An Exploration Into"Agnosticism"

You asked "But why is disblief in one unknowable irrefutable entity justified whilst not being justified in the case of another equally unknowable and unjustifiable entity?" which seemed to be imputing made up stuff. Well, okay, I see where you are getting that. But I disagree. Not taking the IPU seriously is not expressing disbelief. Both belief and disbelief result from active decision making. Not taking something seriously does not require such decision making. I don't agree with that. WTF is that all about. What kind of protection do you suppose is needed?You seem to be taking a crude simplistic physicalist position. Yet you are expressing that position on the Internet which is as social-cultural construct.There are lots of human inventions (social-cultural constructs) that we use. Some of them are quite important. I previously mentioned money (not the coins and bills, but that abstract thing that the coins and bills stand for), and I mentioned mathematics. One way streets are a social-cultural invention. Parliament (the institution, not the building) is a social-cultural construct. Presumably Guy Fawkes was atheistic with respect to parliament. It seems entirely reasonable that a Chinese tourist visiting London might be agnostic with respect to parliament.

It can exist as an idea, much as many other things that we consider to exist are ideas (parliament and the internet are examples).While I don't personally have any use for the Easter Bunny as an idea, I don't see the point of labeling people as "insane" for wanting to consider that idea to be useful. If it is not part of their culture, then what you show them might have no relevance to them. They would see that you showed them stuff, but they might be puzzled as to why you would think that was evidence that parliament exists.

The two points I am trying to make are:

• existence as an idea is very different from physical existence, and the criteria are very different;
• it is precisely with respect to the things that exist as ideas that we are agnostic. For example, I am not agnostic as to whether there is mail in my mailbox - I just go and look.

What I see repeatedly in this thread, are arguments that are applicable to physical things being applied to things that exist only as ideas. And then I see arguments that if it is only an idea, that we should be atheistic.My view: We are atheistic about something that exists only as an idea when we reject that idea. We are agnostic when we decline to embrace the idea but we do not reject it.As I suggested in Message 12, we are neither atheistic nor agnostic with respect to ordinary factual questions. We accept as fact, or reject, or are doubtful, or just express a lack of knowledge. We reserve the terms "atheistic" and "agnostic" for issues that are very different from ordinary factual questions. Yet if I went by Straggler's version of what is irrational and what is insane, then that would sure take all of the fun out of watching a Batman movie or a Spiderman movie (or just about any movie, for that matter).The problem with young earth creationists is not that they believe in a human constructed God. Rather, the problem is that they reject ordinary empirical evidence about the physical world.

Why not just stick to discussing what people say, instead of trying to categorize them (which is a form of ad hominem).

I think you are making a bogus distinction.If there were no conscious being conceiving of such an entity, then:

• parliament (the institution, not the building) would not exist;
• highways would not exist, although there might be strips of land covered with asphalt or concrete;
• golf course would not exist, though their might be grassy fields with flags sticking out of holes.

I could list more.In modern societies, our lives are dominated by things that would no longer exist if there were no conscious beings capable of conceiving of such entities. This is very different from life in nomadic tribes or even in traditional agrarian societies.

I have been trying to do that. New Cat's Eye seems to understand the points I am making. I not sure why you are having problems with them. Why don't you stop making pointless categorizations of people?

That is posed as if it were a factual question. But it isn't.If you ask "Is the outside temperature 70F where you live?" then that is a factual question. We have clear criteria for answering it. I can simply take a thermometer outside and check the temperature.If you ask "Is there an earth-like planet somewhere in Andromeda?", then that too is a factual question. I can just hop into my spaceship and go look. Well, actually, I can't do that. But we still have clear criteria for settling the question, even if there are limitations on our ability that prevent us from applying those criteria in practice.So what are the criteria for the "God" question?Suppose, instead of the "God" question, we ask "were there atoms?" John Dalton would have said "Yes, there would be atoms." And he would be talking of Dalton atoms, not of Bohr atoms. And that would have been a factual question for Dalton, because he did have criteria and if they could be applied they would probably show Dalton atoms.We have different criteria, so we would agree that there were Bohr atoms, but not Dalton atoms.I am trying to point out that our notions of "truth" and of "fact" are very tricky, and we often use them incoherently. We talk of a "correspondence theory of truth" which should suggest that there are some rules of correspondence between what is in the world and the propositions we express about the world. And sometimes there are such rules of correspondence, but we don't all agree on them, and we keep changing them. The view often expressed by theologians and by philosophers, a view of some sort of all-encompassing truth, is incoherent as best I can tell.Okay, so with all that in mind, let's return to the God question: As far as I can tell, some (but not all) theists and deists do actually have criteria. However, they don't all share the same criteria. Presumably some of them have criteria that would be met in the hypothetical world of no conscious beings. If there were biological creatures, then William Dembski's criteria for determining that there was a god would presumably be satisfied. And presumably Straggler's criteria (if he even has any) would not be met.

Yes, it is usually only applied to gods, although I think I have seen it used with respect to non-theistic religions.If we are exploring the usage of a word, we sometimes need to temporarily relax some of the usual constraints for the sake of the discussion.

As you phrased it, it was. You began with "if". We don't actually know that. I have never actually read any of the Harry Potter books, so I don't really have a concept of that.We can consider the past, some time more than a million years ago. And we can ask "Did snow exist then?" One possible answer is that the concept "snow" had never even been formulated, so snow could not have existed.We usually reject that form of answer. We insist, instead, that the question is whether there was something at that time that corresponded to what we would today conceptualize as snow.When you ask the same question about gods, you should interpret it the same way. And to answer that, you need to know how "god" is conceptualized today. What seems obvious, is that people have very different concepts of god. So based on Straggler's conceptualization, there were no gods then just as there are no gods now. But other people's conception, presumably their version of god existed back whenever.I'll just make the same point again. The question being raised is posed as a question of truth, yet it is a question for which we have no agreed criteria to assess that truth. We might just as well be asking "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

There is no evidence on conscious beings anywhere other than earth. Since there is no empirical evidence, none is being denied. One uses "ignostic" at the risk of confusing people, for that word is not in common use.I am reminded of an incident from my past. The link editor on an IBM mainframe, when you were creating a load module named "XXXX" would print a message "XXXX does not exist, but has been added to the dataset". So a friend decided to assign his program the name "GOD". And, as expected, the computer printout contained "GOD does not exist but has been added to the dataset." Thus, contrary to that wiktionary definition of "ignosticism", there actually was something which the word "GOD" could reference.When that bible thumper rings your doorbell, he is not trying to convince you of the truth of a proposition. Rather, he is a salesman trying to persuade you to buy into his particular concept of God. Until there is a suitable concept, there is no proposition. Identifying oneself as an atheist or agnostic is mainly a ploy to try to avoid that sales pitch for the bible thumper's concept. I disagree with your arguments (that atheism is more rational than agnosticism), because you argue as if this were a question on the truth of a proposition or on the evidence for the truth of a proposition. It cannot be that, if there is no actual proposition. I am not particularly interested in arguing RAZD's beliefs or concepts. As I have indicated in earlier posts, I am not interested in having my religious view become part of the debate.

We don't know that, either.For all we know, there might be conscious beings in the core of the sun, feeding off the nuclear reactions. They would not be based on the same carbon chemistry as us, but we don't know it to be impossible.This is a side issue anyway, so let's drop it.

I was not choosing allies. I was simply reporting a relevant observation.