II
T. H. Huxley was by training a biologist, but he had
strong philosophical
interests and as a champion of
Darwinism he became a major intellectual
figure in
the nineteenth century. In his “Science and
Christian
Tradition” (in Collected
Essays), Huxley remarks that
agnosticism is a method, a stance taken
toward putative
religious truth-claims, the core of which is to refuse
to assent to religious doctrines for which there is no
adequate evidence,
but to retain an open-mindedness
about the possibility of sometime
attaining adequate
evidence. We ought never to assert that we know a
proposition to be true or indeed even to assent to that
proposition unless
we have adequate evidence to sup-
port it.
After his youthful reading of the Scottish meta-
physician William Hamilton's Philosophy of the
Un-
conditioned (1829),
Huxley repeatedly returned to
questions about the limits of our possible
knowledge
and came, as did Leslie Stephen, to the empiricist
conclusion that we cannot know anything about God
or any alleged states or
realities “beyond phenomena.”
Whether there is a God,
a world of demons, an immor-
tal soul, whether
indeed “the spiritual world” is other
than human
fantasy or projection, were all taken by
Huxley to be factual questions open to careful and
systematic empirical
investigation. In short, however
humanly important such questions were,
they were also
“matters of the intellect” and in such
contexts the
central maxim of the method of agnosticism is to “fol-
low your reason as far as it will take you,
without
regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In
matters
of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions
are certain which are not
demonstrated or demon-
strable”
(Huxley, pp. 245-46). Operating in accordance
with such a method does not
justify “the denial of the
existence of any Supernature; but
simply the denial
of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of
this, or that, extant form of Supernaturalism” (p. 126).
Huxley
found that he could no more endorse materi-
alism, idealism, atheism, or pantheism than he could
theism; they
all claimed too much about essentially
contested matters. Huxley felt that
people espousing
such world views were too ready to claim a solution
to the “problem of existence,” while he remained
painfully aware that he had not succeeded in coming
by such a solution and
in addition retained “a pretty
strong conviction that the
problem was insoluble” (pp.
237-38).
This conviction is at the heart of his agnosticism.
Huxley was convinced
that Kant and Hamilton had
established that reason fails us—and
indeed must fail
us—when we try to
establish that the world is finite
in space or time or indefinite in space
or time, rational
or irrational, an ordered whole or simply
manifesting
certain ordered features but not something properly
to be
called an ordered whole. Answers to such ques-
tions reveal something about our attitudes but can
never provide us
with propositions we can justifiably
claim to be true or even know to be
false. Agnosticism
is a confession of honesty here. It is “the
only position
for people who object to say that they know what they
are quite aware they do not know” (p. 210).
Such skepticism concerning the truth-claims of reli-
gion and metaphysics, including, of course, meta-
physical religiosity, should not be taken as a denial
that
there can be reliable knowledge. Rather Huxley
argued, as John
Dewey did far more systematically
later, that we can and do gain
experimental and ex-
periential knowledge
of nature, including human na-
ture, and that
this, by contrast with so-called “super-
natural knowledge,” becomes increasingly more
exten-
sive and reliable. And while
remaining an agnostic,
Huxley saw in science—basically the
scientific way of
fixing belief—a fundamental and well grounded
chal-
lenge to the authority of the theory
of the “spiritual
world.”
Whatever may have been the case in the seventeenth
century, there was in
Huxley's time a state of war
between science and religion. Huxley took
science to
be a challenge to claims of biblical infallibility and
revelation. The whole supernatural world view built
on the authority of the
Bible and revelation must come
under scientific scrutiny and when this is done it be-
comes gradually apparent that the use of the
scientific
method and appeals to scientific canons of criticism
give
us a far more reliable method of settling belief
than do the scriptures and
revelation.
To commit ourselves to the Bible as an infallible
authority is to commit
ourselves to a world view in
which we must believe that devils were cast
out of
a man and went into a herd of swine, that the deluge
was
universal, that the world was made in six days, and
the like. Yet such
claims are plainly and massively
contravened by our actual empirical
knowledge such
that they are quite beyond the boundaries of respon-
sible belief. About such matters,
Huxley argues, we
ought not to be at all agnostic. Moreover, we cannot
take them simply as myths, important for the biblical
and Christian
understanding of the world, if we are
to take seriously biblical
infallibility and the authority
of revelation. For the Jewish-Christian
world view to
establish its validity, it must provide us with adequate
grounds for believing that there are demons. But there
is no good evidence
for such alleged realities and to
believe in them is the grossest form of
superstition
(Huxley, p. 215).
