For Agnostic philosophers, 'God' is a placeholder for anything that science can not explain? [closed]

Question

Bertrand Russell: As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

Karl Marx, as well as many other philosophers, simply avoided definitions of their views about God. Is it a prudent science to put the definition of God outside the scope?

Answer 1

The ontological/epistemological questions regarding theological verities that claim center-stage on a forum like this one are almost never the questions that engage people who "believe" (so-called) in God.

Framing Note

It is generally accepted that labeling bias produces conceptual distortion. One does not call a muslim a "Mohammedan", or a native American a "red Indian". And this is not so much a question of a putdown by an intentional pejorative so much as simply ignorance.

Religious people rarely characterize themselves as believers in God but as something more specific and definite like Jew or Christian or even more specific — Catholic, Mormon etc.

Theist is an even worse mislabelling — no one who calls themself a theist, ever self-identifies that way other than in arguments with obstreperous atheists.

So I will stick to "religious" instead of "theist" and/or "believ(er) in God".

Religious people in the usual case, are typically focused on things like prayer, communion, baptism, confession, rites, mantras, breathing, meditation practices etc etc and their palpable (or otherwise) effects on their lives.

Asking them to worry about the epistemics/ontics that are fashionable out here is like going to a doctor in an emergency and instead of discussing the problem's history, symptoms, suggested regimen etc., to spend all the time asking whether the doctor is an educated doctor, whether his medical college was a good/accredited college, etc etc.

So which God are you talking about? The one who religious people orient around (Misnomer: 'believe in') or the one who experts disbelieve? They are not much related...

Put in the language more appropriate to this forum religious people have much less of anything like belief and more of something like seeking procedures, practices and outlooks that give meaning, direction, well-being to their lives.

In summary

Beliefs are what you think is true;
Values are what you feel is important;
Actions are their resultant.

It is helpful to factorize human functioning into 3 dimensions — cognitive, affective, volitive.

It is found across times and cultures

Dimension	Bhagavad Gita	Gurdjieff's "3-brained being"
Cognitive	Jnana	Intellect
Affective	Bhakti	Emotions "heart"
Volitive	Karma	Body

Some examples of each:

• Cognitive
  • "I believe in the resurrection of the dead and eternal life as taught by my faith."
  • "The principles of karma and dharma guide my understanding of justice and moral order in the universe."
• Affective
  • "I feel a deep sense of peace and spiritual fulfillment when I pray."
  • "During worship, I am often moved to tears by a profound sense of love and closeness to God."
• Volitive
  • "I choose to fast during Ramadan as a way to purify my soul and obey God's commandments."
  • "It is my duty to live according to the scriptures and partake in religious community services every week."

So, we may assert that philosophers are generally interested in the cognitive dimension and the religious in the affective and volitive dimensions.

There is little overlap

Note: The cognitive egs above are more likely said by philosophers of the religion than the religious themselves

Everything I say above is negated by some occasional 'argumentators' who would sit in a Richard Dawkins type of lecture and publicly prove to the speaker that they are right in 'believing' and the speaker wrong. But they are the odd exceptions; not the rule.

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There are many other problems with your question.

1. The idea of 'atheism' is essentially a Christian one. What about Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Taoist atheists?
2. The provenance of 'agnostic' is a problematic one. The word 'gnostic' dates to the early centuries of the Christian era, the word 'agnostic' to 1869 ie. the 19th century. Are you ok claiming that there were no agnostics between the 1st and the 19th century AD? And if you claim there were, how do you address the patent anachronism?

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Added Later

I just saw this discussion between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali which encapsulates what I earlier wrote better than I did:

14 min:
Dawkins: Christianity is obsessed with sin
Ali: Christianity is obsessed with love

Towards the end
Dawkins: I want the truth
Ali: I want redemption

Ali's closing note: Humanism took away Christianity. The vacuum was filled by the violence of Islamism. What are you offering when you take away Christianity? Humanism has clearly not worked...
Dawkins: You want to cure a virulent virus by vaccinating with a milder virus, I want no virus

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It's very clear that they are not disagreeing but talking at very different levels

Answer 2

Your suggestion seems to be that God is synonymous with the set of all things not explained by science. That is clearly not correct. Aside from the morning activities of the longest English cat cited by GS, there are many phenomena not yet explained by science, which we would not equate with the idea of God. God can be considered as a catch-all explanation for a sub-set of things not explained by science- a subset that has diminished over the centuries and religion has ceded ground to science.

