Ignosticism

by Tristan Vick

What if the question “Does God exist?” proved to be meaningless? What if the very definition of “God” was incoherent? Could you still, in good conscience, believe in something if it was incoherent and meaningless? Would it even be possible to talk about an incoherent and meaningless thing meaningfully? If not, then what consequences would follow from this realization? These are the questions which the branch of philosophy known as ignosticism concerns itself with. Ignosticism: A Philosophical Justification for Atheism examines these questions and delves into the idea that “God” is a type of language-game. Taking a Wittgensteinian view of language, Tristan Vick takes us on a journey from learning theory to semantics to psychology in this philosophical exploration of whether or not the idea of God holds any relevant meaning. Perhaps more controversial still, Vick makes the case that ignosticism, properly understood, can be used as a positive justification for the reasonableness of atheism.

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 27, 2013

About the author

In elementary school, Tristan Vick once wrote about an alien which came to earth and ate his all of his classmates. His teacher made him tear it up and write a *different more egalitarian story. Apparently, being the sole survivor of the alien attack wasn't egalitarian enough. Now he writes horror, post-apocalytpic, survival, sci-fi, western, erotica, thriller, romance novels and he's not afraid of mixing his genres either.

Tristan Vick is the Author of the zombie/survival/horror series BITTEN: RESURRECTION published by Winlock Press, and exciting new imprint of Permuted Press.

He is also the author of The Scarecrow & Lady Kingston: Rough Justice, also through Winlock Press, which follows the story of a magical scarecrow that joins the LAPD.

This year (2016) Tristan Vick will release three exciting science fiction novels through his self-owned publishing imprint Regolith Publictions, including Robotica: Ultra Heavy, a cyber punk novel, Exoverse: Invasion of the Draugr, a dark sci-fi horror with ancient astronaut and alien conspiracies, and Little Red Gauntlet, a steam punk fairy tale re-telling of the beloved Little Red Riding Hood fable.

Tristan Vick graduated from Montana State University with degrees in English Literature and Asian Cultural Studies. He speaks fluent Japanese and lives with his wife and kids in Japan. When he's not commuting on the train or teaching English, he spends his time reading, writing, blogging, and eating sara udon.

Learn more about Tristan Vick's upcoming projects and contact him at: www.tristanvick.com

Reviews

[Joshua Glasgow · Rating 3 out of 5]

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. —Miguel de Cervantes

I stumbled upon ignosticism in 2017 while engaged in a Facebook debate with a friend’s father who asked why I consider myself an atheist rather than simply agnostic. My friend’s dad argued that agnosticism was the stronger epistemic position in part because of the difficulty of defining “god” in the first place. I argued that we both knew exactly what we were talking about when we spoke about God—the white-bearded cartoon character at the center of Christianity—but I acknowledged the way the term “god” becomes slippery in such arguments. “‘God’ means God until it’s no longer tenable, then it becomes ‘nature’ or ‘love’ or ‘peace’,” I said. “The concept is so insulated by being conveniently incomprehensible that you can’t even deny that it’s a real being because suddenly it doesn’t mean anything . . . I can deny something exists with 100% certainty if it isn’t even definable.” Later, searching online to see if anybody had made this argument before, I discovered ignosticism: the position that “God” is truly undefinable and therefore as good as nonexistent.

Ignosticism has remained in the back of my mind ever since and I recently decided to search out a book on the topic. The only one I could identify was this one by author Tristan Vick. I could tell that Vick wasn’t exactly a renowned authority, but rather more of an internet rando whose biggest claim to fame is having written a series of science fiction books all of which have around 25 ratings or fewer on Goodreads. I nevertheless bought IGNOSTICISM (after my county library refused to add it to their collection on the basis that “this title has little review information and has not been acquired by other libraries so its consistent demand is unknown”) and was eager to read it as soon as I could.

