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Sextus Empiricus (B.C. circa 200), a physician, was the greatest of the later Greek skeptics. He questioned even the possibilities of mathematical demonstrations. As to physical science, he agreed with Plato that the whole world of sense was mere opinion.
Hardly The Real Thing
All of this is akin to idealism, the philosophy upon which all religion is based. Idealism holds, basically, that a thing-in-itself which is not a thing to some consciousness is entirely unrealizable. This means that if there is no one there to be conscious of the tree, the tree does not exist. Realizing the "idea" of tree gives, however, the mind "into possession of itself." That is not the actual tree, remember, it is the "idea" of the tree that verifies the mind!
Agnosticism is thus the theory of one's inability to know anything.
A is a privitive when used as a prefix, constituting or predicating privation or absence of a quality. Gnosis, of course, is a Greek term for "knowledge" or "recognition." And the word agnostic means simply an absence of the quality of knowledge, an inability to know. The agnostic does not know if the tree is there since he denies the ability of his senses to transmit information and denies the ability of his mind to understand the transmissions.
Sir William Hamilton |
Moving To The Modern
The first "modern" agnosticism began with Henry Agrippa (1486-1535) and his publication in 1530 of A Declamation on The Uncertaity and Vanity of The Arts and Sciences. He argued that it is dangerous to trust human studies, foolish to be proud of them, that all is dubious except god's word and that truth is accessible to men only by faith in Jesus Christ and the enlightening grace of the Holy Spirit. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was the next to spread skepticism. In his Essais, published in 1580, he represented so-called science as a failure and the human mind as singularly unreasonable in its reasonings. His preference was for a reaffirmation of the Pyrrhonian attitude. His skepticism did not, however, reach to religion, and he recognized a divine excellence in Christianity. A disciple, Roman Catholic theologian Peter Charrun (1541-1603), published his Les Tres Verites, the spirit and reasoning of which were agnostic in character. But since it was a defense of theism against Atheism and in support of Christianity, it was not attacked. According to Charron, science is unattainable; truth is hidden in the bosom of god and cannot be reached by the natural faculties of men. Reason, he held, is one of the most feeble of instruments to attaining knowledge. A typical specimen of the seventeenth-century skeptic, Le Mothe Le Vayer (1588-1672) was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the old Greek Pyrrhonians and constantly used their arguments. His two-line motto was:
De las cosas mas seguras
La mas segura es dudar
which translates to "Of things most sure the surest is doubt." Jerome Hirnhaim (1637-1679), a dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church in Bohemia, issued his De Typho Generis Humani in 1676. It was a violent and extreme attack on secular science and natural reason. All human knowledge, he assumed, rested on the testimony of the senses, and that testimony proved to be untrustworthy by both experience and the evidence of faith. Daniel Huet (1630-1721), in the posthumously published (1723) Traite de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain presented a completely Pyrrhonistic system, advocated in the interests of Roman Catholicism. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a man deeply saturated in Christianity, was thoroughly agnostic in his estimate of natural reason. He declared Pyrrhonism to be the truth and Pyrrho to be "the only sage before Christ." The most influential of the skeptics was, of course, Peter Bayle (1647-1706). He himself called his skepticism "historical Pyrrhonism." At the time, however, it was commonly known as "erudite skepticism." Although his writing was anti-religious in nature, he attempted to conceal this by arguing that faith and reason are contradictory. Therefore, even when the dogmas of faith are proven to be irrational, they have as much right to acceptance as the conclusions of reason. Inadvertently he thus proved that religion could not reasonably hope to find a friend in skepticism.
The Unknowable
A throw-back to this philosophy was to openly develop in mid-nineteenth-century England. There, in 1858, a conservative High Church Anglican, Henry Longueville Mansel (1820-1871), began his presentation of the prestigious Brampton Lectures at Oxford. His accepted task was to defend Christian orthodoxy, everywhere on the continent as well as in England under attack by a rising tide of unbelief, vested particularly in the findings of German biblical criticism. The eight lectures attracted crowds to the Oxford University Church. Published late in the year under the title The Limits of Religious Thought, they brought religious controversy in England to its height.
Applying the basic concept of acatalepsia and Pyrrhonism to god as well as to a tree, Mansel concluded that god, also, was unknowable. The posit was necessary, for upon it Mansel built his reply to the Bible critics in Germany. Since mere man is unable to possess knowledge of god, he cannot criticize the scriptures and therefore the High Church Anglican's doctrine of biblical infallibility stood fast. Mansel saw knowledge as limited to the finite, external world and god as outside of it. However, there is, he proposed, a duality of consciousness which testifies to the self and to the external world. He seriously advocated a return to Aristotelian concepts but, in actuality, laid out the essence of agnosticism, a doctrine which thus arose out of religious currents of thought to which it is intrinsically related.
The lesson was simple: Man's ability to know has limits and the knowledge of god is beyond those limits. Agnosticism, then, the unknowability of god, was simply a reaffirmation of belief in god as differentiated from an empirical verifiable knowledge of god.
It was a difficult time in England. In 1848 revolution had swept through every country of Europe. In France, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) had developed a system of thought which was called Positivism. He taught that knowledge is confined to observable facts and relations between facts. Hence he regarded all metaphysical speculation about god and absolutes as worthless. Philosophy must be based, he held, on scientific principles. Pressed for a system of ethics to guide humankind, he invented a "Religion of Humanity," a kind of Utopian mysticism.
In Germany, David Strauss (1808-1874) had written his critical Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) in 1835 1 and Tόbingen University had begun its advanced school of theological criticism, owing much to the writings of Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) in the 1840's. The Protestant revolution, having challenged the authority of the Church, had to rest its case for Christianity on another authoritarian base and had chosen the infallible Bible. Where the Roman Catholic Church had opted to rely on Jesus Christ as a god figure, the Protestants wanted to prove his historicity turning to the Old Testament for proof of the prophecy of the coming of a Messiah and to the New Testament for verifying of history. But with the advent of Strauss, of Bauer, and of the "higher criticism" of the German school, the Bible was crumbling.
Enter The Atheists
In the United States, Robert Dale Owens (1801-1877) had established an Atheist colony in New Harmony, Indiana, and Frances Wright (1795-1852) had done the same in Nashoba, Tennessee.
In England, Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891), an open Atheist, was becoming notorious. He was later to be elected to membership in the House of Commons, a position he held from 1880 to 1891, there to cause a storm over a religious oath which would ring round the world. He had read Hamilton and commented on his position. He never hesitated to employ the word Atheist in styling himself and explained that this meant he was "without god." In the National Review of 25 November, 1883, he wrote,
The Atheist does not say "there is no god," but he says "I know not what you mean by god; I am without idea of god; the word god is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny god, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception and the conception of which by its affirmer is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."
As an Atheist, Bradlaugh denied the god of the Bible, of the Koran, of the Vedas, but he could not deny that of which he had no knowledge. Technically, his definition differed little from that of Huxley's agnosticism. But for Bradlaugh, the agnostic, in failing to oppose the churches actively, was merely evading the consequences of his own convictions. Agnosticism was simply, he thought "a mere society form of Atheism."
