An arguement for Agnoticism - against Atheism.

[Verily]

Let me a write up a brief and rather unenlightening rebuttal. By this I do not mean to attack the sort of agnosticism Gully Foyle promotes; it is not, in itself, problematic. It also does a good job of weeding out some of the more unfortunate arguments put forward by atheism—although in doing so it tends to side, quite wrongly, with religion, which both Gully and its other proponents should know better than to do.

I could will appeal to the human senses and to reason to suggest that God does not exist because I do not, and cannot, perceive God. The response is that these are meaningless, and that there can be things which exist beyond our senses and our reason. I am inclined to agree that this is true in theory. However, without any possible evidence, there is no reason beyond doubt to believe things actually do exist beyond our sense and reason.

The confusion agnosticism, or at least the form of agnosticism herein discussed, encounters is the equation of potential to exist with reasonable possibility of existence. Many things have the potential to exist within our world, from a mountain a billion miles tall to a star so small it could fit in the palm of your hand. We have not even come remotely close to plying the complete depths of the universe, yet we would dismiss the possibility of these existing outright. Such, too, is any individual thing beyond our senses and capacity to conceive, including in this argument God. They could exist, in theory, but the possibility of any individual thing existing is small enough as to be negligible and irrelevant.*

(Here we reach something of a semantic standoff as to who will define “God” and how. I think it is reasonable to take “God” to mean any definition applied by any significant faith or any reasonably recognizable deviation from such. While this definition is ambiguous in itself, it at least gives us something other than “thing beyond our senses”.)

To the agnostic, then, the relative chances are unimportant, and the very fact that it is possible means it is worth considering. I suppose philosophically this isn’t wrong, but as a practical argument it falls apart. You should be able to deduce why on your own.

However, we’ve overlooked something else. The fact that I can conceive of things which supposedly exist beyond my senses suggests that they are not, in fact, beyond my senses, or at least beyond my perception. But, then, to what does Gully refer when he says that science is without basis in saying that there is nothing beyond the potential reaches of knowledge? Certainly neither he nor any other agnostic or religious person has any concept of what such a thing would be any more than a nonbeliever does—if they did, the thing wouldn’t be beyond human conception. Just something to chew on.

I suppose you can call this all a variation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument. There is nothing empirical which makes the Flying Spaghetti Monster less likely than God (as defined above). Gully calls it a rhetorical device, but surely he should also then be concerned about the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. One cannot be dismissed without dismissing the other.

*The other possibility is that the regions beyond our conception are infinite in scope, in which case even the most improbable things must exist. Of course, if this is the case, God is the least of our worries.