A Word About Agnosticism, Part I

My brain is a little tired, but I’m going to take a stab at this nonetheless. In short, I’m going to discuss agnosticism and why I tend to prefer to dub myself an atheist even though I may partially agree with agnosticism. I doubt this will take long.

In a very general sense, agnosticism is the doctrine that chooses to deny authority when faced with questions of existence. In terms of the question of supernatural things, instead of choosing that such things are impossible or necessary, the agnostic instead deems such things contingent. Now that I think about it, there’s a difference between saying, “There is no god” and “It is not possible for god to exist.” The first takes the negative affirmation of the contingency, where the second declares god as an impossible.

Let me say a word about logic. One of the bases of logic is the notion of consistency. A series of logical statements are consistent of it is possible for them to be all true at once. All it takes is one line on the truth table. Consider:

1. I love tacos.
2. Dubya is a monkey.

It’s quite clear that the first statement is true, and the second is false. For consistency, one must ask oneself, “Is there a possible world where this each of these statements are true?” Nothing about me liking tacos stops Dubya from being a monkey. Nothing about Dubya being a monkey stops me from liking tacos. They are, indeed, consistent statements, even though they may not be true in our world.

Everybody who is lost raise your hand. Okay, good, moving on. Wait, was the point of that? Oh yeah, consistency of beliefs. I forget if consistency is even necessary in a logical sense.

In logic and philosophy, there are a lot of logical forms of arguments. Consider the argument:

ARGUMENT FROM COOLNESS
(1) That’s really cool.
(2) God must have done that.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

This form can be generalized to:

(1)x has property m
(2)Y must have caused x to have property m
Therefore, a Y exists. (I’m thinking of the backwards E in this one.)

Hmm. Okay, I will need to bring in the concept of validity in arguments. In short, a valid argument is such that given a series of true premises, it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. Okay, that means nothing to most of you. The problem in the above is the problem of infering the antecedent of a material conditional. Haven’t I written about this before? I have. I can effectively reduce this problem to:

xm
y -> xm
(dot triangle)y

Look at the first two for a second. Suppose xm is true. What happens if y is false? A material conditional is only false is the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Can cool things exist without god? Sure. And as such, the premises would be true, and the conclusion false, making this an invalid argument. Which makes it a very very naughty argument to ever use.

And I realize that there’s that key word “must” in there. I’m just guessing that “must” implies that only the antecedent causes the consequent. At first, I’m frightened by this. If it’s possible for a false antecedent and a true consequent to mean a false material conditional… Well, it’s really bad. It negates my previous argument, and thus meaning that, wow, God really does exist. *snaps fingers*

The argument, even in that form is bad. And to think it’s a good argument is dangerous. Why? You can stick anything you want into that argument, and suddenly, it’s true. I have balls. Hercules must have caused me to have balls. Therefore, Hercules exists. We should hope that Hercules really didn’t cause me to have balls. But again, I reiterate, you can put anything into the argument, and suddenly it’s true. Lots of logical and philosophic arguments as well as mathemetical problems have something called an infinite regress, usually refering an unsolvable portion of an equation or problem which then has to be solved. The problem of causal chains is an infinite regress. This caused that, which was caused by something before it, which was caused by something before it; on into infinity. But this problem, while maybe not grammatically accurate, I would like to dub an infinite progress.

Let’s suppose I plug everything into that form of argument. I could keep going, asserting object after object (real or not) did, in fact, exist. You now believe in invisible dildos and Martian Republicans. I assert that (way beyond this) there reaches a point where you “believe” in so much that you actually believe in nothing at all. I think that holds up on it’s own, but I’ll throw some logic in to invalid the previous problem.

I have a penis
Three-sided squares must have caused me to have a penis
Therefore, three-sided squares must exist

Now, wait just a damn minute. The thing with logic is that it’s theory. That argument assumes that three-sided squares might exist (for sake of argument), and then proves that three-sided squares exist, regardless that they’re an impossible. (It’s circular reasoning, the reason why the bible isn’t a good source of divine wisdom.) Three-sided squares are always false, and as such, our collection of beliefs are made inconsistent. As is logical and philosophical tradition, if an argument leads to a contradiction, then it must be false, because anything can be assumed from a contradiction. Why? In a world where a contradiction is possible, anything is possible. Think about it for a moment, I don’t feel like giving an example.