Under the General Philosophical Terms section in the toolkit, atheism and theism are defined as "(mostly) metaphysical claims, the one denying and the other affirming the existence of God" and agnosticism is defined as "the (mostly) epistemological claim that the question is undecidable on the basis of present evidence".
At first I was wondering why religious terms would be categorized as metaphysical claims because metaphysics is "the study of what there is and how it works", which seems more logical and scientific. I didn't think that theology was a part of metaphysics. However, I came to realize that religion is one of the many ways people rationalize how the world works. Other people think that divinity is not involved with workings of the world. Maybe we're all on a path to Nirvana and in order to get there we have to have good karma. There are many possible theological explanations for the world, so atheism and theism are most certainly metaphysical claims.
I had the opposite issue with agnosticism and epistemology. Epistemology is "the study of the nature, scope, and limits of knowledge or understanding", intimating a more emotional way of thinking. Since agnosticism has a lot to do with evidence, or the lack thereof, I figured it was more logical, like metaphysics. But the lack of evidence is actually where emotion starts to take action because agnosticism is a skeptical way of thinking. Since nothing is certain, we have to trust our own beliefs. Epistemology deals with the possibility that we lack any true knowledge, making agnosticism an important aspect of epistemology.
No comments:
Post a Comment