Sunday, November 01, 2009

Thoughts for Sunday ...

... How to be agnostic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... I think the agnostic contribution to these debates is not merely academic. It matters because today we live in a culture with a lust for certainty. Dogmatic science would have us believe that it has all the answers and can feed us body and soul. Religion, too, is being hijacked by a conservatism that turns the quest for the unknown God into a feel-good experience on a Sunday morning. Agnosticism matters because it rejects an equal and opposite militant atheism or fundamentalist retreat. Daniel J. Boorstin put it well: “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.”
I do not see much of a difference between Mark's agnosticism and Newman's definition of faith as "being capable of bearing doubt." But I agree with what he says about the contemporary lust for certainty, which certainly demonstrates not just a lack, but possibly even an incapacity for faith. I think the original sin told of in the story of the Garden of Eden was precisely the lust for certainty, the desire to be sure.

4 comments:

  1. "the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge" - seems a strange assertion, though maybe he supports it elsewhere in his argument. I'd say that ignorance has done immense damage in the historical past, when you look at all the wars, genocides, pogroms etc, which certainly weren't done out of "pretensions to knowledge" but out of superstition and, er, ignorance.

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  2. Genocide is almost always done out of a pretension to knowledge, not an admission of ignorance. Xenophobia may be ignorant, but as a motivator it pretends to knowledge of a threat that might exist. Fearmongering and prejudice presume knowledge that the group or person being targeted are evil, different, Other—not of Us, and therefore suspect.

    Wars almost always presume that the enemy is less human than we, is to be demonized and destroyed. Wars are almost always about projecting an image to be defeated. That's all about presumed knowledge rather than actual knowledge. When people actually see the humanity in each other, as a group, the things we all have in common, by contrast it almost always leads to peace, at least the relative peace coexistence if not an active embrace.

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  3. Well, ignorance has certainly done its share of harm, Maxine, as it continues to do. But I don't think that any segment of human society or activity is immune to the contagion of unwarranted certitude. And that has done at least as much harm as ignorance. Much that we think of a superstitions today were once taken to be certitudes. The medical establishment of his day was certain Ignaz Semmelweis was wrong about how puerperal fever might be prevented.

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  4. So it all boils down to how you define "ignorance" I suppose.

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