I love this blogger.
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/12/how-to-be-an-ally-with-atheists.html
she puts words on the page in funny and informative order. And says stuff that needs to be shouted from the
she puts words on the page in funny and informative order. And says stuff that needs to be shouted from the
And just as a secondary point--just because you've only met the "eyes glaze over" type, there are believers who will give you very similar lines as you give when asked about their faith. Hell, there are saints in the Catholic church who wrote that one cannot have faith without first having doubt, and then having experience, (and were sainted in full acknowledgment of those writings).
I am curious to know what scientific principles/explanations you have that work better without a universal power. While I've certainly never come across any that require a universal power to exist (given that you can't have functional scientific testing beyond the scope of human experience, it would be bizzare if there was ever a scientific principle that dealt with that realm), I've never found any that make more sense without one. Hell, even Einstein believed firmly in a divinity (and wrote about his belief), and he's not exactly the sort to have held fast to something his math worked against (hell, he threw out ages old, well established science without even blinking an eye when the math didn't work). There is, always, the awkward corruption of Occam's Razor (all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best--which was, for the record, one of the older proofs of God before it got claimed by early scientists as a good rule of thumb), but that line is so desperately dependent on how you phrase the question that it's really not a good standard to work from in the big picture. But I really, really am curious.
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'cuase then you'd have to say i was agnostic about, say, Zeus, or Russels Giant Teapot and the Flying Spagetti Monster. or Unicorns. or that I was agonstic about the possibility of humans suddenly developing shapeshifting abilities. I will hesitate to point out that the dictionary was probably written by...well. someone who identifies as christian. Because I'm not jsut someone who doesn't belive in the judeao/christian/islamic God. i also don't believe in the hindu gods, the greek gods, the roman gods, the norse gods, the celtic gods, the native american gods, the japanese pantheon, the chinese gods, the old aztec gods...ect. i think that ALL of those have an equal chance of being correct. which is to say, i find them all the same level of silly. So, if you wish you can call me agnostic--but it's a pretty meaningless label, since it's running into zeno's paradox territory. I mean...if i'm 99.99% sure there is no god of any sort, do you still count me as an agonostic?
I mean, i'm open to the idea that i can be wrong. i'm not delusional. I'm not irrational. I'd just be really really really really surprised. As would, i suspect, a lot of people of many different faiths.
as far as the idea that the world works better without the guiding hand of the supernatural...
if i do an experiment, i need to know that the world works in a rational, orderly and above all, consistant way. if there is a supernatural force acting on the world--what possible use is science? what can possibly be learned in any meaningful way if there is a guiding, supernatural, unknowable force that has whims and can change the outcome in unpredictable irrational ways?
it changes a bit when you say that the supernatural force doesn't actually change anything--but then....why have one? if the supernatural force doesn't actually do anything...why have one? Why believe in something that doesn't interact with the world in any way that cannot be explained by natural phenomenon? What is the purpose in believing in something that doen't do anything?
and if it DOES do things--then why haven't we seen it? why does the world act as if there is nothing guiding it? why add in an ivisible, untestable varible to the experiment? the only purpose to add in something you cannot control or test for into scientific experimentation is to invalidate the experiment. which...i hope goes without saying does have a detrimental effect on science.
I mean--the reason women doesn't get enough medical and scientific data collected on them is because we've got a more unstable hormonal cycle that has a greater range of varibility. and it's hard to account for all that variablilty. if we had to add in an infinate, unknowable varible...it'd be impossible.
Now, this is the sort of thing that gets athiests into trouble with religious types--athieism seems essential to science. but that's false, obviously 'cuase there are scientists that are perfectly happy in thier faiths.
but they don't, if they are good at it, let their god into the lab unless they are testing for him/her/it. and those tests tend to be either unsuccessful, invalidated by a confirmation bias or unreplicatable.
Some, like einstein, saw thier god in the experiments, in the perfect beauty of the natural world. he's like teri.
