Agnosticism - @00:30 YouTube, and Podcast
I’m not a fan of agnosticism, at least not as it’s popularly used.
The term originated back in the 19th century with Aldous Huxley, in order to talk about things we don’t know and can’t know. Huxley was known as Darwin’s bulldog, a fierce advocate for science generally and the scientific theory of evolution in particular.
He coined “agnostic” and “agnosticism” in reference to a collection of religions and religious practices that were popular in the early centuries BC and AD, the gnostics. They were mystics who believed that the way to enlightenment and perfection is through seeking out and learning various secret teachings. There is the evil, material world and the perfect divine world, and by various mystical practices they could get access to the divine and thus achieve perfect knowledge of secret things.
There’s a lot more to gnosticism, of course, but the core of the term comes from the Greek “gnosis”, knowledge. You can also find it in the Latin phrase “nosce te ipsum”, “know thyself”. So Huxley reached back through the centuries (the gnostics were brutally suppressed by the churches in the west, though mystical tendencies and “heresies” naturally pop up everywhere, more so since the Reformation) to take the term, discard the baggage, and talk about something completely new.
“Gnosis” means “knowledge”, “gnostic” means “one with knowledge”. “Agnosis” means “lack of knowledge” and “agnostic” means “one without knowledge”. Huxley meant it to describe his position in philosophy, probably with respect to metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality. He seems to have come to the conclusion that the various philosophers in his day studying metaphysics were coming to unsupportable conclusions.
“They were quite sure that they had attained a certain "gnosis" -- had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.”
The term, at least in my experience, is not much used today to describe a philosophical position with respect to any or all knowledge. Instead, it refers to the position one takes on the existence of a god or gods. The common understanding is that if you are certain there is a god, you are a theist; if you are certain there is no god, you are an atheist; if you are not certain either way, you are an agnostic.
That is, those who call themselves agnostic sometimes (not always) position themselves as morally or intellectually more honest than all of those “dogmatic believers” (whether theist or atheist) who claim certainty about something where there can be no certainty. There’s at least one amusing quip out there: “Militant Agnostic: I don’t know and neither do you.”
However, there are many more agnostics, and I think they’re probably the majority, who just think of agnostic as meaning “I don’t know” and are less strong about “I can’t know”. Rather than having a strong conviction that knowledge on the subject is impossible, it seems that they’re just avoiding confrontation and the uncomfortable label of “atheist” by saying “I’m not convinced there is a god, but I’m not convinced there is no god”.
Unfortunately for them, that makes them atheists. If you believe there is a god, if you are convinced for any reason, good or bad (and they’re all bad) that some god exists, then you are a theist. If you are not convinced, if you don’t believe, then you are an atheist. You don’t have to be convinced that there is no god to be an atheist.
A lot of atheists like to draw the distinction between being a hard atheist vs a soft atheist, or strong and weak, or positive and negative. Either way, the difference lies in which of these two statements you agree with.
- I do not believe that there is a god.
- I believe that there is no god.
If you agree with both statements, you are a strong, positive, or hard atheist. You have been convinced, for whatever reason or reasons, that the proposition “some god exists” is false. If you only agree with the first question, you are a soft, weak, or negative atheist. You have lost, or simply never had, the conviction that some god exists, but you have not been convinced in the other direction.
Obviously, you can’t agree with the second statement without agreeing to the first. If you don’t agree with the first, that means that you do believe that there is a god, and cannot then go on to agree with the second and affirm that you do believe that there is no god.
That, by the way, is why they’re called “positive” vs “negative” or “strong” vs “weak”. The second statement is a positive statement, an affirmation, you’re declaring that you do have a belief, that there is no god. The first statement is negative, a rejection of a claim, simply the declaration that you lack a belief.
But even a negative atheist lacks that belief. If you do believe, then you are a theist; if you don’t, you are a-theist, an atheist.
Many skeptics, atheists, and science advocates today bend over backward to cede as much ground as possible to religion, so as to render his own position that much more defensible. “We don’t know; we can’t know; your claims to knowledge are false not because your claims are false, but because you claim to know. I’m not denying your claims, I’m simply not accepting them.” They’re staking a position in negative atheism and then rejecting the label of atheist.
