The Atheist Blogger

Skepdude recently commented on my article outlining the awareness I think needs to be raised over the true meanings of agnosticism. I feel his points deserved slightly more discussion and dissection than a simple comments thread, so here they are:

Ok, first of all I think you’re making an overly broad generalization when you define atheism as a stance which proclaims either to know or believe that there is no God. I consider myself an atheist, among other things, but I don’t use either “know” or “believe”.

I stated in the article “That is a generalization” in respect to my definitions. I also made sure not to mention atheism as a belief, which it isn’t. Atheism is a disbelief, as defined by the dictionaries. Whether or not you use the words “know” or “believe” personally, the definitions of atheism all rely on a disbelief of gods.

I rely on the lack of evidence to come to the conclusion that such lack of evidence makes the probability of God’s existence very, very very tiny, next to zero. Until further convincing evidence is presented the only logical position is to say that very likely there is no God. This is not a matter of belief nor is it knowledge. It’s simple statistics.

Forgetting the fact that statistics is a branch of science, science being a branch of knowledge, knowledge being a branch of belief…oh wait, you are talking about belief and knowledge. In fact, your admittance that the probability of God’s existence is “very, very, very tiny, next to zero” makes you an agnostic atheist whether you like the label or not.

The problem with your statistical analysis of God is you do not have a good basis for describing evidence that counts. There is no direct evidence of God, as he has never appeared before us personally and said “hey, I’m God”. Theists argue that the entire universe (as a whole, not as separate objects) is the evidence of a God. Your statistical analysis, whilst useful from a atheistic philosophical perspective, is bias as such. When we do a statistical analysis of the number and types of car traveling on a road, we know the description of the data we are collecting. We can distinguish between person and car, and different types of car. If a motorbike came along, there might be some arguing over whether it should be included, but overall we have a full data set. With the idea of God being so incomplete as it is, and such a being existing outside observation, we can never be certain of what constitutes relevant data and what doesn’t.

As far as agnosticism is concerned, regardless of how you define it, I find it to be a lazy position.

This is the point of the article. We shouldn’t go along with personal opinions of what words mean, but rather their actual definitions. I could say I find the word “nigger” to be offensive to blacks, but that doesn’t remove it’s historical position as a word to describe blacks. My personal feelings over a word doesn’t change the definition of it.

Why can’t we know about God, given how God is described by the major religions? Why would a God who’s always meddling in this universe and performing miracles and such not be provable? Of course we can know about God, as long as he is supposed to have some sort of direct effect on our reality, he or she is than well within the realms of science. Science and religion are not two separate magisteria ( I think I just butchered that word).

Which is why we should carefully explain the kind of God we are being agnostic about. We are agnostic about the God who supposedly exists outside the realms of the observable universe. Why would a God who is performing miracles not be provable? Well, perhaps such a being made sure that his miracles, however highly unlikely, always had a basis in the natural world? By saying we are agnostic atheists, we are saying that we do not believe in gods, but at the end of the day, we cannot know about something that has been supposedly placed outside our observable universe, even if such a being acts on the observable universe.

Suppose you lived in a 20m by 20m box, without any way of knowing what is outside the box. The box is your observable universe, since you have no knowledge of what lays outside it. Every night, whilst you sleep, someone takes the lid off the box, and places food for you to eat. You never see them because whoever does this makes sure that you are completely unconscious whilst they do it. You could could either deduce that the appearance of the fruit was a natural occurrence to your universe, or that some “God” was doing it. Even if you had no evidence to suggest otherwise, the proposition needs agnosticism to state “perhaps” or “maybe”. Agnosticism acknowledges the possibility, however remote.

Of course you can never prove that something does not exist, but does that justify taking the “we can not know” position? Are we to be agnostic about fairies, unicorns and Santa Claus? I don’t understand what you mean by an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. Both sound like oxymoron to me. What those terms imply is that I believe or not, while at the same time knowing that I can’t know if I’m right or wrong. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

Given that we know the origin of fairies, unicorns, and Santa Claus in literature, we do not need to be agnostic about them. They have been proven to be false, at least in the context of their definitions.

Indeed, most gods have also been proved to have their origins in literature only. These are not gods I would say I am agnostic about. What I am agnostic about is the idea of a god, some kind of being, energy, whatever, which is outside the universe. I don’t believe such a thing exists, because for me that would be too easy. However, given the nature of philosophical thinking, I have to admit that the possibility is there, however remote. Even Dawkins admits his agnosticism by saying he is 99.9% certain there is no God.

