Recently peardg had this idea that I should post little reflection essays on random topics. Since my son, guango, is an amazing random password generator, I thought I could get him to shift his talent sideways and shoot me a weekly random topic. I must warn you that his mind is quirky so some of the topics are likely to be quirky as well. Here’s the first:

Agnostics are not cowards. Atheists and theists are cowards because they are the people that are too fearful to live without knowing. So great is their fear that they ignore reason and simply fabricate reality to their liking.

My little reflection essay: I think of myself as an athiest but not as a coward and I know guango’s mind well enough to know he has strongly logical reasons to present his view about atheism this way. So immediately upon reading the post topic, given my predispositions, my mind went squirreling off to find a way to make both my sense of myself and guango’s experience both truthful representations of how the world of belief is. Because, of course, agnosticism, atheism and theism are all beliefs. Dictionary.com says of belief:

1. something believed; an opinion or conviction: a belief that the earth is flat. 2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: a statement unworthy of belief. 3. confidence; faith; trust: a child’s belief in his parents. 4. a religious tenet or tenets; religious creed or faith: the Christian belief.

Despite being one word, “belief” is really many things. These various “things” can be expressed as vectors. A pair of commensurable vectors form an axis. One vector, for example, carries an increasing reliance on empirical evidence to support belief, and in the other direction, reliance on emotional states and social structures to support belief. The two together form an axis along which the various manifestations of belief – as they are expressed in human behaviour and discourse – can be positioned. We could name these vectors in a number of ways, but here I will use the terminology of the dictionary.com definition. (There’s a graphic representation at the end of this post to make these distinctions visual.)

The first pair of vectors:

“Opinion” here references the evidentiary vector; “confidence” references the emotional vector. Hence, having the “opinion” that the earth is flat, for example, is really very different than having “confidence” in the truth of the statement “the earth is flat.” Opinion implies that this matter of believing the earth is flat is open to evidential support so that if someone comes along that shows us that the earth is in fact round, then the opinion is changed. In other words, having an opinion that the earth is flat is (dis)provable because it rests on a body of evidence.

Having “confidence in the truth” is something altogether different. It rests on emotion, not evidence. If, for whatever reason, it is terribly important to you that the earth be flat, then evidence is not likely to effect your “confidence.” What changes this kind of belief is not evidence but emotional pressure, or emotional opportunity. So for example, if the world is flat, then going to the Americas to garner the wealth of others is not possible. If the world is round, it may be tough to do but it is possible. The desire for wealth weakened the “confidence” provided by the then current theology-science to the point that having confidence in a flat earth became an opinion about the flat earth, which belief then became open to change by a preponderance of evidence. And now, of course, there are very few people who believe that the earth is flat, and certainly it is no longer central to our concept of self.

Another example: I know a young man who was raised in a fundamentalist home. He was always, I suspect, a bit of an outsider. For one thing he has a higher than normal IQ. He has told me stories of his early years and his flight from the community. What he says is that he found out they were lying to him. He had found science in a library and realized that the stories about the age of the earth, etc. were simply not empirically true as had been claimed. But it wasn’t the evidence per se that booted him out of his family and religious community, it was his outrage at having been lied to. Emotional pressure; and later, an opportunity to develop his sense of autonomy, to pursue the life that he wanted: these things were made possible by his outrage and its consequences.

It has cost him though. The pressure of exile is never easy for any human being. Sometimes those things in which we have “confidence” are such that if we give them up, if we try to shift our emotional needs to another set of beliefs, we simply lose too much. The young man lost his community and faces the deeply saddened looks (probably mixed with anger and contempt although the young man did not say this) of his mother and father, who really do have confidence that their son is going to hell.