As with last week’s discussion of skepticism and the failure to address popular religious topics, this is understandable but not particularly noble. “It’s a matter of picking your battles” vs “you just don’t want the negative attention”. I get it, though I don’t like it.
I also don’t think it’s correct. I don’t think the reasons given are any good. The only reason to bend over backwards for religion is because we’re afraid of its political, social, and economic power.
Okay, those are big reasons. Still. I’m a cis-gender heterosexual able-bodied white man in his mid-thirties from a wealthy family; I can do whatever I want! I fear not the overwhelming power of the bronze-age bigoted blowhards that control 75% of our civilization!
Anyway, the stated reasons for giving religion every conceivable benefit of the doubt are garbage because they’re wrong. Every religion ever has made definite claims not about things that exist beyond this reality and have absolutely no impact on this reality, but about things that exist in this reality and/or have an impact on this reality. Every religious believer is running around claiming to be a “little god detector”, in the words of Matt Dillahunty. They all claim that some version of a soul exists and is responsible for a person’s actions. They all claim that multiple gods in various versions and varieties exist and actually do things in the world.
Okay, that last one might get a few people to raise an objection. “Christianity is a monotheism! It only believes in one god! Same for Islam! They don’t believe in multiple gods!” Check your definitions. What’s the difference between a minor deity like Aeolus, keeper of the winds and ruler of a mythical floating island in Greek mythology, or Babi, Egyptian god of baboons, and the Archangels Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel, who stand at the four corners of the Earth (because early Christians were incredibly ignorant and believed in a flat earth hundreds of years after it was demonstrated to be spherical) and hold back the “four winds”?
Catholic saints, muslim djinn, and angels and demons in both. Monotheisms these religions are not. Islam is a little less polytheistic, what with not having that nonsensical trinitarian three things that are one thing but are still three completely different things… but whatever, not really relevant.
Anyway, all religions make claims about things actually acting in the world. If it has some sort of impact, we can measure that. If we look at a person’s behavior, thought processes, the actual way their physiology works, we absolutely should see the time and place where the soul intervenes. We should be able to detect the effect of some sort of god or demigod or spirit interacting with objects or brains or the body.
No matter what, nothing is a one-way street. Going back to Newton, anything that is acted upon by a force responds with an equal and opposite reaction force. If the soul acts on the body, then the body acts on the soul.
Unless the religious want to posit some sort of entirely new branch of physics. Gotta be honest, I’ve never seen any of them try that. However, we know that trying to put any sort of 1-way street into your system causes it to break. If you want to have some class of items, S, that can interact with another class, P, but where class P can’t interact with S… you’re rapidly going to run into contradictions and inconsistencies. Basically, trying to build physics without Newton’s third law is going to create a physical system that simply doesn’t work.
In other words, the religious conception of reality a) cannot be studied only because the things they believe in never interact in any way with anything in this universe, b) cannot even exist because what they’re proposing is fundamentally broken, or c) can be studied because they don’t want to pretend that they’ve invented a new kind of physics that no one has been able to figure out (even though they’ve tried; that’s what theoretical physics is, imagining wildly different physical laws and seeing what would happen). So let’s go through those in order.
A religious order that can’t be studied because the items or beings involved never interact with reality. Okay, gotta be honest, that’s an incredibly boring “belief” system (heavy scare quotes, there). What kind of jackass would argue for that kind of religion?
Well, the sort of jackass who was afraid of being murdered by religious assholes, for one. It’s called deism and was quite popular in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries among educated individuals. Reject everything about religion except the absolute bare minimum. Just enough to get people to leave you alone. There are probably people who argue on behalf of some form of deism today, particularly in places where apostasy or atheism can be dangerous to your health. But, really, it’s not an interesting position. There’s nothing to grab hold of. Nothing to argue for or against. It’s a vacuous proposition.
And, let’s be honest, anyone arguing on behalf of deism probably isn’t arguing on behalf of the kind of hateful, hurtful bullshit you get out of people like “white evangelicals” (aka the KKK) or wahhabists.
