No. I repeat: I accept only Huxley’s definition of agnosticism included in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.
Summarizing: Agnosticism is the philosophical and religious attitude of those who claim that the existence of God can be neither proved nor disproved. Huxley wrote, “I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man.” (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy).
This is strange : Why do you keep on repeating that over and over again?
“Huxley’s Agnsoticism” is, by definition, what Huxley himself meant by this term, Agnosticism, that he coined ; and I am trying to show you how your understanding of this is flawed, by quoting Huxley himself on this subject.
I have qualified that, what you say above, with what Huxley himself has directly said about Agnosticism : “
“ … it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.”
Do you understand those words? Do you understand that it is Huxley himself who has said them? And do you understand that Huxley has said these words directly about his idea of Agnosticism?
In light of this, your slavish and unthinking adherence to one particular definition from one particular source, and your claim that that particular definition is the overridingly correct interpretation, is perplexing, to say the least. Especially when you are not able to furnish any justification for this claim, in light of the quotes I have presented.
You are free to “accept” whatever you want in your personal capacity, but in as much as you do this without justification and in the face of clear demonstration that your position is flawed, you must not expect us to take your personal choice very seriously.
You insist on including Huxley’s scientism/positivism in the definition. I disagree. Huxley positivism is the basis of Huxley’s agnosticism not a definitional characteristic of the word. If you include positivism as a feature of “agnosticism” you need invent another word to those that neither affirm nor deny that God exists but are not positivist.
Once again, do you not understand that it is Huxley himself who says, when he speaks of his Agnosticism, the word that he coined, that : “
“ … it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.”
This is not just a bald statement of Huxley’s Positivism, but a direct qualification by the man himself about what he meant to convey by the word Agnosticism. Just read it again : do you not see the meaning of those words so clearly in front of you?
There certainly exist other connotations to this word in present-day usage (as I have myself been at pains to point out, all through) : but surely when it comes to Huxley’s Agnosticism, that is, when we speak of what Huxley meant by Agnosticism, it is bizarre to not let Huxley himself have the last word?
As for coining another word to convey this Positivistic nuance, well, that is precisely what Huxley did, isn’t it? That is precisely what the word Agnosticism was all about, as that quote of his clearly shows.
I am unable to comprehend your totally bizarre refusal to adhere to Huxley’s own qualifications when it comes to discussing his interpretation of the term he himself coined. I keep on showing you how you are wrong, and what is you do is simply keep on repeating, without justification and without being able to refute my arguments, that you “disagree”.
Again, your personal disagreement is your privilege, but in as much as it is made in the absence of justification, it is irrelevant and of no interest to anyone other than yourself.
This is unnecessary and confusing, because these people are also usually called “agnostic”. In philosophy, at least. I have not seen your answer to this objection in you long comment.
I find it amazing that you have “not seen” this answer, seeing that I have given this answer more than once, and have also clearly pointed out to you this answer in subsequent posts. I will now try, one last time, to explain to you the straightforward issue that you seem to have so much trouble understanding :
In English, words tend to take a life of their own. There are many words that have multiple meanings, and sometimes those meanings are at odds with one another ; indeed, at times, the same word carries two meanings that might actually carry wholly opposite meanings to each other.
Is this “confusing”, as you say? Absolutely, it can be confusing!
Is it “unnecessary”? There are two ways of looking at it : one POV is that it adds richness to the language ; and another is that indeed certain usages of certain words are unnecessary and do not help with clarity.
But regardless of the confusion they might create, and regardless of whether certain usages of some words may subjectively appear “unnecessary”, the fact is that the English language grows organically, and words meanings are what they are.
You cannot, by fiat, try to change or to limit word meanings just because you are uncomfortable with them.
I am amazed why you cannot comprehend this simple issue, and why you claim you have not seen this “answer”, when this has been so clearly explained to you so many times.
