Heya, let me try to pick this up again.
Left off with the points of "Agnosticism being a process" (the term "method" implies a creed, but that's a semantic point) and clarifying a couple cases where agnosticism is irrational, basically along evidentiary grounds.
*** WARNING MONSTER POST *** DANGER *** DANGER ALERT ***
Lerxst said:
You lost me. Maybe it has just been a long day...
Ok, back to simplest terms and exploring from there:
(1) Endless deferrals of what actually explains an explanandum
Worst case first, since it's easily understood as hyperbole-
"If agnosticism is adopted because it is reasonably held in proportion to the evidence of a proposition, one has to maintain the process by being highly selective of the evidence, otherwise a wrong conclusion could be reached." The similarity between this type of endless deferral and ordinary denial then is simply a matter of degree, or rather- objectivity. The hyperbole at work here is that "endless deferrals are
desirable" (rather than
"a result" of properly following a process).
...
But, ok, what happens if we strictly follow the process of
tempering our understanding to evidence? Afterall, if there is
no evidence to weigh for a proposition then one
can't apply agnosticism at all...
We can rule out "fixing (or discarding) the evidence" ourselves, but what if there are flaws with the evidence?
...
"If agnosticism is adopted by virtue that it is the most reasonable position because it parses rational acceptance of a proposition in proportion to the evidence, but that evidence is recursive, then so too is one's adoption of agnosticism."
Take Aquinas' classic "First Cause" argument (Aristotle's unmoved-mover, essentially); one can't rationally adopt agnosticism to the Deity that is
logically identified as The First Cause.
The problem here is two-fold, the greater flaw is that it is recursive, and the second is that there is an insufficent amount of evidence to consider. When I consider "prime mover gods" I try not to set out right away and trim all the fat and fluff from a protracted dissertation for my own edification; the schematic of Aquinas' argument is just simply
that lacking; no matter how many causes one puts between >now< and the beginning of our Spatio-temporal Cosmic bubble,
no conclusion can be drawn about *before* space-time began and one can know that; and so, to me, it requires no agnosticism.
If we know we don't know, then we're not "agnostic"- we're knowledgable.
(anyone amused by my exceedingly bad taste in puns, please
don't pardon me)...
We know it's Knowledge, otherwise it'd be Ignorance-- DUH!
So, I see no other evidence at all for the Prime Mover God within the schematic of Aquinas' argument; just one factoid and some sophistry. I fully accept that I may be missing something important, and I'll gladly reconsider what that might be, but it seems that the entire case for that deity is purely imaginary and illogical (even
incoherent).
More on topic-
Consider that agnosticism is truly a
process as Huxley described it, rather than a fixed position, in circumstances when there can be no other evidence introduced-- then the process has reached a stopping point; this is not to say that this point is "true or false," it has simply
ceased being useful to weigh the evidence because it is underwhelming and because no further evidence will be forthcoming from it.
The process has ended, thus one is not "being agnostic."
To continue carrying on otherwise creates an inadvertent "endless regression" because "we" would be allowing an underabundance of evidence an undue chance to be
more exhaustive than it is (and was), or even- to make
more sense to us than it did the first few thousand times we considered it, as if any new arrangement of the words or concepts in our heads would become any clearer with "re-re-re-thinking" it over. As in the tired allegory of "testing gravity" by repeatedly climbing a tower to different heights and dropping different items just on the "off chance" that an item will
fall upwards instead of downwards (or towards the larger attracting mass, rather)-- at some
moot point the process becomes patently absurd.
Not because the process itself is bad...
But because the expectation that the results could be any different, even given an infinite number of trials, would not be grounded in objective fact.
At that moot point, one suspends witholding judgement.
(2) A contradiction arises [...]
That was my hastily-condensed way of trying to summarize such propositions as "agnosticism refutes itself" and "agnostics can't know". Again, I consider this to be a strawman when applied outside a narrow set of arguments about knowledge itself.
