15 Years Ago Today: “I don’t believe that x” ≠ “I believe that not-x”

By Moristotle

[Originally published on December 4, 2006.]

Last night I sliced open that one Fuyu persimmon from this year’s harvest [on Ironwood Place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina], preparing twenty or thirty thin slices for our dessert. (There was only the one fruit because, after last year’s Fuyu harvest of over 300, I apparently pruned the tree more severely than I should have. I won’t go into the theory of persimmon cultivation; anyway, my imperfect practice of it tends to disqualify me from stating it.)

14 Years Ago Next Week: Monday Musings

I took this photo in the gardens
of the Rodin Museum in Paris
on April 27, 2016

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 29, 2007, without an image.]

The other day I had occasion to share with someone something that I have thought for many years:

God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]

Ask Wednesday: Chuck, why are you agnostic with respect to "God"?

Guessing at the inconclusive

By Chuck Smythe

Chuck, a couple of weeks ago, in our question to Susan C. Price ("What do you think about religion?"), we indicated that you’ve said you don’t know enough to go one way or the other, so we labeled you agnostic. Please tell us what that means for you. Why are you agnostic with respect to "God" and other religious beliefs?

Thor's Day

“Did Zeus Exist?”

By Chuck Smythe

I stumbled on to the above headline in the New York Times Opinionator. Thinking it a natural for “Thor’s Day,” I sent it on to Morris. He asked me to write about it, so after some foot-dragging, here goes.
    The article is by Gary Gutting, Notre Dame Philosopher. He argues that we have no evidence that the Classical Greeks did not have supernatural experiences denied to most of us. Maybe we’ve forgotten how. Maybe different Gods were active then, in different ways. Maybe almost anything. In any case, a high civilization believed in Zeus with no apparent dissent for centuries. Gutting argues, therefore, that atheism regarding Zeus cannot be defended, and only agnosticism is justified.

The GWB proof of the non-existence of god

George W. Bush's becoming and "serving" as the President of the United States was a catalyst for my coming out of the closet for atheism¹. I may even have discovered yet another proof of god's non-existence in this:

George W. Bush, a self-styled born-again Christian, became President of the United States.   Therefore, there is no god.

The "proof" occurred to me this morning, as I was recalling an interchange with my friend Roger a week ago. He had written:

In the past [your sister] has briefly discussed your lack of faith in God. So out of curiosity, I have always wondered how you came to believe what you do.

And I told him:

How I came to believe what I believe about god (that there isn't one) is actually fairly well documented publicly, insofar as my blog is public. I "declared" for atheism on September 9, 2007, and the post for that day ("All in or All out") gives the proximate reason.
    The main considerations leading up to the declaration are covered over the preceding year or a little longer. Interestingly perhaps, the Bush administration had a little bit to do with it, as I saw what fundamentalist Christians were doing. I guess that made me mad for one thing, sort of set my teeth on edge, motivated me to figure out whether I really did or didn't believe some essential theological things in common with these people.
    The agony of the food chain was perhaps the single most contributing factor: my utter disbelief that a "personal god" could have engineered the mayhem and murder of creatures up the chain devouring creatures down the chain. This is obviously related to the problem of life's injustice. I believe that men are motivated to believe in god and heaven not only because they fear death and want to live forever, but also because they abhor the injustices they see about them and long for a judgment followed by reward for the good and punishment for the wicked. But because that belief is so obviously designed to satisfy men's wishes, it seems obvious to me that it (and god too) were concocted for solace and consolation—created lock, stock, and barrel by the fearful mammal man.
    I was also struck by the fact that the children of Christian parents tend to become Christians, and the children of Muslim parents tend to become Muslims. In other words, the "revelations of god" that they accept (those of the Bible on the one hand, those of the Koran on the other) are simply a matter of where and of whom they were born. So, if a child who is taught to believe the Bible could by accident of birth just as easily have been taught to believe the Koran, then that seemed to undercut any inherent authority of the books themselves. Since there is utterly no evidence whatsoever for the Bible's claim to authenticity, nor for the Koran's, and no evidence for heaven or miracles, etc., and all of the arguments for them can be explained in terms of wishful thinking, the desire of the priestly class to control the rest of mankind, etc., I can only conclude, as a thinking person willing to accept that I will die and not be resuscitated or resurrected, that religion is bunk.
    And the joyful sense of liberation that I feel as a result of concluding so is also a kind of evidence.
    Quod erat demonstrandum.
    In a nutshell, that's how I "came to believe." As you have time or interest, you can, of course, nose around in Moristotle.

