Agnostic Unicorns
FEBRUARY 2010
Back
in 2001 I wrote two articles about agnosticism. I said there is no such thing as
an agnostic. That’s because there isn’t. But now, today, for reasons
unknown, there is a firestorm out there about those articles and I’m stunned.
My site receives a lot of visitors, yes, but in just one week last month I
received over 6,000 hits. Just one week. What the heck is going
on?
My
husband Pat, who is my Web Master, checked into the stats and found that not
only was my site really being bombarded, but that the subject of agnosticism was
the main focus. Blogs were filled with it and arguing rather vehemently about
it. I’m fascinated but baffled. Why
this topic? Why now? My only disappointment about the whole thing is that I
obviously did not make my points clearly enough from the start.
Pat tells me that most of the ISPs have addresses ending with .edu so we are not talking about a bunch of young kids. These were all colleges and universities. I am fully aware that many of my columns are lifted en masse for term papers. The only reason that bothers me is that it reflects a lot of lazy minds. But serious, thoughtful debate is always a healthy and stimulating thing.
In
looking back on those articles I wrote I can see some weak spots in some of my
arguments. (See There Is No Such Thing As
an Agnostic and Pistols at Dawn? Agnosticism
Revisited for a refresher course.) Well, I’m going to give it
another try now and hopefully my points will be more crisp and concise. I’ll
try to be more explicit about the whole thing. Please forgive some of the
necessary repetition from my 2001 articles. So then. Let’s begin, yet again,
at the beginning.
I
can believe in agnosticism. I can believe in unicorns. I can believe in agnostic
unicorns. What I may not do is claim that agnostic unicorns exist.
I may believe it, but I may not claim to know it. Why? Because to believe
something and to know something are different things. They often
coincide, but are not synonymous. And this is where the arguments
derail. In all the arguing there are two entirely different questions being
dealt with as if they were one. They are not. They are two and they are as
different as night and day.
First
question: Is there a God?
Second
question: Do you believe in a God?
How
can anyone say that those two questions are the same question? The
existence of a God is open for discussion. However, the question of whether or
not you, personally, believe in a God is not open for question. You know whether
you do or you do not worship a deity. It is a simple yes or no proposition. The
people I refer to as “fence-sitters” are those who have doubts about the
existence of any gods of any kind. That doubt means they do not have faith in a
deity. They may be considering the possibility. Fair enough. Consider away.
However, while you’re considering you are not worshipping. You
are thinking, comparing, doubting, perhaps wishing. But you do not
possess theistic beliefs. You’re sort of window-shopping. Which is also fair
enough. But until you truly believe in some sort of deity, and
believe it with no doubts, you are without theistic belief. A person without
theistic belief is simply and logically (!) identified as an atheist—one
without theistic beliefs.
It sounds simple enough, but the sticking point, the snag, the trap we all fall into lies in the simple but wholly important meanings of two small words: beliefs and truths. There are truths and there are beliefs and often they do not coincide. Unicorns are a good example. Do they exist? I may certainly believe that they do but I may not claim that they do. Why? Because unicorns cannot be detected in any way. They cannot be seen, touched, heard, or in any way detected by the human senses. They also cannot be detected by any non-human means such as X-rays, CT-scans, MRIs (Magnetic resonance imaging), sonograms, infrared sensors or anything else known to science.
You
can ask hundreds of thousands of questions that can be answered with an
unequivocal yes. Is there such a thing as water? Is there such a thing as a
rainbow? Does the Earth have a moon? Is there an aurora borealis? Does snow
exist? The reason theses questions can be answered so positively is that they
can be proven. There is no need for faith or hope to believe that
they exist. They can all be proved to be true.
However,
when we enter the realm of the “supernatural” we have a whole new ballgame.
By definition, anything supernatural exists outside the natural
world—therefore, super-natural. Unlike the previous questions about snow and
rainbows, which are part of our natural world and easily proven, supernatural
entities are not part of our natural word and most definitely can not be proven.
Therefore faith and hope are required to believe in them. But that’s all that
supports the “existence” of those things—faith and hope. Do leprechauns
exist? Are there mermaids? Are there unicorns? Is there a God? Is there a Loch
Ness monster? Since no one has verifiably seen any of those things, all you can
do is shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t know.” And this is what
self-identified agnostics are trying to do. They are trying to slip God into
this group of unverifiable beings, but with a lot more fanfare.
