The Decision Tree
Eleven months ago, I authored a post titled ‘Whatism?’, in which I discussed the odd futility of defining layers upon layers of subcategories of ‘belief’ when particular objects are concerned. My focus was largely on the fragile distinction between atheism and agnosticism — a boundary, I argue, that ceases to exist at the same moment as whatever metaphysical conversation houses the thought. These lyrical waxings aside (I understand we all love them), proponents of either ‘disbelief system’ cannot be distinguished from one another based on their actions. You can lead the life of an agnostic or an atheist and no one would know until you explicitly told them. But why should they?
Agnosticism is the belief that the truth/falsity of some premise/proposition cannot be determined. This is often a completely justified belief — at no point will I ever criticise the position of agnosticism. Any entity or event that does not interact with physical matter in any way — the invisible, permeable unicorn in the room, for example — warrants an agnostic position. (Yes, even the illusive consciousness interacts with physical matter, as brain-damaged patients have demonstrated.)
Let’s use the word agnosum to denote anything deserving of agnosticism. The unicorn, or the ethereal deistic god, would be an example of something that is an agnosum by definition — we are told that it can’t be sensed in any way, directly or indirectly, and so there is no conceivable evidence that could sway our belief in its truth one way or the other. (Evidence being another premise/proposition with a truth value that is systematically related to the truth value of our original one.) Fortunately, we don’t need to fret over such an agnosum because — by the same definition — it can never affect our universe or our lives in any way.
Now let’s say that our chosen premise has passed the challenge of agnosticism, and we have a hypothesis about potential evidence that could sway our best estimate of its truth value. We’ve moved into the realm of skepticism (the real definition of which is not a euphemism for doubt or disbelief). We have some idea about how our premise can be taken to trial, but haven’t yet made a judgement. We perform an experiment to test our hypothesis. If our hypothetical evidence is found in our (rigorous and peer-reviewed) experiment, then we have just learned something about the premise’s truth value. We’re never going to be one hundred percent certain about it — and that’s where statistics and Bayes’ Theorem come in — but we’ve certainly made some headway.
At some point — this point is an area actually deserving of debate — we feel we are justified in abandoning our skepticism and finally accepting our premise as a belief. Yet this is the most dangerous part of the process, because we become complacement and drop our guard. The belief stops being strange and novel, and starts being normal and encultured. It becomes difficult to let go. We start ignoring the new evidence, while our fuzzy memories reinforce the strength of the old. There’s no way it could be wrong, you think. This can happen surprisingly quickly, and it’s a fact of the fallible human mind that has happened and will happen to each of us time and time again.
How does this tie back to our original focus on atheism versus agnosticism? As I’ve said before, there is a theoretical distinction between the two stances. It just doesn’t matter. If I start with the solipsistic premise that there is a second moon orbiting Earth, orbitally locked to the other side of the planet, it doesn’t take a very sophisticated experiment to gather evidence to the premise’s falsity. Among the many effects we would expect of such a celestial body would be strange tidal fluctuations when the moons line up, and we do not observe these. We can quickly shift from skepticism to belief in the falsity of the second moon (or as it is more commonly put, ‘disbelief in the second moon’).
Yet in what way does our invisible unicorn agnosum differ from our demonstrably non-existent second moon? By definition, the unicorn has precisely the same effect on our universe as the non-existence moon — that is, none at all. This is my argument, in its purest form. No sane person bothers with the distinction between agnosticism and disbelief when it comes to Peter Pan, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. Cynically, I might suggest that the reason we do bother with gods (and rarely ghosts and aliens) is that we’re roped into so many dreary discussions about them that it becomes a way to alleviate philosophical boredom — like getting into some fanatical organising at home when there’s nothing else to do.
My opinion? A much more productive pastime would be rewinding the reel and subjecting these beliefs to the agnostic and skeptic filters that clearly took an inopportune day off. For obvious reasons, there aren’t any surviving religions that instruct parents to wait until these filters have developed — no, cutely-dressed babies are dipped into metaphorical holy water before they can even stand.
If you were one of those children, imagine how you would have reacted to your religious beliefs if those mental floodgates had been allowed to close before the water leaked into your brain.