Roger replied:

I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts concerning Christianity and GWB. We indeed think very much alike, when it comes to GWB. I too have been very angered by the behavior not only of this self-proclaimed "Born again Christian," but of so many of his supporting fellow Christians. As far as I am concerned, over the last 8 years, Christian hypocrisy has been at an all-time high. I mean, how stupid and ignorant can so many of these people be? To me at almost every turn, Bush and his gang were guilty of behavior that totally contradicts biblical principles, and yet so many of his Christian followers had no apparent problem with this. I despise these people to no end. And one of the unfortunate things about all of this, at least where I am concerned, is that practically all of my friends, and most of my family, fall into this group. You talk about feeling isolated. Some days it can be a bit too much. These days, many of them are so quick to forget about Bush's obvious screw ups. Now they only have time to criticize Obama.

And he sent me a link to a web page describing a documentary by Brian Flemming about "The God Who Wasn't There." I've asked my local librarian to acquire it.
    Hmm, I wonder whether there are librarians, as there are doctors and other health professionals, who will refuse to cooperate in such a request on the ground that their religion forbids it? "I couldn't possibly order—or even utter the name of—that DVD!"
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1. If "coming out of the closet" is what I did. I originally worded this, "catalyst for my becoming an atheist"—in the sense of deciding to be one—but it isn't clear that one can decide to become an atheist (or decide to believe in god); one either is or isn't (or believes or doesn't). In my case, I realized that I didn't really "believe in god," so the question I asked myself was: Do I believe in no-god?
       Not-believing in god is quite different from believing in no-god. One can not-believe in god, but also not-believe in no-god. That's what an agnostic does, because he or she doesn't accept that there's adequate evidence for either.
       I had to think about the question a bit to see what my answer was. My own choice of no-god is based on what I consider an extremely high probability rather than a certainty. It was useful to consult Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins for assistance. I am grateful to these authors.
       And maybe I did "decide" to become an atheist, after all, because I considered the question carefully, qualitatively sifting and weighing the evidence. Obviously, I'm still trying to sort out the best way to think and talk about it. If I'm concerned about appearing to be obsessed about this, maybe I shouldn't be. It's just a natural process of thinking.

In your face

After timidly experimenting with a couple of insipid titles for yesterday's post, I finally settled on the more in-your-face title, God didn't vault Adam and Eve to the top of the mountain, which by the way prefigures the first paragraph's reference to the jehovahs, who insist that Adam and Eve were real people.

But is the title I finally settled on too in-your-face? An op-ed column reprinted in today's Burlington, North Carolina Times-News by Miani Herald "Pulitzer Prize-winning" columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. contains an apology for asking of Sarah Palin last week, "Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth?" Pitts writes now that that column

unleashed a flood of e-mails from people angry that I had demoted the Christian creation story [Christian?!] to the status of parable [sic] and suggested by implication that anyone who believes it is, as one reader put it, a "fool."

