I’ve been conducting a discussion over on another blog (which, incidentally, has predictably ended up with the other party crying foul, claiming that he is “not trying to attain a reasoning state” and “as a student of human psychology” insisting on reading sinister motives into getting comments on one entry he made to a public blog quoting me at length and criticising my position and on a second entry written in response to my comments. There’s just no pleasing some people.) which revolved, in part, around the question of “agnosticism”.

The blogger wrote the following:

[Aleister Crowley] was openly agnostic about such topics as reincarnation, the immortality of the soul or the existence of God (as understood in the Abrahamic faiths, at least), but this faction appears actively antagonistic to such notions, and sometimes antagonistic to those holding them.

We have written in a previous post about the tendency for occultists to glibly spout poorly-understood philosophical platitudes and to get themselves in all kinds of messes as a result of it, and this is a good example. It is very fashionable in these times to claim to be “agnostic” about all manner of things on the grounds that “absolute proof is impossible”. The people who make these claims turn out to be woefully mistaken.

Let’s take the position that we are “agnostic” with regards to the existence of God, for instance, as conceived by the Abrahamic religions. It is certainly true that we cannot absolutely disprove the existence of such a god. However, we are equally unable to disprove Scientology’s saga of General Xenu, and equally unable to disprove the idea that we are the subjects of invisible monkey overlords who planted evidence of evolution in order to gradually encourage acceptance of the idea that monkeys are our forefathers and natural rules. Yet who takes either of these ideas seriously? Technically, the scientific method requires us to be just as “agnostic” with regards to this type of proposition as any other.

As we previously discussed, people have a tendency to take a pet theory – such as reincarnation – and reduce it to a question of “reincarnation or not reincarnation”, usually applying a 50% probability weighting to each option and throwing their hands up and saying “I just don’t know!” But they do not do this with, for instance, the General Xenu story and the fable of the Master Monkey Race, the latter two ideas simply never entering their heads.

It quite simply is not “agnosticism” to select ideas from an infinite sea of possibilities and to state “I shall be agnostic about these ideas, but not about the others”. The process of selecting the group of ideas about which one is prepared to be “agnostic” is an exclusionary one, a active choice-based one. One is deluding oneself if one believes oneself to be “agnostic” about reincarnation, for instance, but one is not equally agnostic about the Christian conception of heaven and hell, Valhalla, the Summerlands, the Celtic underworld, and every other conceivable and unconceivable idea about “life after death” that could ever be presented. To reduce the choice to “simple death” and “reincarnation” is to draw an a priori boundary around which ideas you are prepared to accept, and which you reject. This, quite simply, is not “agnosticism”.

If the person who claims to be “agnostic about reincarnation” is to be taken seriously, then he would need to demonstrate why reincarnation is even a likely possibility, let alone the most likely possibility, amongst all the others. If he cannot do this, then he is arbitrarily selecting reincarnation as one of the few theories that he is prepared to entertain, and this selection process denies his agnosticism.

The reality is that the number of ideas are potentially infinite, but the human brain does not have an infinite capacity, so it is absolutely impossible to be actively agnostic about every idea. Therefore, agnosticism always involves a selection of ideas about which one is prepared to be agnostic, and this exclusionary selection process denies the underlying “infinite openmindedness” which these people profess to be exhibiting.

It is no refutation to state that the individual is being agnostic about all the other possibilities by simply not letting them enter his mind, and to therefore avoid drawing a conclusion either way upon them, because by reducing the choice to a limited subset excluding these ideas, he is drawing a conclusion with regards to them, consciously or otherwise.

Moreover, it is meaningless to talk about agnosticism as a purely theoretical concern. It is no accident that all the various position the occultist claims to be “agnostic” about – reincarnation, the existence of the “divine”, the existence and interventionary nature of “spirits” and so on – are inherent in the theories behind his practices. The occultist has no reason to be “agnostic” about the General Xenu story because it simply never presents itself to him, whereas the others mentioned necessarily do because of his practices. The occultist therefore chooses to be “agnostic” about those elements which enable him to ascribe some form of legitimacy to his practices, which enable him to continue them without miring him in an even greater pool of cognitive dissonance.

We can draw an analogy with Pascal’s famous “wager”:

1. If God exists, and we are righteous, we will be rewarded;
2. If God exists, and we are not righteous, we will be punished;
3. If God does not exist, and we are righteous, we will be neither rewarded nor punished; and
4. If God does not exist, and we are not righteous, we will be neither rewarded nor punished.

Since there are no negative consequences associated with being “righteous”, but some eternally bad consequences associated with being “not righteous”, then the rational person would choose righteousness, which, presumably, includes believing in God.