Anyone else will probably equivocate between the remaining two possibilities as needed. “Yes, it has a real effect, no you can’t study it. What do you mean, ‘why not’? Screw you! Because! BECAUSE. SHUT UP.” What I mean is that a lot of them (most? Nearly all?) probably haven’t put much thought into it and never considered that any phenomenon that impinges on reality can necessarily be studied, but quickly retreat to the position that they have a special kind of magical physics that you can’t study because shut up.
But it should be hammered home: they have a massive, uphill battle to demonstrate that their position is defensible. They either have to show that the phenomenon they’re describing (gods, angels, demons, ghosts, souls) exists and can be studied, or they have to show that the phenomenon they’re describing exists but can’t be studied because of a physics system wildly different from the one we know exists. On the one hand they must then provide the evidence to support the system. On the other, they have demonstrate that said new physics exists (which holy shit).
No matter what we’re talking about, the propositions of religion are necessarily subject to scientific investigation, because they’re making claims about the nature of reality and the existence of things within it. The position of hard agnosticism, that it’s impossible to study the claims of religion, is simply false. The so-called “supernatural”, as something separate from nature and completely immune to investigation, is an incoherent concept. There is no way to have something completely separate from nature that can still interact with nature. Not even if it obeys some new set of physical laws, because those physical laws are still part of reality, still part of nature.
Lemme just repeat that: the concept of the “supernatural” is incoherent. There is no “supernatural”. There is only the natural, be it ever so unfamiliar.
Another concept attached to agnosticism I want to discuss is the distinction between belief and knowledge. For a while there I agreed with the view held, as I vaguely recall, by Matt Dillahunty of The Atheist Experience. I used to watch/listen to the show (a live call-in youtube channel that takes questions/debates from atheists or theists), but … See, thing is, believers don’t have new arguments. They’ve never had good arguments, and the well for new arguments dried up pretty much as soon as people started coming up with arguments.
What I’m saying is that the calls got repetitive and I stopped watching. The show’s a very valuable resource for new non-believers; it provides a deep well for answering the apologetics (good or bad) offered by the callers. It also provides a window into a community of non-believers for people who might feel very, very lonely in their non-belief.
And Dillahunty’s one of the regular hosts of the show, and the conversations on the show frequently turned to knowledge versus belief, because a common religious tactic is to try and argue that:
- you don’t know for absolutely certain there is no god
- therefore you don’t know either way
- therefore you’re not really an atheist
- therefore … somehow you have to admit that I’m right?
- I dunno, it falls apart
- they’re just trying to prove atheists aren’t real for some reason
Anyway Dillahunty used to have a position I that I used to agree with, though he may have changed it since then, that knowledge is a form of belief; knowledge being verifiable, true belief. What changed my mind about this is the inclusion of “true”. How can you determine if something is true? Well, it has to be verifiable. That’s what verifiable means, that we can determine it is true. But tagging “true” on there in addition to verifiable is only meaningful if we have some special way to find out it’s true, from “outside”, as it were.
So discard “true” and we’re left with “verifiable”. No one thinks their beliefs are unjustified, unverifiable. Every person is convinced of the things they believe, for whatever reason, or they wouldn’t believe it. Even beliefs held on faith; the faithful think those are justifiable, verifiable, true beliefs. They’re wrong, but they still believe. Many of them even call those beliefs “knowledge”.
Even if you only have very little justification for your belief, very little evidence or confidence, even if you only call it a “suspicion” or a “hunch” or something, you still have some justification or rationalization, you still have, or believe you have, good reason for that. And it will still be in some way verifiable, even if you’re not willing to go to the effort or expense of verifying it yourself.
So my position has changed. I no longer think that knowledge is belief + truth. I now think that knowledge is belief + confidence. What a person considers “knowledge” rather than mere “belief” is a matter of emotional conviction, and isn’t based on some sort of systematic classification using evidence, reason, verification, or “truth”.
And that’s my more … philosophical rejection of agnosticism. My more emotional attack is that it smacks of cowardice (or prudence, if you’re being kind) and isn’t based on a conviction that knowledge is unavailable. This attack is just that knowledge isn’t really a thing; we just have beliefs, some of which are more or better justified. Distinguishing knowledge from belief is what is impossible, because they’re the same thing. And that’s why I reject the category of “agnostic”. You can’t say “I don’t know, but I believe” and call it a separate category. It’s just admitting a lack of confidence in your belief.
