Does Agnosticism Make Sense?

curiously spiritual.

 

what does that mean?

 

"Therefore, all agnostics should remain open to the possibility of the existence of unicorns."

True but not true. Easily because . If life exists, whcih is obviously does (And dont giv-me that perspective bullshit cause, that doesnt exist in the same way your saying.) anyways. Yeah so Existence is GOD, NOn existence is not. IF WE DIDNT exist one could say GOD might or defintely does not exist. See? Si?

 

I really didn't expect this thread to get resurrected, but I should still defend my argument against the recent new wave of criticism.

First, unicorns, lepprechauns, and little green men are very relevant to this discussion precisely because they are things that do not exist but some people (granted, not very many) have thought to exist. Some have argued that it's a mistake to compare God to anything earthly. These people are wrong for a few reasons. (1) Unicorns are not earthly because they do not exist. (2) We are concerned only with existence, not other qualities largely unique to God such as omnipotence or ineffibility. No theist could say that God exists in a different way than everything else, or else he'd be talking nonsense. For example, a proton and a star are two very different things but no one would say that they exist in different ways. (3) If God cannot be compared to other things, then there is no way we can understand him. If there is no way to understand him, there is absolutely no justification in believing in him, and the atheist wins the day.

Zion wrote, "IF WE DIDNT exist one could say GOD might or defintely does not exist." This is actually a very good point, aside from the fact that if we didn't exist we couldn't say anything. But Zion raises an argument for God's existence which has not been considered so far. In my first post, I covered logical arguments for the existence of God, but the argument from design cannot be considered a strictly logical argument because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. The argument goes along the lines of:

The universe appears orderly.
It is very unlikely that an orderly universe could have come to be by chance.
Therefore, God exists.

The argument is a posteriori. So, even if it is false, it's not logically false. This appears to leave open the possibility of God's existence So, for now, it seems like the agnostic may be right after all.

But is it a good inference to infer God's existence from the existence of an orderly universe? Obviously not. It's akin to the man who mistakes the droppings of some animal for unicorn droppings and concludes that unicorns therefore must exist. Say I see a building and infer that it must have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. This is obviously a case of bad reasoning because without any further information for all I know the building could have been built by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, or any other architect. Take it one step further. I see the building and infer that man named Shamus O'Toole, who I just made up on the spot, built the building. When confronted with a very general instance of evidence, we can infer almost anything. With a building, we can infer that a architect designed it, but we can't name the specific architect without more information. The more general the instance of evidence, the less we can validly infer. When the instance of evidence is as general as existence itself, there is a very large set of possible explainations, any of the members of which may be the correct one. So, justification by appealing to existence is really no justification at all.

Lastly, theism, agnosticism, and atheism are not just positions regarding the existence or nonexistence of a deity. All three, but especially agnosticism and atheism, have implicit ideas about how we gain knowledge. I believe I have shown that the agnostic's model is inconsistent with everyday reasoning.

 

do you wake up everyday pondering the existence of unicorns? its irrelevant.

 

I've been over this at least once before. It doesn't matter if you have some sort of gut-feeling or inexplicable urge to ponder God's existence. It doesn't matter if you feel that the subject of unicorns is less interesting than theology. My point is that agnostics do not think about the question of God's existence in a reasonable way, using reasoning about unicorns as an example. To admit that belief in God is unjustified and then to turn around and say that it's still possible that God exists doesn't make any sense. Why would anyone even consider the possibility that something exists when there is no evidence supporting such a claim? It doesn't matter if the thing is question is a unicorn or a god, the same rules about good reasoning apply. So, now that I have demonstrated as clearly as I can the relevance of my argument, why don't you tell me, exactly, why you think it's irrelevant. Hopefully, you'll put a little more time and thought into it, rather than just writing, "It's irrelevant," because that's all you've done so far.

 

because we know nothing past our universe, its the greatest mysterty. whether unicorns exist or not doesnt affect us at all. we still live our lives, whether they exist somewhere or not.

 

That doesn't answer my question, at all. I don't care about the mysterious nature of the universe. I don't care if unicorns have an impact on our lives or not. My question is very simple: Why is it that unicorns and God cannot be compared in any way, as you seem to think? Why is it that my argument is irrelevant? I don't want to hear why it's wrong, that's not the issue right now. I don't want to hear your vague life-philosophy either. I want to hear why it is so unfair to give an epistemic argument against agnosticism, nothing more.

 

because you atheists have bigger fish to fry

 

i don't practice atheism.......i just accept both possibilities and make my own decisions for my own reasons. but thats probably devil-worship to a god fearing believer. I call it being responsible.

 

"But agnostics also say that there can be no proof of God's non-existence, either. Well, of course not. There is no proof of the non-existence of unicorns precisely because unicorns do not exist. "


how do you know for sure unicorns don't exist??
anything is possible.. the world works mysteriously.
there are so many myths and stories: big foot, nessie the loch ness monster, dragons, unicorns, fairies... and how are these all invented?
who's to say they don't exist??
same with god, we've heard of God, but no one has proof of any of this.

agnosticism makes perfect sense.
we have belief that there's a possibility it could be true, or it might not.
atheism is all together not believing in god at all.
agnostics believe you can't know of god, so unless we do for sure, with actual live proof, then it makes sense.

 

Then you act like an atheist.

 

Not true.

 

yuh huh! ^ whats not possible??
how do you know for sure?

 

There are unicorns. Its the rhino, and narwhales. THe stories of unicorns are about the rhino, but was mixed in imagery with mountain goats.the long ivory horn is the narwhale part.

No shit. So see, unicorns do exist.

 

Experience + an IQ over 75.

 

For the time being, we can call a proposition "impossible" if and only if it is logically false. For example, "It is raining at this very place at this very moment and it is not raining at this very place at this very moment" is logically false. In fact, any proposition of the form "x and not x" is logically false. But this isn't the point. The point is that propositions such as,

(1) I could go to the store.


(2) I should go to the store.

(3) Going to the store is good.

are neither true nor false because there is no set of truth-conditions that can be met to make these propositions true or false. So, I'm reluctant to say what I said earlier proviso, that a logically impossible statement is one that is logically false. (1), (2), and (3) all have related grammatical structures. (1) and (2) use what are called "modal verbs." (3) is obviously related to (2) because we can paraphrase (2) into (3).

As I've said about a hundred times in this thread, there is nothing logically contradictory about the idea that unicorns exist. But the point is they don't exist and every sane, reasonable person on the planet knows they don't exist. I think I've shown in this post that thinking about modality in a serious, philosophical way only leads to problems. If I haven't, then one only needs to look to Descartes' conception of ideas and all the problems that caused in philosophy for the next odd 200 years. The point is that we are not concerned with "possibility" or "necessity" but with actuality, and that unicorns do not actually exist.

 

i act like an agnostic.......thank you

 

We're living on one little rock in a great big universe.


For all we know there are a gizzillion planets where unicorns do exist.