The irrational agnostic –
Some folks say that we cannot know for sure if God (the God as defined in Christianity) exists or not. This position is more anti-rational than the position of the faithful believer.
The agnostic position is one which claims we cannot know whether or not God exists, and the only way to know for sure one way or the other is to be omniscient.
Some agnostics misunderstand the claim of the non-existence of God. When someone claims that God cannot exist, the agnostic incorrectly thinks that is synonymous with saying all forms of consciousness, matter, and energy have already been discovered, so there is nothing left to be discovered about our reality, and that’s how we can know that something doesn’t exist.
We can never know everything about the universe, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be sure of anything.
The agnostic says, since we don’t know everything about the universe, we can’t know for sure if God exists or not. What the agnostic leaves out, is the understanding that we do know some things for sure, and we do know some things cannot exist.
Matter and energy have consistent, predictable, reproducible, and universal behaviors. We also know for sure that any contradiction, paradox, or logical fallacy in any proposition, eliminates the truth value of that proposition, and therefore, some things cannot exist.
In other words, we know very little about what exists and the behavior of what exists in the universe, but we can be sure of that which we do know, and we can be sure of that which is impossible because of the behavior of that which exists.
This is essentially what epistemology is; the method and criteria necessary of knowing what exists or not.
Just as the faithful believer is ignorant of metaphysics, the agnostic is ignorant of epistemology.
Aside from the obvious logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam where the existence of a God is arbitrarily asserted and then one is asked to disprove the assertion; God and Heaven, as defined through Christianity is saturated with contradictions and fallacies, such as, not consisting of physical matter or energy but is a conscious being which requires matter and energy, or is omniscient and omnipotent simultaneously, or has a gender but not a body, forgiving but not forgiving, is always moral but sometimes not moral, or Heaven having physical effects with no physical cause. All it takes is one contradiction to eliminate the truth value though.
“But Jeremy, God is not subject to the physical laws of our universe, and you can’t validate the existence or non-existence of that which is supernatural”. Yeah, I get it. So what do we mean when we say “exist”?
Here is my definition of existence that I think you can agree with.
Existence – Dimensions of matter/energy/space/time, or any measurable effects thereof. Objective reality independent of anyone’s consciousness of it.
A complete absence of any matter/energy/space or measurable effects thereof would be non-existence. Any imaginary concept of one’s mind does not exist.
For example, borders, companies, States, governments, rights, feelings, numbers, language, math, science, money etc. don’t actually exist in reality. These are concepts of the mind, and only the material effects of these concepts exist.
Dark matter and dark energy, on the other hand can exist because we can measure the objective indirect effects from it even though it can’t be directly measured or understood yet.
So, since existence is defined as that which consists of matter/energy, then, not consisting of matter/energy would be the definition of non-existence.
If God is supernatural (not natural reality), and is not composed of matter or energy, then that is synonymous with non-existence.
If we change our definition of existence to – That which consists of matter or energy, and also non-matter and non-energy (supernatural), then anything and everything imaginable must exist.
At that point, if anything you imagine therefore exists, and you may as well have an ayahuasca party to make things seem normal, because your definition of existence includes non-existence and you can make up whatever Alice on wonderland story you want.
So, if we align our propositions to the definition of existence which is in concordance with reality, we can know if it is possible for it to exist or not.
For example, if I propose that there is a non-carbon based lesbian guy living on Uranus, who is a married bachelorette, and is sitting next to a cozy campfire (there’s no oxygen for fire on Uranus), drinking dehydrated water out of a cup that is a solid and also gas simultaneously, and he’s writing an unauthorized autobiography without using language, while cooking up some pancakes in a waffle iron, we can know for sure that my proposition is false, because that is metaphysically impossible as it violates the law of identity and noncontradiction. It would be anti-rational to be agnostic about that.
The Christian God as generally defined also fits into this category of violating law of identity and noncontradiction. If God remains without a complete definition as some Christians propose, that is also impossible, because that which has no definition of identity does not exist.
On the other hand, if I make a bizarre assertion that there is a tardigrade riding on a pink bowling ball orbiting Uranus, but there is currently no way for us to detect it in any way, we can’t say for sure that it doesn’t exist, because it is still in concordance with reality. In that case, we could be agnostic about that particular assertion (setting aside argumentum ad ignorantiam).
Matter and energy have identifiable behaviors that our senses, and other devices can perceive, and those behaviors and characteristics can be validated with the epistemology by using proper scientific methodology and logical objective reasoning. That objective validation gets its credibility from how it empirically manifests in alignment with reality.
That’s why we can know some things can or cannot exist for sure, while the agnostic is blanked out in some foggy, irrational, primitive, non-thinking oblivion.
Thanks for finishing part 6 of this 8 part series.
Join me next time where we explore the ethics of God, and do we have authority to tell others what to believe?