John Stuart Mill |
Ding-An-Sich
In Germany a premise for the English controversy had been laid by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who, in his Critique of Pure Reason, had stressed the antithesis between objective reality and reason. His premise was that phenomena are simply the results of the mind's contact with something else, the nature of which we do not know. This unknown thing he called noumenon, the Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself), and placed it forever beyond the reach of either reason or consciousness. There was in his philosophy utter and complete skepticism in respect to the ability to know.
If there is a god we do not know him.
The soul may be immortal but we cannot prove it.
The will may be free but we cannot demonstrate that.
Reason, according to Kant, had no contact with the world of reality and could never tell us anything worth telling. This culminates in absolute spiritualism. Mind creates the phenomenal world. Kant, therefore, reaffirmed idealism and laid the premise for the "unknowability" of any god concepts. The proof for religion, removed from the area of the new scientific reason, was promoted to transcendent reason.
David Hume (1711-1776), in Scotland, was taking the same course. He simply denied the existence of matter but added that mind also is an abstraction, a mere name for a sequence of perceptions. He could thus only affirm complete skepticism. There was, he found, no rational evidence for either god or immortality. His basic theory was that the mind cannot reach realities beyond the phenomena of sense. Hence, he denied miracles. But he characterized himself as an academic skeptic and not a Pyrrhonian.
Thomas Reid (1710-1796), a Scot philosopher, repulsed by Hume and his skeptical conclusions, rejected the concept that all the objects of one's knowledge were simply ideas in one's own mind. He reasserted the independent existence of matter and its immediate presence to one's mind. He asserted that we know the properties but not the "essence" of things. From this he posited what he designated as natural realism or natural dualism. His three basic principles were:
- "All" human "knowledge is relative."
- "To think is to condition." All human thinking is conditioned.
- Notions of the "Infinite" and the "Absolute" are negations of thought.
The Unconditioned
Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856) was much influenced by Reid. It was he who published an edition of Reid's work in 1846, with notes and supplementary dissertations. He held the chair of logic at Edinburgh from 1836 to his death. In 1829, he wrote the essay "Philosophy of The Unconditioned" which appeared in the Edinburgh Review. In this he put forth that for the human finite mind there can be no knowledge of the infinite. Limitless time, space, and power, all of the supersensible, are, humanly speaking, inconceivable. The basis of this was his contention that to think is to condition when every object is known only in virtue to its relation to other objects. Although there is a problem of the nature of objectivity, we must accept the separate existence of objects, not see them as existing in our minds. We can have cognition of the ego: such consciousness implies both 1) knowledge of the self, and 2) knowledge of the external world. Thus he accepted Reid's doctrine of dualistic natural realism.
He could not know the Unknowable or condition the Unconditioned. But, he went further, the cognizable existence of god being undemonstrable, there was no moral or dutiful obligation on man to recognize his being and make him the object of his worship. He, himself, however, felt an inherited personal conviction.
Yet, since he was partially disabled by paralysis from 1845 forward, he lectured from a chair over which a suggestive motto was inscribed:
On earth there is nothing great but man;
In man there is nothing great but mind.
It was from this background heritage that Mansel took. Hamilton was for many years a most prominent figure in English philosophy and Mansel was considered by many to be his foremost disciple. He relied on Aristotle, on Kant, and on Hamilton. Any attempt to know god he found to end in contradictions. One cannot attest to both a finite and an infinite world. This is an antinomy a contradiction between two principles each taken to be true. Since the brain is compelled to think in specific ways which it cannot transgress (its own laws), no matter what the issue with which it deals, it is constrained in its function.
Thomas Reid |
Theism, Pantheism, Atheism
John Toland (1670-1722) had introduced the concept of pantheism to England in 1705, later enlarging on his ideas with his work Pantheisticon in 1720. Pantheism held that god is the universe and the universe is god.
Mansel wanted to refute both the pantheist and the Atheist. He floundered with the idea of the infinite. He saw the theist as holding that there could be co-existence of the finite and the infinite; the pantheist denying the real existence of the finite; the Atheist denying the real existence of the infinite. Reason, he felt, could not justify the theistic position. There was no hope of "the cognitive" conceiving of "a first phenomenon" or embracing at one and the same time both the finite and the infinite. He could not accept the alternative of pantheism, for an infinite god would destroy the "personal" god of Christianity. He could not accept Atheism since it was a negation of his personal belief system. His special problem with the ideas of the "Infinite" and the "Absolute" led him to conclude that they were meaningless words. All thought is finite, limited, and conditioned; hence there was no such thing as infinite time and infinite space. He followed Hamilton closely on this. We cannot, he thought, experience the infinite in part, for the infinite cannot be divided into parts. It is an absolute unity. What we can know is phenomena only and that through experience and reason.
There were, he thought, two methods of arriving at knowledge of god. One was subjective and psychological, based on knowledge of the mental faculties of man, and the other was objective and metaphysical, based on the knowledge of the nature of god. He was certain that by either method one could not attain knowledge of the Infinite and the Absolute, for neither had distinctions or determinants. As he posited his view that god was unknowable, however, he came under more and more attack. Subsequent editions of his book were forced to call upon authorities to support him, all of whom were cited in the preface. His most urgent appeal was to acceptance of god ideas by faith and not by reason, and he pointed out that Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, and other Christian fathers had sustained this position. 2
He needed a scapegoat for his inability to prove god; he found this in the human mind. He pointed out that the contradictions into which theology falls when attempting to define god exist in man's minds and not in god. Hence it is not the nature of god, but rather the nature of the human mind that is to blame. Therefore, one can still believe in god though neither knowing or comprehending him. Revelation, which is above criticism, was the answer not reason. And god's word was revealed in the Bible. Mansel used his arguments of the unknowability of god to defend an ultra-conservative and dogmatic High Anglican Church and its King James Bible.
Mansel grouped knowing, thinking, and reasoning together in opposition to faith. Reason had to be given a completely negative role in religious and transcendental matters. Since reason can give us no knowledge of god, it is necessary to take the avenue of revelation and faith.
The Evidence Game
But empiricism was here to stay. Empiricism states succinctly that all knowledge is derived from sense-given data. It is opposed to any concept of intuition or a priori reasoning. The mind is a tabula rasa to begin. Individual impressions are stored, experiences are gathered together by association, and invariable results are observed. Also associated with empiricism is the concept of the relativity of knowledge, which is not absolute. It is always conditioned by relationships, and in its quality by our channels of knowledge. Although we cannot know the essence of a tree, we know that a tree is there and from that we can derive enough working knowledge to live our lives in relationship to the tree.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) contributed greatly by introducing Comte's positivism to England. In 1844, when he became aware of Comte's money difficulties, he raised over 6,000 francs to send to him so that he could continue his writing. Both of them were much concerned with women's rights and were much impressed with Mary Wollstone Craft's (1797-1851) Vindication of The Rights of Woman. Mill consistently held with Comte's "Religion of Humanity" as a substitute for discredited Christianity.
Mill primarily scoffed at Hamilton and Mansel for "bringing back under the name of belief what they banished as knowledge." He labeled Mansel's Limits of Religious Thought a "detestable" and "absolutely loathsome book." The thrust of his argument with both was, "The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions." Mill, in his final analysis, interpreted his agnosticism in terms of suspension of judgment. Mill also sent Bradlaugh, the Atheist, a contribution toward the expenses of his candidature for Northampton.
