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Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||
AGNOSTICISM
I
Agnosticism is a philosophical and theological
concept
which has been understood in various ways by different
philosophers and theologians. T. H. Huxley coined the
term in 1869, and its
first home was in the disputes
about science and religion, naturalism and
super-
naturalism, that reached a
climax during the nineteenth
century. To be an agnostic is to hold that
nothing can
be known or at least that it is very unlikely that any-
thing will be known or soundly believed
concerning
whether God or any transcendent reality or state exists.
It is very natural for certain people conditioned in
certain ways to believe
that there must be some power
“behind,”
“beyond,” or “underlying” the
universe
which is responsible for its order and all the incredible
features that are observed and studied by the sciences
even though these
same people will readily grant that
we do not know that there is such a
power or have
good grounds for believing that there is such a power.
While the admission of ignorance concerning things
divine is usually made
by someone outside the circle
of faith, it can and indeed has been made by
fideistic
Jews and Christians as well.
Some writers, e.g., Robert Flint and James Ward,
so construed
“agnosticism” that (1) it was identified
with
“philosophical skepticism” and (2) it allowed for
there being “theistic agnostics” and “Christian
agnos-
tics.” However, the more
typical employment of “ag-
nosticism” is such that it would not be correct to count
as agnostics either fideistic believers or Jews and Chris-
tians who claim that we can only gain knowledge of
God through some mystical awareness or “ineffable
knowledge.” It surely was this standard but more cir-
cumscribed sense of
“agnosticism” that William James
had in mind when he made his famous remark in his
essay
“The Will to Believe” that agnosticism was the
worst
thing that “ever came out of the philosopher's
workshop.” Without implying or suggesting any sup-
port at all for James's value judgment, we shall
construe
agnosticism in this rather more typical manner. Given
this
construal (1) “theistic agnosticism” is a contra-
diction and thus one cannot be a Jew
or a Christian
and be an agnostic and (2) also agnosticism is neutral
vis-à-vis the claim that there can
be no philosophical
knowledge or even scientific or common-sense knowl-
edge. We shall then take agnosticism to
be the more
limited claim that we either do not or cannot know
that
God or any other transcendent reality or state
exists and thus we should
suspend judgment concerning
the assertion that God exists. That is to say,
the agnostic
neither affirms nor denies it. This, as should be evident
from the above characterization, can take further
specification and indeed
later such specifications will
be supplied. But such a construal captures
in its char-
acterization both what was
essentially at issue in the
great agnostic debates in the nineteenth
century and
the issue as it has come down to us.
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
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
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
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.
III
Before moving on to a consideration of some twen-
tieth-century formulations of agnosticism and to a
critical examination of all forms of agnosticism, let us
consider briefly a
question that the above charac-
terization of Huxley and Stephen certainly should give
rise to.
Given the correctness of the above criticisms
of Judaism and Christianity,
do we not have good
grounds for rejecting these religions and is not this
in
effect an espousal of atheism rather than agnosticism?
We should answer differently for Huxley than we
do for Stephen. Huxley's
arguments, if correct, would
give us good grounds for rejecting
Christianity and
Judaism; but they are not sufficient by themselves
for
jettisoning a belief in God, though they would require
us to
suspend judgment about the putative knowledge-
claim that God exists and created the world. But it must
be
remembered that agnosticism is the general claim
that we do not know and
(more typically) cannot know
or have good grounds for believing that there
is a God.
But to accept this is not to accept the claim that there
is
no God, unless we accept the premiss that what
cannot even in principle be
known cannot exist. This
was not a premiss to which Huxley and Stephen
were
committed. Rather they accepted the standard agnostic
view that
since we cannot know or have good reasons
for believing that God exists we
should suspend judg-
ment concerning his
existence or nonexistence. More-
over, as we
shall see, forms of Jewish and Christian
fideism when linked with modern
biblical scholarship
could accept at least most of Huxley's arguments
and
still defend an acceptance of the Jewish or Christian
faith.
Stephen's key arguments are more epistemologically
oriented and are more
definitely committed to an
empiricist account of meaning and the limits of
con-
ceivability. As we shall see in
examining the conten-
tions of some
contemporary critics of religion, it is
more difficult to see what, given
the correctness of
Stephen's own account, it could mean to affirm, deny,
or even doubt the existence of God. The very
concept
of God on such an account becomes problematical. And
atheist, or a theist problematical.
