Agnostic vs. Atheist

Michelangelo: Creation of Adam (c.1511-12)

There was an embarrassing moment at our house this Christmas when I opened up one of my presents only to find that it was a copy of Richard Dawkins' autobiography. My mother - who is religious - made a few muttered remarks about Dawkins' general arrogance and "refusal to debate," and even my brother - who isn't - started in on poor ol' Rich.

What is it about Richard Dawkins? Why is he such a bugbear? I guess there's a certain intransigeance in his defence of the strict Darwinian party line, but it's interesting that other equally inflexible ideologues don't seem to generate the same amount of heat.

Richard Dawkins: An Appetite for Wonder (2013)

I was reading his book The God Delusion last year - "The statements was interesting, but tough," as Huckleberry Finn remarked of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress - when I had a little epiphany (so to speak).

Essentially, I suddenly understood the true meaning of the word "atheist," and the reason why people who label themselves thus are so resistant of the apparently more placatory term "agnostic."

An atheist, I'd always been taught, is someone who asserts the absolute impossibility of the existence of God. Given that providing an absolute proof of the non-existence of anything is a virtually impossible task, Thomas Huxley's compromise term "agnostic": one who simply refuses to claim definitive knowledge on the subject, had always seemed more intellectually defensible to me.

Thomas H. Huxley: aka "Darwin's Bulldog"

Dawkins, however, asks how many people nowadays would claim to be "agnostic" on the subject of the existence of Zeus, or Odin, or Osiris, or any other member of the traditional mythological pantheons? Not many, if any (to paraphrase our local rapper Scribe). In other words, we don't take the question seriously enough to bother with entertaining the notion that Hermes or Aphrodite might actually be hovering about, listening in on our thoughts and conversations.

They could be, mind you. It's ridiculously improbable, but not by any means impossible. So perhaps one should declare agnosticism on the question of the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction also ...

Why don't we? Because (I suspect) in these cases, at least, we don't feel that the burden of proof should lie on the unbelievers. It should lie firmly with the true believers (if there are any). If Odin is real, I'd need to see some proof of it. And it had better be pretty convincing proof.

David Hume, in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) reminds us that "A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence." This principle has been popularised by Carl Sagan (among others) in the form: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." In the absence of that extraordinary evidence, I'm going to go on assuming that there's no Odin. I don't know there isn't - but I see no legitimate reason for postulating the possibility in the absence of really compelling evidence.

Allan Ramsay: David Hume (1711-1776)

How does this apply to the atheist / agnostic debate? Well, my epiphany (if that's what it was) consisted simply of the recognition that the term "Atheist" should be taken to apply to a default position, rather than being confused with a statement of belief.

I don't know that there's no God. But my default position is that there isn't - since no-one has yet shown me the extraordinary evidence required to substantiate such an extraordinary claim (and not for want of asking, either). Occam's razor states that "It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer": in other words, as a basic postulate of argument, one should always go for the most economical of the various hypotheses available, the one which requires fewest assumptions.

This default position seems to me best labelled "Atheism". Like a Huxleyan Agnostic, I claim no special knowledge, assert no conviction of non-existence: just as none of us bother to with Odin, Thor, Hermes and the rest. They could all be real, but there's no particular reason to suppose so. The real problem with the Huxley position, however, is that it implies an equal probability for the existence or non-existence of God (in whatever form one wants to conceptualise such a teleological being - or "law of the universe", impersonal ethical principle, etc. etc.)

I don't think that it's reasonable to see these positions as equally plausible. Given two models of the universe: one naturalistic, subject to verification by scientific experiment, and deducible from phenomena which do indeed demonstrably surround us; the other dependent on a nebulous Catch-22 notion called "faith," which by its very nature precludes the necessity (or even possibility?) of objective verification, there's really no contest for me.

History, too, is on my side in this, I'm afraid. When one looks at the number of people throughout the millennia who have claimed to have a hotline to some almighty spirit who just happens to be in accord with everything they're planning to do, while being irrevocably opposed to everything their opponents are up to, I would ask simply how many of those people you actually still believe in? The rivalry between the twin tribal deities "God" and "Gott" on the Western Front in the First World War is one classic example, amusingly outlined by Robert Graves in his war memoir Goodbye to All That.

Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That (1929)

I really don't want to be unnecessarily provocative on this subject, obviously a sensitive one. I simply want to explain why atheism is a perfectly sensible intellectual stance, and does not imply that one is automatically an adherent of a complete alternative belief system comparable to a religion. Nor, I would argue, does it involve any assertion that one is in possession of absolute proof of the non-existence of God (or any other supernatural entity, for that matter).

In the absense of convincing proofs, however, one has to position oneself somewhere. Virtually all of us moderns have already decided, willy-nilly, to take up an "atheistic" position on Ishtar, Amun-Re, Tangaroa and all the others. If you think for a moment, I think you'll acknowledge this to be so.