But it was obvious that the ancient skepticism had been frankly opposed to religious belief. Now, with a great body of doctrine attributed to divine revelation and a great institution like the Christian church having functioned for over 1,500 years, the suggested possibility was of enlisting skepticism in the service of dogmatic faith.
Slowly but certainly the conception of Pyrrhonism, acatalepsia, and unknowability of physical phenomena was forced to yield to the evidence of objective reality so carefully documented by the scientific method of inquiry. The retreat would finally become a rout until its adherents were operating only in the field of theology and its apologetic discipline of philosophy.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), English philosopher, the most illustrious adherent of agnosticism, was born in the same year as was Mansel but outlived him by thirty-two years. Spencer was one of the most prominent exponents of the scientific movement of the period, the last half of the nineteenth century. He especially supported the great development of biology and even attempted to synthesize scientific knowledge. Faced with theology and its theoretics, he put forward the idea of an unknowable power. He further held that certain ideas are innate in each individual mind, established in the race by numberless verifying experiences of our ancestors, and hence necessities of thought. Among these were space and time, force, consciousness, self (ego), matter, motion, and rest. Behind the ego (and non-ego) is an unknowable reality from which all things have sprung.
Spencer used the philosophical principles of Hamilton and Mansel as the basis for his naturalistic First Principles published in 1864, in which he noted, "The man of science more than any other truly knows that in its ultimate essence nothing can be known." Yet he tried to reconcile science and religion. He, as did Hamilton and Mansel, saw three different suppositions respecting the origin of the universe theism, pantheism, and Atheism. Theism posited the creation of the universe by an external agency; pantheism opted for self-creation; and Atheism for the self-existence of the universe. The theories were not reconcilable.
Spencer interpreted his agnosticism as the belief in the existence of the Unknowable; that power manifested by the universe is inscrutable; and that the Absolute was both power and force. Still he pointed out with some emphasis that while theology might have such a rule, science would never decree, "Thus far shalt thou go and no further," in regard to any quest for information or truth. And he held that the self was also unknowable.
Those In The Drama
George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), another British philosopher, also took up the cudgels for science. Because of his unorthodox relationship with George Eliot, he has not been given as much credit for his defense of the newly developing science of biology as is his due.
Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) gave popular agnosticism its finest expression in "An Agnostic's Apology" which appeared in the Fortnightly in 1876. Here he explained that agnosticism was "a form of creed already common and daily spreading." The idea, he pointed out, had been formulated by Comte in France, by Mill and Spencer in England, but it had been given a popular name by Huxley.
Stephen particularly felt that it would be desirable to have an alternative to the word Atheism. Writing of Bradlaugh, he opined that "open Atheism" is "not common in decent English society." He called upon scientists to reject what he called "Dogmatic Atheism" and to affirm "what no one denies," namely, that "there are limits to the sphere of human intelligence" and that "those limits are such as to exclude at least what Lewes called 'Metempirical knowledge'" (which was meant to designate all forms of knowledge of a transcendent, numinous nonempirical sort). "Theology lies within the forbidden sphere." He was also a champion of Darwinism, in open combat with Gladstone, and a foremost exponent of biological science from 1870 to 1884.
From the thought systems and writings of Reid, Kant, Comte, Hamilton, and Mansel developed the basis for the new Victorian agnostic school of thought. Both James Fitzjames Stephen, his brother Leslie Stephen, and Thomas Huxley were following the controversy closely. Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) was a biologist and naturalist. When Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) Origin of Species was published, although he had before turned a deaf ear to evolution, he then stated, "I took my stand." Following this, he became the most widely known champion of Darwinism in the world. In this position, he could only look forward to continuing hostile exchanges with the by-and-large Christian community of scientists in England where the battle of evolution was joined. In most historical articles on the Darwin-evolution struggle Huxley figures prominently, but little or no reference is ordinarily made to his coining of the word agnostic or his subsequent public jousts in the literary and theological field of battle over that coinage.
Thomas Henry Huxley |
Huxley's Evolution
In matters religious, Huxley evolved slowly if at all.
He clung to a friendship with a clergyman, Charles Kingsley, and on September 23, 1860, at the age of thirty-five, wrote to him in these words:
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. . . . if that great and powerful instrument for good or evil, the Church of England, is to be saved from being shivered into fragments by the advancing tide of science an event I should be very sorry to witness . . . it must be by the efforts of men who, like yourself, see your way to the combination of the practice of the Church with the spirit of science. Understand that all the younger men of science whom I know intimately are essentially of my way of thinking. (I know not a scoffer or an irreligious or an immoral man among them....)
In another letter to the same man (September 23, 1866) he wrote very fully concerning his beliefs:
I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not?
And again, to the same correspondent he wrote on May 5, 1883:
I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown underlying the phenomenon of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts. So with regard to the other great Christian dogmas, immortality of the soul and future state of rewards and punishments, what possible objection can I who am compelled perforce to believe in the immortality of what we call Matter and Force, and in a very unmistakable present state of rewards and punishments for our deeds have to these doctrines? Give me a scintilla of evidence, and I am ready to jump at them.
The Word Is Born
To cover this attitude, Huxley coined the word agnosticism. R. H. Hutton wrote in 1881 that the word "was suggested by Huxley at a meeting (party) held previous to the formation of the (now defunct) Metaphysical Society at Mr. James Knowles's house on Clapham Common (one evening) in 1869, in my hearing. He took it from St. Paul's [Acts 17:23] mention of the altar to the 'Unknown God'." [Parenthetical material indicates variation in citations ed.]
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850-1892) had helped to found the Metaphysical Society for discussion concerning the old faith and its relation to the new science. He wished to discover the means which the intellectual leaders could seek to reconcile their "advanced knowledge" with the spiritual purposes of man.
The name agnostic was then constantly used by Hutton in the Spectator and became a fashionable label. The first mention of the word was, allegedly, in an anonymous article titled "Pope Huxley" which appeared in the January 29, 1870 edition. Huxley was called an "Agnostic" and an "evangelist" who was "labouring to preach to us all the gospel of suspense of judgment on all questions, intellectual and moral, on which we have not adequate data for a positive opinion."
Hutton understood the word to mean, and used it in the sense, of it being "a belief in an unknown and unknowable god." Huxley, however, apparently meant it at the time to be "absence of belief": a half-way position between "belief" on the one hand and "disbelief" on the other. As did all of those in the fight, he attempted to distinguish between the sphere of science, which he thought to be the knowable, and the province of religion, which was the unknowable. Spencer had set up the two spheres of (1) religion and (2) science and philosophy. In the latter category science and philosophy he saw science as a partially unified knowledge and philosophy as a completely unified knowledge. Huxley set up instead the two categories of knowledge as being those of science and philosophy, omitting religion.
Huxley felt comfortable for awhile in using the term "the Unknowable" for the word god and in 1866 he referred to the "altar of the Unknown" in one of his essays, "Method and Results." But he gave a variant etymology of the word agnostic.