The thing is that there is the same thing in some parts of the atheist community. There, if you play with the notions that come with the idea of a transcendent reality, you get the same looks as the young man gets from his parents. Of course not all atheists do this, and not all religious people need to be RIGHT. But the young man comes from a fundamentalist community and the need to be RIGHT is what, in part, makes them fundamentalists. Human beings are prone to this need. I think this is what guango is referring to when he says atheists and theists fabricate reality. I think he is referring to the kind of person who think they KNOW.

So there is an axis along which “belief” slides. On one end there is “evidence” and I have called that vector “opinion,” and at the other end there is “confidence” which rests on emotional and social supports. Belief in something can be further analyzed with a second pair of vectors. Context, or to what the “belief” is being pointed is the basis of this second axis.

The second pair of vectors:

When I say “I do not believe in god” what I am “pointing” at is human history. The human representations – Zeus, Odin, Isis, Bumba, Eshu, Astarte, Demuzi, Dionysus, Kali, Amaterasu, Yahweh, Allah – are what I do not believe in. I am saying that I understand there there is a “sense” in which these ideas of divinity exist but I am also saying that the referent to which they point is a human idea or a set of social events and not a (non)corporeal being. And since I understand the person to be inquiring as to my belief in the literal existence of Zeus-Allah, I respond with “I am an atheist.” Having said this, could I be wrong about this lack of literal existence? Sure. Is it likely? No.

The thing is that my response to questions about my belief in transcendental or other non-corporeal realities is gauged based on where I think the person “lives” on the graph below. In another context, with someone else, if asked do I believe in god, I would have to say I have no idea. Do I have an opinion about the possibility of some non-corporeal powerful intelligence? Nope. No way to think about such a thing; no evidence for or against. In fact, it’s not really thinkable for human beings: we inevitably reduce such a potential to some human imaginative creation that is based on our metaphorical representations of existence. This is as we were wired to do, so it isn’t surprising and in Star Trek that’s fun, luminous intelligent clouds and such. As part of political or educational decision making, it isn’t. So really, as in most things human, context is everything.

A bit more about the following graph:

If I were to draw a cloud over it to show the density of individuals falling along these two axes, I would say (an opinion) that the heaviest representation would be over the inner portion of the lower-right quadrant and the lightest representation would be over the extremes of any of the four quarters. I do think that at the extreme upper right a person here cannot say that they know anything for certain, because all things (well except for Descartes’ “I exist”) can be doubted. A person here always references evidence and always points to the inferred referent of any statement. Because the state or even existence of the said referent can always be doubted, there can be no incontrovertible evidence, and therefore, no incontrovertible truth. This is a “true” agnostic, in the sense that they are a philosophical agnostic. And this is not a cowardly position. It simply doesn’t care about the other three quadrants of the graph because the bases on which those others declaim their positions are not logically sound.

The thing is, does this matter? I’m not really sure about that. People are wavery when it comes to the practice of reasoning, that’s just how we are. It seems futile to expect consistent rationality when it so clearly does not exist as we have defined it in our philosophy.

Most agnostics fit into quadrants other than the upper-right. Some will be agnostic because it is what is least socially divisive. Some will say “I don’t know” because they are on an inner journey that simply hasn’t reached any coherence with respect to their sense of self yet. These are more methodological agnostics.

Personally, I think one enviable human attribute is the ability to slide one’s understanding along each of these axes to mentally embrace (temporarily) the various cognitive positions that these vectors make possible. In this way, even though each person has a “home” position, actual communication (as opposed to positional posturing) becomes possible.

This, I think, is deeply courageous, especially for those whose “home” is further along the “confidence” vector. So to respond to the question of courage and cowardice: It is difficult to live with the fact that philosophically we cannot know, that we are all, at this level, necessary agnostics, but it is easier for some of us than others. How difficult it is for you depends on where on the graph you live. So to me, the most deeply courageous of all are those, whether agnostic, atheist or theist, who habitually cognitively locate themselves in the lower-right of the graph, who then force themselves to slide toward the “referent” and to “opinion.” That takes far more courage, I would think, than philosophical agnosticism takes for a person on the upper right.