The cultural context in which we speak of religion
is very different in the
twentieth century than it was
in the nineteenth (cf. MacIntyre, Ricoeur).
For most
twentieth-century people with even a minimal amount
of
education, the authority of science has cut much
deeper than it did in
previous centuries. The cosmo-
logical
claims in the biblical stories are no longer taken
at face value by the
overwhelming majority of edu-
cated people both
religious and non-religious. Theolo-
gians
working from within the circle of faith have
carried out an extensive
program of de-mythologizing
such biblical claims. Thus it is evident that
in one quite
obvious respect the nineteenth-century agnostics have
clearly been victorious. There is no longer any serious
attempt to defend
the truth of the cosmological claims
in the type of biblical stories that
Huxley discusses.
However, what has not received such wide accept-
ance is the claim that the acceptance of such a de-
mythologizing undermines Judaism and
Christianity
and drives an honest man in the direction of agnos-
ticism or atheism. Many would claim
that such de-
mythologizing only
purifies Judaism and Christianity
of extraneous cultural material. The
first thing to ask
is whether or not a steady recognition of the fact
that
these biblical stories are false supports agnosticism as
strongly
as Huxley thinks it does.
Here the new historical perspective on the Bible is
a crucial factor. The
very concept of the authority of
the Bible undergoes a sea change with the
new look
in historical scholarship. It is and has been widely
acknowledged both now and in the nineteenth century
that Judaism and
Christianity are both integrally linked
with certain historical claims.
They are not sufficient
to establish the truth of either of these
religions, but
they are necessary. Yet modern historical
research—to
put it minimally—places many of these
historical
claims in an equivocal light and makes it quite im-
possible to accept claims about the literal
infallibility
of the Bible. Conservative evangelicalists (funda-
mentalists) try to resist this tide
and in reality still
battle with Huxley. They reject the basic findings
of
modern biblical scholarship and in contrast to mod-
ernists treat the Bible not as a fallible and
myth-laden
account of God's self-revelation in history but as a fully
inspired and infallible historical record. Conservative
evangelicalists
agree with modernists that revelation
consists in God's self-disclosure to
man, but they further
believe that the Bible is an infallible testimony of
God's
self-unveiling. Modernists by contrast believe that we
must
discover what the crucial historical but yet divine
events and realities
are like by a painstaking historical
investigation of the biblical
material. This involves all
the techniques of modern historical research. The vari-
ous accounts in the Bible must be sifted by
methodical
inquiry and independently acquired knowledge of the
culture
and the times must be used whenever possible.
Conservative evangelicalism is still strong as a cul-
tural phenomenon in North America, though it is
steadily losing
strength. However it is not a serious
influence in the major seminaries and
modernism has
thoroughly won the day in the intellectually respect-
able centers of Jewish and Christian
learning. Huxley's
arguments do come into conflict with conservative
evangelicalism and his arguments about the plain fal-
sity, utter incoherence, and sometimes questionable
morality of
the miracle stories and stories of Jesus'
actions would have to be met by
such conservative
evangelicalists. But the modernists would be on
Huxley's side here. So, for a large and respectable
element of the Jewish
and Christian community,
Huxley's arguments, which lead him to reject Christi-
anity and accept agnosticism, are
accepted but not
taken as at all undermining the foundations of
Judaism
or Christianity.
Huxley's sort of endeavor, like the more systematic
endeavors of David
Strauss, simply helps Christians rid
the world of the historically
contingent cultural trap-
pings of the
biblical writers. Once this has been cut
away, modernists argue, the true
import of the biblical
message can be seen as something of decisive
relevance
that transcends the vicissitudes of time.
However, this is not all that should be said vis-à-vis
the conflict
between science and religion and agnos-
ticism. It is often said that the conflict between science
and
religion came to a head in the nineteenth century
and now has been
transcended. Science, it is averred,
is now seen to be neutral concerning
materialism or
any other metaphysical thesis and theology—the
en-
terprise of attempting to provide
ever deeper, clearer,
and more reasonable statements and explications of
the
truths of religion—is more sophisticated and less vul-
nerable to attacks by science or
scientifically oriented
thinkers. Still it may be the case that there
remain some
conflicts between science and religion which have not
been
overcome even with a sophisticated analysis of
religion, where that
analysis takes the religions of the
world and Christianity and Judaism in
particular to
be making truth-claims.
Let us consider how such difficulties might arise.