After apologizing (Pitts has to try to keep all of those readers; he's a paid columnist, after all), he tries to regain his self-respect:

Let me be clear: I don't believe the Bible's account of creation. Never have. Leaving aside Darwin [why? afraid of offending yet more of those valuable readers?] and taking the story on its own merits, there are still holes in it big enough to walk a dinosaur through. Not least of which is the conundrum of how, short of incest, humanity reproduced itself if there was only one family on earth.
    And had I framed my question more narrowly—Does Sarah Palin really want the Bible story of creation taught in schools?—you'd be reading no mea culpa here. Science classes are for science and faith is not science. Nor, in a pluralistic society, does anyone have the right to impose faith on someone else.
    But I didn't pose a narrow question. Instead, I airily dismissed a belief which, in and of itself, hurts no one, marginalizes no one, and is a fundament of faith for millions.
    That was needlessly...disrespectful. It also was arrogant. Which is, oddly enough, the one trait of the lately resurgent atheist movement that vexes me....

Then, after maligning atheists, too, for a paragraph, he steps back in a sort of apology to them!

In fairness to atheists, though, I've always suspected that was a reaction to the equally irksome arrogance some religious conservatives—let the Rev. Jerry Falwell stand as avatar—have exuded upon the rest of us for 30 years.

Poor Leonard Pitts! The guy's trying to please everybody, but is surely pleasing only the most complaisant.

An unfortunate consequence of trying to please everybody is that Pitts fools himself into thinking that a religious belief can be "in and of itself" and (therefore) "hurts no one [and] marginalizes no one," and should (therefore) be given a bye because it "is a fundament of faith for millions." But there is no such thing as a religious belief "in and of itself." A person's basic beliefs affect everything. They affect what parents want taught in schools. They affect how people vote—or whether they vote (jehovahs, I'm told, abstain). They affect whether people sign up to detonate themselves in a crowd.

It's important to believe things because you know they're true (and not otherwise)..

What discounts the many discounts the one?

At lunch today with four of my old friends (an atheist, an agnostic, a monotheist, and a polytheistic neopagan—see the Wikipedia article on the Ásatrú movement), I brought up the subject of religion by asking the atheist, "So, have you gotten religion?"

"No, I haven't," he said, possibly a little taken aback.

"I didn't think you had." I reminded him that he had told me some years ago that he was an atheist, but he didn't seem to remember it. I told him that his admission had made an impression on me and had been, along with Sam Harris's The End of Faith, a source of support in my own decision.

The neopaganist, who (like me) majored in philosophy, cited Bertrand Russell for having said something along the lines:

I approve the monotheist's reasons that there aren't many gods, but the reasons equally weigh against there being even one god.¹

Later, this friend said he couldn't run down the actual quote, which may be apocryphal. "A philosophy professor of mine long ago once referred to it offhandedly. As nearly as I can remember, here is the gist of the argument: Monotheism is the most nearly correct religious system because, mathematically, the number of gods it worships (i.e., one) is closest to the actual number of gods in existence (i.e., zero). Or words to that effect."

The monotheist, who manages to be so without being particularly hospitable to religion (as my Jehovah's Witness friend Tom Sheepandgoats says he isn't either), shared what appears to be another version of Russell's quip:

If you understand why you discount all the other gods but yours, then you understand why I discount yours as well.

He said he found this on some newsgroup or other at least ten years ago, credited to someone named Ken Hall. He said he himself likes to use a modified version of this on particularly staunch churchgoers he happens to meet:

If you understand why you don't accept any other church's dogma, then you will understand why I don't accept your church's dogma either.

The agnostic was quiet during lunch, but afterwards she sent me seven or eight links to related articles. But those are for another day....
_______________

1. The atheist commented that he'd heard on talk radio years ago the quip that

   Unitarians believe there exists at most one god.

   He said it's attributed to Alfred North Whitehead (Bertrand Russell's co-author of Principia Mathematica).

Carl Jung wasn't the only one

In my February 9 post, "'Agnostic' = theistically neutral," I said that "'everybody' is agnostic in the root meaning of that term, not knowing whether or not god exists—notwithstanding Carl Jung's statement that he knew." The quotation marks around "everybody" and my facetious reference to Jung of course let you know that I realize there are people who claim to know that god exists.

