOT have a decision making ability that is totally separate from our lived experience. You can only make choices that your mind would come up with, and that depends on your upbringing. So the concious decisions we make very obviously ARE impacted by the physical world we live in as well as the past, in a causal way.
Further, studies have shown that our subjective experience is affected by our physical state. For example, we see the world differently when we are hungry, and make different decisions accordingly.
I don’t think that this self-evident fact means we have no “volitional choice-making ability” (and I don’t see that this term is any more meaningful than Free Will, nor do I think you are truly able to avoid Free Will’s baggage by plugging in a new word to the aame argument).
But all of that is beside the point, because our free will or volition or whatever you want to call it could just as easily evolved in a deterministic universe as it could have been created.
Now, there’s a way around this, and I’m guessing this is where you were going - and if I am wrong, that’s why I think there are some missing steps we need to spell out.
If you define volition or free will specifically as the ability to make decisions completely independently from any deterministic physical process, than any aspect of our conciousness that arises as an emergent property of physical processes happening in our brain must be completely deterministic and therefore not “free”. If this is your argument, I’ll note that a missing step here is demonstrating that human behavior cannot be explained by decisions made through deterministic processes; you should be able to show examples that cast this into doubt, which no Free Will advocate has ever done in my experience.
Putting that aside, if we take as a given that there must be some non-physical aspect to pur conciousness IE a soul that is free willed and separated from our deterministic universe, this STILL doesn’t necessitate the existence of God. For example, a non-God model that includes a non-physical aspect to our conciousness is the Animist model, where every object has a spirit behind it, but the spirits of a rock is less active than the spirit of a tree which is less active than the spirit of a squirrel which is less active than the spirit of a human. If we adopt this model, it is certainly POSSIBLE that the Earth as a whole has a god-like spirit behind it, or that a mighty river or mountain would have a powerful spirit behind it. But it is also possible that human spirits are as big and powerful as it gets.
Well, first off (to borrow a phrase) if the decisions made by the decision-maker are inseparable from the context in which the decision-maker operates, what this situation calls into question is not the validity of volition and choice but the location of the decision-maker. We learn that we have a system comprised as Entity-in-context rather than the context being separate from the entity.
The context doesn’t exist separate from the decision-maker either, of course. So no linear one-way causal determinism line can be drawn. They interact in a reverberating pattern and the entire composite situation may (or may not) be said to possess volitional choice, and I am positing that it does.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re arguing that Human A in Timeline A where he is raised one way takes Action A; Human A raised in Timeline B takes Action B; this doesn’t mean that Human A is not a free agent. Rather, it means that we are dealing with two agents here, Human A Timeline A (HATA) and Human A Timeline B (HATB). Your argument is that HATA and HATB are two separate agents, each of which is free?
(Of course in the real universe only one of HATA or HATB can exist, but it makes sense to think of them as separate agents)
Before I respond (because if this IS your argument I think it’s a fascinating one) I just want to be sure I’m not misunderstanding you.
I don’t think we should speak yet of humans. That’s going to complicate things. Let’s keep it generic. And I don’t think the above is quite my argument, or not that I’d make it. Entity A in SpaceTime Context A is Entity A. Not Entity A whose choices are caused by Context A. Entity A isn’t a separate thing from Context A. Entity B in a different SpaceTime Context, B, is a separate agent, assuming Context B isn’t actually a part of Context A.
So Entity A can ONLY exist in Timeline A, and Entity B is a different entity from Entity A because of the experiences it underwent in Timeline B, even if Timeline A diverged from Timeline B 10 years ago (ie TA-10 = TB-10) and therefore at TA-10/TB-10 the entity was the same?
OK, cool. But in that case I don’t think we really disagree at all. The conciousness that is YOU is shaped by the experiences it has. It makes decisions based on those experiences. Technically, it makes decisions based on its memory and interpretation of the experiences in question, not the experiences themselves, which means that after some self reflection the takeaway from the same prior event can change.
Functionally, the way we expect humans to act will be exactly the same. The only difference is that I see this conciousness as an emergent property of electrical signals in the brain, while you may see it as something more metaphysical. But practically, we’re both going to agree on everything else. If the “soul” is shaped by experience and changes over time to such an extent that Soul A plus 10 years of Timeline A is a different entity than Soul A plus 10 years of Timeline B and will therefore make different decisions in the same situations, I don’t see how it can be said to be more “Free” or “Volitional” than my conception of an emergent conciousness. But that almost seems semantic at this point.