When I reached intellectual maturity, [he was at this time forty-four years old] 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. The one thing on which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis" had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure that I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. . . . So, I took thought and invented [in 1869] 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. To my great satisfaction the term took.
Huxley on Religion
The next year, 1870, he was elected President of the newly-constituted London School Board, where he remained for two years. During that time he insisted on the teaching of the Bible in the schools because he was "seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion in these matters, without its use."
He was quite anxious to avoid the accusation of Pyrrhonism although he knew that his 1869 definition of agnosticism suggested the Pyrrhonist Aphasia. In 1885 he formulated "the perfect ideal of religion" in a passage in his Life which became famous.
In the 8th century B.C. in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. "And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."
After his death, his family would give a totally different interpretation of this idea than Huxley had given.
In 1892 he would write:
It is the secret of the superiority of the best theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they substantially recognize these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to be to be vastly nearer the truth than "liberal" popular delusions....
Huxley claimed to have read Mansel's Limits of Religious Thought about the year 1840, when he was fifteen years old, and he remembered that he said to himself, "Connu!" for "the thrill of pleasure with which I discovered that, in the matter of Agnosticism (not yet so christened), I was as orthodox as a dignitary of the Church who might any day be made a bishop."
Sir Leslie Stephen |
Confusion Starts its Reign
Indeed, much of the confusion regarding the term agnosticism comes from Huxley's own pen. For example, he held that it was not the part of any true agnostic to deny god's existence at the same time his criticisms of the Bible, in the German style, were devastating to the concept of god. He had read Strauss and Renan and was quite conversant with the Pentateuch controversy as set forth by John Colenso, D.D., Bishop of Natal in his Pentateuch and Book of Joshua, Critically Examined, first published in England in 1860. He had read extensively in the critical schools and used their references and arguments on his own behalf. Yet, he often and eagerly proclaimed he was no materialist or Atheist.
He also stated that the idea of agnosticism was for individual use only, since it was "not a creed, but a method." This perhaps is the cause of the confusion: Agnosticism has no real content.
He argued that we can and do gain experimental and experiential knowledge of nature. But for all of his argument, he was called "a mere expositor" who did not create an original proposition.
Hutton reaffirmed as late as the June II, 1876, Spectator that agnosticism was the name demanded by Professor Huxley for "those who disclaimed Atheism, and believed with him in an 'unknown and un-knowable' God."
The most celebrated passage in his most celebrated essay described human life as something like a great game of chess between men and a hidden player.
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Science vs. Theology
It was thought at this time that there was an absolute dichotomy becoming apparent between theology and science. The words "antagonism" were often uttered. The core of the argument was that of ability to know, with science holding for objective knowledge through the observation of phenomena and religion holding for subjective knowledge. It should be remembered that it was about this time (in 1874) that John Draper, Professor of History in the University of New York, wrote his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, (1874) and Andrew Dickson White, Professor of History of Cornell University and its President wrote his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).
Those in the battle included William Gladstone (1809-1898), leader of the House of Commons and several times Prime Minister of England. In the former position it was necessary for him to deal with Charles Bradlaugh who, as an Atheist, was refusing to pledge allegiance to Queen Victoria with an oath "So help me God." As a politician of importance, he felt the need to challenge Huxley. The exchanges were in print and acrimonious. In addition, in a speech to Parliament in 1883, he pointedly discussed agnosticism as a "general movement against doctrinal authority" . . . the "specific form of irreligion with which the country had to contend." He labeled it "the mischief of the age."
Meanwhile, in the U.S.A.
During the period of 1880 to 1885, many articles concerned with the new idea were appearing in the American journal of Atheism, the Truth Seeker. All of them pointed to the stark omission in the English battle which waged on the level of the generic idea of god and did not pause at all to focus on the specific god of Judeo-Christianity. Yet, in all nations and at all times in history, the god questions has always been specific and not generic. One J. B. pointed out in the April 25, 1885, issue in "Something about Agnostics":
we ask the Agnostic if he believes in the existence of angels, fairies, spooks, ghosts (holy or otherwise) and a legion of other 'airy nothings to which imagination gives a local habitation and a name,' he would no doubt answer without reserve in the negative. Yet he could not disprove these any more than any other negative. It is illogical to deny them.
And,
Again, has the Agnostic any reason to believe the Hebrew anthropomorphic deity, Jehovah, was less a myth than the Roman Jupiter, the Grecian Zeus or the Scandinavian Odin? Yet he would think it no violation of sense or logic to deny that these were anything but the creations of human fancy to personify certain powers or principles in nature, of the cause of which the creators were in ignorance.
Further, in the United States, Robert Ingersoll was also speaking to the issue:
The Agnostic is an Atheist; the Atheist, an Agnostic. The Agnostic says I do not know, but I do not believe there is any God. The Atheist says the same. The orthodox Christian says he knows there is a God; but we know that he does not know; he simply believes; he cannot know. And the Atheist cannot know that God does not exist.
Herbert Spencer |
A Religious Man?
Huxley's wife, Henrietta Heathorn Huxley, a Christian all of her life, chose theistic lines for Huxley's tombstone. His grandson, Julian Huxley explained, "My grandfather, Thomas Huxley . . . was in reality . . . a man deeply and essentially religious in nature." When Joseph McCabe contacted both Mrs. Huxley and her son Leonard (1860-1933) to ascertain for himself what Huxley's position had been, he was most taken by the son's statement, affirmed by the widow, that before Huxley had died he had said that "the most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstition."
Because of his waffling on the use of the word, the critics hurled charges at Huxley and at agnosticism in general: It was an attempt to ingratiate with orthodox academic colleagues; it wanted a place beneath the mantle of Victorian respectability, it included "men who didn't believe in God but were afraid of priests;" it represented "an Atheist who fears Mrs. Grundy."
When Havelock Ellis was asked to write in a journal which professed agnosticism, his letter in reply, July 11, 1898, was succinct.
I have never reconciled myself to the term "agnostic." . . . There are so many things that are knowable, and worth knowing, that I scarcely think one need concern oneself much with the things that are unknowable.
Enter Morality
Huxley, of course, felt that a belief in falsehood, even one traditionally accepted, was immoral. Yet he felt that society could not dispense with the Bible as a moral guide. His attitude and opinions on the matter of immorality were set forth in his Christianity and Agnosticism A Controversy:
agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative creed," nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except insofar as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that if is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to agnosticism. That which agnostics deny and repudiate as immoral is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence. [Emphasis added.]
He attacked only on academic grounds, being unconcerned with social problems which arose from the posits of theology. And his introduction of morality into this intellectual position may be for his own reasons. Perhaps he was attempting to compensate for less than a moral life. His September 23, 1860 letter to Charles Kingsley certainly would raise the question.
I confess to my shame that few men have drunk deeper of all kinds of sin than I. Happily, my course was arrested in time before I had earned absolute destruction and for long years I have been slowly and painfully climbing, with many a fall, toward better things.
