How an agnostic differs from an atheist - concepts and distinctive features

Author Igor Bukker

20.03.2021 12:12

The science

Psychologists have completed another study on how the moral guidelines of atheists differ from those of believers. Representatives of both groups place high value on values ​​such as justice and protection of the oppressed. However, they differ in their assessment of loyalty and respect for authority.

Optional Preface

We met Joseph Solomonovich, as they say, completely by accident. We were both invited to a live broadcast of the television program “The Domino Principle,” dedicated to the topic “There are no miracles in the world.” Joseph Solomonovich defended the stated point of view, I acted as an opponent. After the program, Joseph Solomonovich asked me if our magazine was ready to give the floor to an atheist. I honestly admitted that I have been dreaming about this for a long time. But atheists, unfortunately, seem to have disappeared into Rus'. Unfortunately, because communicating (and polemicizing) with an honest atheist is much easier, more pleasant and, probably, even more fruitful than, say, with a modern occultist or an adept of urine therapy. The only condition for publication was the editors' right to reply. Which is exactly what we took advantage of.

Vladimir Legoyda

Joseph LASKAVIY

Start of discussion. Ending here

From an atheist's point of view

Audi partem alteram (Listen to the other side, Latin)

“What can you atheists say? That there is no God?!” — Venediktov, editor of the democratic radio station “Echo of Moscow,” in response to the author’s proposal to give the floor to an atheist.

First, I want to express my joy that I, an atheist, was given the floor. Now this is a rare opportunity - just as under the communist regime a religious person did not have the opportunity to speak out, so now an atheist is not allowed to speak anywhere. In recent years, the only exception was A. Gordon's daytime program "Gloomy Morning".

A little personal history. At school and during my junior year at the institute, I was a glib and uneducated atheist. Then he began to read both religious and atheistic literature and became a knowledgeable and calm atheist. One incident played a big role in this: in the institute’s dormitory I lived in the same room with a student from Togo, Carso Parfait. before our 1st honey he graduated from some French school, it seems, a Jesuit college, and was a zealous Catholic. The guy was very nice, and his religiosity had nothing to do with me, but one day we somehow got caught in tongues. I believe that his French teachers did not spend much time preparing for discussions with atheists “about God and the stone”, “about the suicidal God”, etc. I was having fun and suddenly I saw tears in his eyes, huge, the size of a currant berry. It seemed to hit me: why am I offending him? After all, neither he nor I will change our views. There were no third parties there who had not yet established their worldview. So I just want to win the argument? And this is not worth a person's tears. Since then I have been a “quiet”, internal atheist until recently. But now, when the Russian Orthodox Church is successfully trying to take the place of the ideological department of the CPSU Central Committee, its functionaries and activists have seized a monopoly on TV and are broadcasting dozens of programs there, without giving the floor to opponents, when they are followed by preachers of other religions and completely wild witches, prophetesses, etc. .d. - a materialist is simply obliged to talk about his views. Unfortunately, on TV they don’t give atheists words for discussion, and even just to say “I’m an atheist!” - you need to be either Nobel laureate V.Ya. Ginzburg or Kapitsa Jr.

Therefore, thanks again to the Foma magazine.

Atheist in the description of clerics

Taking advantage of the fact that TV viewers do not see real atheists, the clerics (all sorts of bishops) created the image of an atheist - such a scarecrow with whom they debate, the argument turns out to be very easy for them because this “stuffed atheist” just stupidly repeats “There is no God, there is no God!” Others, more thoughtful, say that an atheist is the same believer, only he believes that there is no God. In the best case, an atheist is recognized as having the right to a belief system, but a very primitive one - an atheist believes only in what he can touch with his hands and calculate on a calculator, the rest does not exist for him.

Atheism in the world

Around 750 million people in the world are atheists. And this is 11% of the total population of the Earth.

This figure is growing. But still, if we compare the indicators of believers - followers of a certain religion, it becomes clear that the number of atheists is small.

The CIA provides the following statistics on its website:

• Christians - 31.4%;
• Islamists - 23.2%;
• Indians - 15%.

But these numbers may vary depending on the country. For example, in Sweden, Denmark and Vietnam, more than 80% of the population consider themselves atheists.

Other countries with large numbers of atheists: Norway, Japan, Czech Republic, Finland, France and South Korea.

According to the American Pew Research Center, in Russia there are 71% Orthodox Christians, 75% theists, and 10% Muslims.

Atheist in life

In fact, an atheist sees everything in life, perceives everything. His world is not poorer, but richer than the world of the idealist. An atheist sees the real beauty and complexity of the world and rejoices in it.