I wouldn’t have put it quite so plainly as that, but since you say it yourself, I have to agree : Yes, you do indeed seem to have “lost it”.
Methinks the problem is that you read too little ; understand little of what you do read ; and do not follow up on what little you do understand.
For instance : In my post #270, I had very clearly demonstrated your error in how you discussed Huxley’s Agnosticism. In your subsequent post #284, you clearly expressed regret at not having been able to go through that post, and you promised to go through it and address it in detail later on. Then again, in your post #305, you clarify that you wish to “refer to” my post #270 and its contents and, presumably, address the points raised there.
And yet you never do that, do you? You keep on saying you will “refer” to my post, but never actually do that! You still haven’t, thus far, “referred to” my post #270 (or if you have, then you have at least not addressed the arguments there that clearly demonstrate your error).
Given this, and given your justification-free repetition of your initial POV, do you see how your argumentation comes across of disingenuous?
Your antics remind me of another member here, two of whose long-running threads I follow with amusement (without myself participating there), who similarly keeps promising people that he will respond to their posts, and keeps on mentioning personal difficulties that keep him from responding right away, but who never does actually respond to those posts (or if he does, only glosses over them perfunctorily), and then returns back to repeating his inanities as if no arguments had been raised against them at all.
I am sorry, I don’t see this discussion of ours going anywhere, if you will keep trying to avoid my arguments and keep trying to somehow ignore them and gloss over them, and go back to parroting your own unthinking ideas. While I have no doubt I will, with profit and with enjoyment, listen to you and engage with what you might have to say on other threads, from this thread I’m afraid I’d like to withdraw.
Having started already to respond to you, I will do you the courtesy of putting down my response now to the rest of this post of yours, but I ask you to excuse me if, for the space of this thread, I do not waste my time engaging any further with this infantile and content-free discussion that I somehow find myself having gotten sucked into, and that is proving to be neither instructive nor remotely pleasurable.
Absolutely not. We are not speaking of moral intentions of an individual. We are speaking of how to know. This is the classical difference between practical rules and rules of knowledge. The burden of proof is not a practical rule but a condition for knowledge of truth. In this case, God’s existence. Moral purposes need no prior demonstration. Truth claims, yes.
Nobody has suggested that a criticism against “agnostic” fideism would be a criticism against “agnosticism” as a whole. I never spoke of criticism but definitions only. In any case, the criticism against fideism would affect this particular kind of agnosticism, not Huxley’s agnosticism which is very different as I have explained in my previous comment. A criticism against Lance Amstrong is not a criticism against Jacques Anquetil.
NOTE: I put into quotation marks “agnostic” fideist because it is a forced use of the word and needs some precisions. I think you had see.
But that is exactly what you did do!
Please go back and refer to your post #273. There you introduce this new creature, the fideist, whom you also qualify with the epithet “agnostic” : and then you go on to attempt to show, in that post, how, speaking of this “agnostic fidesit”,
“If your belief has no justification, it is irrational and cannot even be expressed with meaning … This is untenable from the point of view of (Scientism) [that is, of Positivism).” Those were your very words in that thread!
This is clearly what you are trying to do there : You introduce the Fideist ; you next say that this Fideist is an “Agnostic Theist” or “Agnostic Fideist” -- using one particular meaning of the word ‘Agnostic’ -- and then you try to show the shortcomings in the Fidesit's position, show how Fideism does not measure up to Positivism.
You don’t say anything further, but surely the implication is that you’re hoping that this refutation of Fideism will somehow rub off on Agnosticism, just because you have tagged on the adjective Agnostic on to the Fideist?
If this is not your implication, why then do you even raise this out and out non sequitur?
This Fideism gambit of yours is no more than a red herring ; and when I call you out on this non sequitur, then instead of clearly explaining yourself, what you do is simply pretend that you had not said what you so clearly did say in your post #273! I am not sure how to respond to this kind of apparently disingenuous discussion strategy, other than by simply pointing this out clearly and showing this up for what it is.