In fact, there are likely millions who think that they know. I think of Maliha (of the blog "Lightness of Being"¹). In an e-mail last year, Maliha listed eight or ten "ways of knowing" that god exists—even of knowing god, including intuition, insight, and imagination. (If I can find the e-mail, I'll add the others.)

And my cousin Vera finds god's existence "obvious," although she hasn't told me by what privileged sixth sense she knows this, except that she hinted it might be female intuition. (She had told me that though my unbelief troubled her, she had noticed that many of the men in our family have had trouble "believing in god," whereas the women haven't.)

I suspect that there are literally millions of Muslims like Maliha and millions of Christians like my cousin who feel they know that god exists. (I suppose there are even a few such Jews as well.) I'm willing to accept that and classify them as "'knowing' theists," but with the quotation marks around "knowing" to express my skepticism.
_______________

1. Maliha shut her blog down three days ago, explaining that "I need to discipline and allow myself to mature in some ways. I also hope that this move will quiet down the chatter within."

On "agnostic theism"

In last Saturday's post," I wrote of a friend who "holds the view that it wasn't possible to be an atheist before [Darwin's discovery of evolution]." Before Darwin, he seemed to contend, "God" was unavoidable in order to explain the existence of seemingly designed creatures [and we cannot avoid giving some explanation or other]. He has denied that at least two of my examples of ancient atheists (Diagoras and Anaxagoras) were really atheists. They were more likely agnostics, he countered. (He didn't say this about Critias, but relied on the historical evidence that Critias was such a bad guy that I should have been embarrassed to offer him in evidence in the first place.)

It occurred to me this morning that my friend's counter move might not help him. After all, I was thinking, agnostics don't believe in god either. So, how was saying that Diagoras and Anaxagoras were agnostics going to help his case? (In fact, he's more than once said that "agnostics are a dime a dozen.") Was he now going to say that, before Darwin, they couldn't have been agnostics either?

Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. Agnosticism is a position on knowing ("gnosis"), not on believing. Just because someone holds that it isn't possible to know either that god exists or doesn't, he can still believe either way. In fact, believing in the former (that god exists) is formally known as agnostic theism. An agnostic theist is someone who (to quote the handy Wikipedia), "views that the truth value of certain claims, in particular the existence of god(s), is unknown or inherently unknowable but chooses to believe in God(s) in spite of this." [emphasis mine]

And, you're likely thinking, isn't agnostic atheism also possible? Indeed it is. Back to Wikipedia for a handy, fairly respectable-looking discussion:

One of the earliest explanations of agnostic atheism is that of Robert Flint, in his Croall Lecture of 1887-1888 (published in 1903 under the title "Agnosticism"):

The atheist may, however, be, and not unfrequently is, an agnostic. There is an agnostic atheism or atheistic agnosticism, and the combination of atheism with agnosticism which may be so named is not an uncommon one....

If a man has failed to find any good reason for believing that there is a God, it is perfectly natural and rational that he should not believe that there is a God; and if so, he is an atheist...if he goes farther, and, after an investigation into the nature and reach of human knowledge, ending in the conclusion that the existence of God is incapable of proof, cease to believe in it on the ground that he cannot know it to be true, he is an agnostic and also an atheist—an agnostic-atheist—an atheist because an agnostic...while, then, it is erroneous to identify agnosticism and atheism, it is equally erroneous so to separate them as if the one were exclusive of the other....

This discovery on my part might be as good an example as I could quickly find of the possibility that my friend and I, in discussing religion without any real expectation of changing the other's mind, might nevertheless gain a better understanding of each other's and our own positions. For I'm now inclined to think that I may more accurately label myself an agnostic atheist than an out-and-out atheist, for I have never claimed that I know there is no god, even though I think that there isn't and am comfortable in saying so. The Wikipedia article just quoted concludes: "Individuals may identify as agnostic atheists based on their knowledge of the philosophical concepts of epistemology, theory of justification, and Occam's razor." Those considerations do indeed play a crucial role in my disbelieving in god.