No
one gives a flip if there is a Lock Ness monster or not. However, if there were
a God who could explain the beginning of the universe, and be prayed to and listen
to us and our dire needs, and perform much needed miracles………..and
on and on and on. Well, then, the world would be a much more understandable
place, at least to our remote ancestors who created the idea of deities in the
first place. And those deities would need to be placated and worshipped and
obeyed in order to keep things running smoothly—like making sure the sun comes
up in the morning. No one ever seriously thought leprechauns or unicorns created
the universe and needed to be worshipped to keep things running smoothly. They
were simply rather cute fantasies and the source of stories for the little ones
at bedtime. But an almighty God? Time to start praying.
This
is how things stood for century after century, as gods came and went, some
staying around for many centuries, like Mithra, who was said to have been the
Savior of humankind and born of a virgin, and competed with Christianity for 300
years. And it’s probably a safe guess to say that almost all humans, taking no
chances, believed in whatever the locally accepted gods were. Probably the most
famous (and most brilliant) rebel along those lines was Socrates (469-399 BC)
who was sentenced to death for “failing
to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges.”
This
common state of affairs meant that if you asked any average human whether they
believed a god or gods existed, you’d get a definite YES! If you found an
occasional heretic who said no, and who would probably be burned at the stake
for saying it, it would be a rarity. Aside from imbeciles, you would never hear,
“I don’t know.” It was then, like it is now, a simple yes or no question.
Do you believe in God?
Then,
in 1825, along came a man named Thomas Henry Huxley. Born in England, he became
a biologist. While most would say that his most notable claim to fame was that
he became known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his fierce advocacy of
Darwin’s theory of evolution, I claim otherwise. I will state with a fair
amount of certainty, that the most notable and infamous action he ever undertook
was to decide to coin a new word: agnostic. He just made it up out of whole
cloth. It had never been used before. But Huxley began using it in 1869 and the
fur has been flying since. It is a weasel word. It is not only meaningless, it
is quite stupid. To say that you
don’t know whether or not there is a God is quite reasonable. No one knows the
answer to that. To say that you don’t know whether or not you
believe in a God is ridiculous. Of course you know! Either you do or you
don’t, and you know which it is.
No
one, not you nor I nor Thomas Henry Huxley could ever say with certainty that
there is or is not a God. Only someone with infinite knowledge of the universe
could confirm or deny that proposition and I’ve never heard anyone claim to
have infinite knowledge of the universe. However, most of us fall into the bad
habit of using a shorthand version of a lengthy idea. We atheists will scoff and
say, “There is no God!” The true, longhand version of that is, “I do not
believe in any gods that have thus far been offered for consideration.” And
there are hundreds to choose from. But we atheists have no idea if there’s a
god or not, any more than anyone else does. That’s part of the problem too,
and part of the reason there is so much argumentation over the meaningless word
“agnostic.”
Pollsters
don’t help by asking the kind of questions they ask. They push us into a
corner, more or less forcing a yes or no. If you say “I don’t know” then
the non-word agnostic is thrown into the poll. But they are asking the wrong
question, just like the rest of us usually do. They ask if you believe in God as
if that were the same as asking if there is a God. Sorry,
Charlie, those are not the same questions. But they treat them as if the two of
them are the same.
Faith
must be 100% solid or it is not true faith. It’s like pregnancy. It’s a yes
or a no. There is no in between. There is no point in saying a prayer
“hoping” that someone will hear it. If you are not certain
that someone will hear it, then you are not certain that a god exists. If you
are not certain that a god exists then you are not a true
believer. You do not possess a clear, unambiguous faith in a deity. You are
therefore an atheist until you acquire that unambiguous faith. Hoping has
nothing to do with it. True belief makes you a true theist. Hoping makes you a
true atheist. It is so simple.
Keep
in mind that hundreds of well-respected philosophers debated the existence of
God, the nature of God, the need for a god and so on, for centuries; yet they
never felt the need for the word “agnostic.” It wasn’t until a
strong-willed biologist, trying to separate the new scientific theory of
evolution from the dreaded, hated word “atheism” that the silly word,
agnosticism, was made up in 1869. And we’ve been battling over it since.
So
the next time someone asks you if you believe in God, a first good response (my
favorite) is which God? But you also might want to throw in, “Are you asking
if I believe in God or are you asking if there is a God? Because
on that second part, I haven’t a clue. And neither do you.”
©
2010 Judith Hayes
“The
invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
Delos McKown
For some non-religious opinions and/or political rants see BEYOND BELIEF
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