This is a post I've had kicking around in my head for years now. Every time I was out hiking, or on a walk, or doing anything that let my thoughts wander, I often found my thoughts returning to religion. (And small wonder. Religion the biggest philosophical subject there is. And how we respond to the religious question defines much of who we are.)
I had, as most people do, volumes of things I wanted to say on the subject, built up over a lifetime of listening, pondering, reacting, and my own life exerperience. I had long wanted to write something on the subject, but I it was hard to know how to organize my thoughts.
With every new hike I took, this unwritten post would get longer and longer.
And yet it still was not exhaustive of everything that needed to be said on the subject.
It is probably impossible to write a nice clean piece defending agnosticism. To argue for agnosticism, you have to argue against every single religion out there, and refute the arguments for each of them. And then once you've finished with the religious community, you then have to turn in the other direction and argue against atheism. It's pre-destined to become one big muddled mess of an argument.
So why then take a bite at the apple at all?
Many of my former Christian school classmates have turned into agnostics or atheists as they've grown up. And to the best of my knowledge, none of them have felt the need to write a huge blog post justifying it to everyone. Why should I?
I don't know. The urge to spout off my two-cents about everything. The intellectual challenge of engaging the biggest philosophical issue of all time. The need to get it off my chest once and for all. The desire to try and tackle this fully in one post instead of hinting at it in various other posts about religion.
This is probably as good as any place to say that nothing on this blog is a polished piece of writing. Every single post on this blog is a rough draft. What it's a rough draft for I don't know yet. Most likely nothing. But every post represents a few thoughts that could with some refinement someday become a better piece of writing. This post as well is a rough draft. I'll just try and put all my ideas down into writing. Some day I might pick up some of the same ideas and refine them a bit into a more coherent argument. But for now I'm just getting it out of my system.
As Kurt Vonnegut might say this post is destined to be a failure. It has to be. To argue against every single religion out there, and to engage against every single argument for faith, is destined to become a huge muddle of a post.
And yet, in another sense, the entire argument for agnosticism is simplicity itself.
Let me start with a statement that is uncontroversial.
The majority of religions are false.
No one can deny this. Even if we grant that there is one true religion out there, that means that every other single religion must, by definition, be false.
Which means that the vast majority of people on this earth, past and present, believe in a religion which is not true. Many of them believe it strongly. Some of them have dedicated their whole lives to it. But since all the religions can not simultaneously be true, this means that undeniably most people are believing in something false.
When you add up all the different religions out there (and the factions within those religions) the odds that the religion you happened to be born into is the one true religion are extremely poor. In order to justify that the one particular religion is true, and all the rest are false, there has to be some very convincing proof.
And does this kind of proof exist: the kind that convinces you beyond a shadow of a doubt that one religion is true and all others false?
Well, I guess everyone will have to answer that question for themselves. My guess is that almost no one will say that they know their religion is true beyond a shadow of a doubt. Some people might go so far as to say that they are mostly sure their religion is true, but even these people, when you talk with them, in my experience really fail to give you much of a convincing argument.
Often what you will hear is an appeal to faith or personal spiritual experiences. They believe that they feel God's presence in their heart somewhere, and so even though they can't logically prove that there's a God, they feel certain he exists.
The problem with this, however, is that all religions will say this. So if you grant it for one faith, you have to grant it for all. And they can't all be true.
The Mormon missionaries, who I used to come to my apartment in Japan, and who I used to debate weekly, relied heavily on this. I would point out to them all the reasons I thought Mormonism couldn't possibly be true. They wouldn't be able to give me an answer. But they would go home and pray about it, and they would come back more convinced than ever that they were right. It wasn't something they could logically prove to me, but they felt God was speaking to them.
And they weren't looking to convert me to Mormonism by logic either. They wanted me to read the book of Mormon, and then to just pray about it, and to ask God for myself whether it was true or not. And they felt confident that if I did this, God would move my heart and show me that it was true.
And the scary thing is that they might have been right.
Personally I think the evidence that Mormonism is a fabricated religion is just overwhelming. But from a psychological perspective, if you sit down over the book of Mormon and pray about it, what you're doing is consciously putting an idea into your head and telling your brain to focus on it. And then the next day it should be no surprise that you feel like you have a little voice in your head telling you that it's all true.
But if you still don't believe, here's the beauty of it, it means that you weren't praying hard enough. Or in the right way. Or that your heart wasn't open to recieve God. And then you have to pray again. And is it any surprise that if you do it enough times, eventually you start to believe it?
I don't buy it, but lots of other people do apparently. Otherwise the Mormon missionaries wouldn't be doing it. Otherwise no one would ever have converted into Mormonism in the first place.
It's the same way with the old Christian prayer, "God I believe. Help thou my unbelief."
You think that the element of unbelief is somehow a defect in you that needs to be cured. So you pray to God to help you. And if it doesn't work at first, then the problem must be with your praying or with your heart. And you pray harder. And you try and train your brain to focus on God and not to linger on all those doubts. And lone behold, the doubt eventually disappears and you feel God working in your heart.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Perhaps the best way to structure my argument is to start from my own personal experience, and work out from there.
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My Experience
My own religious experience is pretty boring and typical, but perhaps that's precisely the reason it deserves to be recounted--because it represents what so many other people feel.
I was born into a Christian family, attended Church regularly, and went to Christian schools as a child. I accepted uncritically everything I was told as a young child.
I remember once, I must have been 6 or 7, asking my mother how I could be sure that Christianity was the true religions with all the other religions out there. I wasn't asking this to challenge her. I just assumed she had the answer, and she would give it to me. And she remarked on what a good question it was, and what a thoughtful child I was, but I never did get an answer to that question.
But I put it aside and didn't think about it anymore. All the adults around me were Christians. I didn't even know anyone who wasn't a Christian. I assumed that any doubts I had must be some sort of defect in me, and that once I was old enough and mature enough, like all my teachers and parents and Sunday school leaders, I would somehow know everything that they did, and understand all the reasons for Christianity that they were so sure about, but never could really articulate.
A bit later, in second grade, I decided to set up various tests for God, as kids do. "God if you're really out there, make this sandwich turn into chocolate." Or something like that. Of course none of them really worked.
It sounds stupid and I guess it was. But if you're brought up on Bible stories of God doing miraculous things all the time to prove his existence to the Israelites, as a kid it makes a certain degree of sense to try and test it out yourself, and I would wager that just about everyone who came from a religious background has similar stories in their childhood.
After the first few failures I decided (as most kids do) that I was asking too much, and that it wasn't reasonable to expect God to perform huge miracles on my behalf just to prove his existence to a 2nd grade kid. So I lowered the bar and tried to ask God to do things that wouldn't put him out too much. I started to ask him to do stuff that had about a 50/50 chance of succeeding anyway, like "When I go downstairs, have the first sentence that my parents say to me be a question." And sure enough, God did a lot better on these types of tests, and eventually I convinced myself that he must exist after all.
Later that year, in Bible class, I remember my 2nd grade teacher telling us the story of doubting Thomas. And Jesus said to Thomas, "Thomas, you have believe because you have seen. Blessed are those who haven't seen, and still believe." And then she said to the class, "That means us. We are blessed because we believe in Jesus even though we haven't seen him." And I felt incredibly guilty at this point, because I had only believed in God after I had tested him first, and thus excluded myself from this blessed group. From that point on, I thought that believing in Jesus in the face of contrary evidence was somehow a sort of virtue to be aspired to. And if you allowed logic to somehow make you doubt faith, then that was a fault in your character.
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