At this point, I'd like to express my gratitude to Tom Sheepandgoats (aka "Sheepandgoaticus") for engaging me in this discussion, whatever his reply on the merits of my objection to his argument.

As to his reply, he is free, of course, to try to argue that, before Darwin, only "knowing" theism¹ and agnostic theism were possible; that is, that "knowing" atheism² and agnostic atheism were not. (It could be quite interesting to see how he would try to justify that!)

Tom, of course, might find in Flint's clause, "If a man has failed to find any good reason for believing that there is a God," just the loophole through which to insert the supposed need to explain apparent design as the reason to believe that there is a god. But if he does so, he'll do it realizing that I'll come back once again with my question how deus ex machina is any more than "a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty"³ (to once again quote Webster's appropriate definition of the term).

I trust that we'll hear from Tom on this, and that he'll include an answer to the deus ex machina objection as well....
______________

1. By which I mean theism that thinks it knows that god exits. Carl Jung, for example, said, "I don't believe God exists; I know it."
2. Ditto, mutatis mutandis.
3. The way turtles were once suggested. One version of the story is given in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which I read during the summer of 1989:

   A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Trust and obey1

David Lodge's second novel, Ginger, You're Barmy, was first published in England in 1962. "It is," he explained in his introduction to the 1982 edition, "'about' peacetime National Service, as an institution and as an experience—one which most young men born between, say, 1928 and 1941, underwent." (Lodge was born in 1935.) The novel's narrator is Jonathan Browne, who, like Lodge, "was drafted into the Royal Armoured Corps shortly after obtaining [his] B.A. in English Language and Literature at London University." Like almost all of his later novels that I have read, this one too makes pointed use of religious themes:

One Sunday we had a Church parade. I presumed that even the Army would not compel me to attend church, and said so to [Corporal] Baker, with a certain challenging note in my voice which was probably my undoing.
      "You can presume what you fugging² well like," he replied. "You'll parade with the rest of the squad. After the inspection, fall out and report to me. We'll find you something to do while the others are saying their prayers."
      When I reported to him he sent me over to the cookhouse. If there is a God, and if, as some say, He whiles away the long light evenings of eternity devising choice punishments for His creatures, He need not hesitate over selecting my particular hell. It would be an everlasting cookhouse fatigue. By the end of that Sunday I was almost weeping with misery and a sense of injustice. Whereas those on the Church parade were free (relatively speaking) by noon, I slaved all day in that stinking, greasy cookhouse. It was an old building, irremediably dirty: platoons of soldiers could not have scrubbed it clean, though the Cook Sergeant nearly drove me and my companions into the tiled floor in the attempt. I remember kicking a hot water pipe in sheer wretchedness and frustration, and the shudder of disgust that shook me as a swarm of cockroaches scuttled out over the wall. I kicked and kicked at the pipes in a masochistic frenzy until the wall was alive with the repulsive vermin. Then I retched into a nearby sink. I went over to the Cook Sergeant and said pleadingly: "I've just been sick. I feel ill. Can I leave?" He looked at my white face and gave permission with a contemptuous jerk of his head. Blessing him, I staggered weakly back to the hut, and collapsed on to my bed. Mike [Brady, the "Ginger" of the title] was less sympathetic than I expected. "You can now count yourself one of the glorious martyrs for Agnosticism," he said. Percy, sitting on the same bed, laughed. Their visit to church seemed to have put them in good spirits.
      "At the moment I'd cheerfully become a Jehovah's Witness, if it would get me out of cookhouse fatigues," I said savagely.
      "A very good idea," he replied. "Being a Jehovah's Witness would get you out of the Army altogether. They're conscientious objectors."
      "That's the religion for me," I said.
      "My brother-in-law was a Jehovah's Witness, but it didn't get him out of the Army," observed the soldier on the bed opposite to mine...
      "What happened to your brother-in-law then?" inquired Mike.
      "Well, it was in the war, like. And they wouldn't let our Ernie be a conscious objector. But Ernie said he weren't going to put on a bloody uniform no matter what they did. So they sent him to this training depot, and he wouldn't put on his uniform. So they put him in this cell in his underclothes, and threw in his uniform. It were winter, like, and they reckoned he'd be so cold he'd have to put the uniform on."...
      "And did he?"
      "Did he fugg. When they opened the cell next morning our Ernie were still in his underclothes; and on the table were his uniform—all in pieces."
      "What d'you mean, all in pieces?"
      "He'd spent the whole night taking his uniform to pieces. He never tore nothing mind you. He bit through the seams with his teeth. His socks were two balls of wool. He said with a bit more time he would have taken his boots to pieces. He could've too. He was in the boot trade."
      The story pleased us immensely.
      "They should put up a statue to that man," said Mike reverently.
      "What happened to him eventually?" I asked.
      "A few days after they came and told him his ma had been killed by a Jerry bomb. Went fuggin mad he did. Couldn't get his uniform on quick enough. Joined the paratroopers and finished the war with thirteen medals."... [pp. 63-65]

