Unwittingly, it seems, notwithstanding that they proclaim themselves to be a Star, they become a satellite, only reflecting the light of another source. When an eclipse occurs, as it inevitably does, they blame the light source, claiming it has failed them.

I think you’re right, and that this has a wider applicability than just reflecting the light of another person. There is also the tendency some folks have to worship the system itself. As I’ve noted here before, there is a large contingent of occultists who perpetuate the idea that one should “just do the work, and the results will follow”. Aside from representing an obvious attempt to democratise and dumb-down a relatively complex subject, this is also a device to take the person out of personal development, and to replace it with an abstract system. It states that work – more specifically, a particular system of work – is responsible for personal development, and not actual individuals. This does, of course, encourage the tendency to “reflect the light of another source”, since a system first has to be devised and presented by another before one can begin to follow it.

When one follows a system with “long study and patient practice” and then ends up rejecting it wholesale, it is a good sign that one was not dealing with real things all along, but with an idea, with a fantasy (obviously this is true for any “occult” system worthy of the name). If this were not the case, the system in question would have served merely as a kind of facilitator between the practitioner and the real things he was dealing with, and hence would not be significant enough to legitimately come into serious criticism other than on the grounds of efficiency. To reject a system in this way is to claim that “the system has failed me”, when the facts are that you shouldn’t have been expecting an abstract system to do anything for you in the first place. Such a rejection reveals an abdication of personal responsibility for personal progress.

I’ve been following your “agnosticism is the only rational position” argument. I think there are a number of problems with it, although that’s not to say there aren’t an equal or greater number of problems with Mr. Geller’s position.

“relying upon an unsupported assertion would not be rational. This disposes of Atheism and all organized religion.”

This, I think, requires every assertion to be a cast-iron certainty before labeling it as “supported”, which is an unreasonable requirement. Even the criteria that Plato described require a “belief” to be only “justified”, rather than “proven beyond error” (which, in my mind, takes it out of the category of “belief” altogether, since I define the latter specifically as an assertion not justified by evidence). Knowledge doesn’t have to be certain and beyond all doubt in order to qualify as knowledge.

“Einstein…Heisenberg…QM…Chaos Theory…Godel…Given this, the only rational course is to say ‘I don’t know'”

Disagree. For one thing, the ability to make accurate predictions of the future cannot be so simply equated with “knowledge”; no lack of ability to predict precludes us from having knowledge of what has happens, or precludes us from having knowledge of what would happen if a particular set of causes were in place, even if those causes may be in principle unknowable. With regards to specific examples:

1. Relativity gives us a precise set of equations. Despite “time and space being relative” we can, according to the theory, precisely quantify the degree of relativity and calculate down to an error of zero for everyone, if only we had all the data.

2. Heisenberg limits only precision in one particular combination of variables, he doesn’t invalidate knowledge. He does not, for example, in principle prohibit us from accurately describing a wave packet and ascribing precise probabilities to the likelihood of the particle being at any particular point on that wave packet. All he does is to preclude us from having one particular type of knowledge – the uncertainty principle does not speak to the uncertainty of any other type of knowledge than the simultaneous knowledge of position and velocity. In addition, it only really has much of an implication on a detailed level that the average person never encounters.

3. Chaos theory again only puts theoretical limits on predictive models. If we drop millions of grains of sand onto the same spot, we cannot predict exactly how each grain will behave when it hits the top of the pile, but we can predict that a cone of sand of very specific proportions will be formed. We cannot predict the weather precisely, but we can predict with some approaching certainty that it’s going to be relatively warm in summer, and relatively cool in winter.

4. Godel is something I’ve discussed at length, here, and it refers entirely to attempts to axiomise the whole of mathematics. It doesn’t deal with the provability of statements, only with their provability within the terms of a formal logical system which one has constructed in an attempt to axiomise the whole of mathematics. In particular, there are many formal logical systems (such as Presburger arithmetic and Euclidian geometry) which do not suffer from Godel incompleteness and can be demonstrated to be both consistent and complete. Some physicists suspect that “it is very likely to be true” that the laws of physics out there in the universe “use only the decidable part of mathematics”.