Any first year philosophy student will naturally be able to tear this piece of startling idiocy to shreds, remarking that it relies on the presumptions that (1) we know what “righteousness” is; and (2) we know what “God” wants us to do. For the wager to make any sense, it needs to be first demonstrated that a God who, for instance, reserves punishment solely for those who have the presumption and audacity to think they know what “righteousness” is, cannot exist. It also needs to be demonstrated that a God who reserves punishment only for those who are wicked enough to believe in a slightly different God, cannot exist. The “argument”, therefore, whilst at first appearances seemingly sound – certainly sound enough to convince a vast number of Christians – is seen to be built upon a vast and arbitrary set of assumptions.

In the same way, this position of “agnosticism” which these occultists and others believe themselves to subscribe to is not a “neutral” position at all, but arises from an actually vast amount of selection; to be “agnostic” about reincarnation, but not about the other infinite number of possibilities, requires that reincarnation be specially selected from those possibilities, and the others rejected. Before we even begin down this road, therefore, we have abandoned “agnosticism”.

The only “neutral” position is indeed to never give these possibilities a moment’s thought; one can only be neutral towards them if one never things about them. Once one starts to think, one is no longer agnostics, because we simply cannot help but draw conclusions by the mere fact of being aware of an idea. Therefore, those conclusions come from one of two places; evidence, or from the imagination.

The true place for agnosticism is where the evidence suggests a number of competing alternatives, but is unable to come down strongly in favour of any of them. In such a case, we have a number of identified positions which could be consistent with the evidence, we just do not know which – if any – of them are true. For things which there is no evidence, we cannot be “agnostic”, because we cannot identify what it even is that we are supposed to be agnostic about.

It is simply not sensible to take a subject over which we have no confirmatory evidence whatsoever – such as ideas about “life after death”, or the “existence of God” – to invent one imaginary possibility out of millions, and then to claim “I am agnostic about it”. One would have to be agnostic about all these imaginary possibilities, and there are so many of them that singling out one for special attention demonstrates the very lack of objectivity that the professed “agnostic” is claiming. It is certainly not sensible to then construct an elaborate system of occultism or religion around that one selection from millions because “it might be true”. This is not an independent or neutral position; it is an active choice – based on no sensible grounds whatsoever – about which of an infinite number of possibilities will be accepted as being possible. And if there is no confirmatory evidence against which that choice can sensibly be made, then that leaves us with only one alternative; the active choice is being made non-sensibly on the basis of the imagination.

Now, ironically, many occultists will claim that the skeptical application of reason is “limited”. Indeed, the blogger referred to at the top of this post claims:

long ago I clued into the fact that what we call reason is always highly subjective, and thus arbitrary. As a result, it limits itself to its own horizons, when it should be the place whence we go out into the more unexpected regions of our personal universes. There, our ideas of what is so and not so will lose their clear definition, and the supra-rational can peep through our own cloudbanks.

In reality, we can see that the converse is the case. The delusionary occultist, in this particular example, restricts himself to “permanent death” or “reincarnation”. The “rationalist” – if we can call him that – recognises that none of the competing life-after-death theories have any evidence in their favour, and thus does not restrict himself by selecting a subset of those imaginary theories and forcing himself to think that one of them must be true. It is reason that demonstrates where we can not have knowledge, and to sidestep this process and to invent some imaginary knowledge using “supra-rational” process is to create a mental prison for oneself, one in which our entire outlook on the world is a captive of whatever fanciful delusions we happen to have been spoonfed that morning.

One cannot go through life without forming conclusions, despite how politically incorrect that may sound to occultists. Some occultists, as we have explained, make an active choice to be “agnostic” about reincarnation not to be open-minded, but precisely to allow themselves the possibility of it being true by virtue of specially selecting it for consideration. Once they start leaving offerings of bananas “just in case” the Master Monkey Race theory is true, then I’ll start taking their claims to “agnosticism” seriously. Until that time, what they delude themselves into thinking is “open-mindedness” is in fact a delusion mechanism, a selective “I don’t know” which serves as a sly and cunning backdoor into “well, actually, I do know.”

Yet again, we see how the abandonment of reason leads people straight into making rational mistakes. The statement “we can’t disprove reincarnation, therefore reincarnation might be true, therefore I’ll be ‘agnostic’ on the question of whether when we die, we die, or we are reincarnated” is itself a rational conclusion, and, as we have demonstrated, a misguided one. The person who believes there is merit in this position of “agnosticism” because “reason is imperfect” shuts themself off from applying reason to this rational conclusion, and it becomes a dead-end for them. Far from becoming free from reason, they’ve made themselves slaves to it. If they did not reject the role of reason, they would see easily the inconsistency in holding the position that reason is imperfect so we should be agnostic about everything without realising that that position is a rational one itself which makes claims to knowledge. The professed “agnostic” is in a contradictory position when he refuses to be agnostic about his agnosticism. 

Thus, when the original blogger expresses surprise at those who are “antagonistic” towards those who claim such “open agnosticism”, he should now be in a position to understand why. Those who profess it are at best mistaken, and at worst outright liars. It’s not the neutral and open-minded position that he thinks it is.