For Huxley, who relied on German Bible scholarship, the difficulty with what Jesus Christ said or did was a scientific problem, not a theological problem. There was no internal or external evidence. Whether there was a god, a world of demons, an immortal soul, were all taken by Huxley to be factual questions open to careful and systematic empirical investigation. 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. It is evident from New Testament sources that Jesus believed in demons. But once we challenge the ultimate authority of the Bible, the ground for the whole Judeo-Christian world view is undermined.
The Equivocator
Yet Huxley claimed not to have a dispute with Christianity, but rather with ecclesiasticism government by the unquestioned authority of the church. Again from Christianity and Agnosticism A Controversy:
It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between agnosticism and . . . ecclesiasticism. For theology, the science, is one thing; and ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion as the truth of a particular form of theology, is another. With scientific theology, agnosticism has no quarrel. . . . The scientific theologian admits the agnostic principle, however widely his results may differ from those reached by the majority of agnostics.
He pointed out that theology, as a science, admitted the agnostic principle and had no conflict with Huxley.
What it came down to was that Huxley's arguments were accepted by Judeo-Christianity as not undermining its foundations. It simply helped Christians rid the world of the historically-contingent cultural trappings of the Bible's writers. The scientific way of fixing "belief" is clearly the most desirable for the Christian church.
Agnosticism is an inherently unstable position, tending to pantheism, and needs some general philosophical supporting view such as idealism or if it is in earnest materialism. It has no solid rational foundation. There are no facts which science cannot explore, what cannot at least in principle be known by the method of science cannot be known at all . . . since there is only one sort of level or order of existence and that is spatio-temporal existence. The modern answer to agnosticism is now given in the writings of Karl Barth, which holds that man on his own can know nothing of god but must rely utterly on an unpredictable and rationally inexplicable god's self-disclosure by god. That is a divine revelation which cannot be assessed by man, but must simply be accepted.
The Old and The New Controverted Question
In regard to the existence of god, the modern "Controverted Question" is not if god exists, but when accepting the proffered statement that he does, the question then is, "Why does he exist?"
The "Controverted Question" of the time of Huxley was how far the process would go of the fight for dominance of the natural with the supernatural. On this subject, he wrote a fifty-eight-page prologue to his book, Science and Christian Tradition. Despite Huxley's hopes, the scientific method was not to find the answer to theological questions.
Later persons thought that there were two Huxleys: one who urged the cause of science and the other, who defended himself from attack. A Church Congress was held at Manchester in October, 1888. Dr. Henry Wace, principal of King's College, there made a statement concerned with Huxley which forced him to reply in the February 1889 issue of Nineteenth Century, in an article titled "Agnosticism." Later in the year he was writing that he did not care to speak of anything as 'unknowable' and confessed in 1893 that "long ago, I once or twice made this mistake; even to the waste of a capital 'U.' " His main concern was to avoid a reference to god as the unknowable, for this granted god an ontological status.
Agnosticism really rests on the doctrine of the Unknowable, the assertion that we never can have any scientifically-derived ground for belief. One can never know the essence of the tree. That this is the current idea of agnosticism was reinforced by Bertrand Russell, who made the statement in the November 3, 1953 issue of Look magazine that "An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as god and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at least impossible at the present." In other writings he stated that agnosticism was not "negative skepticism" but rather a plea for skeptical caution of belief and opposed to materialism.
Robert Bostrom put it nicely in 1969:
One who is agnostic usually finds himself saying something like the following: "I don't personally believe in god, but I see that a great many other people do. Where there is a difference of opinion we must conclude that the issue is in doubt therefore, I must hold that the question of existence of god is in doubt; that none of us know for sure whether or not god exists."
Immanuel Kant |
Fear of The Majority
There is an obvious fear of majoritarian viewpoints in the rationale. Because of the great number of believers, if the issue can said to be in doubt, abstain: Don't irritate the majority. Agnosticism, thus, is a way of solving, by passing over, the ultimate problems of thought.
Soon the term was used to cover any and every variety of skepticism or cowardice. We are at that point today in the United States.
The most reasonable thing to do is to opt for Atheism, particularly when we realize that we do not need any religion to make sense of our lives or to buttress morality.
In respect to the doctrines of Christianity: predestination; original sin; the innate depravity of man; the evil fate of the greater part of the race; the primacy of Satan in this world; the essential vileness of matter; a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty; a future life of rewards or punishments; immortality of the soul; the benevolence of a kindly watching, loving, caring god to name those listed by Huxley only the theist would claim an agnosticism to any one or all of them. It is obvious to any sociologist that they are a set of fears with which people, individually, must cope, while they are manipulated by power groups.
Later writers construed agnosticism so that it was identified with philosophical skepticism and that, as such, it allowed for their being "theistic agnostics" and "Christian agnostics."
The kiss of death was given to agnosticism most caustically by H. L. Mencken, who put it briefly: "The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all."
Agnosticism and The Trees
Modern American Atheism's message is more wholesome and life-celebrating. Whereas some life philosophies cannot see the forest for the trees, agnosticism cannot even see the trees. American Atheism assures you that you may trust your senses and your reason. The empirical approach to life will give you all the information you need to live a rich, filled, life. Agnosticism, as it is known today, is very closely related to the religious doctrine that the ways of god are unfathomable, that human reason is fallible, and that man requires a different, non-scientific path to the "truth." Agnostic philosophers are always allies of the church. The reason for this is clear agnosticism puts forward the false notion that the world in which we live is unknowable, and this undermines science and reinforces theology. It inclines man to faith, inducing him to trust religious doctrines. An Atheist is simply a person who is free
from theism. Whatever the monkey on your back, an Atheist doesn't have a similar burden. Life is what you have. Don't throw it away in an elusive chase after an ephemeral "truth" that has no substance and which cannot make your life better in the here and now.
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A Few Meanings, Please
Pure agnosticism does not positively deny the existence of God, but does refuse to admit that we can have any certain knowledge of His existence. Pure agnosticism is an agnosticism of unbelief, a basic and deep-rooted skepticism regarding the problem of God. . . . The pure agnostic is convinced only that, concerning God, we can be sure of absolutely nothing, not even whether He does or does not exist....
Dogmatic agnosticism likewise denies that we can know with objective certitude that God exists, but maintains that we can be subjectively assured of this truth, on grounds of faith, feeling, or moral imperative. Dogmatic agnosticism has as little confidence as pure agnosticism in man's ability to arrive at a certain knowledge of the existence or nature of God through strictly rational processes. The dogmatic agnostic wants to admit that there is a God, not because he is able to discover in objective reality unmistakable evidence leading to this conclusion as a necessary truth, but on altogether other grounds.
John Reid
Man without God
To be an agnostic is to hold that nothing can be known or at least that it is very unlikely that anything will be known or soundly believed concerning whether God or any transcedent reality or state exists.
Kai Nielsen
"Agnosticism"
Dictionary of The History of Ideas
Hence the original meaning [of the term agnostic] is that man cannot know the truth about God and immortality, and must leave the issue open.
The great majority of Agnostics today [1948] mean by that term that they have examined the arguments for the existence of God and rejected them. That the Agnostic "leaves the question open," while the Atheist. . . does not, is a myth of the apologists . . . Agnostics and Atheists now usually mean the same thing that they are without belief in God...