Most Christians, for
example, would want to claim as
something central to their religion that
Christ rose from
the dead and that there is a life after the death of
our
earthly bodies. These claims seem at least to run
athwart our
scientific understanding of the world so
that it is difficult to know how
we could both accept
scientific method as the most reliable method of settling
Christian claims. Moreover, given what science teaches
us about the world, these things could not happen or
have happened. Yet it is also true that the by now
widely accepted new historical perspective on the
Bible recognizes and indeed stresses mythical and po-
etical strands in the biblical stories. And surely it is
in this non-literal way that the stories about demons,
Jonah in the whale's belly, and Noah and his ark are
to be taken, but how far is this to be carried with the
other biblical claims? Are we to extend it to such
central Christian claims as “Christ rose from the
Dead,” “Man shall survive the death of his earthly
body,” “God is in Christ”? If we do, it becomes com-
pletely unclear as to what it could mean to speak of
either the truth or falsity of the Christian religion. If
we do not, then it would seem that some central Chris-
tian truth-claims do clash with scientific claims and
orientations so that there is after all a conflict between
science and religion.
Given such a dilemma, the agnostic or atheist could
then go on to claim that
either these key religious
utterances do not function propositionally as
truth-
claims at all or there is indeed
such a clash. But if
there is such a clash, the scientific claims are
clearly
the claims to be preferred, for of all the rival ways
of
fixing belief, the scientific way of fixing belief is
clearly the most
reliable. Thus if there are good empir-
ical,
scientific reasons (as there are) for thinking that
people who die are not
resurrected, that when our
earthly bodies die we die, and that there is no
evidence
at all, and indeed not even any clear meaning to the
claim
that there are “resurrection bodies” and a
“res-
urrection
world” utterly distinct from the cosmos, we
have the strongest
of reasons for not accepting the
Christian claim that “Christ
rose from the Dead.” The
scientific beliefs in conflict with
that belief are ones
that it would be foolish to jettison. But it is
only
by a sacrifice of our scientific way of conceiving of
things that
we could assent to such a central religious
claim. Thus it is fair to say
that our scientific under-
standing drives
us in the direction of either atheism
or agnosticism.
Some contemporary theologians have responded to
such contentions by arguing
that there are good con-
ceptual reasons why
there could not be, appearances
to the contrary notwithstanding, such a
conflict.
“Christ” is not equivalent to
“Jesus” but to “the son
of God”
and God is not a physical reality. Christianity
centers on a belief in a
deity who is beyond the world,
who is creator of the world. But such a
reality is in
principle, since it is transcendent to the cosmos, not
capable of being investigated scientifically but must
be understood in some other way. God in his proper
non-anthropomorphic forms is beyond the reach of
evidence. Only crude
anthropomorphic forms of
Christian belief could be disproved by modern
scien-
tific investigations.
To believe that Christ rose from the dead is to be
committed to a belief in
miracles. But, it has been
forcefully argued by Ninian Smart, this does not
com-
mit us to something which is
anti-scientific or that can
be ruled out a priori
(Smart [1964], Ch. II; [1966], pp.
44-45). A miracle is an event of divine
significance
which is an exception to at least one law of nature.
Scientific laws are not, it is important to remember,
falsified by single
exceptions but only by a class of
experimentally repeatable events. Thus we
can believe
in the miracle of Christ's resurrection without clashing
with anything sanctioned by science. It is a dogma,
the critic of
agnosticism could continue, to think that
everything that can be known can
be known by the
method of science or by simple observation. A thor-
oughly scientific mind quite devoid of
credulity could
remain committed to Judaism or Christianity, believe
in God, and accept such crucial miracle stories without
abandoning a
scientific attitude, i.e., he could accept
all the findings of science and
accept its authority as
the most efficient method for ascertaining what is
the
case when ascertaining what is the case comes to
predicting and
retrodicting classes of experimentally
repeatable events or processes.
Christians as well as agnostics can and do recognize
the obscurity and
mysteriousness of religious claims.
The Christian should go on to say that
a nonmysterious
God, a God whose reality is evident, would not be the
God of Judeo-Christianity—the God to be accepted
on faith with
fear and trembling. It is only for a God
who moves in mysterious ways, that
the characteristic
Jewish and Christian attitudes of discipleship, adora-
tion, and faith are appropriate. If the
existence of God
and what it was to act in accordance with His will
were perfectly evident or clearly establishable by hard
intellectual work,
faith would lose its force and ration-
ale.