In short, some people think that these things deal a much stronger blow to the concept of knowledge than they actually do. Indeed, all these things are very precise, mathematical theories. If one is to accept their conclusions, then one cannot say “I don’t know” – one has to say “I do know”, or the rational foundations of those areas immediately crumble. They really cannot be invoked in support of an argument for agnosticism in principle.

My biggest theoretical criticism is that it is just an intellectually dishonest approach. We do, as a matter of fact, go through life behaving as if we know things, and no amount of declaring oneself to be an agnostic changes this. We go through life, for instance, behaving as if we know that emptying a magazine of .45 auto into someone’s skull will have a very good chance of killing them, so we tend not to do such a thing with our friends. Equally, we go through life behaving as if we know that serving them a plate of beans on toast will not likely have this effect, so we may happily do that quite often. To argue that agnosticism is the only rational position is to argue that it is rational to have no idea what is going to happen next at every single point in our life and with regards to every single decision we make, and that quite simply is not how people behave; thus, anyone who claims to be such a principled agnostic is just not being honest with themselves. This being the case, it becomes rational to accept that we do think we have knowledge, and this gives us the impetus to engage in attempts to improve the quality of that knowledge, which one cannot really do if one denies in the face of the evidence that one has it. To support such an argument requires that we use a definition of “knowledge” which is not even close to being in accord with the type of knowledge which actually manifests in the real world, which naturally makes it a pointless argument.

My biggest practical criticism is that agnosticism only really tends to get invoked as an excuse for people to give far too much credence to silly ideas. There are things with respect to which agnosticism is the only rational position, and these are things for which the evidence simply does not point to a single clear picture. For instance, there may or may not be life on other worlds. It is quite possible that there is, and it is quite possible that there isn’t, and we have no good evidence that either is true, because there has not been one single observation of life on another world which we could even use to calculate vague probabilities. But, there are plenty of things for which agnosticism is not a rational position. Obvious things like the existence of that tree outside my window are trivial, but there are plenty of others. In the case of atheism, there is no evidence for the existence of, say, the Christian god, but there is plenty of evidence for the absence of such a god, and in this case agnosticism is definitely not any kind of rational position, let alone the only rational position. Sure, it may be true, but only in the same sense that it may be true that if I feed a strip of bacon to my dog he’ll turn into an elephant, but it is not rational to be “agnostic” with regards to either of these possibilities.

“my personal favourite being to suspend disbelief, exactly as one does when watching a movie: you know it is an elaborate deception, yet choose to accept it for the sake of entertainment.”

The key difference being that you “know” that a movie is, indeed, a movie, an elaborate deception. You don’t know this is true of reality. Again, people just do not behave in this way. In a movie, people get hit by cars, roll all the way over the top, land on the road, and then get up and continue to run, but people don’t (usually) tend to “suspend disbelief” in the real world and try giving this a go. “Suspending disbelief” in the case of the belief that putting a pistol to your head and pulling the trigger is going to give you a fairly bad day is not a wise decision, no matter how warm and fuzzy believing in the occult may make one feel. It is not sensible to say that one can “choose to accept it for the sake of entertainment” if one is not equally at liberty to choose not to accept it with no worse consequences than becoming slightly bored with a marginally less entertaining form of entertainment. It’s a charming soundbite, but smacks suspiciously of delusion and apologetics, to me.

One doesn’t need to be of the opinion that what one calls “knowledge” must necessarily be the final and incontrovertible truth, but to deny knowledge at all is not a sensible approach on either a theoretical or a practical level. Denying knowledge is like denying gravity, and requires a self-imposed blindness to be put into practice.

I disagree. I consider a “belief” to have *no* direct supporting evidence. Bugger all. Not a sausage.