And saying you don’t think others can know is saying you don’t think others can have good justifications for their beliefs, which means you don’t believe. You might not be a strong or positive atheist, but you’re still an atheist.
TERFs & SWERFs - @18:58 YouTube, 17:10 Podcast
- TERF - Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism
- SWERF - Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism
Although douchebags on the right call every feminist “radical”, being a radical feminist places you within a specific branch of feminism that arose back during the second wave, in the 60s and 70s. The first wave of feminism was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and secured the right to vote, the second wave was in the 60s and 70s and brought women into the workplace, and the third wave is attempting to secure social equality and integrate it into the broader context of social justice right now.
“Radical” isn’t just a term from California surfer culture. I was always much more familiar with it as a term within chemistry, where it refers to an atom or compound with an unpaired (and thus highly reactive) electron. In other contexts, “radical” comes from Latin “radix”, “root”, and anything “radical” is attacking or identifying the root cause of something.
Radical feminists, therefore, identified themselves as such in order to distinguish themselves from other feminist movements. They identify the root cause of women’s oppression as arising from the gendered expectations of patriarchal social structures rather than in government (liberal feminism) or economic class (Marxist feminism).
Radfems claim that society as a whole is organized for the benefit of men and to the detriment of women, that men as a whole oppress and subjugate women. In broad strokes, this is true, as are the claims of liberal feminism that government institutions act to give men advantages over women and those of marxist or socialist feminism that capitalist institutions give men advantages over women.
However, radical feminists claim that the social patriarchal structures are the fundamental root, the true origin, and that government and economic structures arise from that basic attack on women’s dignity. Since socialist and liberal feminists agree with one another that both government and economic institutions contribute to women’s oppression, but differ on which is more important, radical feminists called themselves that to state that they were declaring social norms the real problem.
I want to note that radfems aren’t wrong to attack patriarchy and social institutions. The gendered and regressive expectations placed on women give them severe disadvantages and force them to struggle their entire lives and generally to experience worse outcomes in all their endeavours. However, government and economics are culture. These systems are all integrated in different ways, and attacking one is attacking all… and radfems usually do so. From what little I’ve pieced together (and please note I’m not a feminist scholar nor a historian of feminism), radfems usually hold a number of mainstream feminist views, such as wanting to expand reproductive rights and to improve women’s equality generally.
However, some radfems are weird, blaming women’s oppression not just on a larger culture that advantages men at the expense of women, but blaming individual men. Some radfems take ordinary feminist discourse in weird directions or to extreme conclusions.
For example, more typical feminist discourse will note that video porn is largely produced by men for men and thus focuses on male pleasure and the pleasure of the male viewing experience, reducing women to objects serving the male gaze. The feminist response will include condemning mainstream porn for excluding and degrading women, and can then go on to either condemn porn in and of itself. Or it can advocate a broader, more inclusive, and healthier form of pornography, where women aren’t merely bodies present for the pleasure of men, but are active and pleased participants themselves, where women aren’t just participants in the production, but are part of the intended audience, and so on.
Radfems, meanwhile, will usually take the first route: condemning pornography. But a number of them take it even further. Not only do they attack pornography as objectifying and degrading women and leading to violence against them, they likewise attack marriage as doing the same. Don’t get me wrong, many feminists dislike marriage as practiced in the United States as constrictive, restrictive, and unhealthy, especially for women. As that “especially” notes, they’ll point out that it’s also constrictive, restrictive, and unhealthy for men. (noting that men are restricted and isolated by patriarchy, and forced into unhealthy roles that harm them as well as women is one of the things that makes feminism awesome and always has done)
Some radfems will then go on to say that all heterosexual sex is patriarchal and benefits men at women’s expense. Others view sex mainly in terms of its utility for reproduction and the role sexual reproduction plays in forcing women into certain social roles (mothers) and out of the workforce, limiting their freedom and making them into servants of men specifically and society more broadly.
