An introduction to militant agnosticism

On Q&A the other night Dr John Dickson said that the God hypothesis explains the universe to him. With all due respect, he is mistaken. The God hypothesis might give meaning to the universe, but it cannot explain anything because it cannot be tested or refuted.

Without falsifiability and testability, a proposition cannot provide any knowledge. Consider the following example. Someone dies. The local priest explains the situation by pointing out the person was evil and hypothesising that God punished them.

Then someone lovely dies. The evidence refutes the priest’s hypothesis, which needs to be modified. If a suitable modification cannot be made then the hypothesis must be abandoned and ignorance admitted.

But religious explanations do not admit ignorance, they jump to untestable positions—‘God is unfathomable’, ‘it is a question of faith’, and best of all ‘God moves in mysterious ways’. These propositions cannot be confirmed or denied and, as such, they do nothing to further our knowledge.

Contrast this situation with a testable proposition: this woman died because she suffered cancer of the brain. In future cases where someone dies and we discover cancer of the brain we can explain the situation. We have knowledge.

If someone dies but their cancer of the brain appears not to be the cause we can modify our hypothesis and make further tests. Perhaps brain cancer requires a critical mass to be terminal—here we are nuancing and growing our knowledge.

This is scientific method as elucidated by Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. We conjecture a hypothesis and then test it in controlled conditions. If our tests confirm our hypothesis then we can treat is as fact, though not as truth, because all things remain falsifiable. If our tests refute our hypothesis we must modify or abandon it and remain ignorant.

There is nothing wrong with ignorance. We can live perfectly well not knowing the origins of the universe or the intricacies of junk DNA. We can’t live well when bigots argue their platforms from faith-based positions that are impervious to logical analysis.

Accepting ignorance is a crucial part of the atheist platform, which is why many atheists are taking the step of referring to themselves as militant agnostics. Militant agnosticism is pure scientific method. Its position is that ‘God exists’ is a hypothesis that cannot be tested and verified, and therefore cannot be taken as fact.

Militant agnosticism does not take the step of saying ‘God does not exist’, it simply emphasises that God is not a viable hypothesis. Militant agnosticism is thus not a faith.

All of this is important because liberal democracy is founded on rational policy discourse, and rationality is founded on quality knowledge claims. At present, the only sources of knowledge that we have are a priori reasoning from universal first principles (I while hazard an example: suffering is bad), and scientific method. The God hypothesis conforms to neither of these streams.

Liberal democracy enshrines everyone’s right to vote for religious reasons, which is noble and fantastic. But this does not mean that arguments derived from faith have any place in policy debates. Australia has thankfully be almost totally immune to this trend thus far, unlike the US where faith based arguments for various policy positions, particularly on gay marriage and abortion, abound.