Even if we fall back on a severe Christology, we
are still in difficulties,
for it is evident enough that Jesus
believed in demons and if we are to
adopt a radical
Christology and take Jesus as our infallible guide to
the divine, we are going to have to accept such super-
stitious beliefs. Such beliefs affront not only our
intel-
lect—our credibility
concerning what it is reasonable
to believe—they also affront
our moral sense as well
(p. 226). Yet once we give up the Gospel claim
that
there are “demons who can be transferred from a man
to
a pig,” the other stories of “demonic possession fall
under suspicion.” Once we start on this slide, once we
challenge
the ultimate authority of the Bible, and
follow experimental and scientific
procedures, the
ground for the whole Judeo-Christian world view is
undermined.
Huxley obviously thinks its credibility and proba-
bility is of a very low order; an order which would
make
Christian or Jewish belief quite impossible for
a reasonable and tolerably
well informed man. Those
who claim to know that there are such unseen
and
indeed utterly unseeable realities, are very likely peo-
ple who have taken “cunning phrases for
answers,”
where real answers are “not merely actually
impossi-
ble, but theoretically
inconceivable.” Yet as an agnostic
one must
always—even for such problematical trans-
cendental claims—remain open to conviction
where
evidence can be brought to establish the truth of such
transcendent religious claims.
Leslie Stephen in his neglected An Agnostic's
Apology (1893) remarks that he uses
“agnostic” in a
sense close to that of T. H. Huxley.
To be an agnostic,
according to Stephen, is to reject what he calls
“Dog-
matic Atheism,”
i.e., “the doctrine that there is no God,
whatever is meant by
God...”; it is, instead, (1) to
affirm “what no one
denies,” namely “that there are
limits to the sphere
of human intelligence” and (2) also
to affirm the controversial
empiricist thesis “that those
limits are such as to exclude at
least what Lewes called
'Metempirical knowledge'” (p. 1).
(“Metempirical
knowledge” is meant to designate all
forms of knowl-
edge of a transcendent,
numinal, nonempirical sort.)
Stephen makes apparent the empiricist commit-
ments of his conception of agnosticism in charac-
terizing gnosticism, the view agnosticism is
deliberately
set against. To be a gnostic is to believe that “we
can
attain truths not capable of verification and not needing
verification by actual experiment or observation” (ibid.,
pp.
1-2). In gaining such a knowledge gnostics in
opposition to both Hume and
Kant claim that by the
use of our reason we can attain a knowledge
that
transcends “the narrow limits of experience” (p.
1). But
the agnostic, firmly in the empiricist tradition, denies
that
there can be any knowledge of the world, includ-
ing anything about its origin and destiny, which tran-
scends experience and comprehends “the sorry
scheme
of things entire.” Such putative knowledge, Stephen
maintains, is illusory and not something “essential to
the
highest interests of mankind,” providing us, as
speculative
metaphysicians believe, with the solution
to “the dark riddle of
the universe” (p. 2).
In a manner that anticipates the challenge to the
claims of religion and
metaphysics made by the logical
empiricists, Stephen says that in addition
to the prob-
lem of whether they can establish
the truth or probable
truth of “religious
truth-claims” there is the further
consideration—actually a logically prior question—of
whether such putative claims “have any meaning”
(p.
3).
It should be noted that Stephen does not begin “An
Agnostic's
Apology” by discussing semantical diffi-
culties in putative religious truth-claims but starts
with
problems connected with what W. K. Clifford was later
to call
“the ethics of belief.” We indeed would all
want—if we could do it honestly—to accept the claim
that “evil is transitory... good eternal” and that
the
“world is really an embodiment of love and wisdom,
however dark it may appear to us” (p. 2). But the rub
is that
many of us cannot believe that and in a question
of such inestimable human
value, we have “the most
sacred obligations to recognize the
facts” and make
our judgments in accordance with the facts. But
the
facts do not give us grounds for confidence in the
viability of
Judeo-Christian beliefs. Rather we are
strongly inclined when we inspect these beliefs to
believe they
are wish fulfillments. And while it may
indeed be true that for the moment
dreams may be
pleasanter than realities, it is also true that if we
are
bent on attaining a more permanent measure of happi-
ness, it “must be won by adapting our lives
to the
realities,” for we know from experience that
illusory
consolations “are the bitterest of
mockeries” (ibid.).
The religious platitudes “Pain is
not an evil,” “Death
is not a separation,”
and “Sickness is but a blessing
in disguise” have
tortured sufferers far more than “the
gloomiest speculations of
avowed pessimists” (ibid.).