Accepting the complexity of the world, he is ready to fight what he considers evil. An atheist does not at all believe that he knows everything; his system of answering questions is scientific. To the question “Why?” he replies: “That’s why.” And to the next question, “Why is this?” "Because…". And finally, when his knowledge is exhausted, he answers: “I don’t know this yet, but then I hope to find out.” The atheist knows that the more we know, the more the sphere of ignorance increases, and this pleases him.

Anaximenes of Miletus, who lived in the 4th century BC, told his student: “...your knowledge is a small circle, and mine is a large one. But all that remains outside these circles is the unknown. A small circle has little contact with the unknown. And henceforth, the more you learn new things, the more unclear questions you will have. And this is wonderful, because no matter how boring a world would be in which everything is known.”

A religious person has one answer to everything: “God did it that way!” or “God wants it this way!” It is always correct, unverifiable (cannot be falsified) and therefore false (see Karl Popper about this).

One might say that religious people are like soldiers who paint the grass green and the snow white, awaiting the general's inspection. The atheist, like Laplace, who answered Napoleon I’s question: “Where is the place for God in your system?”, replies: “I don’t need this hypothesis.

Agnosticism in philosophy

The German philosopher of modern times I. Kant studied the phenomenon of agnosticism and developed a coherent and consistent theory of this direction. According to Kant, agnosticism in philosophy is the impossible cognition of reality or reality by the subject, because:

1. Human abilities of knowledge are limited by his natural essence.
2. The world is unknowable in itself; a person can only know a narrow external region of phenomena and objects, while the internal remains “terra incognita”.
3. Cognition is a process in which matter studies itself with its inherent reflective ability.

D. Berkeley and D. Hume, other prominent philosophers, also contributed to this area of ​​philosophy. Briefly, who is an agnostic and the general features of agnosticism from the works of philosophers are presented in the following theses:

1. Agnosticism is closely related to the philosophical movement - skepticism.
2. An agnostic rejects objective knowledge and the ability to fully understand the world.
3. Knowledge of God is impossible, obtaining reliable information about God is difficult.

An atheist is not an agnostic

A favorite trick of the clerics is to declare atheists agnostics. They say to the atheist: “You yourself admit that you cannot know everything, how then do you claim that there is no God?!” The atheist’s answer is simple: “the agnostic says that he doesn’t know whether there is a God, but without knowing everything, I know for sure that the gods you described (Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, etc.) do not exist, and they did not create the world,” those. the atheist is specific. By the way, he can easily imagine beings creating worlds (as in the fantastic stories of Stanislaw Lem), but these will not be supernatural beings, not gods, but simply very powerful and knowledgeable beings. After all, we, with our achievements today, would seem like gods to primitive man.

Vladimir Legoyda

What is an agnostic?

An agnostic is a person who does not deny the existence of God, but also admits that he may simply not exist. The percentage of agnostics is increasing every day. For them there are no authoritative sources in various religions; all sacred scriptures for an agnostic are just literary monuments. All agnostics strive for the truth and understand that the world order is much more complex than it seems at first glance, but in the absence of evidence, knowledge becomes impossible for an agnostic, and an inquisitive mind questions everything.

The term “agnosticism” was first introduced into science by T.G. Huxley was a follower of Darwinian evolutionary theory to describe his views on religious beliefs. Richard Dawkins, in his work The God Delusion, identifies several types of agnostics:

1. Agnostic in fact. Faith in God is slightly higher than disbelief: not entirely convinced, but inclined to believe that there is a Creator after all.
2. Unbiased agnostic. Faith and unbelief are exactly in half.
3. Agnostic, inclined towards atheism. There is a little more disbelief than faith; there are a number of doubts.
4. An agnostic is essentially more of an atheist. The probability of the existence of God is absolutely small, but not excluded.

What do agnostics believe?

Can an agnostic believe in God? This is the question asked by people who are gradually moving away from religion, but continue to believe in “their” way. A typical characteristic of an agnostic helps to understand these issues:

• refrains from judgment: whether there is a God or not, i.e. can neither refute nor prove the existence or absence of the Creator;
• believes that a person must act on his own;
• even if God exists, he has nothing to do with man;
• the concept of good and evil is relative, it is undesirable behavior;
• a person’s conscience is the measure of his actions;
• most agnostics admire the personality and life of Jesus Christ, but see him as an ordinary person, albeit endowed with super qualities;
• doubt the existence of the soul and immortality;
• the meaning of life for an agnostic is life itself with its joys and sorrows and the goals that a person sets for himself;
• They consider the evidence of the existence of God or his absence to be a matter of time, while there are few of them and all are doubtful.

From a Christian's point of view

The modern world is teeming with people who have forgotten that they have dogmas. They would not call their views dogmas, although the idea of ​​progress requires more blind faith than the idea of ​​immortality.

G.K. Chesterton.

