Another kind of agnosticism

Last time in Atheism and Agnosticism Again you wrote in a comment:

[Atheism] means, so far as I can see from the uses in standard works since Huxley, the denial of God's existence. That I do not do.

But now you feel comfortable referring to a god as "some obviously non-existent object like Thor"?

You propose to "Call those agnostics who think that it's very improbable that there is a God weighted agnostics. " By that definition, then, I'm a weighted agnostic. In practice, when people ask, I refer to myself as an atheist, since "weighted agnostic" doesn't register with the average person. Naturally, I cannot prove beyond doubt the non-existence of a higher being, but that doesn't mean I should just refer myself as an agnostic, when in fact I'm such a "heavily weighted agnostic" in this respect that I may as well just refer to myself as an atheist. What then, is the hair-splitting difference between the two, if any? I am of course, speaking for myself and not for other atheists.

Yawn.

Yes, the "angles-on-the-head-of-a-pin" story comes to mind.

Evidently Mustafa is agnostic towards the whole agnosticism debate.

Bob

Some people have to have answers for every question. Others are content to consider an answer may or may not exist of which they may or may not have any knowledge or belief. The difference between agnostics and atheists is arrogance. The difference between believers and doctrinaires is also arrogance. Belief one's knowledge is omniscient is always arrogant.

As others have said, the main problem comes from the fact that there are far too many possible definitions to the word "god" and these can be brought out in a revolving fashion to answer any single attack against the concept. You consider yourself an agnostic toward a philosophical, removed god like Spinoza's, and indeed you are right that one could define "god" in such a way as to find him impervious to refutation. But, and here's the problem with the disparate uses of the word, to say that you are agnostic about god sounds to most people that you are saying you are agnostic on the question of a personal god that must be worshipped. Are you? If not, it seems a tad disingenuous to not clarify that you are atheistic with what would be definition "1" in the dictionary in most people's minds, and are only referring to definition "23".

Additionally, a theory of knowledge that believes a special case must be reserved for propositions that many in our society believe to be true as opposed to those that are not popularly held, such as Mill's "Live possibility" idea that you yourself referenced in "Atheism and Agnosticism Again" most certainly is an argument ad populum.

That being said, I love your site; especially your posts on the interaction of evolution and knowledge, since that's the direction I see my thesis going. (Should I have led off with the compliment?)

One more point: this may be the starry-eyed idealism of a beginning grad student, but I've always thought that arguing merely to sway opinions is sophistry, not proper philosophy, and more the purview of lawyers trying a case. The goal of philosophy, as I've taken it, is not to convince people rigidly opposed to your viewpoint, nor agnostic onlookers (Benjamin Franklin's old saw about the purpose of debate). Rather it's to examine your beliefs as closely as possible, casting aside bits that don't quite fit, and hopefully coming closer to the truth. Philosophical argument then is helping others do the same by asking questions and pointing out potential errors they might not have thought of themselves. Note even I'm not naive enough to say this is what philosophy is as practiced, but surely it is the central point to the whole thing, or why bother? I could win more arguments with logical fallacies anyway.

... to say that you are agnostic about god sounds to most people that you are saying you are agnostic on the question of a personal god that must be worshipped. Are you? If not, it seems a tad disingenuous to not clarify ...

... a theory of knowledge that believes a special case must be reserved for propositions that many in our society believe to be true as opposed to those that are not popularly held, ... most certainly is an argument ad populum.

I'm sorry, how does that work again?

I thought philosophers are concerned with maintaining disinterest rather than agnosticism. That is, they may have already decided on the conclusion but they argue for it without rhetorical tricks or emotional appeals.

John -

It works because there is a large difference between saying that someone's terms should be carefully chosen so as to not cause confusion (the first quote), and saying that an idea's popularity or lack thereof should not put it into a different class of truth-value (the second).

It works because there is a large difference between saying that someone's terms should be carefully chosen so as to not cause confusion (the first quote), and saying that an idea's popularity or lack thereof should not put it into a different class of truth-value (the second).