However, the problem of meaning cuts to a deeper
conceptual level than do such arguments about the
ethics of belief. Where
Judeo-Christianity does not
have a fideistic basis, it is committed to what
Stephen
calls gnosticism. But does not such a doctrine fail
“to
recognize the limits of possible knowledge” and
in
trying to transcend these limits does it not in effect
commit the
gnostic to pseudo-propositions which are
devoid of literal meaning? Logical
empiricists later
answered this question in the affirmative and while
it
is not crystal clear that Stephen's answer is quite that
definite,
it would appear that this is what he wants
to maintain. And if that is what
Stephen is maintaining,
there can, of course, be no knowledge of the
divine.
Stephen raises this key question concerning the
intelligibility of such
gnostic God-talk, but he does
little with it. Instead he focuses on some
key questions
concerning attempts by theologians to undermine
agnosticism. He first points out that an appeal to rev-
elation is no answer to the agnostic's denial that we
have knowledge of transcendent realities or states, for
in claiming to rely
exclusively on revelation these
theologians acknowledge that
“natural man can know
nothing of the Divine nature.”
But this Stephen replies,
is not only to grant but in effect to assert the
agnostic's
fundamental principle (p. 5). He points out that H. L.
Mansel in effect and in substance affirms agnosticism
and that Cardinal
Newman with his appeal to the
testimony of conscience does not provide a
reliable
argument on which to base a belief in God nor does
he
undermine the agnostic's position, for “the voice
of conscience
has been very differently interpreted.”
Some of these
interpretations, secular though they be,
have all the appearances of being
at least as valid as
Newman's, for all that Newman or anyone else has
shown. Moreover, on any reasonable reading of a prin-
ciple of parsimony, they are far simpler than Newman's
interpretation. Thus Newman's arguments in reality
prove, as do Mansel's,
that a man ought to be an
agnostic concerning such ultimate questions
where
reason remains his guide and where he does not make
an appeal to
the authority of the Church. They, of
course, would have us accept the authority of the
Church, but
how can we reasonably do so when there
are so many Churches, so many
conflicting authorities,
and so many putative revelations? Where reason
can
only lead us to agnosticism concerning religious mat-
ters, we can have no ground for accepting one Church,
one religious authority, or one putative revelation
rather than another. We
simply have no way of know-
ing which course is
the better course. Agnosticism,
Stephen concludes, is the only reasonable
and viable
alternative.
Like Huxley, and like Hume before him, Stephen
is skeptical of the a priori arguments of metaphysics
and natural
theology. “There is not a single proof of
natural
theology,” he asserts, “of which the negative
has not
been maintained as vigorously as the
affirmative” (p. 9). In
such a context, where there is
no substantial agreement, but just endless
and irre-
solvable philosophical
controversy, it is the duty of a
reasonable man to profess ignorance (p.
9). In trying
to escape the bounds of sense—in trying to gain
some
metempirical knowledge—philosophers continue to
contradict flatly the first principles of their prede-
cessors and no vantage point is attained where we
can
objectively assess these endemic metaphysical conflicts
that
divide philosophers. To escape utter skepticism,
we must be agnostics and
argue that such metaphysical
and theological controversies lead to
“transcending the
limits of reason” (p. 10). But the
only widely accepted
characterization of these limits “comes in
substance
to an exclusion of ontology” and an adherence to
empirically based truth-claims as the only legitimate
truth-claims.
It will not help, Stephen argues, to maintain that
the Numinous, i.e., the
divine, is essentially mysterious
and that religious
understanding—a seeing through a
glass darkly—is a
knowledge of something which is
irreducibly and inescapably mysterious. In
such talk
in such contexts, there is linguistic legerdemain: we
call
our doubts mysteries and what is now being ap-
pealed to as “the mystery of faith” is but the
theolog-
ical phrase for agnosticism (p.
22).
Stephen argues that one could believe knowledge
of the standard types was
quite possible and indeed
actual and remain skeptical about metaphysics. It
is
just such a position that many (perhaps most) contem-
porary philosophers would take. In taking this
position
himself, Stephen came to believe that metaphysical
claims are
“nothing but the bare husks of meaningless
words.” To
gain genuine knowledge, we must firmly
put aside such meaningless
metaphysical claims and
recognize the more limited extent of our
knowledge
claims. A firm recognition here will enable us to avoid
utter skepticism because we come to see that within
the limits of the experiential “we have been able
to
discover certain reliable truths” and with them “we
shall find sufficient guidance for the needs of life”
(p. 26).
So while we remain religious skeptics and
skeptical of the claims of
transcendental metaphysics,
we are not generally skeptical about man's
capacity
to attain reliable knowledge. Yet it remains the case
that
nothing is known or can be known, of the alleged
“ultimate
reality”—the Infinite and Absolute—of tra-
ditional metaphysics and natural theology
(p. 26). And
thus nothing can be known of God.
