A HPL Quote for 29 Feb

"...when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things."

Dawkins the Agnostic?

During the course of his discussion with the archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Dawkins described himself as an agnostic (i.e he doesn't know whether or not God exists). Superficially this is a fine sentiment to have. The agnostic position is somewhat distorted nowadays because it is used by those with a sense of humility towards knowledge (such as Richard Dawkins) and those who simply do not want to express an opinion or be held to having to prove their case.

Agnosticism was intellectually invented by T.H. Huxley. Formerly the position that Huxley used it to describe was called negative atheism. Negative atheism is the position that there is no evidence for the existence of God. One holds it by expressing a view that all the arguments for the existence of God are inconclusive. However, it does leave open the possibility of new evidence changing that assessment. So it is effectively a 'provisional undecided' vote.

What I found disheartening about the subsequent comments was that there was no firm line drawn between a particular conception of God (in this case, Christian views) and the broad notion of a "supernatural creator". I say above that agnosticism is superficially fine because if it were the most general notion that were in debate it would be impossible to totally refute the claim that the universe was created by a being outside of nature. This does not translate to not being able to disprove particular beliefs or conceptions though. There is ample evidence that the God of Christianity (and the various deities of other faiths) are mythological constructions. Therefore one could rightly challenge the assertion of a particular God's existence with the purpose of disproving that claim.

Brief Research Note: HPL

One of the papers I am currently working on features H.P. Lovecraft. Yesterday, while watching a presentation by Richard Dawkins and Laurence Krauss on youtube I came across an interesting thought. Dawkins had pointed out (as he done in the past) that the human brain is evolved to cope with certain time frames which are far smaller than the geological scale across which evolution happens and the universe was formed. Reflecting on several comments that HPL makes in his letters and fiction writing which display acute awareness of geological time scales, I wondered if it was not this aspects of his thinking which caused him to be dismiss religious and supernatural explanations in favour of science and unbelief. It is a matter of his philosophical thinking that I will likely follow up on in a specific paper of its own.

Here is one of my favourite quotes from HPL:

"It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive short cut of supernaturalism."