Faith involves risk, trust, and commitment. Judaism
or Christianity is not
something one simply must be-
lieve in if one
will only think the matter through as
clearly and honestly as possible.
What is evident is that the agnosticism of a Huxley
and a Stephen at
least—and a Bertrand Russell as
well—rests on a
philosophical view not dictated by
science. James Ward saw this around the
turn of the
century and argued in his Naturalism and
Agnosticism
that agnosticism “is an inherently unstable
position”
unless it is supplemented by some general
philosophical
view such as materialism or idealism (p. 21). Yet it is
anxious to avoid and along Humean lines viewed with
a thoroughgoing skepticism.
In sum, the claim is that only if such an overall
philosophical view is
justified is it the case that there
may be good grounds for being an
agnostic rather than
a Christian or a Jew. The overall position
necessary
for such a justification is either a position of empiricism
or materialism and if it is the former it must be a form
of empiricism
which in Karl Popper's terms is also a
scientism. By this we mean the claim
that there are
no facts which science cannot explore: that what can-
not at least in principle be known by the
method of
science cannot be known. Where alternatively scien-
tism is part of a reductive materialist
metaphysics,
there is a commitment to what has been called an
“existence-monism,” namely, the view that there is
only one sort of level or order of existence and that
is spatiotemporal
existence. That is to say, such an
existence-monist believes that to exist
is to have a place
in space-time. In support of this, he may point out
that we can always ask about a thing that is supposed
to exist where it exists. This, it is claimed, indicates
how
we in reality operate on materialist assumptions.
And note that if that
question is not apposite, “exists”
and its
equivalents are not being employed in their
standard
senses, but are being used in a secondary sense
as in “Ghosts
and gremlins exist merely in one's mind.”
Besides
existence-monism there is the even more per-
vasive and distinctively empiricist position—a position
shared by the logical empiricists, by Bertrand Russell,
and by John
Dewey—referred to as “methodological-
monism”: to wit “that all
statements of fact are such
that they can be investigated scientifically,
i.e., that
they can in principle be falsified by
observation”
(Smart [1966], p. 8).
However, critics of agnosticism have responded, as
has Ninian Smart, by
pointing out that these philo-
sophical
positions are vulnerable to a variety of fairly
obvious and long-standing
criticisms. Perhaps these
criticisms can be and have been met, but these
positions
are highly controversial. If agnosticism is tied to them,
do
we not have as good grounds for being skeptical
of agnosticism as the
agnostics have for being skeptical
of the claims of religion.
Some samplings of the grounds for being skeptical
about the philosophical
underpinnings for agnosticism
are these. When I suddenly remember that I
left my
key in my car, it makes sense to speak of the space-time
location of my car but, it is at least plausibly argued,
not of the
space-time location of my sudden thought.
Moreover numbers exist but it
hardly makes sense to
ask where they exist. It is
not the case that for all
standard uses of “exist” that to exist is to
have a place
in space-time. Methodological-monism is also beset
with
difficulties. There are in science theoretically
unobservable entities and
“from quite early times, the
central concepts of religion, such
as God and nirvana
already include the notion that what they stand for
cannot literally be observed” (Smart [1962], p. 8).
Moreover it
is not evident that we could falsify state-
ments such as “There are some graylings in
Michigan”
or “Every human being has some neurotic
traits” or
“Photons really exist, they are not simply
scientific
fictions.” Yet we do recognize them (or so at least
it
would seem) as intelligible statements of fact. Such
considerations
lead Ninian Smart to claim confidently
in his The Teacher
and Christian Belief (London, 1966)
that “it remains
merely a dogma to claim that all facts
are facts about moons and flowers
and humans and
other denizens of the cosmos. There need be no general
embargo upon belief in a transcendent reality, pro-
vided such belief is not merely based on uncontrolled
speculation” (p. 51). Smart goes on to conclude that
“the exclusion of transcendent fact rests on a mere
decision” (p. 52). So it would appear, from what has
been said
above, that agnosticism has no solid rational
foundation.
The dialectic of the argument over agnosticism is
not nearly at an end and
it shall be the burden of the
argument here to establish that agnosticism
still has
much to be said for it. First of all, even granting, for
the
reasons outlined above, that neither the develop-
ment of science nor an appeal to scientism or empiri-
cism establishes agnosticism, there are other consid-
erations which give it strong
support. David Hume's
Dialogues on Natural Religion (1779) and Immanuel
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) make it quite
evident that none of the proofs for the existence of
God work, i.e., they
are not sound or reliable argu-
ments.