...Badmore [where Browne is stationed to serve out his clerkship] was, and always would be, the despair of any sergeant-major, because the sergeant-major is a man who works in the medium of outward appearance. His object is to make every man look identical, because if all men look alike, they will act alike, and eventually think, or rather, not-think alike. But the sergeant-major must have a basic structure of uniformity to work on. Without this he is like a theologian without dogma. The analogy is not inapposite. A regiment is like a religion. Its dogma governs the way its members wear their lanyards, the angle they wear their berets, the manner in which they perform the movements of drill. As in [Cardinal John Henry] Newman's theory of religious doctrine, developments may occur. It is the responsibility of the sergeant-major, as of the theologian, to control and rationalize such developments, to distinguish genuine developments from heresies, and ruthlessly to suppress the latter.... [p. 70]

"...Now I want you to tell me why you want to be an officer." [Commanding Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Lancing] smiled encouragingly.
      "I feel in rather a false position at the moment, sir," I replied. "Because the fact is I don't want to be an officer." The C.O.'s smile vanished abruptly. I continued: "I told Lieutenant Booth-Henderson last week, but my name appeared on Orders for this interview, and Corporal Baker told me I should attend it."
      ..."Well now, Browne, suppose you tell me why you have changed your mind?"
      ..."Well, sir, I'll be quite frank with you. I don't like the Army. I know I'm stuck with it for two years, but I'm sure I shall continue to dislike it. I don't see how I could possibly be an officer with that point of view. Don't you agree, sir?"
      "What don't you like about the Army?"
      "Almost everything, sir."
      ...The C.O. began to look rather angry.
      "Now look here, I've been in the Army for twenty-five years. You've been in it for four weeks. I think you've got a lot of nerve to sit there and say the Army's all wrong."
      "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't mean to be impertinent. I quite understand that my position must seem inexplicable to you." I began to get into my stride. "I suppose it's my education. I've been encouraged to question everything, to form an independent judgment. In the Army one has to accept orders without questioning them. I feel that if I were to hope to become an officer I would have to give up too many principles."
      "When you're older, Browne, you'll discover that there must be some sort of authority which is obeyed without question...." [pp. 90-92]

_____________

1. The hymn "Trust and Obey" was ingrained into my adolescent head as thoroughly as any other song sung at the Assembly of God Church I attended during the very years of David Lodge's national service. Its words by John H. Sammis (1887) included the refrain:

   Trust and obey, for there’s no other way
   To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
         — Courtesy of Moody Bible Institute

2. Lodge noted in the 1982 introduction: "Working within the conventions of the day, I adopted Norman Mailer's expedient, in The Naked and the Dead, of representing the most common of the four-letter words as 'fugg'..."