Joseph McCabe
Rationalist Encyclopedia
The Agnostic one who asserts. .. that there are limits to the sphere of human intelligence. He asserts further. . . that those limits are such as to exclude at least what Lewes [George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) British philosopher] called "metempirics" knowledge. But he goes further, and asserts, in opposition to theologians, that theology lies within this forbidden sphere . . . The Gnostic holds that our reason can, in some sense, transcend the narrow limits of experience. He holds that we can attain truths not capable of verification, and not needing verification, by actual experiment or observation.
Sir Leslie Stephen
An Agnostic's Apology and Other
Essays
It [agnosticism] means, in its finest sense, a courageous envisaging of the awful problems of life and death, and an admission of their total insolubility. It might almost, in particular temperaments and personalities, be said to have become a new religion by itself . . .
Edgar Fawcett
Agnosticism and Other Essays
The Atheist says he does not know of any God; the Agnostic says he cannot know of any God.
G.W. Foote
Freethinker, July 7,1885
The Atheist is generally understood to be one who denies the existence of God. Now, to the Agnostic, who finds that to him "God" is an incomprehensible term, it does not seem rational to deny the existence of a possible something of which he can form no conception. To say "I can form no conception of Deity, therefore I deny the existence of Deity," is a form of reasoning which does not commend itself to the Agnostic, who knows that many things may exist which he cannot understand. He has no belief in such things, because he has no knowledge of them. Neither does he deny the possibility of their existence. He does not know.
G. G. Greenwood
The Faith of An Agnostic
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And An Atheist's View
Chapman Cohen (1868-1954) was the third President of the National Secular Society of Great Britain, the organization which had been founded by the militant great Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh. He served as Executive President for thirty-four years, during which time he wrote over 2,700 articles, many of which have been gathered into books. Prior to taking that office he had spent twenty-five years in "open air work," which is to say, speaking in public parks.
Cohen was an enthusiastic writer for Atheism, an excellent administrator for the organization, meticulous in his logic, and inordinately perceptive in his evaluation of the culture of the times.
Largely ignored by freethought historians, he was probably one of the finest such thinkers the movement had. American Atheists publishes his four-volume set of Essays in Freethinking.
The following essay was originally published in Theism or Atheism, The Great Alternative under the title "Agnosticism."
The primary difficulty in dealing with agnosticism is its elusive character. It is a word of various and vague meanings, and many of those who use it seem to have no great anxiety to fix its meaning with any degree of precision. It is used now in a philosophic and now in a religious sense, and its use in the one connection is justified by its use in another. It has become, in the half century of its existence, as indefinite as "religion," and about as enlightening. On the one side it appears as a counsel of mental integrity with which everyone will agree, and on the other, the religious side, it will vary from a form that is identical with that much-dreaded "Atheism," to a religious or "reverent" agnosticism that reminds one mentally and morally of Methodism minus its creed. Indeed, to say that a man is an agnostic nowadays tells one no more than calling a man religious indicates to which one of the world's sects he gives his adherence.
The only aspect of agnosticism that we are here vitally concerned with is its relation to religion, or specifically with the god-idea. But it will be necessary to say a word, in passing, on at least one other phase.
And first as to the origin of the term. The credit for the first use of the term has always been given to the late Professor Huxley. . . . Huxley appears to have given himself a lot of needless trouble. In philosophy there was the term "sceptic," and in relation to religion the term "Atheist" was ready to hand. The latter term certainly covered all that Huxley meant by agnosticism as applied to the god-idea. The plain, and perhaps brutal truth, is that Huxley was just illustrating the fatal tendency of English public men to seek for a label that will mark them off from an unfashionable heresy even more clearly than it separates them from a crumbling orthodoxy. It is certainly suggestive to find, in this connection, a French writer of distinction, M. Emile Boutmy, pointing out that in France, Spencer, Mill, and Huxley would all have been professed Atheists. (The English People, p. 44.) But France is France, and has always possessed the courage to follow ideas to their logical conclusion.
When it comes to a definition of agnosticism Professor Huxley's position becomes still more difficult of understanding. Agnosticism, he says, is a method the essence of which may be expressed in a single principle. "Positively the principle may be expressed; in matters of the intellect follow your reason so 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 demonstrable." So far as this goes we have here perfectly sound advice. But why call it agnosticism? It is no more than the perfectly sound advice that we must be honest in our investigations, and make no claim to certainty where the conditions of certainty do not exist. But we have no more right to call this agnosticism than we have to give the multiplication table a sectarian or party label.
Attitude of Mind
Nor do we believe for a moment that what Huxley had in view, or what other agnostics have in view, is no more than a counsel of intellectual perfection. What is really at issue here is one's attitude of mind in relation to the belief in god. It is in pretending to know about god that the theist finds himself at issue with the agnostic, and it is to mark himself off from the theist that the agnostic gives himself a special label. And the trouble of the agnostic is that so soon as he begins to justify his position, either he states the Atheistic case or he fails altogether to make his case good.
There is, perhaps, one other topic on which agnosticism may be professed, and that is in connection with the question of what is known as the problem of existence. We may profess our belief in the reality of an external world, but deny that any knowledge of it is possible. Here we assert that what "substance," or "reality," or "thing in itself," is we do not know and cannot know. But while many attempts are made under the name of "the Absolute," etc., to identify this with "god," it is really nothing of the kind. The belief or disbelief in an external "reality" is a problem in philosophy, it has no genuine connection with theology. To identify the two is a mere dialectical subterfuge. Mere existence is an ultimate fact that must be accepted by all. It is only on the question of its nature that controversy can arise.
Whatever may be claimed on behalf of agnosticism, it certainly cannot be claimed that it carries a clear and definite meaning. As we have seen, Professor Huxley used the word to indicate the fact that he was without knowledge of certain things. But what things? To answer that we have to go beyond the word itself that is, we have to define the definition. As it stands we may profess agnosticism in relation to anything from the prospects of a general election within a given period to the question of whether Mars is inhabited or not. If, then, it is said that what is implied is that the agnostic is without a knowledge of god, or without a belief in god, the reply is that is exactly the position of the Atheist. And there was no need whatever to coin a new word, if all that was wanted was to express the Atheistic position. Still less justifiable was it to proceed to misinterpret Atheism in order to justify a departure that need never have been made.
Atheism An Honest Word
One cannot at this point forbear a word on Mr - atterwards Sir - Leslie Stephen's curious justification of his choice of the word agnosticism. After the enlightening remark that the word "Atheist" carries with it an unpleasant connotation, he says:
Dogmatic Atheism the doctrine that there is no god, whatever may be meant by god is to say the least of it a rare phase of opinion. The word Agnosticism, on the other hand, seems to imply a fairly accurate appreciation of a form of creed already common and daily spreading. The Agnostic is one who asserts what no one denies that there are limits to human intelligence. (An Agnostic's Apology, P. 1).
And then he goes on to assert that the subject matter of theology lies beyond these limits.