Either way, you get some weird radfems who insist that all heterosexual sex is sexual violence against women, that it isn’t possible to have an uncoercive heterosexual relationship, that any sex between a man and a woman is rape. You can even get a branch of radfems who so remove themselves from men that they embrace radical political lesbianism: the idea that sexual orientation is a choice and women should become lesbians until they achieve true equality. Some will even argue that the use of a dildo is sexual violence, because it recreates the norms and expectations of the patriarchy and turns one of the women into a pseudo-man raping the other. Other radfems just argue for celibacy and say that abandoning heterosexuality is an unfortunate necessity.
This is, at least in part, the origin of SWERFs, Sex-Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists. In theory, radfems are opposed to prostitution, cam-work, and porn because it recreates oppressive social institutions that hurt women. In practice, at least some radfems today often target sex workers for harassment, abuse, or even assaults or threats of the same.
By contrast, a large segment of third wave feminism is dedicated to supporting sex workers, eliminating oppressive and harmful practices. They recognize that sex is awesome and sex work is at the very least just another job, or could even be a really awesome thing that improves society (see for example the powerful economic or even religious positions sex workers have held in the distant past).
Radfems also take positions on gender and being trans. They’re as divided here as they are elsewhere, with some radfems being open and inclusive, others being bigoted and exclusive. Hence TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism. Just FYI, very, very few people actually claim the titles of TERF or SWERF; most view those as slurs and try to report people who use them as abusers or bigots themselves on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. They are, however, fairly straightforward descriptive labels applying to people for their expressed ideologies (radical feminism and bigotry against trans people and sex workers) and for their openly claimed titles (radical feminism again).
TERFs assert that gender is purely a function of biology, that you are the plumbing you were born with, that social roles are social roles, but there's still something fundamental about biology. Like conservative Christian bigots, you are born an XY male with male dangles or an XX female with a female dimple. They claim that, having been born male and having lived male, trans women have lived with male privilege and cannot actually understand what it is to be a woman. That claim, depending on how it is expressed, can be at least modified to fit within trans-inclusive feminism: no, trans women haven’t lived as women their whole lives, they don’t know what it is to be born, raised, and live fully as cis women, but they do have the experience of being a trans woman living as a man, being a trans woman living in transition, or a trans woman living as a woman.
But TERFs reject the notion that gender is separate from plumbing, but still biological or something, that the human brain is a very complex organ. There is no “internal female identity” or “female essence” or “female brain”, there is only chromosomes and genitalia. They call themselves "gender essentialists" rather than TERFs. They go on to claim that trans women are men attempting to invade female space, to steal and degrade the concept and experience of female oppression (thus weakening the feminist argument… somehow), and possibly to assault and rape “real” women. TERFs are fucking assholes, full stop.
These last few paragraphs have focused largely on TERFs and their bigotry toward trans women. As with the broader culture here in the US, the TERF conversation around trans people tends to focus on trans women. Just as Christian bigots focus on trans women going into women’s spaces in order to attack and degrade women (bathroom bills), TERFs focus on trans women coming into feminist spaces to do the same. The hypothesis or model among gender theorists, as I understand (again, not an expert) is that bigots fully understand the desire of a “woman” to “call herself a man”, but a “man” trying to “call himself a woman” triggers cognitive dissonance.
That is, trans men are easy for bigots to understand because men are seen as better or of higher status than women. They don’t actually understand trans men, because trans men aren’t trying to achieve higher social, political, or economic status; they’re just trying to live their fullest, happiest, best, most honest lives as who they truly are. But for the bigots, trans women are moving down the ladder, seeking a lower status in society. Once you understand that this is something trans women have to do because it is who they truly are, it’s not a problem.
But for the bigots, it’s a huge brainfuck. They have this rigid, hierarchical worldview that they refuse to modify (hey, sociologists/neurologists, is this a brain thing, or can we actually improve society so that this sort of person doesn’t happen any more?), and can only support that view by coming to the conclusion that trans women are men who are trying to get some sort of advantage. Since women are lower status, it can’t be an advantage in the broader culture (except insofar as right wing bigots believe that “claiming victim status” lets you get away with stuff), so they must be trying to attack women.