You are still saying that John should do or refrain from doing something based on the the number of people who have a particular belief. If one is ad populum, so's the other.

While I don't want to speak for John, I think your first statement is wrong because your premise, that John is only agnostic toward a philosophical, removed god like Spinoza's, is false.

The second is not an ad populum fallacy because John is not claiming that the beliefs of theists are true because they are popular, he is saying that it is a phenomenon that must be addressed more seriously than the example (given as an attempt to "poison the well") of "fairies in the garden."

Finally, by what system are you determining the supposed "truth value"? Isn't the problem that we are really discussing here that people have different systems for judging truth?

An argument ad populum is a fallacy because it claims that many people believing something has some relevance as to whether or not it is true. Saying that you should make sure your words aren't misunderstood is not a fallacy of that type, unless you are willing to condemn every dictionary under the same charge, since they too try to say what usages of words are more or less common.

On the other hand, saying that we should reserve judgements on some claims (invisible sky spirits) and feel free to dismiss others (invisible garden fairies) because the first is "live" and the second not, means that we are assigning it to an entirely different category of possible truth value. The first time I ever came across the phrase "live possibility" it was used to explain why we as people growing up in a christian society should accept Pascal's wager about the christian faith but not about islam, while someone born in an islamic country would be justified in the reverse. This is a statement of complete cultural relativity of what we should have faith in, and one that seems fairly ridiculous on its face. Here, similarly, the concept of a "live possibility" is used, it seems to me, as a handwaving way to avoid coming to the conclusion that you are an agnostic, in John's definition of the word, on literally every proposition actual or imagined if you can create any "system for judging truth" that would consider it true.

If that is the definition of agnosticism used, then fine, but in that case how is it adding to the discussion to say one is agnostic about god or any other one proposition, since we've already determined we are all agnostic, at a meta-level at least, about all of them? To trot out the old, possibly dead, horse, it seems like one would do that only if one wished there were a god and didn't like saying there wasn't.

An argument ad populum is a fallacy because it claims that many people believing something has some relevance as to whether or not it is true.

No. There is no implication as to its truth. The question is simply a threshold one of how seriously we should take the claim. Think of it this way: if one person reports seeing a UFO at a certain place and time, would you take that equally seriously as you would if 1,000 people reported seeing the same thing? They may all be seeing Venus but there is more reason to consider the issue when there is 1,000 reports. Heck, if it wasn't an important phenomenon, why is Dawkins writing books about religion instead of fairyology?

The question then becomes how you investigate the claims. Yes, you can construct an escape clause for any possible claim (witness Omphalos) -- which itself is an important bit of knowledge about knowledge. That's why I asked how you are measuring truth claims.

Science, which is, in my opinion as close to "knowledge" as humans get, is as effective as it is precisely because it limits itself to observations that can be shared and repeated. Having done that, however, it's disqualified itself from questions about the existence or nonexistence of God. In addition, there are areas that I would still call "knowledge" that are not (at least for now) reducible to science/empiricism, such as beauty and art, which point to the possibility of other sorts of "knowledge" intractable to science, such as personal experience of God.

So here we have reports by billions of people of a phenomenon (personal experience of God) that our best form of knowledge is incapable of testing. While science can detect frauds in fairyology and in religion, that doesn't determine the truth of the ultimate claims of those beliefs, any more than the fraudulent cloning claims of some Korean scientist disproves the ultimate truthfulness of science.

Ultimately, God's existence is a claim too widespread to ignore and too beyond our poor abilities to obtain knowledge for me to claim any certainty about.

actually, if 1,000 people all claimed that they observed something, it would make it more likely that some phenomenon was going on, but no, it would not make me take something "more seriously" if a)there was no other evidence for it/there were good reasons to think it was impossible and/or b)by "more seriously" you mean in any way consider their numbers an argument for the truth, since that is the textbook definition of the logical fallacy we've been discussing. BTW if you don't mean b), I'm interested in what else you possibly could mean by "take seriously". Not poke fun? And indeed, many people's claims of a spiritual life does make it likely that there is some phenomenon going on in the brain, one worth studying, but it does not make it more likely that their claims are true, especially if that's all the evidence we have.