I was immediately made uneasy. Vick is… not a good writer. Much of the book is written in an informal manner (“Even super smart people can hold extremely irrational beliefs”), tends to be denigrating toward believers (references to believers “paying lip service to God at church” and “magic invocations of prayer”), it is filled with tautologies (“[T]he very purpose of a description is to provide an accurate definition”), and is unnecessarily wordy (a claim that nonbelievers know how religion arises and “what’s more is that we are pretty certain these are entirely natural explanations”). On top of all this, the book has a plethora of typos and grammar issues. I kept a running list at first, but abandoned it after some time. Suffice it to say that within the first few pages, I counted multiple instances of subject-verb agreement issues, missing words, missing commas, typos, and misplaced apostrophes. Vick also uses the word “subsequently” on at least five occasions throughout the book when what he meant is “consequentially” or “therefore”, suggesting he truly misunderstands the meaning of the word. Also, at the end of an introduction chapter, Vick states that “some of the concepts [in the book] are challenging, and if I make mistakes it is most assuredly due to my own limitations. Then again, I have given it my best, and if other people find my arguments compelling or beneficial, then great.” This called to mind for me Robert Pantano’s THE ART OF LIVING A MEANINGLESS EXISTENCE which ends with the author meekly saying, “I hope, even if just a little, my work has been of some value to you.” I perceived that statement as so pitiable, and Vick’s similar statement struck me as equally gutless. Also, Vick at one point unironically refers to himself as a “gentleman scholar”, and it’s hard not to imagine him tipping his fedora as he says it.

All of this is to say that there’s a lot here that you might call cringe and which, rightly or wrongly, serves to undercut Vick’s larger message. It’s tempting to be dismissive of him altogether when you see him write about trying to prove God’s existence “beyond a reason of a doubt” or when he says things like that he has come to believe atheism “can be more rigorously defended than any theistic belief system” and “[m]oreover, I believe this is a defensible claim”. 😑 Strong as the impulse may be, I’d caution against throwing the baby out with the bathwater, though, because the author does in fact make some potent arguments for ignosticism.

One thing Vick brings up is the concept of theological noncognitivism, which works in tandem with ignosticism and is the idea that all alleged definitions for the term “God” employ circular reasoning and amount to “God is that which caused everything but God.” Vick argues that when theists assert that God is transcendent, immutable, timeless, etc., they are engaging in a practice of ritualistic naming. That is, they are imagining what God’s attributes are and naming them rather than describing them. They’ve not tested or observed God to have this or that attribute, but are making mere assumptions. Any such attributes are ascribed to God rather than derived from God: they come “not from the study of God [as a creature], but from what the Holy Bible says about God”—or rather, what their particular interpretation of the Bible says about God. “If it were an accurate description of God, then every other Christian would profess belief in the exact same God, and their definition of God would be the same,” Vick argues. But in fact, everyone has their own unique concept of God. One church commands adherents to hate homosexuals while another commands them to love homosexuals. If there was any truth to the experience theists claim to have with God, one would expect they would all be able to agree on a definition of the deity they “profess to have a ubiquitous belief in”.

The term “God” therefore becomes incoherent—what does it mean exactly? What are we supposed to be arguing does or does not exist? The author writes, “If I asked you, ‘Do you believe in Twinkerschwetzles?’ then you’d be perfectly justified in asking me, ‘What do you mean by Twinkerschwetzles?’” As an aside, I made the same point in that 2017 argument with my friend’s father, albeit using a different made-up word. To quote myself: “I cannot possibly be expected to construct an argument about nothing at all. It’s as if I asked you to tell me whether qrkgvlfej exists. There is no valid argument re: its existence because it’s not a valid premise. Without even the tiniest sliver of some property when we talk about ‘God’, we aren’t talking about anything.” If there is no “tangible referent” on which descriptions of God are based, then God seems to devolve into a concept only and it is right to reevaluate whether God really exists. Vick notes that theists and theologians confronted with this difficulty often resort to redefining God in metaphysical terms which is “part of the semantic gymnastics believers frequently employ” when they cannot describe God with any specificity. “By keeping God confined to a semantic purgatory—a gray zone in which God can be defined and redefined any which way the theist sees fit . . . the term ‘God’ can come to mean anything the theist desires.”

