[Vision2020] Interfaith Panel Thurs. May 15

[Chasuk]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Donovan Arnold
<donovanjarnold2005 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Agnostics and Atheists are not faiths. They are anti-faiths.

Correct and incorrect simultaneously.  While agnostics and atheists
are not "faiths" (the part you got right), they are also not
"anti-faiths" (they part you got wrong).

I subscribe to the Bertrand Russell definitions of agnosticism and
atheism.  If you embrace other definitions, then what follows may not
work for you (which is why in my personal life I have stopped using
these labels, having long grown weary of tedious debates).

Russell expressed it succinctly in this paragraph:

"... An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or
not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a
God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends
judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for
affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that
the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he
may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in
practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. His
attitude may be that which a careful philosopher would have towards
the gods of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that Zeus and
Poseidon and Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should
be at a loss to find conclusive arguments. An Agnostic may think the
Christian God as improbable as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for
practical purposes, at one with the atheists."

I know Christian agnostics, who quite happily acknowledge that they
don't know that God exists, whilst fervently believing that he does,
thereby leaving room for doubt, a necessary ingredient of faith.

When I was a Christian, I was an existentialist in the school of Søren
Kierkegaard, so naturally the "leap to faith" (or "leap of faith") was
an important part of my belief (and remains so).

As for atheism being anti-faith, consider that most flavours of
Buddhism have no consistent, explicit doctrine of a god or gods, yet
is emphatically a faith, if only arguably a religion.  What I'm trying
to say is, neither affirming the nonexistence of deities or rejecting
theism necessarily means that you lack faith.

Chas