Bernard's personal revelation

Bernard (in David Lodge's Paradise News) continues to write into his journal the story that he regrets not having told his friend:

You don't have to go very deep into the philosophy of religion to discover that it is impossible either to prove or to disprove the truth of any religious proposition. For rationalists, materialists, logical positivists, etc., that is a sufficient reason for dismissing the entire subject from serious consideration. But to believers a non-disprovable God is almost as good as a provable God, and self-evidently better than No God at all, since without God there is no encouraging answer to the perennial problems of evil, misfortune, and death. The circularity of theological discourse, which uses revelation to apprehend a God for whose existence there is no evidence outside revelation (pace Aquinas), does not trouble the believer, for belief itself is outside the theological game, it is the arena in which the theological game is played. It is a gift, the gift of faith, something you acquire or have thrust upon you, through baptism or on the road to Damascus. Whitehead said that God is not the great exception to all metaphysical principles to save them from collapse, but unfortunately, from a philosophical point of view, that is exactly what He is, and Whitehead never found a convincing argument to the contrary.
      So everything depends on belief. Grant the existence of a personal God, the Father, and the whole body of Catholic doctrine hangs together reasonably well. Grant that, and you can bat all day. Grant that, and you can afford to have a few mental reservations about the odd doctrine—the existence of Hell, say, or the Assumption of the Virgin Mary—without feeling insecure in your faith. And that was what I did, precisely—I took my belief for granted. I didn't seriously question it, or closely examine it. It defined me. It explained why I was who I was, doing what I did, teaching theology to seminarians. I didn't discover that my belief had gone until I left the seminary. [pp. 149-150]
      All the radical demythologizing theology that I had spent most of my life resisting suddenly seemed self-evidently true. Christian orthodoxy was a mixture of myth and metaphysics that made no kind of sense in the modern, post-Enlightenment world except when understood historically and interpreted metaphorically. Jesus, insofar as we could disentangle his real identity from the midrash of the early Gospel-writers, was clearly a remarkable man, with uniquely valuable (but enigmatic, very enigmatic) wisdom to impart, infinitely more interesting than comparable apocalyptic zealots who were characteristic of that period of Jewish history; and the story of his crucifixion (though not historically verifiable) was moving and inspiring. But the supernatural machinery of the story—the idea that he was God, "sent" by himself as Father from heaven to earth, born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead and returned to heaven, from whence he would return again on the last day to judge the living and the dead, etc., well, that too had its grandeur and symbolic force as a narrative, but it was no more credible than most of the other myths and legends about divinities that proliferated in the Mediterranean and Middle East at the same time.
      So here I was, an atheist priest, or at least an agnostic one. And I didn't dare to tell anyone.... [p. 154-154]

__________________
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

Open Letter to Maliha on Agnosticism

Dear Maliha, thank you for coming to my blog and providing a Muslim perspective on religion. But thank you even more for your provocative questions, which I am trying to use to better travel my "journey of self-discovery through self-exploration." At about 8:40 this morning you commented, for example:

I don't understand agnosticism, because it seems so uncommitted to anything.

And then how would you derive meaning to our existence? What's the point? Is there a point? Are we just a comical abberation of a universe gone wild?

I am really interested in the thought process, because as I have struggled in determining whether Islam is "the" path (and now I am settling for its [being] "a" path), I never questioned the existence of God...it just seems like everything would be too mundane for such a beautiful world.

I must have read that not long after you submitted it, for at 10:01 I commented back to you:

I'[ll think] on these things...But know that I can't tell you when my muse is likely to strike with something like insight. She comes in her own time, but always faithfully responsive to my sincere desire for answers.