Now on to the idea that there are other truths that "science/empiricism" cannot begin to approach in religion. It depends on one's claim. If one is claiming that they have some observational evidence for god, which importantly includes statements like sensing his presence, then they are appealing to empiricism, in which case they are not in some entirely different sphere of knowledge than science. If science later shows that their sense of god is explainable by other means, such as events in the brain caused by material stimuli, their argument is shown to be false by their own empirical standards.

Those that are making no appeal to empiricism, merely claiming something along the lines of "direct knowledge" escape that part of the trap, which I think is John's point, but consider what they must defend instead. They are not saying that direct knowledge per se should be taken as truth, only that their direct knowledge should be taken so. After all, if I say I have direct knowledge that they should give me all their money they would not, or ask for other (empirical) evidence that they should, whereas if their direct knowledge tells them that they should give their money to a church they would happily do it. Thus the only "truth" is what they say it is. This may be defensible along strict logical argument lines, though it ultimately rests on the circular argument of you knowing your direct knowledge is correct because you have direct knowledge that it is, but it is absolute solipsism, so it is very difficult to see these people building anything like a movement or religion if they were being honest with themselves or each other. After all, they do not agree on the same truth, any more than two people each saying the sentence "I am the smartest" are agreeing with one another.

I cannot believe that just because someone is able to say "It's true because I feel like it is, and I define 'truth' to be that which I feel is so" that we should then call ourselves agnostic on that question saying "After all, that guy might be right! Perhaps the entire universe IS whatever he says it is!!" That's something I find I have a hard time "taking seriously"

Manuel Vargas's comments are enlightening. http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2007/01/so_a_mysterian…

[I]f 1,000 people all claimed that they observed something, it would make it more likely that some phenomenon was going on, but no, it would not make me take something "more seriously"

I'm sorry, thinking that some phenomenon may be going on isn't taking it more seriously? Remember that this point was only raised as an answer to the sneering objection that we should treat the claims of theists the same as those of fairies in the garden.

But you are quite right that it does not make theists' claims more likely to be true ... but neither I nor John claimed it did. On the other hand, on what basis can you say that their claims are less likely to be true?

Thus the only "truth" is what they say it is.

Umm, what knowledge isn't ultimately that? For example, explain how I can prove, even to myself, that I exist without evoking "I feel like it"?

That's something I find I have a hard time "taking seriously"

Nobody says you have to. But if you insist on engaging in cheap rhetoric, like equating theists with believers in fairies, instead of real arguments, then the rest of us don't have to take that seriously either.

But you are right that it does not make theists' claims more likely to be true...but neither John nor I claimed it did.

You may argue that you aren't saying their claims are more likely to be true, but it's difficult to see how, because you are saying that one should label one's self an agnostic about views that a lot of people have, but straight-up dismiss views that only a few people have. This is especially puzzling when you say:

What knowledge isn't ultimately that? For example, explain how I can prove, even to myself, that I exist without evoking "I feel like it"?

Taking this kind of radical skepiticism seriously (there's that word again, sorry) means that, as I said before, you are an agnostic about all claims, in which case why specify that you are an agnostic about some and not others? It brings nothing to the table since it is an assumed proposition in every single argument. Again, the only reason I can see is that you want to draw attention to your doubts about some untestable claims, either for personal reasons (such as wishing that they were so, not that I am trying to imply that either you or John personally fit into that category) or because you are attributing some increased likelihood solely based on the fact that lots of people say they feel it, when this is entirely unwarranted.

And no, when I say some phenomenon may be occuring, that is is not me taking their claim seriously. I should have been more clear: I did not mean that many people claiming that something happened made it likely that some phenomenon, such as what they claim, is going on, merely that something is happening, such as lying, self-delusion, or hallucination, which is the same thing that I would think about an individual person. If one person makes the impossible or untestable claim, this purely internal phenomenon is probably an abberation. If many make the claim it (the claim) is a valid phenomenon for psychologists to study, for the delusion/lie/etc. may be a human tendency. Regardless, it does not make me think the claim itself is true unless there is some other even possible evidence for it.