Unfortunately, I cannot answer Joseph Laskavoy the way Alexander Green once answered Yuri Dombrovsky, who came to interview him for the magazine “Atheist”:

“Your disbelief will soon pass.” And not only because I am not Green, and my respected opponent is not Dombrowski. And the time is different, and the people are different. To be honest, I don’t really believe that my arguments will be able to dissuade Joseph Solomonovich. The dispute between a believer and an unbeliever about faith most of all reminds me of the dispute between a lover and a non-lover about love. How can someone who flutters on her wings convince with rational arguments someone who sees the reason for his behavior in a change in chemical processes in the body or in something else, but not in a real feeling for a real person?

What then can we talk about and why argue? I think only about the consequences. A lover (a believer) assures the whole world that love makes him purer and better, although sometimes it is not easy to change. The unloved (non-believer) is convinced that love has a harmful effect on both the lover and those around him. If only because there is no object of love. Actually, this is what my respected opponent writes about: what is good and what is bad? What is right? Faith in God or disbelief in Him? This is what we will try to talk about.

Venediktov, who did not allow my respected opponent onto Echo of Moscow, is actually wrong. He’s not right even philosophically. To say that there is no God is not an empty phrase. This is a serious and meaningful statement, from which a lot follows. Let us remember Captain Lebyadkin from Dostoevsky’s “Demons”: “If there is no God, then what kind of staff captain am I?”

Gnostic and agnostic - the difference

Atheism and agnosticism have united in such a direction as atheistic agnosticism, in which belief in any deity is denied, but the presence of divine manifestation as a whole is not denied. In addition to agnostics, there is also the opposite “camp” - gnostics (some philosophers consider them true believers). What is the difference between Gnostics and Agnostics?

1. Agnostics question the knowledge of God, Gnostics simply know that he exists.
2. Followers of Gnosticism believe in the truth of human knowledge through the knowledge of reality through scientific and mystical experience; agnostics believe that the world is unknowable.

An atheist in my understanding: on the meaning of dialogue

First of all, it’s not entirely clear to me who the “real atheists” are and where – during the day with fire – you need to look for them. As for the “stuffed atheist,” I have never encountered such a thing. In addition, let's immediately clarify the statement that an atheist is also a believer. There is no disdain for atheists, no primitivization here. The point is that, ideologically, people can be divided into those who believe in the existence of God and those who do not believe in Him.

I will not go deeper into the analysis of how the faith of a theist differs from the disbelief of an atheist (and they, of course, differ. Atheism is not “the same faith,” but a different one). I'll just note this. A dialogue between an atheist and a believer makes sense only when both of them, one believes and the other does not believe, in the same God. This point is very important, and I am going to insist on it with all the force that is permissible in our politically correct times. Otherwise, we do not and cannot have any subject for dispute, conversation, dialogue, etc. In other words, if I believe in the future of Russia, and my opponent does not believe in the future of Georgia, it is unlikely that we will understand each other - to understand, we need, as scientists say, to agree on terms. And since atheism - logically and historically - is a reaction to theism (at first people believed, and then began to doubt the existence of the object of their faith), then ideas about God will have to be borrowed from believers, and not from atheists.

Therefore, our polemic with Joseph Solomonovich will make sense if we discuss my faith in God, who, in the words of the Gospel, is Love, and not someone’s idea of ​​a bearded and tired (or nasty) grandfather flying on a cloud through interplanetary space. I personally have never believed in such a God, I do not believe and will not believe, even if all the atheists in the world begin to convince me of the opposite - that is, that this elderly cloud guide is the object of my faith.

Under the microscope of psychologists

A study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology in 2011 found that “the mistrust of atheists is comparable to that of rapists.”

A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that for 44% of Americans, compared with 26% of Canadians, believing in God makes a person highly moral.

The last four surveys on the Amazon Mechanical Turk online platform, which included a total of 4,193 respondents from the United States (a relatively religious country) and Sweden (a generally non-religious country),

Non-believers, the study says, are not immoral beings due to their upbringing and high level of analytical thinking.

For believers, moral criteria such as:

• authority (respect for government officials, the police, parents and teachers);
• loyalty (loyalty to one’s group, for example, the country - do not discredit the state symbols of the country);
• holiness (do not humiliate human dignity, often in a sexual sense, for example, avoid promiscuity).

However, both groups disagreed with the statement: “I am willing to behave unethically if I think it will help me succeed.”

Psychologists have concluded that non-believers are no more immoral than believers.

An atheist in life: what is it?

I am ready to admit that my respected opponent in this life sees everything and perceives everything.” I am even ready to consider the anonymous atheist cited by my opponent as a kind of ideal type, in opposition to another ideal type - the Orthodox Christian. Precisely ideal, because in real life, alas, among those who consider themselves atheists, as well as among those who consider themselves Christians, not everyone “enjoys life.”

