I encountered Bart Ehrman many years ago, when I encountered his excellent book, Misquoting Jesus. Today I learned that Ehrman writes at his own website, The Bart Ehrman Blog. Yesterday he published an article that makes sense out of a confused topic: the difference between agnostics and atheists? Erhman holds that the difference is not a matter of degree, a common misunderstanding. The title of Ehrman article is “On Being an Agnostic. Or Atheist?” Here’s an excerpt:
. . . I think it is possible to be both an agnostic and an atheist. And that’s how I understand myself. So, in this newer view of mine, agnosticism is a statement about epistemology – that is, about what a person *knows*. Do I know whether there is a God in the multiverse? Nope. I really don’t. How could I know? I’m just a peon on a very big planet, circling around a very big star, which is one of some 100 billion stars in this galaxy, which is only one of anywhere from 100 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in this universe, which may be only one of trillions (infinite number?) of universes. So, well, I don’t have a broad perspective on the question. So I don’t know. I’m agnostic.
Atheism, on the other hand, (in my way of thinking) is not about knowledge but about belief. Do I *believe* that there is a God? No I don’t. I especially do not believe in the biblical God, or in the traditional God of Jews and Christians (and Muslims and so on). I simply do not believe that there is a God who created this world (it is the result of forces beyond my comprehension, but it goes back to the Big Bang, and we are here because of evolution, and I exist only because of some pretty amazingly remote chances/circumstances…); I don’t think there is a divine being who is sovereign over this world who interacts with it and the people in it, who answers prayer, who brings good out of evil. I don’t believe it. So I’m an atheist.
So I’m an agnostic atheist. Or an atheistic agnostic. Take your pick!
I like this approach. No one knows whether there is a god hiding behind a distant star. It’s possible that there is such a lurking god, even though I’ll never be able to prove or disprove such a claim. This inability to prove or disprove god is an epistemic challenge, according to Ehrman. I am forced to live a life of ignorance about many things, including shy gods hiding in outer space (or in my toaster, or wherever). Ehrman would attach the word “agnostic” to that epistemic predicament. Fair enough.
And in the meantime, I need to either act as though god does exists or that god doesn’t exist. As I see it, this is a question of where I’m setting my default for belief. Some people set the bar low and they believe in all kinds of mystical claims and conspiracy theories. I am extremely skeptical about claims about gods (and many other things). This might also be seen as how I set up my “burden of proof,” as we might say in a courtroom. Those of us who are highly skeptical need extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims.
I consider the question of whether god exists to be an extraordinary claim, but others might set the bar much lower. Some of them believe with with nothing more than a hope and a duty old book of apocryphal tall tales. What do I believe when I (a person who sets the bar for proof high) don’t see any evidence of a god and yet I can’t disprove the existence of god? Shall I act “as if” or not “as if” there is a god? A lack of belief in a god is what Ehrman calls “Atheism.” This nomenclature makes sense to me.
I will give this some more thought, but I’m inclined to join Ehrman as new member of the church of Atheist Agnostics.
In one of John Vervaeke’s talks on the “Meaning Crisis” he says it doesn’t matter so much what you believe, what is important is what you practice.
For me the practice is honoring and continually recollecting the idea that there is a quantum field from which all energy arises and to which it all returns, and within that process we are all connected to a larger Isness (Being) which is mysterious, unknoweable, and creative.
That does sound like a a practice embedded in a belief, but as science changes our understanding of ultimate energy dynamics, that belief can change with it. Its flexibility precludes its inclusion under the category of “doctrine,” I think (but I could be wrong, and that’s ok).
It seems to me that when one gives one’s thoughts permission to wander wherever they might, one inevitably ends up recognizing some useful and dependable knowledge and know-how. But along with those things, many of which fall into what we call the fruits of science, inevitably comes humility that what one knows is dwarfed by what we don’t know. This idea was articulated by Nietzsche:
“Just beyond experience!– Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.”
–from Nietzsche’s Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale transl
It’s also bizarre to fail to call one’s self a believer in a god is often attacked by religious believers as “arrogant” when non-believers are admitting that they do not know and/or cannot know such things, which seems to me to be a position of humility.