Furthermore it should be noted that their ar-
guments do not for the most part depend for their force
on
empiricist assumptions and they most certainly do
not depend on the
development of science.
The most rigorous contemporary work in the philos-
ophy of religion has not always supported the detailed
arguments
of Hume and Kant but it has for the most
part supported their overall
conclusions on this issue.
Alvin Plantinga, for example, in his God and Other
Minds (1967) rejects rather thoroughly
the principles
and assumptions of both existence-monism and metho-
dological-monism and he
subjects the particulars of
Hume's and Kant's views to careful criticism,
yet in
the very course of giving a defense of what he takes
to be the
rationality of Christian belief, he argues that
none of the attempts at a
demonstration of the exist-
by such important contemporary analytical theologians
as John Hick and Diogenes Allen. This lack of validated
knowledge of the divine or lack of such warranted
belief strengthens the hand of the agnostics, though
it is also compatible with fideism or a revelationist view
such as Barth's, which holds that man on his own can
know nothing of God but must rely utterly on God's
self-disclosure.
IV
In the twentieth century a distinct element comes
to the fore which counts
in favor of agnosticism but
also gives it a particular twist. This new turn
leads
to a reformulation of agnosticism. It states agnosticism
in such
a manner that it becomes evident how it is
a relevant response to one of
the major elements in
contemporary philosophical perplexities over
religion.
We have hitherto been talking as if God-talk is used
in certain central
contexts to make statements of whose
truth-value we are in doubt. That is,
there is no doubt
that they have a truth-value but there is a doubt
which
truth-value they actually have. Theists think that at
least some
of the key Jewish or Christian claims are
true, atheists think they are
false, and traditional agnos-
tics, as H. H.
Price puts it in his Belief (London, 1969),
suspend
“judgement on the ground that we do not have
sufficient evidence
to decide the question and so far
as he [the agnostic] can tell there is no
likelihood that
we ever shall have” (p. 455). But in the
twentieth
century with certain analytic philosophers the question
has
come to the fore about whether these key religious
utterances have any
truth-value at all.
A. J. Ayer defending the modern variety of em-
piricism called “logical empiricism” argued in his
Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1935) that such
key religious utterances are devoid of cognitive mean-
ing. Such considerations lead Ayer to deny that he or
anyone
taking such a position could be either a theist,
an atheist, or even an
agnostic. In a well known passage
Ayer comments that it is very important
not to confuse
his view with agnosticism or atheism, for, as he puts
it,
It is a characteristic of an agnostic to hold that the existence
of
a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason
either to
believe or disbelieve; and it is characteristic of
an atheist to
hold that it is at least probable that no god
exists. And our view
that all utterances about the nature
of God are nonsensical, so far
from being identical with,
or even lending any support to, either
of these familiar
contentions, is actually incompatible with them.
For if the
assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the
atheist's
assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical,
since
it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly
contradicted. As for the agnostic, although he refrains
from
saying either that there is or that there is not a god,
he
does not deny that the question whether a transcendent
god
exists is a genuine question. He does not deny that the
two
sentences “There is a transcendent god” and
“There
is no transcendent god” express
propositions one of which
is actually true and the other false. All
he says is that we
have no means of telling which of them is true,
and therefore
ought not to commit ourselves to either. But we have
seen
that the sentences in question do not express
propositions
at all. And this means that agnosticism also is ruled
out
(p. 219).
Ayer goes on to remark that the theist's putative claims
are neither valid
nor invalid; they say nothing at all
and thus the theist cannot rightly be
“accused of saying
anything false, or anything for which he has
insufficient
grounds” (ibid., p. 219). It is only when the
Christian,
so to speak, turns meta-theologian and claims that in
asserting the existence of a Transcendent God he is
expressing a genuine
proposition “that we are entitled
to disagree with
him” (ibid.).
The central point Ayer is making is that such reli-
gious utterances do not assert anything and thus they
can be
neither doubted, believed, nor even asserted
to be false. With such
considerations pushed to the
front, the key question becomes whether such
religious
utterances have any informative content at all.
