Archive for October, 2008

I watched Bill Maher on The Daily Show today. He’s got a new movie about religion. In the interview, Bill says that he’s agnostic, because he finds the absolute certainty of atheism to be just as intellectually dishonest and distasteful as the absolute certainty of the religious (a paraphrase, not a direct quote).

As a scientifically-minded person, I get the argument that it’s impossible to disprove the existence of anything. That being said, some things are more likely to exist than other things, and we have no problem being relatively certain about them. Just because I can’t say for sure that Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster don’t exist doesn’t stop me from saying that they probably don’t exist, and that I live my life based on that assumption, until evidence to the contrary presents itself.

But here’s the thing: nobody feels the need to explicitly claim agnosticism when it comes to Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In as much as we acknowledge the possibility that they do exist, that acknowledgment is implicit in the understanding that all knowledge is subject to a degree of uncertainty. Given that understanding, we can say, “There’s no such thing as the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and it can be understood that what we mean is, “The probability of the FSM existing is low enough that I am comfortable conducting myself as if it did not exist, although I am aware of the possibility that it does exist, and am open to evidence indicating so.”

So why does religion get special treatment? When I say, “I am atheist. I do not believe that there is a god,” why does the implicit understanding of uncertainty that underlies all other expressions of disbelief suddenly get tossed out the window, and the listener assumes that I am absolutely certain of my premise? Especially when all of the atheists that I have read are careful to say, “Here is why I think there is not likely to be a god, but I am open to evidence to the contrary.”

The more I think about it, the more agnosticism seems to me to be a sort of mealy-mouthed pandering to the religious. I think that agnostics’ hearts are in the right place: they want to acknowledge the impossibility of proving the negative, but unless they go to the same trouble for all the other things that they don’t believe in (would you say, “I’m agnostic as to whether Superman exists”?) then they’re giving religion a special treatment that I don’t think it deserves.