Why, then, should you be indignant if someone takes up the same position vis-à-vis any other belief system? You may well be making an exception in one particular case - and you might even be correct in doing so. But until you can actually prove it, can't we just continue to examine the evidence of the natural world - which should be a complex enough task to satisfy anyone?

Fantasy literature can be fun, and rewarding in many ways, but you don't have to believe in the objective existence of the Kingdom of Westeros to enjoy watching Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones (2010- )

The Ghostseer

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall (1936)

I saw a ghost on Monday night. At least I think it was Monday night - the event is getting a little blurry now, a few days later. It might have been Sunday night, the end of mid-semester break, with the alarm clock set for the new working week, but I'm pretty sure that it was Monday.

When I say "saw a ghost," I have to admit that I was in bed at the time, and was definitely in that state of drifting in and out of sleep when most apparitions are seen. It might be better to say "I saw a hypnagogic hallucination of a woman on Monday night" instead, then.

I was lying in bed, as I say, and I saw a woman walk past the door of our room, up the corridor towards the bathroom and the stairs. My impression of her was that she had dark mid-length hair, and was wearing a trench coat or some other kind of dress coat. I think she was wearing a skirt, and had reasonably dressy shoes on too. I only saw her for a moment, though, so I could be wrong about that.

She definitely looked in at me as she passed, and I think she smiled at me - not a particularly warm or reassuring smile, as I examine it now in my mind's eye, but not a clearly threatening one either. A bit of a grimace, really.

I knew at the time that I should get up and go and check if there really was a woman in the house. The bed was very warm, though, and I felt somewhat reluctant to venture out into the cold dark hall. I did hear a few thumps and scrapes later on which (again) should probably have got me out of bed, but didn't. Such things are fairly typical in an old house built in the 1940s, anyway. It wasn't Bronwyn. I could see her lying asleep beside me.

Once before I've had a similar experience, half-waking in a motorcamp unit with the strong impression that there was a strange woman in the room, leaning over the bed. On that occasion, though, there actually was a woman (or so I conjecture). Our neighbours in the motorcamp had been having an uproarious time of it next door, and presumably this was just one of them who'd mistaken the door and walked into the wrong unit. I was wearing my earplugs to shut our the racket they were making, so it would have taken a fair amount of noise to wake me.

On this occasion, though, there's no reason to suppose that the woman was real. The front door was still snibbed with its chain next morning, and the back door was bolted. I don't have any clear guesses who she was, either. She wasn't my sister, who did die in that house: wrong hair colour, and quite a different face.

I record the event for what it's worth, then (not a lot in evidential terms). I've seen hypnagogic phenomena before in that half-asleep / half=waking state: grey cats coming at me across the bed-covers; other animals, friendly and threatening - never a person or even a human face before.

I should add that I'd been reading a book about ghosts before going to bed (Roger Clarke's A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof), so no doubt I was primed to see something. I have read an awful lot of books on that subject, though, and even slept in allegedly "haunted" houses and rooms, but there's never been so much as the hint of an apparition before - certainly nothing as clear as this.

So is our house haunted? Who can say? There's been no repetition of the sight in the nights since then, and I suspect there won't be - it was an unusually concrete dream manifestation, that's the best I can do. I have no idea why it took that particular form, though.

Woman in trench coat

[She looked something like this: only without the bag and the styly boots:
she had straighter hair, too, and her face was turned towards me]

Double Whammy

Well, I certainly hope that the subscribers and contributors to brief 50 - the projects issue are pleased with the results of my editing and Brett Cross's stunning text and cover design. More to the point, I hope they're happy to get, as a special bonus with this fiftieth issue of the magazine, a free copy of Leicester Kyle's Millerton Sequences, which has just been published by Atuanui Press:

It's been quite a while since I've posted here. Apologies for that: blame it on having to compose a new set of lecture notes for my travel writing paper at Massey, which is proving unexpectedly popular in its new distance form.

That's no excuse, of course. I hope I'll be able to do better now things have settled down a bit.

So what exactly is this book, The Millerton Sequences? Well, in a sense it's meant as a culmination of all the work I (and others) have put into the Leicester Kyle website (address below). That site certainly errs on the side of inclusiveness, so I thought it was important to put out a selection of Leicester's shorter poems which would enable readers to appreciate some of the qualities his admirers value most in his work as a whole.

There's an introduction by me, a poem by David Howard - we've tried to make it as attractive a proposition as possible for the casual poetry fan:

You can find out a lot more about the book here, if you're curious. And, yes, some copies are still available for sale from the Atuanui Press website.

And what of brief? Well, again, you can see a complete list of contents on the brief index site. Here's a list of the authors you can encounter in this special anniversary issue (how many literary magazines - especially experimental ones - actually reach a fiftieth issue?)

So anyway, as you can see, I've not been entirely idle during this hiatus in Imaginary Museum posts. I can't promise it'll never happen again, but I certainly will try to come up with some fresh new stuff to interest you once I'm over the hump of the next couple of months. Don't write me off just yet ...