I did not mean that many people claiming that something happened made it likely that some phenomenon, such as what they claim, is going on, merely that something is happening, such as lying, self-delusion, or hallucination ...

On what basis do you limit the choices to only those possibilities and eliminate the possiblity that their claims are true? It is certainly true that I am agnostic about any truth claim that cannot do better than mere assertion, including that one. And mere ridicule is never an argument.

In fact, you were right the first time ... there is an experienced-based, rough-and-ready rule of thumb, not unlike Ockham's razor, that's encompassed in the saying "Where there's smoke, there's fire." It does mark a real difference between the claims about fairies and God without going to the truth of the underlying claim.

And yes, I have some agnosticism about whether or not there is something that someone might describe as "fairies" ... the universe has not necessarily shown itself to be less strange as we have learned more. But as John and I have said before, this is a sliding scale. There is no indication that there is any phenomenon to really investigate in the case of fairies while the same most certainly cannot be said of God. Fairies are a remote possibility not worth dealing with. The same, for so many reasons, cannot be said of claims about God.

That disposes of the question why I say we should treat those claims more seriously but it does not go to how we treat the question of whether or not they are true. Empiricism is our best form of knowledge, as long as it stays within its own sphere. I'm willing to listen to any research plan you may propose to investigate God claims, as long as it does not suffer the same problems you claim theists suffer from.

But what evidence (empiric or otherwise) do you have to support your claim that a purely internal phenomenon is probably an abberation? Am I supposed to take that as true based solely on your purely internal instinct about what constitutes "truth"?

On what basis do I discount that what people say is true, barring any other evidence whatsoever, as true? Well, the fact that many people's religious revelations are in direct contradiction of one another, meaning at least some are definitely false (and, indeed, they often contradict themselves), the fact that many people have been "sure" of something in the sense of faith and have since changed their minds, and the fact that many people were "sure" of something in the sense of faith with no evidence have been shown to be wrong once evidence was available - think of the Earth at the center of the universe. And that's only people that truly believe what they are saying. We also know for a fact that many people lie and/or exaggerate.

These are the standard reasons for not believing what someone says they know to be true, but rather wanting some evidence for it. The only additional step to get the argument ad populum is that since one person saying something is not evidence, a bunch of people saying something isn't evidence either. 0+0=0. When you say "where there's smoke there's fire" you are essentially stating that you take argument ad populum to be a valid argument, rather than a logical fallacy. I don't really know how to argue that it is, in fact, illogical. If you don't accept the concept of formal logic than you just don't, I guess. The only thing I can point out are some examples: the flying spaghetti monster is becoming more and more popular (you may say that people are merely pretending to believe in him, but I don't know what evidence you could possibly produce for this). Is there some point when it will cross that threshold into a strong possibility? What about Odin, in whom many people honestly and sincerely believed for some time, but is now out of favor? Was there a point when not enough people were endorsing him, allowing him to slide down that scale?

You also say "The same, for so many reasons, canot be said of claims about God." The only reason we have discussed at all is this same logical fallacy of many people saying so from personal revelation. Are there others? I know from your blog that you dislike ID'ists, so I'm not sure what you would put forward here.

Even if there are other reasons, you are saying that though you cannot, truly, claim that you are an a-fairiest, you choose to do so anyway because the possibility seems insufficiently likely to you. Thus one should call one's self an agnostic about god (or anything else) if and only if one finds the argument for god to be, if not likely, at least not "remote". This is not agnosticism. Agnosticism means "without knowledge" which you have admitted applies to fairies. You mean that you are rather a god "probablist" since what you are trying to communicate is not a lack of knowledge, but a belief in the high probability of god. (If I'm mischaracterizing the exact position of god on your sliding scale, you might instead call yourself something like a god "distinct-possibilitist", though that doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but either will get your actual position across.)

