TheBoySaunders.com

On arriving home for lunch the other day I was mildly bemused to encounter two middle aged ladies hanging out in the passage that leads to my flat. As they didn’t appear threatening there was no need to engage in violence, and I thought that, seeing as it was a Thursday (or possibly a Wednesday - my memory is not what it was), I might engage them in conversation. My opening gambit:

Phil - “Can I help you?”
Ladies - “We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
Phil - “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m an atheist.”
Ladies - “So you’re not interested.”
Phil - “No, sorry.”
Ladies - “Well, thanks anyway. Goodbye.”

And so they left. My first thought was ‘wow, that was easy’. My second was a slight twinge of guilt. Because I lied to those sweet, innocent, stir-crazy ladies: I’m not an atheist.

My religious beliefs, such as they are, can be summed up in the following sentence: “I very much doubt that there is a God and, if there is, its existence is almost certainly unproveable.” Note the many qualifiers in that sentence! One thing I sincerely believe is that, if there is a supreme being, it is about as far away from the anthropomorphised version presented by the world’s major religions as it is possible to be.

Whenever the question has come up in debate I have always described myself as a ‘Pessimistic Agnostic’, in that there might be a God, but I sincerely doubt it. However, predictably, someone had beaten me to the term. A quick Google search results in many hits for “pessimistic agnostic”, most of which seem to define the term as what is more commonly known as Apathetic Agnosticism, which condenses down to “I don’t know, and who cares anyway”. That’s not me - I do care and it’s immensely relevant. If there’s a ‘proper’ religion and way to live your life then I’d quite like to know, especially if the alternative is ending up in hell being poked with a fork by a guy in red pyjamas for all eternity.

So, it appears that I’m not a Pessimistic Agnostic.

Ellie suggested that I may be an Optimist Atheist, but that doesn’t sound right. Isn’t Atheism an absolute? Then I started reading on Wikipedia about Strong and Weak Agnosticism, Agnostic Theism, Ignosticism… but none of them seemed to fit. I read deeper and deeper. Eventually I realised that I may be either an Agnostic Atheist or a Atheistic Agnostic… apparently there is a difference… but to fully comprehend those theories I was obliged to understand philosophical terms such as ‘epistemology’, ‘Theory of Justification’ and ‘Occam’s Razor’.

After all that, I realised that my head hurt and I was far happier just being ‘Phil’.