The timeline made me (aka “Entity A”) happen — stimulated my choices and behaviors — but I, in turn, made the timeline happen. When we view the Self as one critter and the Context as external to the Self, it can be useful and compelling to consider the context as the cause of what the Self does. But the context could also be considered to be what the Self hath wrought, as it is what it is, and is in the condition that it is, as a consequence of what the Self does. They exist in a mutual causal interactive state. (This can easily be lost to view if we start off thinking of humans instead of Entity A, the abstraction. Much the way that it’s easy to dismiss the gravitational effect that I personally have on the Earth when discussing the gravitational effect it has on me. This is why I said “let’s not start off with Human A, that’s going to complicate things”).
That’s because a Self is an arbitrary term. Does your Causal Self include your microbiome? Your dead skin cells?
Yes, your actions affect the wider universe, but so do your very atoms. Your decision to have some cereal irrevocably changes the universe, from altering the trajectory of trillions of atoms to impacting the price of milk, corn, and gasoline. But the dead skin cells you shed yesterday float in the wind and impact weather patterns.
The way you just waved your arm could contribute to weather patterns that cause a hurricane three centuries from now to land a hundred miles up the coast and strike a major city instead of missing it. Is this as much a consequence of your free will as the miniscule increase in the price of milk that occurred because that bowl of cereal caused you to buy another gallon a few days earlier, causing your purchase to land in Q1 earnings instead of Q2 and making milk appear to be just a hair more profitable?
Positing that free will is not, in its entirety, an illusion does not dissipate the possibility of all illusions. One very prominent illusion that a great many theologies have independently come to address is the illusion of separateness in identity. We speak of a conscious self that makes choices and has volution — but where is it ensconced? Not, the many theologies tell us, in the individual head of the individual entity contemplating these very questions. That there is actually a connectedness that isn’t apparent at first glance.
Yes, in other words, to the dead skin cells being a part of the self!
As might the price of milk for that matter.
And a belated yes to the possibility that we’re just bandering semantics around. I’ve often thought that possible, that theistic thought and atheistic thought aren’t incompatible.
I’m absolutely differentiating between belief and know. I may believe my team will win the next game, but I don’t know it. Many religious people believe on faith, and some claim that this faith would be destroyed or cheapened with knowledge.
I’m using “know” not in the absolute sense but in the very high probability sense.
If you know 2+2=4, you also believe it, even if that is a trivial statement. (You certainly don’t disbelieve it or even lack belief, right?)
Actual atheists say over and over again that atheism is lack of belief in any god or gods, which includes the position of actively believing that gods don’t exist. And you either believe in something or lack belief in it. There is no third position. And lacking belief is not equivalent to believing it does not exist, just to be clear. The assertion that atheism involves active belief that god does not exist, or, even worse, claims of knowledge that gods don’t exist is a strawman that theists have used for a long time.
As for agnosticism, the thing that seems to be a problem is whether it involves a current lack of knowledge or that knowledge is impossible. If the former I think we’re all agnostic about aliens except those convinced they got abducted or took a ride to Venus. But that seems a not very interesting statement. I tend to prefer the one about possible knowledge. And that’s of existence, we certainly can never know that no aliens exist anywhere.
Agnosticism is orthogonal to atheism.
You can construct all kinds of models to test based on relevant assumptions for each model. Why do you have to believe the assumptions in order to work with the model?
I’d say agnostic atheist is the majority position. The weasel part comes when people say “I’m not an atheist, I’m an agnostic” when they lack god belief, since theists can accept uncertainty more than lack of belief. Atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal - there can be agnostic theists also, like all deists, as mentioned above.
The point is, I don’t think it’s weaselly, I think it’s just the popular understanding of those terms.
Yes it would be good if people knew the strict meaning of these terms in a philosophical context.
But it’s similar to the word “theory” having different connotations in common speech to the scientific meaning.
Wiki says that the date of Easter was originally linked to Passover, but was changed in the third century to be the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21. That full moon is usually, but not always, the date of Passover.
A standard Jewish year consists of 12 29-30 day lunar months, totaling 354 days per year. Because we want to stay approximately in sync with the solar calendar, so that the holidays fall in the appropriate season, we occasionally add a “leap month” to get a 384 day year. When that happens, Passover can be about a month later than Easter, and Easter then coincides approximately with Purim.
I’ve known people who have used agnostic to not get into trouble with believers. It’s kind of like how 40 years ago “confirmed bachelor” was a code word for gay. Not all men who didn’t want to get married were gay, of course, but it was a convenient cover.