A Theist, an Atheist, and an Agnostic Walk Into a Bar
The bartender looks up and says, "What'll it be?"The Theist says, "I'll have a water, uh, actually, make it wine."The Atheist says, "Just a beer for me, I’m not a fan of strong spirits."The Agnostic pauses and says, "I’m not sure…surprise me, I’ll try a few things until I find something legit."😂What better day than Christmas to make a dig at religion in all its forms!I don’t know about you, but I love wandering around YouTube for interesting things to watch, and recently I’ve come across a number of videos of Alex O’Connor (Cosmic Skeptic) debating and discussion religion with various folks like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and more.If you’ve not watched his videos, I highly recommend checking them out! I don’t agree with all of his stances (not a fan of veganism, nor do I believe morality is objective lol, not even close), but he DOES have both a sexy mind and a very sexy voice, and I find his videos oddly soothing, so can’t go wrong there :)But why that channel? Why those videos?For those of you who don’t know, I was raised Mormon, and in the heart of Texas, so I got a double dose of religion growing up (triple dose if you count the Texas obsession with Football…)I went to church almost every Sunday for the first ~21 years of my life, went to seminary every morning for 4 years, served a 2-year Mormon mission, got married (young) in the temple, the whole nine yards. I was intimately familiar with the deepest of the deep Mormon doctrine. I studied biblical Hebrew, and read the OT cover-to-cover multiple times with a Hebrew concordance, and the NT over a dozen times including with Greek concordances.I was once quite the apologist, and could “bible bash” with the best of them…But I was also blinded by indoctrination, suckled from birth on the tit of confirmation bias, and most of my social circle and sense of meaning was rooted in my religion :/But at a deep level religion never fully sat well with me (football included lol, such a stupid obsession), and so I asked a lot of questions, and struggled with wishy-washy answers like “because the bible says so” and “just have faith.”And so I found myself pushing back more and more over time. In college, I effectively dual majored in philosophy and theology (same as Alex O’Connor), a combo which very quickly made evident the contradictions and logical flaws underpinning religion as a whole.And so, no surprise, as most anyone raised in religion who finds their way out might do (especially someone raised in a very conservative, damn near cult-ish religion), I eventually bounced from theist to atheist.But I found that atheism seemed to suffer from the very same thing religion did…false certainty. Where theists are SURE that god exists and their religion of choice is the right one, atheists are SURE that gods don’t exist and no religion is true.Now some atheists might argue that definition, and say they aren’t sure that a creator doesn’t exist, only that human religions are bullshit and the imaginary sky fairies they worship are sadistic and contradictory and as far from omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient as they could possibly be…fair enough.And this is actually a very important point.As I discussed in my Epistemic Crosstalk post, some words are “loaded” with all sorts of bullshit, attempting to compress a spectrum into a single word-point. So it is with Theist, Atheist, and even good ole door number three I eventually found myself at, Agnostic.So, rather than singular points, let’s look at the spectrum for each label (and let’s call the endpoints Soft, and Hard, for ease of reference):* Theist - ranging from a soft theist who “passively believes in a creator of some sort” (like a Deist or Pantheist) all the way to hard theist who “militantly believes in one specific god and religious structure and everyone else is a heathen.”* Atheist - ranging from a soft atheist who says “I see no firm evidence to support any of the theistic religious claims I can examine” all the way to a hard atheist who says “I am100% sure no god / creator of any kind exists, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a moronic sheeple.”* Agnostic - ranging from a soft agnostic who says “we don’t know what’s true, but I am open to whatever turns out to be true” all the way to a hard agnostic / nihilist who says “we can never know what’s true so why bother.”I consider myself firmly a soft agnostic with a dash of soft theist (I’m still open to the simulation hypothesis, non-duality, etc.; just not your typical religious monotheism.)The reason I find myself there is that, simply put, agnosticism is the only truly honest position to hold. I believe, as does David Deutsch, that humans are universal explainers, and that all problems are knowledge problems, and thus everything is potentially knowable. For now the true nature of reality is UNKNOWN, but it is (hopefully) not unknowable.Now, all of that said, I want to explore one of my greatest frustrations in the Atheist:Theist debate space, and that is the bundling of concepts that should not be bundled. (I even have a whole different post on this, Unbundling Bundled Concepts.)Theists, for example, are routinely guilty of one very specific motte-and-bailey, and that is attempting to defend their weak position (their specific, easily disprovable religion), and then falling back to an unfalsifiable position (that a creator of some sort exists).Nothing is 100% certain, for numerous reasons, not least of which is that if the speed of light truly is a hard limit, then 94% of the universe is forever out of our reach. There is a TON we might never be capable of knowing, and thus epistemic uncertainty is ALWAYS warranted (thus agnosticism being the only honest stance.)And while individual religions are VERY easy to tear apart, using simple logic and their own religious texts (seriously, it’s so, SO easy), what can’t be so easily torn apart is the idea of a creator.Not a monotheistic sky fairy of religious fame, but a creator of some kind.It’s entirely possible that whatever this is (waves hands) WAS created by something. By a simulation programmer, or a Boltzmann brain, or a universal consciousness of some sort, or by some advanced alien species.Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯It’s entirely possible that we might someday find hard evidence that supports one of the above (and you could argue that there is already pretty compelling evidence that we’re in a simulation, and statistically it’s quite likely).It is this very line of thought that leads people to “spirituality” in various guises, the sense of the unknown combined with the need for the numinous.But for now, as interesting as that might be, since it’s forever unfalsifiable the epistemic value is minimal. (Not zero, as Deutsch or Popper might say, but not high either.)By all means, keep an open mind, hunt for clues, be a seeker…but there is very likely no certainty to be found.There could be a creator.And it is this very “Creator Bailey” that apologists seem to always fall back to, often with some flavor of the fine-tuning argument.And that chaps my ass 😭To actually make headway, the dissection of specific religions needs to be separated from the concept of a creator. They are two different things that, while topically related, need to be addressed individually.Bah.Now, I think we can all agree that religion is not, or at least *was* not, useless. It clearly had, and for many still has, utility. It’s clearly a powerful meme, and if wasn’t it wouldn’t persist. But at the same time, while the social utility aspect may still be of value (setting aside the many flaws and downsides), its explanatory utility has been neutered.In a world without science, religion filled a useful explanatory gap. As Derek Sivers might say, it falls in the “useful, not true” category.But we now have the scientific process, THE ultimate error-correcting feedback loop, to help us explain all that can be explained.The problem though is that religion is effectively a zero-sum… Get full access to The Grand Redesign at blog.thegrandredesign.com/subscribe
