Ignosticism

[tongodeon]

I've previously posted about atheism and agnosticism. Theism or a-theism is how much theistic inclination you've got. Gnosticism or a-gnosticism is the extent of your gnosis - the knowledge you presume to have. An agnostic atheist hasn't seen God and doesn't know if they will or not, a gnostic atheist is pretty certain they won't, a gnostic theist

Comments

[andrewducker]

I keep encountering Ignosticism and then forgetting the term. I really should make more of an effort to reference it next time religion comes up.

[tongodeon]

A big part of the reason why I write an LJ is to keep a written record, either of stuff I need to remember or references it's hard to cite off the top of my head. That's also why I use tags obsessively: so that it's easy for me to go back and find what I'm looking for. Unfortunately it's also why it's probably so annoying to have an in-depth, serious conversation with me. "Oh yeah ... I wrote something about that ... hold on a second ..."

[xiphias]

How weird.

This is clearly one of the ways in which being Jewish is different than certain other modern religions.

It never even OCCURRED to me that there might be people who thought that there WAS such a thing as a distinct, coherent, cognitively meaningful concept of God.

It is an article of faith in Judaism that God is NOT such a thing. It is considered blasphemy to postulate a coherent, cognitively meaningful concept of God in the manner that is suggested here. The third of Maimonedes's Thirteen Principles of Faith specifically requires theological noncognitivism by the way that this is being defined.

So, yeah. I see your point.

Still, to me, this doesn't so much make an argument against the existence of God so much as yet another example of why having the theist/atheist argument is just an annoying waste of time.

[mmcirvin]

Many evangelical Protestants, in particular, seem to think that their concept of God is generally accepted and maybe even believed in by everyone, and the only question remaining is whether the individual accepts it emotionally or rebels.

[tongodeon]

Still, to me, this doesn't so much make an argument against the existence of God

Ignosticism is not "an argument against the existence of God", it's deeper than that. It asserts that there can be no argument against, or in favor of, or appeal to, or praise of, or meaningful discussion about God, since "God" is not a coherent or meaningful concept. By the same token there is no "argument against the existence of square circles", there is just the observation that the concept is inherently nonsensical.

FWIW, after his "conversion" to Jewish Ignosticism, Sherwin Wine discarded virtually all previous Jewish liturgical writings but continued to conduct secular religious services in purely humanist terms. Comparing his services to the writings he rejected might give you an idea of the difference between traditional Jewish and Ignostic positions:

How wonderful is the light of the world

[xiphias]

Sounds much like much of the liturgy at my shul, actually . . .

'Course, my community is at least 50% humanist, anyway.

[flwyd]

agnostic theists might enjoy the community, meditation, and ritual of religion without assuming there's more to it than that

That's a position that gnostic and agnostic atheists can take as well. I think a better example of an agnostic theist is someone who accepts Pascal's wager: "God might not exist, but I believe in him to hedge my bets."

The pan-religious position (Brahma, Allah, God, et al. are different names for the same thing) is a legitimate position, even if that thing is ill-defined if couched as an emotional observation. There are lots of emotions that are hard to define like angst, saudade, or even love. Lots of people feel them, but they're hard to explain and essentially impossible to design a reliable test for. There are similar feelings associated with religious experience that are even harder to elucidate than saudade, so people have created all sorts of religious language to provide a framework for discussion. The pan-religious position asserts that the experience people have when "talking to God" and the

[dnereverri]

I think that atheists could improve their rhetorical position by affirming the existence of religious experience and the value of religious community while maintaining the point that the mythic context associated with them doesn't directly correspond to reality. I think it would help us come across as less of a threat and/or dick.

This.

I tend towards agnosticism in general, but I've never made it more than two pages into Dawkins without wanting to convert to Evangelical Christianity, just as a reaction to the incredible arrogance that seems to exude from his writing.

[dpolicar]

Here by way of andrewducker.

Nice post.

One thing I would add...

Does God just happen to be an inherently indistinct and incoherent concept? Or have religious people retreated from a position where they made coherent and meaningful claims to a position of incoherent unverifiability because they're just making it up?

It might be worth carving out a distinctly third option: perhaps people fall easily into the trap of making incoherent and unverifiable statements about God because it's outside of the contexts they are accustomed to thinking about.

That is, perhaps they are in the same situation as someone who grew up on a desert planet having been told about oceans. Oceans aren't inherently incoherent, and they aren't making oceans up. Nevertheless, what they know about oceans doesn't fit well with everything else they know about the world, and it's very easy for that to lead to a corrupted cognitive database and a lot of gibberish.

[tongodeon]

perhaps they are in the same situation as someone who grew up on a desert planet having been told about oceans.

I'm not sure that follows. I didn't grow up on a planet of molten lava but I can still describe what a volcano looks like. Someone who grew up in a desert planet could still make a coherent description of an ocean. You could say "like a cup of water, but thousands of miles wide, with ripples 12 feet tall". Even if nobody had ever seen liquid water, oceans still have intrinsic properties like mass, depth, composition, viscosity, and melting/boiling points. I didn't grow up in a village with wizards, dragons, and unicorns but I can give you a coherent description of how to recognize one.

Oceans aren't inherently incoherent, and they aren't making oceans up.

If they're not making a coherent statement, how can you say that this incoherent statement is describing an ocean? How can you say it's describing anything at all?

Let's say that you and I find a book printed in Chinese which happens to be completely incoherent to us.

[dpolicar]

I basically agree with everything you just said, while at the same time recognizing that you set out to disagree with me, so clearly I failed to communicate. (I may also be confused, or mistaken about something, but at the very least I failed to communicate

[tongodeon]

inferring from the fact that someone is spouting gibberish about X that either X is "an inherently indistinct and incoherent concept" or that the person is "just making it up" may be excluding a third alternative that might be useful to consider.First, I think you're seriously misreading me. Obviously, spouting gibberish about X doesn't make X inherently indistinct and incoherent. If I say "Barack Obama happy waffle upside down angry sundae" that doesn't make "Barack Obama" an either vacuous or fictitious concept

Mystics have long asserted God must be Unknowable

[darth_thulhu]

Most anything that would properly be termed Mysticism (Zen, Sufism, Christian monastic, etc.) is going to fuse your second Caveat and your Credit. Ironically / Obviously / Paradoxically, rigorous axiomatic Legalism (Confucian, Talmudic, different Christian monastic, etc.) will also fuse them, albeit in an inverse way

Re: Mystics have long asserted God must be Unknowable

[tongodeon]

Circles, truth, justice, or beauty may not be physical or objective, but at least they're coherent, distinct, and cognitively meaningful, and so ignostics are happy to have a meaningful discussion about whether these concepts are "real" or "exist". They may or may not, but at least we know what we're talking about. These concepts' intrinsic properties and meaning is what makes "justice" and "beauty" not vacuously interchangeable. A court that adjudicated on a basis of beauty or love would be a very different court than one which adjudicated on a basis of justice, whether or not "justice" or "beauty" "exist".

But "God" doesn't get that far, because "circles" or "beauty" are distinct and meaningful in a way that "God" is not. Asking "does God exist?" is like asking "does ᎯᎭᎧᎦᎲ exist?" It's premature to meaningfully consider that question until we know what we're talking about. We can interchange "God" with "Bigfoot", "Cosmic Muffin" or "The Big Electron" in a way that we can't interchange "beauty", "love", or "pain" because the latter