You’ve almost certainly noticed that I’ve talked about right wingers, conservatives, and Christians a few times here and there. TERFs and SWERFs on the one hand, Republicans on the other, are natural allies on a lot of issues. In fact, I have heard that a significant fraction of early radfems were Catholic nuns, of all things. Now, I heard this several years ago, and my google-fu has completely failed to turn up anything relevant, so this might have been a single author’s opinion or it might just have been part of Pope Francis’s attack on Catholic nuns from a few years back.
What I recall, though, was that Catholic nuns wanted a piece of the feminist pie. The Catholic church has always been ridiculously misogynistic and nuns, like most Catholic women, want a large voice and place in the hierarchy. Not all forms of feminism are a natural fit but, somehow, apparently, radical feminism worked. Maybe because of its change in emphasis from political and economic institutions over to culture?
In any event, this would help inform the strand of right wing bigotry that has woven itself into parts of radical feminism. The Catholic hierarchy is very gender essentialist; male and female made he them, woman as helpmeet to man, etc. There is a brand of Christianity more generally that calls itself “complimentarian”, where women and men are “separate but equal”, having completely different roles. Radical Feminism rejects the idea of different roles, but accepts the idea of women and men as different. TERFs have found a middle ground there, working with Christian bigots to attack trans folk.
There’s also a group of right wing bigots who style themselves as “second wave feminists”, who like to talk about how feminism used to be okay, but now it’s all about claiming victim-hood and attacking men and blah blah blah. They’re not feminists. Some are just parroting old feminist talking points in order to distort them and attack feminism on behalf of a right wing agenda (see, for example: Christina Hoff Sommers, a far right wing bigot employed by the Koch Brothers through the American Enterprise Institute). Others are ignorant little shits who don’t even realize how much feminism has done for them, who accept a large amount of feminist thought without noticing that it deeply conflicts with their far-right-wing bigotry (such as racist terrorist Lauren Southern).
In any event, TERFs and SWERFs are happy to work with right wing bigots because their own bigotry, at least in the areas of trans politics and sex politics, so often match. TERFs hate trans women, Republicans hate trans women, and they cooperate to put together laws to discriminate against trans women. The TERFs provide the Republicans with cover because they get to say they talked to feminists who helped them write the bills! And the Republicans provide the TERFs with money. Lots and lots of money. Republicans are really good at getting rich people to foot the bill for bigoted mouthpieces, because that’s how Republican fascism works.
- promise rich people that they’ll get more rich
- rich people give Republicans money
- promise poor people that the people they hate will get punished
- rich people pay a few bigots to spread lies and propaganda talking to poor bigots
- poor bigots vote Republican
- Republicans pass laws:
- always - laws that give money to the rich
- sometimes - laws that punish the targets of bigotry
If not for their alliance with the fascist Republican party, the absolutely minuscule movement that is bigoted radical feminism would have died out long ago, because they are minuscule. By far the majority of feminists aren’t TERFs or SWERFs. The portions of radical feminism that were correct have largely migrated into mainstream feminism, leaving bigotry, attacks on individual men, and the like out in the cold.
Again, this is all the understanding of a dude who hasn’t dedicated years to gender studies and hasn’t done a survey of the field to find the size of various groups within it. I have links in the thingy for those who want to learn more, and I do encourage you to do a lot of reading, because feminism is a large and diverse movement with lots of focuses and lots of different analyses and forms of analysis.
Either way, fuck TERFs, fuck SWERFs. They’re assholes. They make life a living hell for people. They love to target people for harassment and abuse. And if you see anything like that, I encourage you to find some way to stop it. If it’s in meat space, just go ahead and get in their way, physically step in front of them, stop them from attacking whoever they’re attacking. If it’s online, report their harassment and abuse. It won’t do much good, but you can try.
Links
- Agnosticism
- Agnosticism at the Skeptic's Online Dictionary
- Agnosticism at the Rational Wiki
- Agnosticism at the mainstream dudebro wiki
- The Atheist Experience webpage... Okay, I'm not a web genius, but that site looks pretty rough.
- TERFs & SWERFs
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