There is something very strange here. Ayer, as we
have seen, does not regard
his position as atheistical
or agnostic, for since such key religious
utterances
could not even be false, they could not be intelligibly
denied and since they make no claim to be intelligibly
questioned, they
could not be sensibly doubted. But,
as Susan Stebbing rightly observed,
“the plain man
would not find it easy to see the difference
between
Mr. Ayer's non-atheism and the fool's atheism” (Steb-
bing, p. 264). But before we say
“so much the worse
for the plain man,” we should
remember that to believe
that such key religious utterances are
unbelievable
because nonsensical is even a more basic rejection of
religious belief than simply asserting the falsity of the
putative
truth-claims of Christianity, but allowing for
the possibility that they might be true.
Because of this altered conceptualization of the situ-
ation, Price, Edwards, and Nielsen have characterized
both
agnosticism and atheism in a broader and more
adequate way which takes into
account these problems
about meaning. A contemporary agnostic who is
alert
to such questions about meaning would maintain that
judgments
concerning putatively assertive God-talk
should be suspended for either of
two reasons, depend-
ing on the exact nature
of the God-talk in question:
(1) the claims, though genuine truth-claims,
are without
sufficient evidence to warrant either their belief or
atical that it is doubtful whether there is something
there which is sufficiently intelligible or coherent to
be believed. Where God is conceived somewhat an-
thropomorphically the first condition obtains and
where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically the
second condition obtains. The contemporary agnostic
believes that “God” in the most typical religious
employments is so indeterminate in meaning that he
must simply suspend judgment about whether there is
anything that it stands for which can intelligibly be
believed. His position, as Price points out, is like the
traditional agnostic's in being neutral between theism
and atheism (p. 454). He believes that neither such
positive judgment is justified, but unlike a contem-
porary atheist, on the one hand, he is not so confident
of the unintelligibility or incoherence of religious ut-
terances that he feels that religious belief is irrational
and is to be rejected, but, on the other hand, he does
not believe one is justified in taking these problematic
utterances as being obscurely revelatory of Divine
Truth. Neither atheism nor any of the several forms
of fideism is acceptable to him.
The contemporary agnostic sensitive to problems
about the logical status of
religious utterances simply
stresses that the reasonable and on the whole
justified
course of action here is simply to suspend judgment.
His
doubts are primarily doubts about the possibility
of
there being anything to doubt, but, second-order as
they are, they
have an effect similar to the effect of
classical agnosticism and they lead
to a similar attitude
toward religion. There is neither the classical
atheistic
denial that there is anything to the claims of religion
nor
is there the fideistic avowal that in spite of all their
obscurity and seeming unintelligibility that there still
is
something there worthy of belief. Instead there is
a
genuine suspension of judgment.
The thing to ask is whether the doubts leading to
a suspension of judgment
are actually sufficient to
justify such a suspension or, everything considered,
(1)
would a leap of faith be more justified or (2) would
the
overcoming of doubt in the direction of atheism
be more reasonable? Or is
it the case that there is no
way of making a rational decision here or of
reasonably
deciding what one ought to do or believe?
It may indeed be true, as many a sophisticated theo-
logian has argued, that religious commitment is per-
fectly compatible with a high degree of ignorance
about God and the nature—whatever that may
mean—of
“ultimate reality.” But, if this is the case and
if
our ignorance here is as invincible as much contem-
porary philosophical argumentation would have us
believe, natural theology seems at least to be thor-
oughly undermined. In trying to establish
whether the
world is contingent or non-contingent, whether there
is or can
be something “beyond the world” upon which
the world
in some sense depends, or whether there is
or could be an unlimited reality
which is still in some
sense personal, theological reasonings have been
no-
toriously unsuccessful. About the
best that has been
done is to establish that it is not entirely evident
that
these questions are meaningless or utterly unan-
swerable.
Here a Barthian turn away from natural theology
is equally fruitless. To say
that man can by his own
endeavors know nothing of God but simply must
await
an unpredictable and rationally inexplicable self-
disclosure of God—the
core notion of God revealing
himself to man—is of no help, for
when we look at
religions in an honest anthropological light, we will
see, when all the world is our stage, that we have
multitudes of
conflicting alleged revelations with no
means at all of deciding, without
the aid of natural
theology or philosophical analysis, which, if any,
of
these putative revelations are genuine revelations. It
is true
enough that if something is actually a divine
revelation, it cannot be
assessed by man, but must
simply be accepted. But the agnostic reminds the
reve-
lationist that we have a
multitude of conflicting candi-
date
revelations with no means of reasonably deciding
which one to accept. In
such a context a reasonable
man will remain agnostic concerning such
matters. To
simply accept the authorative claims of a Church in
such a
circumstance is to fly in the face of reason.