The example of black holes is not correct. If some scientist has a scientific theory about black holes, he would need some evidence about the existence of black holes and this evidence would be debatable in terms of scientific theories. Even as a hypothesis there will be some arguments to present. A scientist never would affirm that cosmic unicorns exist and then claim: “Prove that cosmic unicorns don’t exist”. He would be the laughingstock of his colleagues.
I have no idea of what is a “pocket universe” but if this is a debatable thing I suppose that someone has presented it in such a way that we can know where is a “pocket universe” and what is doing. If this is not the case I would say that it is a big silly thing. And the same is valid for gods and pink dragons. Unless we are speaking of a Sci-Fi novel, of course.
You seem completely oblivious to how blatant an instance of special pleading this is. Your understanding of the burden of proof is flawed; and your desperate attempts to somehow fit on the argument to your pre-conceived ‘solution’ is amusing.
You remind me of a schoolboy who has cheated by copying the answers to his sums from his friend, and who then pretends outrage when the teacher catches him out on his inability to explain his particular method for deriving his answers ; and so keeps protesting loudly to the teacher that his particular answers are correct!
We all know that your Fairy Queen and your Pink Dragon do not exist. Most of us, including I myself, agree with you that God -- as represented by specific ideas like Yahweh, and Allah, and Indra, and Ra, and Zeus -- do not exist either. You get no marks for copying your answer to this obvious question from elsewhere! You are telling us nothing new by saying that these things do not exist.
The point is,
how do you know these things do not exist? Not you personally, but how do we, in general, know this? How do we know that a certain thing or idea exists (or is plausible), or does not exist (or is not plausible), be it black holes, or pocket universes, or bacteria, or certain specific God-ideas?
And the answer is two-fold : First, when you posit something, you need to back it up. Therefore, if someone posits a particular God-idea, or black holes, or pocket universes, then the onus, the burden, is on them to show us clearly how what they are saying makes sense. If they are not able to do this, we are free to reject their claim. This is the equivalent of Soft Atheism.
And second, we may ourselves roll up our sleeves and get down to actively disproving some particular idea : be it black holes, or pocket universes, or some specific God-ideas. If we declare that such do not exist, then we take upon ourselves the burden of proof to back up our claim : and it is then we who need to show reasons why others should accept our claim that black holes, or certain God-ideas, or pocket universes, do not exist. And this is the equivalent of Hard Atheism.
(I will go out on a limb here and, despite my general ignorance about many things legal -- and therefore the possibility that there could be technical objections, in law, to what I am saying here -- present this analogy that occurs to me : I believe this is the broad principle based on which it is the prosecution that needs to prove the guilt of the defendant ; and if they are not able to do this adequately, then the Court rules that the defendant is not guilty ; never is it demanded that the defendant prove their innocence, and nor does the Court rule that they are actually innocent. While in practice “not guilty” and “innocent” mean the same thing -- just as in practice Soft Atheism and Hard Atheism mean the same thing, namely, Atheism, or rejection of some God idea -- nevertheless there is a nuance differentiating the two positions, that speaks to how we have come to this conclusion.)
Does this mean that we are now called upon to actively disprove every fantastic formulation that people keep coming up with? The obvious answer to that question is : Only if you want to! No one is forcing us to!
If we don’t want to engage with the issue, then sure, we can simply see that not enough evidence has been presented to accept something, and we reject the idea, Soft-Atheism style. And if we find ourselves drawn to the subject -- no matter what the subject, be it the existence of bacteria, or the existence of black holes, or the existence of pocket universes, or the existence of particular God-ideas -- then we are free to try to actively disprove these ideas, Hard-Atheism style.
This only speaks to the method used to reject some idea, not to the strength of the rejection itself. The Soft Atheist can be just as robustly atheistic as the Hard Atheist. The difference lies in how they happen to have arrived at their particular position.