Contradictions such as- "if agnosticism is the best method for evaluating "truth" but can be shown to be "false" in
just one case [...]"-- aren't really
contradictions, of course, but try explaining
that to any newsgroup or message board "ingenue" who has only a "folk-understanding" of philosophical terms or of logic.
It's undeniable, and "brutally elegant" that one cannot withold judgement on matters in which there are only two logical, polarized states; one can't be half-pregnant- as the saying goes. In that case, one can "not know" if they are pregnant, but one cannot
assert that it is "unknowable"...
For if one tries, the process of agnosticism transistions from method into belief.
Objectively, one can "know" about
beliefs... without adopting
them.
Others
merely believe.
Lerxst said:
I'm also agnostic on the existence of ETI.
Mere existence, or "contact" or
both? I now think that it is so highly probable- as to be indistinguishable from a logical, rational, and
practical certainty that other intelligent, material beings actually exist in the same cosmos we inhabit.
...
"Contact" however, is
exponentially less probable... proportional in some regards to
both the time and distance between ourselves and "whoever" else,
and a vast number of ponderable differences between "our" respective biological, philosophical, and cultural evolutionary statuses.
But I can't honestly say I'm agnostic on either phenomenon.
...
Nor was I ever agnostic on the proposition that there are other planets orbiting other stars.
Lerxst said:
This is something that almost everyone who has thought about it agrees on. We don't have any evidence for ETI, but it is certainly conceivable given the size of the known universe that it is out there. All we can honestly say is that there is no evidence, but that this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And there are plausability arguments. Now if clear positive evidence for ETI turns up tomorrow, the agnosticism ends. But if it never turns up, it will tough for the agnosticism to end until every cubic mile of the universe has been accounted for. Will that ever happen? Probably not. So I can never imagine "we know there is no life but that on earth" being a statement I would accept - at least in my lifetime.
Ok, now let me say I respect your opinions, but this is where I will strongly disagree-- between "ETI" and "God"... and agnosticism.
"We" can't honestly say that there is no evidence for ETI; only that the evidence which
we know about is not compelling enough to suspend our
(agnostic) processes. Even if we could
agree that we have seen all there is to see- consensus doesn't make it so; we are going to find we have different levels of exposure and familiarity to the evidence for this phenomenon, and thus different assessments; even if we both compared each other's data exhaustively.
Besides, there's nothing necessarily supernatural or incoherent about ETI, nor anything preventing sufficiently-advanced ET's from having studied our solar system. In short, ETI is a topic that is so broad, and with so many objective details which will be (or are-) actually checkable that one can't legitimately say "I looked and I saw no evidence."
"I never saw one" I'd believe, but "I never saw any evidence" (and neither did anybody else)...
not a fuckin chance.
...
What have the "God bots" got? Nothing but sophistry. Why? Because all Gods are imaginary, mythological beings. This is the
one definition that works for any, all, and every God and Goddess, objectively. You ask any monotheist why
they reject every
other god but One, then use that same criteria on
their God.
It even passes the "litmus test" of NOT equivocating "exist"...
One can't say "Gods don't exist" because imaginary ideas and concepts
do exist... they simply aren't actual (as in "actually real"); they "exist" only as any other notion, dream, or memetically transferred concept "exists." Right between one's ears.
...
And, in the case of such deities, the absence of material evidence is a
type of evidence which is
necessarily absent to support the hypothesis that imaginary articles and critters aren't actual. It's a cop-out plea to semantics or nihilism (or both
or worse) to suggest that one can't *really* know what "imaginary is" when this word has clear and concise positive, negative, and relative and associative definitions; it defies the laws governing conventional language to suggest that words don't mean what words mean...
Heh, Clinton's blowjob be damned... (if I may again be so vulgar)
Stopping here, sorry if the "fluff" is unwelcome, I'm rather sleepy so there is little doubt there are misspellings and dropped words here and there.
Cheers, Lerxst (and fellow posters)