The most crucial problem raised by the so-called
truth-claims of Judaism and
Christianity is that of
conceivability—to borrow a term that
Herbert Spencer
used in the nineteenth century and thereby suggesting
that there are more lines of continuity between the
old agnosticism and the
new than this essay has indi-
cated. The incredibility—to use Spencer's
contrasting
term—of these central religious claims is tied, at
least
in part, to their inconceivability.
“God” is not supposed
to refer to a being among
beings; by definition God
is no finite object or process in the world. But
then
how is the referring to be done? What are we really
talking about
when we speak of God? How do we or
can we fix the reference range of
“God”? God surely
cannot be identified in the same
manner we identify
the sole realities compatible with
existence-monism.
There can be no picking God out as we would a dis-
crete entity in space-time. Alternatively
there are theo-
logians who will say that
when we come to recognize
that it is just a brute fact that there is that
indefinitely
immense collection of finite and contingent masses or
conglomerations of things, we use the phrase “the
world” to refer to, and when we recognize it could
have been the
case—eternally the case—that there was
puzzled about why there is a world at all.
Is there anything that would account for the exist-
ence of all finite reality and not itself be a reality that
needed to be similarly explained? In speaking of God
we are speaking of
such a reality, if indeed there is
such a reality. We are concerned with a
reality not
simply—as the world might be—infinite in
space and
time, but a reality such that it would not make sense
to ask
why it exists. Such a reality could not be a
physical reality.
In sum, we have, if we reflect at all, a developing
sense of the contingency
of the world. The word “God”
in part means, in Jewish
and Christian discourses,
whatever it is that is non-contingent upon which
all
these contingent realities continuously depend. God is
the
completeness that would fill in the essential incom-
pleteness of the world. We have feelings of de-
pendency, creatureliness, finitude and in
having those
feelings, it is argued, we have some sense of that which
is without limit. “God” refers to such alleged
ultimate
realities and to something richer as well. But surely
this,
the critic of agnosticism will reply, sufficiently
fixes the reference
range of “God,” such that it would
be a mistake to
assert that “God” is a term supposedly
used to refer
to a referent but nothing coherently
specifiable counts as a possible
referent for “God,”
where “God”
has a non-anthropomorphic employment.
Surely such a referent is not something which can
be clearly conceived, but,
as we have seen, a non-
mysterious God
would not be the God of Judeo-
Christianity. But has language gone on a holiday? We
certainly,
given our religious conditioning, have a
feel-
ing
that we understand what we are saying here. But
do we? Perhaps, as
Axel Hägerström thought, “contin-
gent thing,” “finite
thing,” and “finite reality” are
pleonastic. For anything at all that exists, we seem to
be able to ask,
without being linguistically or con-
ceptually deviant, why it exists. “The world” or
“the
cosmos” does not stand for an entity or a class of things,
but is an umbrella term for all
those things and their
structural relations that religious people call
“finite
things” and many others just call
“things.” What are
we talking about when we say there
is something
infinite and utterly different from these “finite
realities”
and that this “utterly other
reality” is neither physical
nor temporal nor purely conceptual
nor simply imagi-
nary, but, while being
unique and radically distinct
from all these things, continuously sustains
all these
“finite things” and is a mysterious
something upon
which they are utterly dependent? Surely this is very
odd talk and “sustains” and
“dependent” have no un-
problematical use in this context.
These difficulties and a host of difficulties like them
make it doubtful whether the discourse used to spell
out the
reference range of “God” is sufficiently intelli-
gible to make such God-talk
coherent. An agnostic of
the contemporary sort is a man who suspends judg-
ment, oscillating between rejecting
God-talk as an
irrational form of discourse containing at crucial junc-
tures incoherent or rationally
unjustifiable putative
truth-claims and accepting this discourse as
something
which, obscure as it is, makes a sufficiently intelligible
and humanly important reference to be worthy of
belief.
One reading of the situation is that the network of
fundamental concepts
constitutive of nonanthropo-
morphic
God-talk in Judeo-Christianity is so problem-
atical that the most reasonable thing to do is to opt
for
atheism, particularly when we realize that we do
not need these religions
or any religion to make sense
of our lives or to buttress morality. But
agnosticism,
particularly of the contemporary kind specified here,
need not be an evasion and perhaps is the most reason-
able alternative for the individual who wishes, concern-
ing an appraisal of competing world
views and ways of
life, to operate on a principle of maximum caution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Two extensive discussions are in Robert Flint, Agnosticism
(London, 1903); and in R. A. Armstrong, Agnosticism and
Theism in the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1905). See also
James Ward, Naturalism and
Agnosticism (London, 1899).