Whether the terms “agnostic atheist/theist” make sense to you or not isn’t the issue. They make sense to a lot of people, which is the reason for the article. Your definition is wrong though. What the terms imply is that whether we believe in God or not, the proof of such a being is impossible to find. Knowledge is different to belief. A belief does not need evidence to support it, merely ideas. Knowledge is a belief that has facts. You cannot know something if you do not first believe it to be true.

I don’t buy your whole “yes, but I don’t think it can be proven” line of reasoning, simply because it is not useful. It is meaningless. It can be applied to anything. Make up any fancy fantasy you can think of, and you can apply that line of reasoning. Agnosticism is a dialogue stopper. It is giving up, throwing your hands up in the air and saying, we can never know. The implication is that we should stop wasting our time. What if that sort of logic was to be applied to anything that’s just too hard for us to figure out currently?

I firmly believe that we should stop wasting time trying to “prove” or “disprove” God. Give that the very definition of God puts it outside our realm of existence seems obvious to me that you cannot prove it. Yes, Russell’s teapot is a good example of this. If we cannot prove it, we simply say so and move on. There is no point building massive telescopes for the sole purpose of finding Russell’s teapot, when by it’s very definition puts it outside our observation.

Agnosticism isn’t a scientific method, it is a philosophical method. We do not use it on anything that is too hard for us to firgure out for the reasons you have stated. It is simply not useful. Philosophy has never strived to prove anything. Indeed, all it has done is prove the diversity of the human mind. Agnosticism is an approach on philosophical questions, not scientific ones. It should only be used as such. Agnosticism allows discussion of beliefs or disbeliefs, but states that as soon as you try to prove or disprove those beliefs, you are going to reach a dead end, and you really should stop wasting time.

Pick a side. Either you are convinced there is a God, or you’re not, or you’re on the fence. But you can’t have it both ways, and that’s what your agnostic atheist and agnostic theist terms are, having it both ways. That’s not a position any logical person should take.

Here we have the classic misunderstanding of those terms yet again, which again justifies my article and reasoning for the agnostic project. Agnosticism is not an “on the fence” position. An “on the fence” position would be “I honestly do not know” or “I honestly don’t know what I believe”. An agnostic admits the possibility, but says that they cannot know. Not knowing and not being able to know are too very different things. The former is a form of ignorance, the latter is an admitance to a lack of justifiable method.

We can’t prove that Russell’s teapot does not exist. Does that imply that we should be agnostic about it? There’s millions of things we can’t disprove. Does that lend them legitimacy, simply because we can dream of them?

On a technical level, yes. However I doubt very many people are agnostic about absolutely everything. Agnosticism isn’t about making some claim a legitimate claim, but rather saying “the claim is impossible to prove or disprove, therefore we should stop wastimg time trying to do so”. It pushes the claim to the mountain of the possible, and leaves it there. I could claim a million things, each being possible, and each unable to be disproved. Agnosticism does not have a say on whether they are probable, but whether they are possible. Anosticism does not have a say on whether you should believe such things, and many people would probably choose not to; if the possibility is there, however remote that possibility may be, it must be recognised, if only to designate it as such.

Of course, as I have previously stated in regards to the origins of gods, my ideas would probably reach the same scrutiny. If I simply made something up I wouldn’t expect people to be seriously agnostic about it, simply because I pulled it out of thin air.

In light of recent events surrounding The Barefoot Bum’s brief affair and subsequent termination of his self hosting, I am coming out fully in support of Db0’s efforts to get more people self hosted. The Barefoot Bum has taken down his self hosted site, but his review of self hosting is still in my feed reader. I should point out that I have only respect for The Barefoot Bum, and this post should be read as a counter-point to some of his points against self hosting, as well as to inform people of what they should do in terms of self hosting.

I’ve more-or-less completed the move to the self-hosted blog. Overall I consider the effort an epic fail, justified only in that I like messing with technology for its own sake. The effort has clearly pointed out what the authors of Wordpress need to do to take their technology to the next level.

db0 was very generous with his time and effort to make the move a success, but that his effort was both considerable and absolutely necessary is a strong argument against moving.

Unless you’re a LAMP developer, I strongly recommend that you stick with your free blog, Blogger or Wordpress.com.

The fact that time and effort is needed to make a self hosted blog is not an argument against self hosting, let alone a “strong” argument. A self hosted blog is good for a number of reasons which Db0 went over in his multitude of posts relating to the subject. Such good things do not come easily, and the fact that Db0 offered his services freely surely negates this argument. Unless you are planning to move your blog constantly around, I cannot see how this argument could hold. Moving your blog to a self hosted platform is a one-way trip.

