A Tense Reflection on Theism

I have learned in the course of my study in philosophy about the construct that we call Knowledge. This is not to say that I have acquired knowledge, necessarily, which is itself somehow true--but that is another point entirely. Rather, I have learned about the manner and nature of knowledge, about its basic makeup. We say that knowledge seems to be the product of three components, although there is quite a lot of well-respected interlocutory about including a fourth. The three pillars, for now, are: belief, truthhood, and justification.

To illustrate the meaning of each of these is a necessary part of understanding the way in which they fit together. First, in order to say, "I knew that," it is obvious that the speaker would have had to have believed in the thing in the first place. It would be senseless to say that I knew the sun would rise today, if I did not believe in that statement in the first place. The second tenet is truth of the statement, for it is impossible to say that you know something which is false. We call this situation simple belief, as it is clearly a misnomer to identify something as knowledge if it actually does not exist; this is a major point of contention for many people, if I assert that they can have an opinion about anything, but that some opinions are just wrong. This statement is based on the disconnect between belief and knowledge, which centers upon the degree of truth present in the evidence: I could not rightly say, "See, I knew the sun was going to rise today!" if it turns out that the sun did not actually do this. Finally, justification is needed in order to validate any belief because we call it knowledge. In the sun example, we might use as justification the evidence that the sun has always risen, and this is in fact what we call daytime; therefore, if the sun rises, it must be day. Ipso facto, it is semantically impossible to be wrong about the sun rising "today", because every time the sun rises, it is day. I also have no reason to believe that the sun would not rise--and I have total reason to believe that it will--because that is the only option that anyone has ever been aware of: it is, for all intents, impossible to imagine a situation in which the sun simply did not rise, and to expect that it will is entirely reliable. Thus justified in my belief, which has indeed turned out to be true, I can satisfactorily say that "I knew the sun would rise today."

By now, I have come to measure all of the statements which hold a claim to knowledge by the rubric of the epistemological triumvirate delineated above. This is why, when claims about plain belief are accepted by others as actual truths during a conversation--or worse, during discourse--I shudder at the blight of intellectualism.

Based on this metric, I cannot classify myself as an atheist. This is manifest in the polarized language of that system of thought: there is no god is a system of thought whose truth or falsity is necessarily and irreversibly undefinable. I can neither classify myself as a a theist, because I do not believe that there is a god, so this claim would fall short on the belief component, in addition to provability. Before I relegate myself to the mired and uninteresting camp of agnosticism--of which we are all necessarily members, incidentally--I offer one parting shot at the theists. I am a man of logic, and a firm believer in its principles as tools for the acquisition of knowledge. So I will be hoisted by my own principles, and lay off of the claim that there is no god. But I am also, at my core, a pragmatist. Let me end this analysis with a thought, then, and one which many thinkers before me have shared: while I do not know one way or the other, I so strongly suspect that a god does not exist that I have come to believe that pursuit of such a thing, or devotion to it in any baseless regard, are each a proper waste of time.