Now putting on one side this perversion of the meaning of Atheism, was it really worth while to coin a new word to affirm what no one denies? Theists do not deny the limitations of knowledge, on the contrary, they are always affirming it. Neither do all theists deny that "god" is unknowable. That has been affirmed by them over and over again. What they have claimed is that "god" is apprehended rather than known, and they affirm his existence on much the same grounds that others assert the real existence of an external world. Professor Flint's comments on Stephen's performance are quite to the point, and the more noteworthy as coming from a clergyman. He says:
The word Atheist is a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term. It means one who does not believe in god, and it means neither more nor less. It implies neither blame nor approval, neither desert of punishment nor of reward. If a purely dogmatic Atheism be a rare phase of opinion critical Atheism is a very common one, and there is also a form of Atheism which is professedly sceptical or agnostic, but often in reality dogmatic or gnostic. (Agnosticism, P. 69).
The more carefully one examines the reasons given for the preference for the word agnosticism, the clearer it becomes that the real motive is not the wish to obtain mental clarity, but the desire to avoid association with a term that carries, religiously, disagreeable associations. The care taken by so many who call themselves agnostics to explain to the religious world that they are not Atheists, is almost enough to prove this. Indeed, the position is well summed up by Mr. John M. Robertson:
The best argument for the use of the name Agnostic is simply that the word Atheist has been so long covered with all manner of ignorant calumny that it is expedient to use a new term which though in some respects faulty, has a fair start, and will in time have a recognised meaning. The case, so stated, is reasonable; but there is the per contra that whatever the motive with which the name is used, it is now tacked to half a dozen conflicting forms of doctrine, varying loosely between Theism and Pantheism. The name of Atheist escapes that drawback. Its unpopularity has saved it from half-hearted and half-minded patronage.
So that, on the best showing, we are to take "agnostic" on the professed ground that it is more exact than "Atheism," but on the real ground that it is less unpopular, waiting meanwhile for the time when it shall have become more exact than it is by becoming accepted in the same sense as the Atheism that has previously been rejected. Courage and straightforwardness saves a lot of trouble.
God A Meaningless Word
Mr. Bailey Saunders (Quest of Faith, p. 7) calls agnosticism "a plea on behalf of suspended judgment," and this is a favourite expression. It gives one an air of impartiality, with the comforting reflection that it will please the socially stronger side. But suspended judgment on what? To hold one's judgment in suspense implies that we have at least a workable comprehension of the subject in dispute, and that judgment is suspended because the evidence produced is not adequate to command decision. But is that the case here? Does the agnostic claim that the evidence produced by the theist is merely inadequate, or that it is irrelevant? Surely he holds the latter position. And if that is the case, then he does not suspend judgment, for the simple reason that there is no case made out concerning which judgment is to be suspended. There is simply no case before the court. For the agnostic, no more than the Atheist, can attach no intelligible meaning to "god." He must have it defined to understand it, and when it is defined he rejects it without ceremony. And it is quite obvious that when an agnostic says, "I know nothing about god," he means more than that; otherwise it would not be worth the saying. He really means that no one else knows either. He asserts that a knowledge of god is impossible to anyone, because it does not present the possibility of being known. "God," standing alone is a meaningless word, and how can one suspend judgment concerning the truth of an unintelligible proposition? For here are the plain facts of the situation. If we ask the agnostic whether he suspends judgment concerning the existence of the gods of any savage peoples, the reply is in the negative. If we put the same question concerning the god of the Bible, or of the Mohammedan, or of any other of the world's theologies we receive the same answer. There is nothing here to suspend judgment about, the characters and qualities of the gods being such that there admits of no doubt as to their imaginary character. Or if it is said that the agnostic, while dismissing the gods of the various theologies, savage and civilized, as being impossible, suspends judgment as to the existence of a "supreme mind," or of a "creative intelligence," the reply is that one cannot suspend judgment as to the possible existence of an inconceivability. For "mind" must be mind, as we know it. And it is a downright absurdity to speak of the possible existence of a "mind" while divesting it of all the qualities that characterise mind as we know it. Really between the statement that A does not exist, and the affirmation that A does exist, but differs in every conceivable particular from all known A's there is no difference whatever. We are denying its existence in the very act of affirming it.
Further, we quite agree with Mr. F. C. S. Schiller (Riddles of the Sphinx, pp. 17-19) that in practice such suspense of judgment is impossible. We suspend our judgment as to whether we shall die tomorrow or at some indefinite future date, and for that reason we make our arrangements in view of either contingency. We suspend judgment as to the honesty of an employee, and our attitude towards him is governed by that fact. And so with the question of a god. In one way or another we are bound to indicate our judgment on the subject. We must act either as though we believe in the possibility or in the impossibility of "divine" interference. If the mental hesitancy of the respectable agnostic were accompanied by a corresponding timidity in action life would be impossible.
Reverential Agnosticism
A less common plea on behalf of agnosticism, but one on which a word must be said, is that the agnostic attitude is more "reverential" than that of Atheism. But why in the name of all that is reasonable should one profess reverence towards something of which one knows nothing? Reverence, to be intelligible, must be directed towards an intelligent object, and we must have grounds for believing it to be worthy of reverence. Reverence towards our fellow creatures is a reasonable enough sentiment, but what is there reasonable in an expression of reverence towards something that can only be thought of and even this is unwarranted as a force? The truth is that this expression of reverence is no more than the flickering survival of religion. Numbers have reached the stage at which they can perceive the unreasonable nature of religious beliefs, but they have not yet managed to achieve liberation from the traditional emotional attitude towards these beliefs. In other words, the development of the emotional and the intellectual sides of their nature have been unequal, and for these the "Unknowable" has simply served as a peg on which to hang religious feelings that have been robbed of all intellectual support. The semi-religious agnostic thus represents a transition form, interesting enough to all who observe how curiously decaying types strive to perpetuate themselves, but which is bound to disappear in the process of intellectual evolution.
Finally, one would like from the agnostic some authoritative announcement as to his position in relation to what is known concerning the origin of the god-idea. So far as professed theists are concerned one expects this to be ignored. On the part of non-theists one expects a more logical attitude. In this case it is common ground with the Atheist and the agnostic that the idea of god owes its beginnings to the ignorance of primitive man. We know the facts on which this idea was based, and we know that all these are now differently explained. The belief that there is a god governing nature is just one of those blunders made by primitive man, and is on all fours with the numerous other blunders he makes concerning himself and the world around him. Knowing this, and accepting this, believing that "god" springs from the same set of conditions that gave rise to fairies and spirits of various kinds, one would like to know on what ground the agnostic definitely rejects the grounds on which the idea of god is based, while professing a state of suspended judgment about the existence of the object created by this primitive blunder. It is certainly surprising to find those who accept the natural origin of the god-idea, when they come to deal with current religion talk as though it were merely a question of the inconclusiveness of religious arguments. It is nothing of the kind. The final reply to the arguments set forth on behalf of theism is, not that they are inconclusive, but that they are absolutely irrelevant to the question at issue. We cannot remain undecided because there is nothing to remain undecided about. We know that the idea of god is pure myth, and was never anything but myth. A belief that began in error, and which has no other basis than error, cannot by any possible argument be converted into a truth. The old question was, "Can man by searching find out god?" The modern answer is an emphatic affirmative. Substantially we have by searching found out god. We know the origin and history of one of the greatest delusions that ever possessed the human mind. God has been found out. Analytically and synthetically we understand the god-idea as previous generations could not understand it. It has been explained; and the logical consequence of the explanation is Atheism.