Then what is an assertion with merely “some” direct supporting evidence, or “a lot of” direct supporting evidence? How much direct supporting evidence do we need to go from “belief” to “knowledge”? If that amount is anything less than “absolute cast-iron certainty” then you’ve just denied your own notion that agnosticism can be the only rational position, and agreed with me.

This idea further suffers from the problem of what constitutes “direct supporting evidence”. Some credulous theists, for instance, assert that the very existence of the universe is itself “direct supporting evidence” for the existence of their imaginary invisible man in the sky.

“If only we had all the data” is the relevant statement.

No, it isn’t. Knowing that something would be the case if only we had all the data is, in fact, knowledge, and it is not useless knowledge, either. If we know what would be the case if only we had all the data, then we’re well on our way to attempting to quantify how much data we don’t have, and to attempting to quantify how much that lack of data might reduce the precision of our conclusions. This being the case, we can determine whether or not that lack of precision is fatal to our purposes, and proceed accordingly. Hence, we can use even Newton’s laws to reliably send spacecraft to the moon and back, despite the fact that we know we don’t have all the data, because we know that the data we don’t have is not significant enough to have a serious impact on the predictions we want to make. If we stopped and said, “oh bother this, we’ll never have all the data, so we’ll never have knowledge and we’re wasting our time”, we’d come to an enormously false conclusion.

Again, lack of all the data and lack of complete precision is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether we have knowledge, because we don’t need to know everything in order to know something.

Probabilities: it recognizes that there is a possibility of error in describing particles.

No – it recognizes that there is a possibility of error in simultaneously describing the exact position and velocity of particles (indeed, some argue that particles don’t even have exact positions and velocities). If, instead, we describe particles in terms of wave packets, the principle does not preclude us from doing so precisely. Simultaneously describing the exact position and velocity of particles is not the only way one could “describe particles”, and it’s not the only useful way one could do so, either. To argue against knowledge as a whole because we cannot achieve precision in one particular type of knowledge is folly.

This is evidence that our ability to predict the actions of one particle are not perfect.

Again, this is true only of one type of prediction. We could, in theory, predict with absolute certainty that the particle will be somewhere on that wave packet, for instance. This may not be a precise simultaneous position and velocity of a particle, but it is a precise prediction of the actions of one particle. Once more, the fact that we cannot make one type of precise prediction about a particle does not preclude us from being able to make other types of precise prediction about that same particle, and does not preclude us from being able to make usefully precise predictions.

Amusingly, Godel’s theorem is one such statement.

It actually isn’t. You don’t need a formal logical system large enough to encompass the whole of mathematics to prove the incompleteness theorems, hence the incompleteness theorems themselves do not suffer from Godel incompleteness. This is one more demonstration that Godel’s incompleteness theorems do not deal the fatal blow to logic in the way that many – particularly occultists – falsely believe them to. They merely raise some difficulties with some statements in some types of formal logical system above a particular level of complexity.

I note their lack of definitive opinion on the matter.

Naturally. Until we have a “theory of everything”, we won’t be able to determine whether or not it suffers from Godel incompleteness.

Insisting upon the infallibility of impression is a dangerous path.

Nobody has been doing this in recent discussions, to the best of my knowledge.

Nonsense. Agnostic : a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god

If you want to limit your use of the term “agnostic” to “god” or “ultimate reality” then you take your position that “agnosticism is the only rational position” and well and truly throw it into the sea. If this is how you limit your use of the term, then agnosticism is only the only rational position for an exceptionally narrow and practically useless set of ideas, leaving the door perfectly open to have knowledge on a vast array of other subjects.