However, I categorically disagree with the following expression: “An atheist does not at all believe that he knows everything... his system of answering questions is scientific.” Moreover, I disagree not as an Orthodox Christian, but as a culturologist, as a teacher, finally. It does not in any way follow from the atheism of our ideal type that his system of views is scientific. This is a typical methodological error characteristic of recent Soviet times, when atheism was proclaimed scientific.

Therefore, I will repeat with the insistence of the Roman senator, who insisted on the need to destroy Carthage: atheistic, as well as theistic, worldviews cannot be finally rationally proven. Therefore, it is methodologically correct to contrast not religion with science, but a non-religious worldview with a religious one. It is more logical to contrast science with pseudoscience, that is, with that which claims to be genuine and precisely scientific knowledge, but is not such (for example, astrology, history according to Fomenko, etc.).

Outwardly, it may seem that the atheist is more scientific, for he argues something like this: “Science does not (and cannot testify) in any way about what is beyond the limits of rational knowledge. This means there is nothing to talk about here. This means there is no God.” The reasoning of a believer will be almost the same, right down to the last sentence, which will sound different: “This means that it is impossible to speak about God in the language of science.”

I repeat, I in no way doubt that my respected opponent is well acquainted with and has excellent command of scientific instruments, but this fact follows solely from his scientific training, and not from his atheistic worldview. And since the Higher Attestation Commission awarded me the degree of Candidate of Sciences, I dare to hope that I also know the basics of scientific methodology.

As for the expression “scientific atheism,” it is nothing more than an oxymoron, that is, a combination of the incongruous—like Tolstoy’s “living corpse.” There is nothing offensive to atheism or atheists in this statement - there are simply different ways of understanding the world and relating to it. There is a way of faith, and there is a way of knowledge. Both atheism and theism are ways of believing. (It’s just that the theist’s faith is most often based on special experience, and the atheist’s disbelief is based on scientific data, which cannot measure this experience, therefore they deny him objectivity.) In other words, an atheist can be a scientist (as well as a believer), but atheism can be scientifically cannot. An atheist may be based on scientific evidence, but that does not make atheism a science.

I am also ready to agree with my respected opponent that a religious person (Christian) has one answer to everything: “God wants it that way.” But only if Joseph Solomonovich admits that Venediktov is right that for a non-religious (atheist) this answer sounds like “Because there is no God.” If my respected opponent talks about the diversity of an atheist’s answers, then, excuse me, why am I, a believer, denied the right to a colored perception of life? Gilbert Chesterton wrote about this: “I do not want to be attributed to me a wild, absurd opinion; I do not believe that our views and tastes depend only on circumstances and are in no way correlated with the truth. I apologize to free thinkers, but I will still allow myself to think freely.” It is time to accuse the anti-clericals of creating the image of a “stuffed Christian.” However, this already turns out to be a citation. To be honest, it’s not involuntary.

As for the reference to Karl Popper, whom I deeply respect, here too I have to disappoint Joseph Solomonovich. And again - not as an Orthodox Christian, but as a culturologist. The principle of falsifiability of scientific knowledge, to which my respected opponent appeals, was indeed introduced by Karl Popper into the philosophy of science in order to distinguish between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. But Popper argued that only scientific knowledge can, in principle, be falsifiable. And he strictly recognized as unscientific that which cannot be falsified!

In a little more detail: unlike his positivist predecessors, who believed that scientific knowledge is true, and the criterion of scientificity is empirical confirmability (verification), Popper believed that scientific knowledge cannot lay claim to truth. This is just one type of knowledge (along with everyday, religious, etc.). This type is very specific and must be distinguished from others. Popper introduces the above principle as a criterion. Its meaning is that only a theory that is capable of formulating the conditions under which it turns out to be false can be considered scientific. Due to this attitude towards scientific knowledge, Popper was absolutely convinced that any scientific theory would inevitably turn out to be false in the (not) distant future. And scientists will have to find a new logical explanation for the once explained facts. This fundamental falsifiability of scientific knowledge is, according to Popper, the way of developing science.

If the conditions under which the thesis turns out to be false cannot be formulated, then such knowledge is not scientific.

This does not mean that such knowledge should be branded as bad. Let’s take the thesis: “London is the capital of Great Britain.” Provided that it can be proven that London is not located in Great Britain, or that there is no such city, our statement about the capital claims of London will be false. Which, according to Popper, is evidence that this thesis can be considered scientific. Let’s take another thesis: “God exists.” Can we formulate conditions under which our thesis will refute itself? If we do not assume that God rotates in near-earth or other orbits, but proceed from the Christian understanding of God as a transcendent (alien to the world) Person, then such conditions cannot be formulated. Which inevitably takes ideas about God beyond the boundaries of scientific competence. That is, scientific knowledge can neither confirm nor refute the existence of God. Q.E.D.