A Rose by Any Other Name
Ultimately, then, we come to this: (1) The agnosticism that concerns itself with a confession of ignorance concerning the nature of "existence," has no necessary connection with religion and is only made to have such by a confusion of two distinct things. (2) The plea of a suspended judgment is invalid, since there is nothing about which one can suspend a decision. (3) The agnosticism that professes a semi-religious feeling of reverence towards the "Unknowable" is fundamentally upon all fours with the religious feelings of the ordinary believer. Worshipping the Unknowable is more ridiculous than worshipping Huxley's "wilderness of apes." The apes might take some intelligent interest in the antics of their devotees; but to print our hypostatized ignorance in capital letters and then profess a feeling of veneration for it is as ridiculous a proceeding as the world has seen. After all, an absurdity is never quite so grotesque as when it is tricked out in scientific phrases and paraded as the outcome of profound philosophic thinking. (4) The only agnosticism that seems capable of justifying itself is an agnosticism that is indistinguishable from Atheism. To again cite Professor Flint, Atheist "means one who does not believe in god, and it means neither more nor less." The agnostic is also one who is without belief in a god, every argument he uses to justify his position is and has been used as a justification of Atheism. Atheist is really "a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term," it admits of no paltering and of no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech.
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Other Opinions
So we are either Atheistic or agnostic. We admit that we cannot prove there is no god, but claim that we don't have to disprove what there is no credible evidence for. Neither do we feel the need to disprove the existence of fairies. It is for those who believe in a god to explain the proposition fully and in testable form, and to produce better than ancient books and "religious experience" which can be just neural activity.
Jim Wooinough
"Presenting Humanism in the Media"
New Zealand Humanist, Winter 1985
The definition given by Spencer to Agnosticism cannot be accepted by science. "The power which the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." Science will not affirm that anything is inscrutable. To do so is suicidal. Science will never give up the eternal struggle to know. To know what a part of things? No, but all things. That is the goal, and nothing else will satisfy the scientific mind. It is theology that talks of the "inscrutable," but not science. Theology puts up the bars of ignorance, but not a true philosophy. Philosophy nor Freethought ever says: "Thus far thou go and no farther."
Samuel P. Putnam
400 Years of Freethought
The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.
H. L. Mencken
A Book of Calumny
One who is agnostic usually finds himself saying something like the following: "I don't personally believe in god, but I see that a great many other people do. Where there is a difference of opinion we must conclude that the issue is in doubt therefore, I must hold that the question of existence of god is in doubt; that none of us know for sure whether or not god exists or not." An agnostic position of this type is comfortable because it does not unduly irritate the majority. It is much easier to say "I don't know" than "Your position is one of rank superstition." This position is no position at all. This type of "agnostic" reminds us more of the Pharisee in the parable than anyone else.
Robert N. Bostrom
"Agnostic Belief Systems and the Problem of Knowledge"
Religious Humanism, Winter 1969
The Agnostic is an Atheist; the Atheist, an Agnostic. The Agnostic says I do not know, but I do not believe there is any God. The Atheist says the same. The orthodox Christian says he knows there is a God; but we know that he does not know; he simply believes; he cannot know. And the Atheist cannot know that God does not exist. Robert G. Ingersoll
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A Few Arguments - For God's Sake
For scores of millenia, the religion pushers used the same arguments for god that drug pushers use today: "It makes you feel good and takes away your cares. You needn't worry any more."
Why should you do this? Because someone, somewhere, sometime, saw, talked, or even wrestled with god. No one ever asked what the person was "on" who if he was conscious hallucinated this, or what he had to eat if he was dreaming to cause the nightmare. Was it drugs, booze, improperly digested pork? If the guy was big enough and ugly enough and said he had a "direct sensory experience" (real or imagined), the herd accepted it. When times were bad, when bodies did not have enough food, when minds, strained beyond endurance, turned inward, anyone could have "mystical insight" which produced a god even as perceptions show a mirage in a desert. Or there was that sensitive effete who by intuition just knew there was a god.
Humankind in its infancy had no science, education, or history from which to learn. There was only groping after "some way to make it," day by day, coping in the world's wildernesses for food, shelter, and sex.
With the one who was ugly, big and mean enough to push his ideas onto others, authority was born. After that god ideas were quickly based on authority: first, the authority of an individual (Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha), then on the authority of an institution (church, state), and then later, when words could be scratched on stone or sheep's hide, the authority of the written word (Bible, Koran, Veda, Upanishads). Since no god ever zapped himself into the presence of men so that the god theory could be tested, these substitutes for the real thing were the basis of belief.
Late in mankind's development the "rational" or "logical" ideas were born, but they were all based on a priori premises. That's a polite way of saying that the beginning statement, the first premise, has to be accepted without examination. One good argument was needed; the theists came up with half a dozen because all failed.
The cosmological argument: There is a cause for everything. The first cause is god. Theology says that the egg was not generated without the chicken, so the universe was not generated without god laying it.
The reply: If everything has a cause, who caused god? What chicken laid god?
The teleological argument: Look how wonderful it all is? See the design in nature? A planning intelligence was behind it all.
The reply: Oh, sure! For god so loved the world that he gave all of us bodies which self-destruct. That's damn fine planning.
The ontological argument: God exists because he can be thought about and defined in exquisite detail. I know all about him: he is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipresent. I think god into existing.
The reply: I can think about leprecauns and unicorns. But show me one!
The moral argument: I know god exists because from him there flows goodness, kindness, love, justice, truth, and wisdom.
The reply: That leaves unsolved badness, unkindness, hate, injustice, falsehood, and folly. No hell on earth no reason for a god.
The pragmatic argument: But the god idea works. The god idea has brought humanity to a peak of excellence.
The reply: Mankind could have made it sooner and better without religious wars, the crusades, the Inquisition, and the personal psychological hells into which religion has cast most of the human race. Religion exhalts cruelty, sadism, insanity, slavery, sexism, war, and death. Either Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny is a better idea!
The argument from entropy: When god made the word flesh, corruptness set in. Ultimately matter and energy in the universe shall degrade to inertness and nothingness.
The reply: Living organisms have advanced in complexity not degenerated from perfection. Humans in community become more interrelated, knowledgeable, and sophisticated not more degraded and disorganized.
I'll take my chances with humankind. You can take your ideas of god.
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1 This was translated into English in 1846 by George Eliot, with a Latin preface by Strauss. ![[back]](../pix/backarrow.gif)
2 Quintas Septimius Florens Tertullianus (circa A.D. 155), church father.
Titus Flavius Clemens [Clement] of Alexandria (circa 150-211), Greek Christian theologian and church father.
Origen (185?-254?), Greek writer, teacher, and church father.
Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus [Cyprian], (d. 258), Christian father; bishop of Carthage (circa 248-258).
Saint John Chrysostom (circa 347-407), church father and patriarch of Constantinople.
Saint Augustine (354-430), church father; bishop of Hippo (396-430).
Tommaso d'Aquino [Saint Thomas Aquinas], (1214?-1274), Italian religious philosopher.
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