Moreover, this belief in agnosticism relies on the unquestioned assumption that there even is a “god” or some form of “ultimate reality”, which is not an assumption that should go unquestioned. Even if we accept that “any ultimate reality…is unknown and probably unknowable”, if it were possible to deny the existence of such an “ultimate reality” at all then it would be goodbye to agnosticism without even ever having to challenge its premise. So even in the case of “ultimate reality”, whatever one might mean by that, the premise of agnosticism alone is not sufficient to justify an assertion that “agnosticism is the only rational position” – you must also demonstrate that the very existence of an ultimate reality cannot be reasonably challenged.

Foolishness: The Agnostic doubts, which leads him on to refine his knowledge

The “agnostic”, by the very nature of the term, denies that he has or that he can have any knowledge. If he has “knowledege” which he is “refining”, then he is simply not an agnostic, at least not with respect to the particular type of knowledge he’s refining.

You would seem to champion never doubting the quality of experience, or the accuracy of what you have learned.

I have no idea what you could possibly have read which would lead you to this conclusion.

I have seen only absence of evidence, which demonstrates (surprise) absence of evidence.

Then you haven’t looked very closely. Off the top of my head I can list the following with respect to the traditional Christian conception of “God”:

1. The absence of any divine intervention, such as in the movement of heavenly bodies, which would be expected if an interventionary god were to occasionally intervene in the natural order of things;

2. The evidence for the evolutionary development of life, which directly refutes the view that this god instantaneously created all species in their current form;

3. The contradictory abilities which are ascribed to this god, such as his omnipotence, and the old chestnut about whether he can create a rock which he cannot move;

4. The huge surfeit of different ideas about god, which often mirror cultural development, suggesting very strongly that “gods” are merely created ideas, and not real things at all.

5. Mounting and convincing evidence for the idea that complex things must almost inevitably be preceded by simpler things, strongly challenging the idea that a complex thing could be there at the beginning.

The evidence simply goes on and on for anyone willing to look at it.

Since no replicable tests have been designed for trans-finite beings, no reasonable test can be constructed, and the acceptance or rejection of such a premise is based on belief. No evidence. Bugger all. Not a sausage. Nada.

Absolute nonsense. There are plenty of things we can have knowledge of despite the fact that “no replicable tests have been designed” or could be designed. Much of what we know of history has not arisen through “replicable tests”. Much of the evidence for evolution has not arisen through “replicable tests”, even though a surprising amount of replicable tests have been successfully carried out. To reduce knowledge, even strictly scientific knowledge, to “replicable tests or nothing” is an astonishly myopic and false view. There are plenty of other ways of reliably acquiring knowledge which every one of us uses every day of our lives.

Atheism and Theism are twin brothers with empty pockets begging amongst the half-convinced.

Patent twaddle peddled by theists with an anti-intellectual agenda to serve. It’s an attempt to reduce legitimate knowledge to the gutter-level of religious belief in an attempt to give unwarranted credibility to that latter.

In such a situation, the rational response is to say “beats me” and get on with life.

If there really was no reason to prefer one idea of the another, then Pascal’s wager would start to look like a good bet. If one of the options involves the very real possibility of eternal damnation, then the “rational response” is to dispose of that idea before ignoring it. Fortunately, disposing of the ideas of theism is trivial these days, precisely because of the evidence against it.

Life is entertainment: if not it would be really fucking boring.

So show me all the people who slice of their own limbs, bang six inch nails into their heads, jump off 500 foot cliffs, set fire to their own homes, to relieve “boredom”. Once I see a significant group of people doing this, then and only then will I take seriously the idea that they are “suspending disbelief for the sake of entertainment” rather than actually harbouring ideas of knowledge that they pretend not to have.

Agnosticism does not deny knowledge

That’s exactly what it does. The very word breaks down to “without knowledge”.

it suggests that we do not know if it is “the final and incontrovertible truth”

Sounds more like “science” than “agnosticism”, to me. Science is incompatible with agnosticism, because the latter argues that “it’s unknowable, so there’s no point investigating it. We’ll just declare as a matter of principle that there is no evidence, and never will be any.” This is not a rational position.

Given this uncertainty, it is not rational to adopt a stance that you know to have a possibility (no matter how small) of being in error.