Now. here is where Teri and I differ in terms of semantics. Teri offers that there IS a Universal Power--and that it is, for all intents and purposes,The God of Physics. Her "god" set the laws of the universe in motion, and then left. there is no point to worshipping it, it doesn't care. believe in it or not, physics doesn't care. She holds the same views as I do as an atheist--but she calls herself a Deist. I skip the middle man and just call that force physics, and don't ascribe any athromophic qualities to the fundemental laws of the universe, like "not caring". Teri shares this sort of faith with thomas jefferson, einstien, and a lot of really smart people who, for some reason or another found it hard to let go of faith.
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'Cause, see, we know now that Newton was wrong. His science works for us, here and now, on our planet, but utterly fails in the bigger picture. And once we got a good look at the (slightly) bigger picture, we could tell that Newton's math was incorrect, and that it only worked for what he had experienced, and that a different explanation was required overall, one that worked both out there and down here. And yet Newton's physics gave us most of the great early breakthroughs in human technology and development--in fact, Newtonian physics is still used in most engineering, even though it's ultimately incorrect. So what would the point of science be in a world where there is more than you can test for? Well, because ultimately, all those steps out to that limit still have value, still improve our lives. They don't negate the big picture, and there's still a point to them--there's just more that on one level may, in fact, invalidate them overall (but not invalidate their function in the now). And heading towards that infinite limit is what they strive for.
I'm not sure I understand why you think atheism/agnosticism is in any way limited to a Christian god...there's nothing about either points of view that would limit them in that way.
But more to the point--you're playing the "I'm pretty sure but it's not a belief which makes me more rational" game, which is why Agnosticism got triggered. That 1% of doubt you have? Most religious have that too. And you really do not have any more evidence for your point of view than anyone else has for theirs, no matter how much you feel that a lack of evidence for them means evidence for you. So if you're going to run with this whole "but it's not a belief, because it could change" thing, you're going to run into trouble when other people can't figure out how that's any different from them (because for most, it's not).
As for why haven't we seen it...well, can you really say we haven't? With all of the terribly methodical and overly organized things that exist in the universe, all of the consistent math and the underlying structure, what makes the idea that this all simply is any more logical than it all is because it's supposed to be that way? Not that I necessarily buy into that myself, but it's a valid point. Certainly, it could all simply be...but it could be more, and the only reason that idea could be rejected is, again, Occam's Razor, which is a theory of knowing originally set forth as a proof of the existence of God, and has no more rational validity than anything else, because the simpler solution to any situation is totally dependent upon the way in which the situation was originally posed.
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Putting aside all discussions of whether or not you "believe" there is no god, what I am terribly comfortable in saying is that you do believe that until there is concrete/definitive evidence of something, there's no validity to it.
And that, while I think it would still fall under the term agnostic as far as the English language is concerned, is a belief that you need to recognize as having underlying assumptions, assumptions that do, in fact, rely on faith (not faith in god, obviously, but faith none-the-less). While it may be a more adaptable kind of faith than you have experienced in a lot of other people, it is still a form of faith. In order to believe that evidence is required for validation, you first have to believe that evidence is possible. You have to believe that function holds some sort of primacy (that is, that things must somehow function within our perceived existence--which is, interestingly enough, one of the primary innovations of the Hebrew Bible to religious thought overall--but that's another long tangent). That the ability of the world to be understood somehow relates to functioning in that world (the lines "if i do an experiment, i need to know that the world works in a rational, orderly and above all, consistant way. if there is a supernatural force acting on the world--what possible use is science? what can possibly be learned in any meaningful way if there is a guiding, supernatural, unknowable force that has whims and can change the outcome in unpredictable irrational ways?" are particularly significant to this. Even just in the most basic sense, you don't have to understand physics to understand chemistry, and you don't have to understand chemistry to understand biology. Biologists make significant contributions to our daily lives, and yet very few of them could give you the true, deep down details of how life on this planet works. A physicist could give you a ridiculous amount more, but even they don't have the full picture, and they know it. In fact, in the really high end stuff worked on these days, unpredictability and paradox seem to reign supreme--take Schroedinger's cat, for example, or any other theory dealing with the functioning of light. The "I have to be able to control it in order for what I do to have meaning" is only sort of true--it's true if the goal is to know everything, absolutely, but not remotely true if the goal is, to say, something like curing cancer).
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