Agnosticism is a belief related to
the existence or non-existence of God.
An agnostic
is a person who feels that God's existence can neither be proved nor disproved,
on the basis of current evidence. An
agnostic usually holds the question of the existence of God open, pending the
arrival of more evidence. Famous agnostics include Charles Darwin, Robert G. Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, and Thomas H. Huxley, who invented the term agnostic in the 1840's. He combined "a" which implies negative, with "gnostic"
which is a Greek word meaning knowledge.
"When I reached intellectual
maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a
pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found
that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at
last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these
denominations, except the last,” Huxley wrote.
“So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate
title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic
to the "gnostic" of Church history, who
professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant."
Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say to God after he
died if Russell found out that he was wrong in his agnosticism. “Lord,” he said, “you should have provided
more evidence.”
The attractiveness of agnosticism is
that it eschews the dogmatism of atheism. Atheists, unlike agnostics, can be as
unyielding as any washed-in-the-blood-of the lamb believer. They use reason to demolish a structure that
is not built on reason. “Logic,” Elbert
Hubbard said, “is an instrument for bolstering a prejudice.” To the atheist who is quite sure what he
does not know and the fundamentalist who is quite sure what he does
know, I would agree with the agnostic that there is a vast middle ground of
uncertainty. On the other hand,
agnosticism embraces an intellectual fuzziness that insists that we should
disclaim belief in God the absence of proof or evidence. This, as a presupposition, has no more or
less standing than a theistic presupposition.
It furthermore embraces other self-limiting empiricist
presuppositions. It isn’t clear why
God’s existence needs to be either proved or disproved and what would
constitute sufficient proof or evidence, especially in light of the
universality of theistic beliefs. I
reject agnosticism for the same reason that I reject atheism. Both views the world through the lens of
logic and logical positivism, verifiability, and materialism, and because of this, I think it is the
mechanics who are the mystics, it is
the logicians who are the
lotus-eaters, for it is they who shut countless doors to countless worlds.
