Why I'm Not an Atheist: The Case for Agnosticism [View all]

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Posted: 05/28/2013 12:00 pm
Omar Baddar
Political Scientist, Human Rights Activist

I had my falling out with religion in my early 20s, and a few years ago I published a piece making the case against religious certitude and blind faith. I also read some of the works of "the new atheists" with great interest, and watched them devastate religious opponents in entertaining public debates. However, a convincing argument against religion is not necessarily an equally compelling one for atheism. Between religious certitude and atheism lies a more suitable ground for truly open and skeptical minds: agnosticism.

For clarity's sake, it is important to note that no credible atheist claims they can prove that God does not exist. Atheists merely claim that there is no evidence at all for God's existence, making "him" as probable as a pink unicorn or a celestial tea pot. In the section on agnosticism in his famous book "The God Delusion," renowned scientist Richard Dawkins mentions the "tooth fairy" analogy to argue that while we should be technically agnostic on the existence of fairies because we lack evidence in either direction, in practice we are all (or at least the reasonable among us) "a-fairyists." But is God really only as probable as a tooth fairy?

In order for the tooth fairy analogy to be accurate, we would have to modify reality in one way: teeth would have to magically go missing from under pillows in a manner that science cannot even begin to explain. If that were the reality, no one could assert with any merited confidence that tooth fairies are definitely behind the inexplicable disappearance of teeth, but the idea would not be so patently absurd either. If that were the reality, then God would indeed be as probable as a tooth fairy.

What is analogous in the real world to the magic disappearance of teeth is the very existence of existence. Yes, science can (and if we survive long enough, probably will) explain almost everything about our evolution and the development of the universe, but it can't explain why there is something in the first place rather than nothing. Dawkins argued that it is easier to comprehend simple beginnings to the universe than complex ones, but I would argue that, when it comes to the universe, beginnings are fundamentally unfathomable, be they simple or complex. What "beginning" could possibly stop us from asking, what was there before that? The alternative, of course, would be that the universe has always been here, which is equally unfathomable, as we have evolved in Middle World to think in terms of beginnings and ends because everything we know is temporary.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/omar-baddar/why-im-not-an-atheist-the-case-for-agnosticism_b_3345544.html