In regards to the “LAMP developer” comment, I would point out only that I set up my first blog at the age of 16, with absolutely no experience with websites, let alone hosting. This was back in the days when WordPress was without the documentation and support it now has. Setting up a WordPress blog is now one of the easiest things to do with a self hosted account. WordPress has a large number of tutorials (written by users) that should guide you through the process.

On the other hand, Blogger is much easier to use than Wordpress, since Google has complete control over the feature set. Wordpress is getting better, but it’s still much more complex and many features and user interface elements are counter-intuitive.

Wordpress is a great system, but it suffers the problem of almost all open-source systems. It’s written by computer nerds for computer nerds and requires a steep learning curve just to get started. There are already enough cool features in Wordpress; the developers need to focus on ease of use for the non-technical user. Firefox should be their model. They also need to support scripts.

I don’t quite understand how WordPress is counter intuitive, especially in regard to the user interface. As Db0 pointed out on the original post, you click “Settings” for settings, “Write” for writing a post. If you cannot work out where to find everything, go look it up and you will most likely remember it for next time.

A “steep learning curve” is possibly a tad over-dramatic as I have already pointed out the vast documentation for beginners and the easy to use interface. The documentation isn’t meant to be read cover to cover, but is meant to help on individual sections. If you want to know how to add widgets or change settings, you will find the relevant article.

Supporting scripts is one of the things that WordPress has nailed completely, so I do not see how Barefoot Bum managed to miss this. You can either edit the templates and add the code, or simply add it to a text widget. Both take less than 1 minute to do.

Wordpress also needs to make migration from Blogger 100% complete, bulletproof and one-click. Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress was “easy” only in the computer nerd sense of “not completely impossible.” For the ordinary person the process is extremely complicated. I couldn’t have done myself: db0 did most of the work. I still have to manually move my non-scripted blogrolls (I link to 100 or so blogs) item by item. I still have to maintain my original blog, because there are still many people linking there. (Indeed the hit count on the original blog hasn’t dropped much). I suspect also that Pedro Timoteo has abandoned the Planet Atheism aggregator, so I have to continue posting links to the old blog to publish my content there. I still have to migrate James F. Elliott’s posts.

You will never get a migration system that is “one-click”, nor one that is “bulletproof” for the simple reason that both are too complex to perform globally. Authentication is needed to export the blogger account, and after that it is actually a one-click process. Given the vast differences in styles of Blogger and WordPress, having everything move across perfectly will be impossible.

As for the blogrolls, it can be a pain, but there are alternatives such as creating a text-widget and simply pasting the raw html code from the old blog. No harm, no fuss, done in a few minutes.

As for maintaining the old blog, I find this process counter to the original aim of the exercise, which was to move to a self hosted blog. You could always post an article linking to the new site, and hope that people get the hint. As for Planet Atheism, I thought they do everything via RSS, so all one would have to do would be to change the RSS feed they have in their database. If you used something like FeedBurner already, this process would be much easier.

That said, I’m sorry it didn’t work out for The Barefoot Bum. I’m not sure whether I agree with a week trial for something like this, as in my opinion 7 days does not give you enough time to properly go over the interface and make sure you understand everything. I think if more emphasis was put on the documentation, people might last longer. It seems a waste of a hosting account though, especially one that has been paid for, along with the domain.

So, what advice should I give to people wishing to move?

Well, firstly I would make sure they knew that this might be a tricky process first time, as it is with all new things. When you get a new car you only know the basic functions, and need to read the manual to find out how to change the clock, and find out where everything is. The same applies to self hosting. Once you have done it the first time, you will understand it more. Hopefully though, you will never have to move the blog again!

Secondly, I would ask people to comply with a month long (possibly more) trial of the new hosting. DO NOT just give up after a few days because something is going wrong. When I first moved from Windows to Linux (arguably more confusing that self hosting) there were many times when I messed up configuration files and had to spend hours messing around in terminals. This wasn’t a negative point, it was a learning curve. If I had given up there and then I wouldn’t have reached the point where I am now, which is with a very efficient and fast version of Gentoo Linux, self configured.

Finally, I would demand people ask about things they do not understand. Db0 is doing this for free, and I would be happy to provide support, or answer questions about WordPress. I have already linked to the documentation for WordPress, so please use it!