From a different tac: I'm interested in why you believe science and empiricism are our best forms of knowledge. On what basis? After all, empiricism has several unprovable claims at its root, such as that our sense-experiences map on to anything at all. The success of its predictions is no evidence, since what you take to be affirmitive evidence is itself an unprovable decision. You clearly don't think (my position) that a parsimony of unprovable assertions is a good thing, since an undisprovable god is nothing but a host of extraneous unprovable assertions.

You might think that everyone's reality is whatever they choose it to be by fiat, though then your description of empiricism as "our best form of knowledge" is misstated. This leads us again down the same road that in this definition one is an agnostic (in the meta-sense that John defined, since locally whatever you claim to be true is true for you) about everything. There is from here no possible way to say that you are more or less agnostic about some things, since your grounds for dismissing them are themselves unprovable assertions (such as that you consider many people saying something to be a kind of quasi-evidence or clue). This is the no-nothing position of radical skepticism, and it is not disprovable, but it also means you are contributing nothing to say you are agnostic about one claim or another.

Sorry about that long post; that what happens when I read something I want to respond to but can't get to a computer for almost a week I guess.

Sorry about that long post; that what happens when I read something I want to respond to but can't get to a computer for almost a week I guess.

That's okay but it might take me a while to get to answering. 'Til then ...

These are the standard reasons for not believing what someone says they know to be true, but rather wanting some evidence for it.

And yet, all those things can also be said of the process of science. There is always contradiction, more and less direct, between hypotheses in science, with some positions being necessarily false; science is littered with false claims held passionately (consider that doctor who drank Pasteur's vial of germs -- accidentally sterilized, lucky man); many scientists have held to their favored theories long after the evidence has gone against them and we just had that Korean scientist faking his cloning claims. Do you treat all propositions by scientists that do not yet have empiric evidence in their favor as aberrations? Are string theory, the multiverse and, for that matter, the Higgs boson aberrations?

But that wasn't my question, anyway. I asked for evidence that an internal phenomenon is probably false and you gave me back a version of the scientific method. Experience teaches us, however, that the scientific method does not guarantee "truth" and we know (because we constructed it that way) that the scientific method does not claim to examine, much less exhaust, all the possible truths that may exist. In effect, what you are doing is philosophically adopting science/empiricism as the only possible source of truth. Now that is a philosophically acceptable position (called scientism) but you have to understand that it is just as unevidenced as the theism you disdain.

The only additional step to get the argument ad populum is that since one person saying something is not evidence, a bunch of people saying something isn't evidence either. 0+0=0. When you say "where there's smoke there's fire" you are essentially stating that you take argument ad populum to be a valid argument, rather than a logical fallacy. I don't really know how to argue that it is, in fact, illogical. If you don't accept the concept of formal logic than you just don't, I guess.

Don't be insulting. The problem you're having is that you are confusing an empiric claim with a logical one. By experience (as the UFO example that you naturally agreed with to begin with) we know that the more reports of a particular phenomenon there are, the more likely something is going on. I am not claiming that there is any logical connection (hence no logical error) between the number of people who report a phenomenon and the truth of any one person's interpretation of or explanation for the phenomenon, either your claim they are all aberrations or the theists' claims that they are personal experience of God.

What I then go on to point out that, in the contest between your explanation and the theists' explanation for the phenomenon, yours is, at its core, just as unevidenced as theirs.

But here's a poser for you: a common response to IDers is that the overwhelming consensus of scientists rejects their claims. Is that a logical fallacy? If not, why not?

As for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, to begin with there is evidence that it is a hoax (of the satiric sort) just as the other favorite dismissive examples of atheists, the tooth fairy and Santa Clause. But let me turn it around. If you suddenly had a group of, say, a million people claiming (seriously, by all initial evidence) that they saw a creature mightily resembling the FSM, would you do nothing? Not even check the local water supply for hallucinogens?

What about Odin, in whom many people honestly and sincerely believed for some time, but is now out of favor? Was there a point when not enough people were endorsing him, allowing him to slide down that scale?