The central works from Hume and
Kant relevant here are
David Hume, Enquiry concerning
Human Understanding
(1748), and Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion (London,
1779); Immanuel Kant,
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781),
and Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen
Vernunft
(1793). For the paradigmatic nineteenth-century
statements
of agnosticism see T. H. Huxley, Collected
Essays, 9 vols.
(London, 1894), Vol. V; and Leslie Stephen,
An Agnostic's
Apology and Other Essays
(London, 1893), and English
Thought in the Eighteenth
Century (London, 1876).
The following works are central to the nineteenth-century
debate over
agnosticism: Sir William Hamilton, “Philosophy
of the
Unconditioned,” The Edinburgh Review
(1829); H. L.
Mansel, The Limits of Religious
Thought (London, 1858);
J. S. Mill, Three Essays
on Religion (London, 1874); and
Herbert Spencer, First Principles (London, 1862). Noel
Annan, Leslie Stephen (London, 1952); William Irvine,
Thomas Henry Huxley (London, 1960); John Holloway,
The
Victorian Sage (New York, 1953); Basil
Willey, Nineteenth
Century Studies (London,
1950); and J. A. Passmore, A
Hundred Years of
Philosophy (London, 1957), provide basic
secondary sources.
For material carrying over to the twen-
tieth-century debate see R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Dieu, son
existence et sa nature; solution thomiste des
antinomies
agnostiques (Paris, 1915); and J. M. Cameron,
The Night
Battle (London, 1962). For some
contemporary defenses of
agnosticism see Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Para-
Christian (London, 1957); H. J.
Blackman, ed., Objections
To Humanism (London,
1963); Religion and Humanism, no
editor, various
authors—Ronald Hepburn, David Jenkins,
Howard Root, Renford
Bambrough, Ninian Smart (London,
1964); William James, The Will to Believe and Other Es-
says... (New York, 1897), attacked agnosticism.
The following books by contemporary philosophers or
analytically
oriented philosophical theologians make argu-
ments relevant to our discussion. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth
and Logic (London, 1935); Axel
Hägerström, Philosophy and
Religion, trans. Robert T. Sandin (London, 1964); John Hick,
Faith and Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, 1966); R.
B.
Braithwaite, An Empiricist's View of the Nature of
Religious
Belief (Cambridge, 1955); Diogenes Allen, The Reasona-
bleness of Faith (Washington and Cleveland, 1968);
Ninian
Smart, The Teacher and Christian Belief
(London, 1966);
idem, Philosophers and Religious
Truth (London, 1964);
idem, Theology,
Philosophy and Natural Sciences (Bir-
mingham, England, 1962). Alasdair MacIntyre, Secular-
ization and Moral
Change (London, 1967); idem and Paul
Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York,
1969); H. H. Price, Belief (London, 1969); L. Susan
Steb-
bing, “Critical
Notice, Language, Truth and Logic,” Mind,
new series, 45
(1936); Kai Nielsen, “In Defense of Athe-
ism,” in Perspectives in
Education, Religion and the Arts,
eds. Howard Kiefer and
Milton Munitz (New York, 1970);
Paul Holmer, “Atheism and
Theism,” Lutheran World,
13
(1966); Alvin Plantinga, God
and Other Minds (Ithaca,
1967); George Mavrodes, Belief in God (New York, 1970).
Some good critical and historical commentary on Hume
occurs in Bernard
Williams, “Hume on Religion,” in David
Hume: A Symposium, ed. D. F. Pears (London, 1963);
in
the essays by James Noxon, William H. Capitan, and George
J.
Nathan, reprinted in V. C. Chapell, ed., Hume: A Collec-
tion of Critical Essays
(New York, 1966); and in Norman
Kemp Smith's masterful and
indispensable introduction to
Hume's Dialogues. See David Hume, Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion, ed. and
introduction by Norman Kemp
Smith (Edinburgh, 1947). For Kant see W. H.
Walsh, “Kant's
Moral Theology,” Proceedings of the British Academy,
49
(1963).
KAI NIELSEN
[See also Gnosticism; God; Positivism; Skepticism.] Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||