Happy Blasphemy Day everyone! September 30th 2005 was the day the whole Muhammad cartoons controversy kicked off (here he is!), so since then there’s been the campaign to commemorate the day as a way of promoting, and protecting, free speech and the freedom to mock and insult religion without fear reprisal. So here’s to blasphemy!
Anyways, it leads to a regular rant I seem to have with people – the difference between being theistic and gnostic. [You may say the fact so many people disagree with me may suggest that I am wrong, though I prefer to see it as a difference in opinion that should be debated, sometimes with the aid of a large stick...]. I identify myself as an agnostic atheist – I don’t believe in god, but I don’t believe I can know this. What do I mean?
Most would say you’re either theistic, agnostic, or atheist. But technically, at least as far as language is concerned, that’s incorrect. Because there’s a difference between the two – it’s a epistemological question, the difference between belief and knowing.
The word “theism” implies a belief in a god. So those who believe a god exists are theists, those who don’t are atheists. If you’re an “agnostic” in the traditional sense of the term, you’re also by definition an atheist. You do not hold to a belief in a god as you do not accept the claims of theists. You hold a position of non-belief in god. So that is a-theism.
However that isn’t everything when it comes to views on deities. “Gnosticism” is the belief that a human being can possess knowledge about a god. It’s a term about the possibility of knowledge in regard to god claims, nothing to do with a statement of belief in the object itself. Agnostics are holding to the epistemological position that humans can’t actually know anything about something “supernatural” such as the god concept, it’s something beyond “nature” and what is testable. And in fact, many theists agree would agree with this viewpoint, that there’s no way for a human to know anything about a god, only whether they believe or not. They would be an agnostic theist.
A biggy here is the celestial teapot of Bertrand Russell:
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time
The point is, you can believe or not believe in the teapot (theism), but you also need to decide how well you know it’s either there or not there (gnosticism). Most would say they were didn’t believe, but (when pushed), would probably admit that they couldn’t know if it was there or not – it’s unobservable! So why not apply these same two criteria to god?