Atheism, Agnosticism and Reasonableness

In Thinking About The God Delusion, John Scalzi ruminates on Richard Dawkins’s new book, which I haven’t read yet, so can’t really comment on. However, I do know enough of Dawkins’s writings that something Scalzi said, mostly in passing, leapt out at me. He said this:

As far as things go, I suspect Dawkins and I are in the same boat regarding the existence of God, which is to say we’re agnostic about it, roughly to the same amount we’re agnostic regarding invisible pink unicorns.

Scalzi goes on to say that, despite this basic agreement between them, he doesn’t share Dawkins’s view of religion as inherently dangerous. So long as it doesn’t step on his toes, he’s cool with its existence. (Don’t trust my piddling little précis. Go read the whole thing. As usual for a topic such as this, most of the meat is in the discussion afterwards.)

I’m not interested just now in the ‘Religion: Good or Bad?’ question – though I will very clearly stand up in Dawkins’s corner. What does interest me here is the language Scalzi chose to describe both himself and Dawkins. Scalzi self-identifies as an agnostic. Dawkins self-identifies as an atheist. So how can Scalzi put the two of them in the same boat?

I suspect the answer to that might come from a bit of rhetoric similar to the following, which appears in Dawkins’s The Root of All Evil?, a two-part television piece made for British TV, which is practically unshowable in the self-congratulatingly free-speech-championing US. On the notion of the unprovability of the existence of God, Dawkins says:

Science can’t disprove the existence of God. But that does not mean that God exists. There are a million things we can’t disprove. The philosopher, Bertrand Russell, had an analogy. Imagine there’s a china teapot in orbit around the sun. You cannot disprove the existence of the teapot, because it’s too small to be spotted by our telescopes. Nobody but a lunatic would say, ‘Well, I’m prepared to believe in the teapot because I can’t disprove it.’

Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic, but in practice we are all teapot atheists.

The construction of Dawkins’s last line here is characteristically precise. On a philosophical level we have to accept that the non-existence of the teapot can’t be proven. However, that doesn’t mean that we consider ourselves believers. We almost certainly don’t even consider ourselves to be agnostic on the matter, except in the context of a purely philosophical argument, or some sort of conscious playing of devil’s advocate. Ask someone, truly, honestly, whether they believe in the teapot, or the invisible pink unicorns, and they’ll say, ‘No’, and might add, ‘Of course not’, even though they would at the same time be quite happy to accept the logical impossibility of disproving their existence.

In the real world, what you won’t find with respect to Mars-orbiting teapots and invisible pink unicorns is the retreat into the philosophically safe haven of agnosticism. And yet it happens with the god-concept all the time. Scalzi places himself in the same boat as Dawkins, yet self-identifies as an agnostic, despite the fact that Dawkins wouldn’t ever seriously self-identify that way, except, as shown, to essentially use the term ‘agnostic’ as a way of describing that he isn’t one in anything other than a meaninglessly, bean-countingly empty way.

In some sense, to someone who believes that there isn’t a god, both ‘agnostic’ and ‘atheist’ are accessible as ways of describing themselves. ‘Agnostic’ is accessible through purely logical grounds: such-and-such can’t be disproven, therefore I must entertain the possibility, however remote. ‘Atheist’ is accessible in a real-world, non-academic, practical way: I might be wrong, but I don’t believe that there’s a god.

Note the use of ‘but’, because it gives away the precedence. Dawkins says:

Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic, but in practice we are all teapot atheists.

What he’s saying here is that, with the technical and logical qualifier that non-existence of pretty much anything can’t be proven, the defining part of how we look at the teapot is that we don’t believe in it. It follows linguistically that we’d call ourselves ‘atheists’ with regard to the teapot, ditching the agnostic bit as being an irrelevant footnote to the main argument.

Interestingly, one of Scalzi’s commenters, fishbane, uses a mirror image of the same construction:

I believe there is no god, but I have no way of proving that is so, so the best word for my belief state is agnostic.

This is a very curious and revealing line of reasoning. The first six words are more or less a dictionary definition of atheism, and yet the arcane philosophical quibbling which makes up the post-‘but’ remainder of the sentence is deemed to take precedence. Both ‘atheist’ and ‘agnostic’ are accessible here, yet the technical hedging of bets that’s inherent in the espousal of the agnostic view is seen as trumping the basic, practical statement of belief.

I’ve seen the same (frankly) spurious and inconsistent argument elsewhere: I can’t disprove X, therefore I’m agnostic on the matter. The curiosity that Russell and Dawkins pick up on is that the X in question is almost always religious. The sudden familiarity with and love of logical rigour is picked up only when it proves to be weakly expedient. About the teapot and the unicorn there is no practical agnosticism.

I’m interested in why self-described agnosticism is regarded as more correct among people whose descriptions of themselves are often textbook examples of atheism. The answers, I suspect, are caught up in a web of social history: false equivalences between atheism and communism, for example, or the propaganda pushed by the right-wing that atheism is inherently amoral. There are also basic failures of either knowledge or logic, too, in which atheism is falsely portrayed as the belief that a god cannot exist, or the claim that one knows that a god doesn’t exist. These are straw men, of course. Like all straw men, it’s helpful to look behind the curtain to see why these straw men have been created. Sometimes it’s genuine ignorance, but often it’s more disingenuous.

I’m struck by the sense in which, when atheism and agnosticism are both accessible as descriptions, agnosticism has acquired a perceived golden glow of reasonableness, of moderation. Again there are societal and historical motivations for portraying atheism as an extremist position, rather than merely a relatively uncommon one. The effect is to see agnosticism as a matter of logical responsibility. If I cannot disprove the existence of God, the argument goes, not only do I call myself agnostic on the matter, but it’s incumbent upon me to do so. To do otherwise would be unethical and extreme. Of course, this argument is hogwash, since it’s a kind of logical exceptionalism applied with remarkable selectivity. The teapot and the unicorn don’t have good enough agents to get this sort of deal.

Moreover, the perceived ‘reasonableness’ isn’t at all in the direction of agnosticism. It’s in the direction of faith. It just so happens that agnosticism sits neatly between faith and absence of faith, a rose between two thorns. So if one rejects atheism as a description of oneself, no matter how apt it might be, agnosticism is the first refuge. Those who might laud agnosticism as the responsible, ethical position, given that the non-existence of a god cannot be disproven, and who might excoriate the extremism of the atheist position for the same reason, are somewhat less likely to see agnosticism as the responsible, ethical position for the theist who accepts that the existence of a god also cannot be proven. Churches are not full of believers who think it’s the responsible thing to call themselves agnostic because they cannot be certain.

[Update: More on the atheist/agnostic semantic quibbling at Pharyngula.]