How many people are reporting the experience (or other evidence) of Odin? Why do you think that is a problem for what I've said?

You also say "The same, for so many reasons, canot be said of claims about God." The only reason we have discussed at all is this same logical fallacy of many people saying so from personal revelation. Are there others? I know from your blog that you dislike ID'ists, so I'm not sure what you would put forward here.

I was consistently pointing out that the reported personal experience of God is a widespread phenomenon in need of explanation (not least because of all the other effects religion has in our society), while belief in fairies is, relatively speaking, an unreported case.

Even if there are other reasons, you are saying that though you cannot, truly, claim that you are an a-fairiest, you choose to do so anyway because the possibility seems insufficiently likely to you.

I'm sorry, I can too be an a-fairyist, especially when I have no particular case before me. Just as I can be an a-braneist. If there was a sufficient reason to suspect that a fairy-shaped phenomenon existed, I'd consider it worth looking at empirically and I can consider fairies as conceptual entities as I can consider string theory. I do not (and, I say, cannot) make a truth-claim that there is no such possible entities as (by some definition) "fairies" or "branes". My use of the word "remote" was certainly not intended to convey any creationist-like calculation of "probabilities" in the absence of any facts on which to calculate them. Fairies are "remote" in the sense they are not reported and, therefore, there is nothing to investigate. Whether we even have the tools to investigate is another matter, of course.

Agnosticism means "without knowledge"

Don't make the mistake of confusing word roots with word meaning.

which you have admitted applies to fairies. You mean that you are rather a god "probablist" since what you are trying to communicate is not a lack of knowledge, but a belief in the high probability of god.

Is it a requirement to be an atheist that you are willing to go around and tell everyone else what they believe? My position, at its simplest (and, therefore, not completely accurate) is that there is a phenomenon that exists, the massively reported direct experience of God, the various explanations of which our means of investigation cannot adequately determine the truth or falsity of. It is a situation where we are "without knowledge" and are reduced to (sorry, John) mere philosophy and belief.

From a different tac: I'm interested in why you believe science and empiricism are our best forms of knowledge. On what basis? After all, empiricism has several unprovable claims at its root, such as that our sense-experiences map on to anything at all. The success of its predictions is no evidence, since what you take to be affirmitive evidence is itself an unprovable decision.

My idiosyncratic justification for accepting empiricism as better than (not inherently different from) other forms of "knowledge" is that, if I ignore the empiric world, it hurts. Now, indeed , I cannot demonstrate that the pain is real but I find it unpleasant and that's enough reason to treat it as if it is real. Other phenomenon appear to respond to treatment as if they are, in fact, physical and subject to consistent rules. By extension, then, (and by Hume's psychological justification) I'm willing to treat the empiric world as "real" for purposes of daily living and as the best available "knowledge." However, this has its limits as justification. There are "painful" experiences (such as "grief" and, in a different way, "beauty") that are not (obviously) physical. Therefore, I cannot say that empiricism exhausts the possibilities of what might be, in some absolute sense, "real."

You clearly don't think (my position) that a parsimony of unprovable assertions is a good thing,

I think it is, when applied universally to things that are beyond empiric investigation, a perfectly fine philosophy that is as unevidence as theism.

since an undisprovable god is nothing but a host of extraneous unprovable assertions.

Ah, what is proof?

There is from here no possible way to say that you are more or less agnostic about some things, since your grounds for dismissing them are themselves unprovable assertions (such as that you consider many people saying something to be a kind of quasi-evidence or clue).

My, my. You do so want to inhabit a black and white world. I suppose it is why atheists so often seem to agree with the thinking of theists. Part of being an agnostic is accepting ambiguity. There are no absolute answers available to humans (I say, quite unevidenced).

This is the no-nothing position of radical skepticism,

Oh, how I love this. Skepticism (I think you mean "know-nothing") is somehow now a bad thing? Since you seem to need "bright lines" so much, what is the dividing line between radical skepticism and the correct sort, such as your "parsimony of unprovable assertions" and how do you justify the line you draw?

and it is not disprovable, but it also means you are contributing nothing to say you are agnostic about one claim or another.