For instance, theists might argue that God exists outside of space and time and therefore is beyond our limited human comprehension. However, “[p]lacing God outside of reality does not safeguard God”, but rather makes God even more undefinable and therefore increases the difficulty of making a positive claim that such a creature exists. Another argument Vick mentions having encountered from believers is the suggestion that a finite being (i.e. humans) cannot provide a “coherent definition” of an infinite being. Setting aside the question of how one is so certain that a finite being is incapable of describing an infinite being, this assumption that “our minds are capable of detecting the infinite mind of God through our experience of God, thereby recognizing the experience as tangible, but then, in the same breath, [turning] around and say[ing] whatever that experience contains in terms of information cannot be understood due to God’s incomprehensible nature . . . voids the experience of God.” Vick quotes a friendly commenter who summarized the point on his blog: “I guess one could ask the theist how they know God is incomprehensible—if he is truly incomprehensible, how would we even figure that out?”

Vick relies on something her calls referential justification, i.e. the principle that if we are describing something within reality, then descriptions of that object will always match up, absent a problem in the way one of us is perceiving the information or a problem with the information itself. An orange will be orange will be orange will be orange. The problem with God is that there is no reliable reference point to show that the term “God” relates to anything in the real world. Until a “real link” for God can be demonstrated, Vick argues, God remains confined to the conceptual realm of ideas—not things which exist apart from them—and all the theist has done is “provide an incoherent description by calling something imaginary real.” Theists and theologians are constantly shifting their meanings and redefining terms in the moment, as mentioned above (and I would argue that they do this only insofar as it is useful in a theological debate and will immediately snap back to their indefensible definitions of God once off-stage); insisting on a “real link” between their descriptions and an object within reality short-circuits that tactic. Most often, in fact, theists just tend to appeal to the authority of their church, their faith, or their prejudice. Vick asserts: “These people cannot be taken seriously because they have effectively stated they refuse to test their claims against other competing claims. How do they know their claim is in fact true? They can’t. What if Brahma is the true supreme being and all Christians are wrong? If they never held their idea of God up against any other competing ideas, they would never know if they were wrong.”

All of this is very powerful and arguably pretty commonsense. Turns out, when you cut out all the snake oil and bullshit, there’s not much left of God. Huh. Whaddaya know. I did find myself wondering whether Vick was going to address the universal fallback argument that even if the theist is unable to define God in any coherent way, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist—i.e. the “you must have complete knowledge of the universe in order to deny God” argument. Of course, this is a bad faith argument to begin with since the person making this argument isn’t really trying to argue in favor of some unknown, undefined entity called God but instead wants an excuse to hold onto their specific, unjustified definition of God. The author does address this, actually! Kind of. He says, “If by some infinitesimally small chance God should exist as some imperceptible entity, then atheism is still the more rational position as it assumes nothing about God, whereas the theist continues to make the mistake of assuming far too much.” I do believe Vick here is referring to agnostic atheism, though, as he states near the start of the book that he doesn’t know “for a fact” that God does not exist; as much as he promotes ignosticism, he’s not willing to go the extra step toward gnosticism. But as I pointed out before, if the thing can’t even be defined, then there’s no fault in saying categorically that it does not exist. It’s a non-concept! Even if there is conceivably some entity that had a hand in the origin of our universe, calling that entity “God” would be a misnomer—it’s the ultimate resuscitation of the God of the Gaps, preemptively claiming any heretofore unrealized knowledge as “God”. I’d suggest that allowing theists to get away with that kind of double-dealing is at least as bad as allowing them to get away with defining God in abstract, immeasurable, invented-out-of-whole-cloth terms.

Overall, then, I felt there was a good deal of substance here and a pretty solid summation of the main points of ignosticism. As the only book I’m aware of to deal with this subject, I’m impressed. At the same time, though, the author’s desperate, painful need for an editor to hack away the wordiness and correct the numerous mistakes is too plain to ignore. I’ve split the difference in my rating with 3 stars. I’d personally say that the pros outweigh the cons, but I can see how a more critical reader would find these issues impossible to overlook.