Answer 3

For Agnostic philosophers, 'God' is a placeholder for anything that science can not explain?

Not necessarily.

Karl Marx, as well as many other philosophers, simply avoided definitions of their views about God.

Why name drop Marx just to say that he is irrelevant to the question...???

Is it a prudent science to put the definition of God outside the scope?

The other way around if a theist refuses to give a clear and concise definition of god or makes god so powerful that he is not bound by the laws of nature, then it's prudent to be agnostic, because it's not impossible that there exists a definition for a god that does actually exist/not exist. Or if you go by a definition such as omnipotent (all-mighty), omnipresent (everywhere at once) and omniscient (all-knowing), then they could phase in and out of our existence at will and hide all the traces of their existence from science.

Like for that you could manipulate the observer, the tool of their observation or if they get really good every atom of the universe that interacted in that event and thus changed because of it. Which would be, from the perspective of science, be borderline impossible, but hey you're thinking about an all-mighty, all-present being that is all-knowing about how things work, so if it exists in the first place that might not be a big deal.

You know if ever someone figured out how the universe works, god could end it and replace it with a more complex one. People would either think their ancestors just didn't have the tech to measure reliable (likely true), that they made mistakes (also likely true), that they misinterpreted their data (likely true) and if you have enough of these likely scenarios people are likely going to accept the new reality.

That's massively cheating from the perspective of science and within that framework it doesn't really get you anywhere other than a depression because all your work would be ultimately futile, but you can't conclusively prove or disprove it. So for better or worse they just ignore it and move on without the hypothesis of an O3-being (omnipotent,...).

So no god is not necessarily just a name for the unknown and god might not just hide within the scientifically unexplained, that's just one particular way where to look at it without discarding our current knowledge of the world.

Answer 4

We don't have a rigorous definition of 'god', any more than we have a rigorous definition of 'peace', 'love', 'beauty', or for that matter 'pornography'. These are 'universal linguistic standards' meant to guide human praxis in particular ways without themselves being defined. They are Wittgenstein's metre-rule writ large:

There is one thing of which one can state neither that it is 1 metre long, nor that it is not 1 metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. But this is, of course, not to ascribe any remarkable property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the game of measuring with a metre-rule. ["Philosophical Investigations" §50]

There is no method in material science for measuring linguistic elements. Scientists measure aspects of the world that are pointed to by linguistic elements, but in the case of universal standards (which are merely adopted) there's nothing to point at which cannot be questioned. Scientists who believe in God or who are properly agnostic mainly ignore God for practical purposes. The tension lies between science-antagonistic theists and science-oriented atheists who respectively want to elevate the standard to a material fact or reduce the standard to 'mere' language.

When philosophers address religion, it's usually to examine the separation between religious ideals and religious praxis. Marx, for instance, had no objection to the ideals of religious faith (many of which he echoed in secular terms); he objected to the Christian praxis of instructing adherents to hope for rewards in the afterlife, not in this life. He could have invoked God to this end — a practice common among church reforms and certain types of social activists — but his interests lied in societal reform, not religious reform. getting into discussions about God would merely have distracted from his main point.

Answer 5

I guess that's an insultingly ignorant assumption that fails to capture the bold spirit of agnostic inquiry. Agnostics do not treat 'God' as some semantic placeholder or God of the gaps fallacy. They reject the idea of punting difficult questions to a supernatural answer when science currently has no explanation.

True agnosticism maintains that the question of God's existence is either meaningless or impossible to answer definitively based on the available evidence. It is not a cop-out or an argument from ignorance. It is a rational position that says - in the absence of convincing proof either way, we simply reserve judgment on the matter. They don't fill gaps with God.

The agnostic position is that the existence or non-existence of God is unknown and perhaps unknowable. They find the claims and proofs of both religious believers and doctrinaire atheists to be unconvincing. It's the rational, skeptical position of refusing to accept an extraordinary claim without sufficient evidence.

But "people of faith", yes, they constantly move the semantic goalposts and redefine their deities as science progresses. Well, and they are right in a way, churches need to maintain money and power. ;)