Simply unbelievable and dishonest twaddle. On what possible grounds can you assert that “it is not rational to adopt a stance that you know to have a possibility (no matter how small) of being in error”? There are a bizarrely enormous number of occasions in which it would be perfectly rational to do this. It is, in fact, the norm. It is rational to assert that, if you let go of a weight, it will fall to the ground. The fact that there is “a possibility (no matter how small)” that the invisible gravity pixies might decide to be contrary and pull it up instead is neither here nor there to that rationality.

As I said right back at the beginning, your insistence that one must either have cast-iron certainty, or one doesn’t have knowledge, is an unreasonable requirement. Knowledge does not have to be certain in order to be knowledge. Insisting on this requirement is demonstrably at odds with how the world works, and with how knowledge works. No epistemologist in the world takes this view, so you’re right out there by yourself with it.

Exactly. Agnostics admit their ignorance;

Exactly nothing. The scientists knew they could reliably calculate a course to the moon. And they were absolutely right. Several times over. There’s nothing “agnostic” about that at all.

Agnostic is a very specific word

Then you are misuing it. Again, go back to the original discussion, which was prompted by the comment “Knowledge is based upon experience. Agnosticism can be a rational position.” The discussion was about “knowledge”, not “knowledge of some poorly-defined idea of ‘ultimate reality'”. If you want to weasel out of that by saying, “oh, I was only talking about something much more specific after all!” then good luck with that, but it doesn’t sound like a productive way to conduct a debate to me.

Silliness. Not knowing implies that the panoply of available knowledge has been powerless to demonstrate clearly one way or another.

See? I say that your “very specific” definition of agnosticism leaves it irrelevant to the wider question of knowledge, because it only deals with things – i.e. “God” and “ultimate reality” – which have no observable effects on the universe at all (otherwise, they wouldn’t be unknowable), and you reply “silliness”. You absolutely are not using the word “agnostic” in the narrow sense that you claim to be, as evidenced by your own words.

Agnosticism is not a belief

It absolutely is. It is a belief, in your own words, that (a) some vaguely specified form of “ultimate reality” exists; and (b) that that form is “probably unknowable”. Both of these beliefs being formed, of course, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever.

Nonsense: it is possible to deny just about anything, should you state that dinosaur bones were planted by some devious deity on a Wednesday afternoon, about teatime, ten thousand years ago it will make no difference to agnosticism. We still won’t know what the fuck is happening outside a limited range of phenomena.

Yet again, you claim to be using “agnostic” in a “very specific” sense in terms of “God” and “ultimate reality”, and then you go right on ahead and start applying it in a far more general sense to things like dinosaur bones. Make your mind up, and stick to one story.

Poppycock: the only rational position for a human vis a vis “ultimate reality” is to respond “I don’t know”.

So why, pray tell, do you also, in addition to this, go on to claim that such “ultimate reality” is also “probably unknowable”? Sounds like you’ve just admitted that’s not a “rational position”, to me.

The term (unlike Gnostic) was coined as a neologism in the mid-19th century by T.H. Huxley

I’m not interested in etymology, which is the last resort of the weasel at the best of times. I’m interested in how the word is used right now, and, in particular, how you are using it right now, which is that knowledge of certain subjects is in principle “probably unknowable”. Agnosticism, as you are employing it, is a political stance, not a rational stance.

Not evidence of anything. An “intelligent design” theist would use the same phenomena to justify the existence of his deity.

And they’d be wrong. Are you seriously suggesting that correctness is a function of how strongly one believes in a conclusion? If one seriously wanted to postulate a supernatural God who could and did intervene in the natural order of things, then you would definitely expect to see occasional interventions in the natural order of things. The asbence of such intervention could not legitimately “justify the existence” of an interventionary god, and any “intelligent design” “theorist” who suggested it could would be demonstrably wrong.

