{"id":258,"date":"2007-05-09T10:47:15","date_gmt":"2007-05-09T14:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=258"},"modified":"2007-05-09T10:47:15","modified_gmt":"2007-05-09T14:47:15","slug":"why-i-am-an-agnostic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=258","title":{"rendered":"Why I am an agnostic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The excellent Gene Expression<\/a> blog has a pointer<\/a> to a Plos Article<\/a> on the effects of meditation on the brain: after three months practising , people got better at noticing things which in normal life we can’t (very crude summary). This kind of thing raises the prospect that we can lift out “technologies” like meditation from their encrusting superstition and practice them in a wholly atheistic way. Something like that is certainly what seems to be going on with AA.<\/span> The only two alcoholics I know well who attend it (both, coincidentally, religious affairs journalists) are neither of them exactly believers. But they would be lost without the ability to behave as if they had a personal providence.<\/p>\n\n

Some AA groups are deeply and explicitly religious, and some less so; clearly, the particular form of doctrine doesn’t matter very much. But the social format matters a great deal. You can’t get the desired effect (sobriety) without some combination of belief and<\/em> practice. Which comes first? I don’t think the question is answerable and I suppose that both must modify each other in practice.<\/p>\n\n

But suppose that it is found that we can’t, so to say, purify the techniques of religion so that they function outside of particular social environments. This suggests that there is some knowledge about the world embedded in them which must remain forever implicit and hidden from us. We can’t know completely why they have the effects on us that they do. They interact with some features of the world which we can’t understand in any other way.<\/p>\n\n

In that case, it seems to me that one must be doubly agnostic: one, in the obvious sense that we can’t know whether these features of the world revealed by eg meditation are those which some descriptions of God are also attempting to describe. Second, we must also be agnostic about whether this situation will ever change. It’s one thing to have a kind of metaphysical research programme that it committed to the idea that all mysteries must eventually yield to the approach of natural science. There are certainly a huge number of mysteries that will. But it’s quite another to assert that we can know<\/em> that there are none which won’t. I don’t think we should assert that or assume it. This position is related to Colin McGinn’s “mysterianism” about consciousness, of course.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The excellent Gene Expression blog has a pointer to a Plos Article on the effects of meditation on the brain: after three months practising , people got better at noticing things which in normal life we can’t (very crude summary). … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}