Except describing my philosophical stance on a certain question of the limits of knowledge, of course.

My position, at its simplest (and, therefore, not completely accurate) is that there is a phenomenon that exists, the massively reported direct experience of God, the various explanations of which our means of investigation cannot adequately determine the truth or falsity of. It is a situation where we are "without knowledge" and are reduced to (sorry, John) mere philosophy and belief.

a whole 'nother debate can be had as to whether one should say empirical testing v. mere philosophy or Philosophy v. mere empirical testing (I can't quite bring myself to insert a winking emoticon smiley thing here, but take it as read that I meant that facetiously)

It has to be said that this "massively reported direct experience of God" is a bit of a canard. Most of these direct experiences are of a very specific God, be it the Muslim, Christian, Jewish or what-have-you version. Indeed, even these groups are too broad; where one draws the line to say that two people are reporting the direct experience of the same thing (if it can be drawn anywhere) is a question. If you seek to conflate these experiences you'll be doing so against the direct reported experience of the faithful. Imagine a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian who says he has direct experience of a God: "The God you claim to feel loving you and telling you that you MUST BE SAVED BY JESUS is the exact same phenomenon as this guy's experience of God saying that Jesus was a prophet at best and you must keep kosher." "No, it isn't. The God I directly experience would never say either of those things." I don't see grounds for choosing which bits of the direct experience to say are valid and which to toss out, since we have no other means of verifying it by definition.

The god that cannot be tested, the Spinozan god of infinite retreat from reality, is the one that exceeds the "limits of knowledge" and we must forever remain agnostic on. But it is also a god that virtually no one (aside perhaps from some theologians) claims to have direct experience of. The various gods that are experienced, according to these people, are almost always present, interfering, Daddy-But-Bigger gods. These are often logically self-refuting (which is why most theologians don't defend these versions), and also sometimes quite testable at least in theory. As such they don't need some special "agnostic" category. One can simply say "There still may be data coming in, but all the tests so far have shown that it doesn't exist" Like phlogiston or caloric.

I don't mean to tell you what you believe (as all atheists apparently do) but it seems that you are arguing that while we technically perhaps cannot ever claim 100% certainty, and must therefore be "agnostic" in one sense about everything, the line of where to draw a-whateverism and agnosticism by your definition is shown by the numbers of reported experience (in this historical time and place for some reason). That's fine, but to then say that all of these people with mutually exclusive beliefs are one group for purposes of counting numbers of reporters seems impossible. Do you have some directly experienced knowledge that they're all "really" talking about the same thing?

As an aside, there are two other, perhaps less strong (?) arguments against your position. First, the fact that many people have direct experiences that can't be tested against empirical data, but those times when people claim to have direct experience of things that are empirically verifiable those direct experiences are often shown to be false, might make one leery of accepting the ones that we haven't yet figured out how to test.

Secondly let me add that it also might make you leery that direct experience of a single god as we are now discussing, rather than a pantheon of deities or a single principle or nature or mathematics or ancestors or..., can be shown to spread as a meme historically. Is this a magic ability of direct experience that is spreading, or merely a concept which is thought of independently at different times by several people but once thought of spreads in an observable way? This is also true of the concept of directly feeling just "A Presence" or some other non-defined experience rather than the actual god(s) of their fathers, as is more popular now.

Most of these direct experiences are of a very specific God, be it the Muslim, Christian, Jewish or what-have-you version.

For a skeptic, you're awfully willing to take the participants' report at face value. The phenomenon that needs investigation is the report by billions of people of something they call an experience of God (which, in any case, I suspect has certain core similarities, though I'm no expert in comparative religions) not the details of how the participants themselves explain the experience. I know of few, if any, people who report that the experience involves Jesus telling them to 'read your Bible.' It is much more like the report of Francis Collins of an 'experience of the ineffable.' Nor did I say that there would be any way to determine which explanation people give to the experience was true and which false. Merely identifying a phenomenon does not require that there necessary be a solution humans can arrive at.