Well, within about one hour my muse was already starting to whisper to me, urgently, while I was driving home after doing an errand. Already, while driving out of my yard to go do the errand, I had been thinking that if an agnostic is not committed to anything, then the term hardly seems to apply to me. I feel committed. I am passionate about responding impeccably to life, to "the human condition." I have never been a couch potato, a spectator, a blindly following dogmatist. I have tried to engage life, to have passed this way not in vain.

In other words, your comments were affecting me powerfully and I'm sure they strengthened my desire to hear from my muse. And this, in turn, prompted her to aid me as quickly as possible.

At any rate, because I was driving when she started to whisper to me, I pulled off the road and took notes:

Free thinkers, free from received opinions about faith and science, pre-fabricated thought structures, and, perhaps most of all, other people's revelations, unless they accord with my own experience and the light of my own reason. Descartes tried to practice methodical doubt. In my own way, I have lately been trying to practice constructive skepticism.

Maybe I'm not agnostic as to whether God is or is not, but rather as to what God is (beyond the I AM THAT I AM). For I do believe in...Something. Maybe it's just that I'm unwilling to say I know what it is (because I don't think I do).

[Added on Monday: More whisperings followed, with some guidance on what God is.]

"Agnosticism"

Sam Harris, I think, thinks he can know. He is a scientist. He even "knows" that God doesn't exist. That is, he is literally an atheist.

I have labeled myself an agnostic with respect to God. Or an "agnostic Christian," if my answers to my own "religion survey" are to be believed.

But it occurs to me now that I am maybe an agnostic in a wider sense. I don't think that we can know everything. I'm an agnostic, that is, with respect to science, too.

And I don't mind being a lone, wide-ranging, "Thomas Painean" free-thinker. It's the way I've come now, a good deal more than midway through my life, to respond to this "human condition."

"I don't believe that x" ≠ "I believe that not-x"

Last night I sliced open that one Fuyu persimmon from this year's harvest, preparing twenty or thirty thin slices for our dessert. (There was only the one fruit because, after last year's Fuyu harvest of over 300,
I apparently pruned the tree more severely than I should have. I won't go into the theory of persimmon cultivation; anyway, my imperfect practice of it tends to disqualify me from stating it.)

The slices were delectable! "How can a persimmon get so sweet," my wife asked in awe.

This morning, as I was walking our poodle Wally around our cul-de-sac, I remembered the Fuyu slices and felt a rush of gratitude that we had had them to enjoy. My natural impulse was to thank God. But then I remembered: I don't know that God exists. My next thought was that I don't know, either, that God doesn't exist. I believe neither that God exists nor that God does not exist, which is not equivalent to believing that God does not exist. The former is a statement of agnosticism, the latter of atheism.

But I realized that, when gratitude rushes over me so strongly that I want to express it, I prefer to say thank you to God who may or may not exist than to have the feeling stifled in what would amount to the solipsism of atheism.

At any rate, that's how I feel this morning. This is how far my thinking has so far brought me.

An agnostic objection to atheism

Michael Lurski, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has a letter to the Editor of Newsweek this week in which he adduces a problem with atheism:

Atheist author Sam Harris makes a strong case when he criticizes established religions for the harm they have caused and for the dangers they now present ("Beliefwatch: The Atheist," PERISCOPE, Oct. 30). And he is correct that belief in God is irrational and cannot be proved by reason or current evidence. However, it is just as irrational for Harris to advocate atheism, a certainty that no God exists. An atheist can no more prove there is no God than a believer can prove God's existence. The only alternative based on reason is agnosticism, the belief that it is impossible to know whether there is a God without sufficient evidence. It does not deny the possibility; it is uncertain.

Harris, however, addresses this objection in The End of Faith, but I no longer have a copy of the book to consult. I seem to recall that it went sort of like this: There are any number of things that might exist, whose non-existence we cannot prove: purple people-eaters, and the like. Shall we say that we're agnostic as to their existence as well?

That isn't exactly an ironclad argument in favor of atheism.