It does not preclude the “intelligent design” theists nor any theist who does not support the six day special.

Of course not – it precludes the type of God who is believed to have instantaneously created a variety of species.

Look, you can’t take a criticism of God, and every time reply “Aha! But your criticism fails if we assume a different type of God altogether!” Sooner or later, if you keep doing that, you’ll be left with God that is nothing and does nothing. Which is no God. You’ll drive yourself to my conclusion with your current line of reasoning.

The qualities are not atypical for gods or comic-book heroes, though by no means universal. One has only to read Homer to find hugely exaggerated descriptions of humans such as Achilles.

Which are equally as imaginary. Q.E.D.

Indeed they are, yet is it not possible that at the root of such hyperbolic tales is a seed of truth?

Possible. But highly unlikely – so unlikely to be discounted, in fact – that such a “seed of truth” bears any resemblence at all to its ultimate fruits.

This assumes that a deity must be complex,

Yes, it does. Beings who create universes, listen to and respond to prayers, intervene in the natural order of things, set fire to bushes, and command sacrifices, are complex. If they aren’t complex, they don’t do that kinda stuff. If a “deity” with the power to create universes is “not complex”, then it isn’t a “deity” at all; it’s a natural process, and not a god.

To take a subject about which there is no evidence whatsoever and then make pronouncements about it is the stuff of which religions are made, not knowledge.

Again, you seem to think that evidence either arises from “replicable tests”, or it isn’t evidence. You are utterly and completely in error.

A theist would say exactly the same as you, except they would replace the word “Theist” by “Atheist” and “religious” with “profane”

Yes, they would. And they’d be talking absolute crap, too. Again, it takes more than misusing words to make your position correct.

One cannot choose to believe

What an odd statement. One certainly can do this. Often takes a bit of time, but it’s trivial to manage.

Must have missed these people

Exactly.

In regards to any deity, the Agnostic says that such is unknown and unproven.

You seem to have dropped the “probably unknowable” part. Your claims as to what you are actually trying to say are getting smaller by the post.

Of more interest to me has been the fact that the OT which the Hebrews likely picked up here and there from various sources, manages to get the order of appearance of the major species correct. This could be coincidence, or point to an earlier civilization.

What correct order of appearance are you talking about?

In Genesis, God fills the earth with plants on the third day, before creating the sun on the fourth day. So photosynthesis appears before there is a sun in the sky.

Then He creates sea creatures and birds on the fifth day, but waits until the sixth day to create all land creatures. So Genesis puts the appearance of birds in a totally wrong place.

And then there’s the business of plants blooming all over the place before stars are created…

Actually, about the only timing issue Genesis does get right is the appearance of humans as the final act of creation, since we are a very recent development.

“In Genesis, God fills the earth with plants on the third day, before creating the sun on the fourth day. So photosynthesis appears before there is a sun in the sky.”

The verse where YHVH creates the Metal Halide HID lamp is clearly missing.
You missed the point about life preceding photosynthesis, also, which it almost certainly did.

The Sun is not a species. Nor are stars.

This leaves the “creatures of the air.”

“On the fifth day of creation God created great sea monsters and flying creatures. This would have included the great swimming and flying reptiles (like the plesiosaur and pterosaur). On the sixth day God created the land animals, which would have included all of the dinosaur kinds (Genesis 1:20-25).

Birds are in the wrong spot, admittedly, being descended from the Hadrosaur.
However, were you an ignorant nomad wandering around a fairly inhospitable area, and were to chance upon some advanced knowledge, I suggest you might interpret it in a similar manner.

Of the many creation-based religions, most have the deity creating humans right away,(after creating themselves) which tends to highlight the importance of the tribe.

I think many religions can (and eventually will) be traced to contact with cultures in possession of a higher level of knowledge. The fact that such a culture has yet to be identified is not a particular problem: the number of facts that have raised their ugly heads to destroy beautiful and beloved theories is legion, and shows no sign of slowing down.