Indeed, there is no reason to suspect that an infinite being could be experienced in ways that humans could sort into categories of right and wrong. An infinite being, which would be, by definition, beyond the understanding of human beings, might be many things to many people. The "mutually exclusive beliefs" (to the extent they really are) may simply reflect our inability to understand an infinite being.

And you are free to chose to be "leery" of other people's reported non-empiric experiences because they sometimes turn out to be untrue (do you treat their report of grief at the death of a loved one as untrue? -- but never mind). You can even turn it into an empiric rule of thumb but that doesn't mean it is delivering "knowledge," much less "truth." It is, like Ockham's Razor, simply a systematic guess.

... the line of where to draw a-whateverism and agnosticism by your definition is shown by the numbers of reported experience (in this historical time and place for some reason).

The line to be drawn is between knowledge and opinion. Unfortunately, the line is fuzzy, at best, and some of us would rather endure doubt than wrongly label our opinion as fact. You may find it frustrating that other (hopefully intelligent) people view what you think is "knowledge" is, in actuality, "opinion" but that doesn't mean that isn't the case.

And, out of curiosity, what other "historical time and place" do we investigate knowledge from but the present? Do we do science based on what people once believed but no longer do? Do we do science based on what we might know someday?

Which ties into your objection about the fact that the concept of God has changed over time, from pantheons of mostly local Gods to now mostly monotheisms. Why would that disqualify theism and not science? Why shouldn't the explanations for the phenomenon of the experience of God change just as our explanation of why the sun rises in the east and sets in the west changed? The explanations people give for the phenomenon are not necessarily dispositive of the existence of the phenomenon or of its nature.

I seem to be coming to the point in an argument where I begin to cycle back around (more on that in a moment).

I simply do not grant the phenomenon you are using as your base: that a large number of people claim direct experience of a theoretically undisprovable god about which we can never have knowledge. This "large number" can only be achieved by gerrymandering around their own reports, accepting some of their direct experiences as interesting phenomena and rejecting others on no basis interior to their self-reporting, but rather to make them conform to an a priori form, namely the philosophical, removed "god".

The phenomenon that I see is that a large number of people report direct Knowledge of all kinds of random things, most of them internally inconsistent and almost all of them mutually incompatible. It's interesting that we as humans feel groundless certainty, but I doubt that it is somehow impossible for neuropsychology to make any headway in explaining why this is.

-----

So the original point of the post that John made (I almost forgot there was a post at the beginning of these comments) was about the purpose of philosophical argument. I can only state that I was not debating you to convince other silent listeners, I have no way to prove this, and equally I doubted that I would sway you to my position. What this argument did do is bring into focus exactly where our disagreement lies, and strip away all the outer hubbub (hopefully. On the other hand I always have to fight the temptation to do a line-by-line response, since if you did the same back, it would end up far to tangential to be only a single argument, and would descend into unreadable self-referentialism.)

This "large number" can only be achieved by gerrymandering around their own reports, accepting some of their direct experiences as interesting phenomena and rejecting others on no basis interior to their self-reporting, but rather to make them conform to an a priori form, namely the philosophical, removed "god".

But this kind of "diagnosis" is commonly used effectively in medicine, given the limitations inherent in communicating symptoms. I don't think I've rejected the phenomena at all. I reject reliance on the patient's own explanation for the phenomena, just as a doctor would consider the patient's statement that "It hurts here" while ignoring the patient's statement that "It's my gall bladder, you have to take it out."

It's interesting that we as humans feel groundless certainty, but I doubt that it is somehow impossible for neuropsychology to make any headway in explaining why this is.

[Cough] You have certainty that science can answer everything?

We got started on the issue of whether recognizing the difference between the reported phenomenon of the experience of God and the reports of fairies was an ad populum argument. I had hopes that I could convince you otherwise on that point at least. The rest is just civil discussion that may not change our beliefs but (hopefully) sharpens our own thinking about them. I know it has mine, for which I thank you.