Whatever Happened to Agnosticism?

The rise of secular society in the West seems undeniable, and although the 1960s may not be the decade which created secularism, it certainly fed it an accelerant. It was not just sexual and social liberation combining with new-found wealth which favored materialism over spiritualism, however, and even the Anglican Church was beginning to have doubts. In 1963, John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God, a book which was also the subject of a piece written by the author in the London Observer, and dramatically headlined; “Our Image of God Must Go”. Faith in Christianity was under threat from the forces of Mammon, certainly, but it was also being questioned by its own high-priests.

As materialistic, temporal values gradually replace those of the Church, this would suggest a concomitant decline in religious belief, at least for Christian countries. Put in theological terms, the number of theists is falling, while the number of atheists increases. This certainly seems true in the UK, for example, where church attendance has been in steady decline for half a century. Despite occasional pieces informing us that the youth of Europe are turning back to the Christian religion, this seems fanciful. I doubt Gen Z will find God unless they can download an app making it easy for them to do so.

In 1983, 1.3 million British people attended church regularly, but that was down to a million by the turn of the century. By 2019, there were around 850,000 regular, Anglican churchgoers, and Church statisticians watched anxiously for a return to these figures after an obvious slump during Covid. But, by 2023, the figure had dropped still further to 685,000, and the downward slope is even sharper when adjusted for the rise in population.

So, belief certainly seems to be on the wane, if church usage is any reliable marker. Of the 16,000 Anglican churches in Britain, between 3,000 and 5,000 are currently derelict or used only rarely (and even more rarely for anything to do with actual worship), and none has a resident vicar. It appears, then, that people are increasingly inclined to atheism, although that is not the only theological alternative to a belief in God. It is not true to say that people either believe in God or they do not, and there is a tertium quid, a third way. Whatever happened to agnosticism?

Thomas Huxley, grandfather of Aldous, was the first writer to use the term “agnosticism”. He coined it in private conversation around 1869, although the word would not appear in print until nine years later, when it appeared in an essay by Huxley on David Hume. This is significant, as Hume is part of a long train of philosophical skepticism which is necessarily closely allied with agnosticism. Huxley’s term is an Ancient Greek construction, and comes from the word gnosis.

Gnosis as a philosophical concept starts its life with a pre-Christian sect, the Pyrrhonists, named after the philosopher Pyrrho and exemplified by physician and philosopher Sextus Empiricus. If we can conceive of God, says Sextus, then we can conceive of his properties (what would later be called “attributes”). But there was no consensus among Sextus’ fellows concerning what those properties were. These arguments would last at least until the great Catholic Counter-Reformation Councils which began with the Council of Trent in the 16^th century. Did God have a body or was he incorporeal? Was he a temporal being or outside of time? Was he spatial or unextended? In fact, some of Sextus’ questions are far less trivial than those asked at the later Councils in supposedly more enlightened times, where debating points included whether or not Christ owned his clothes.

The later Gnostic school of the first century AD went on to co-exist uneasily with early Christianity before being declared heretical, and was syncretic, combining elements of previous thought (including Platonism) concerning the revelation and conception of knowledge. Gnosis makes its way into the Bible, and comes to mean something along the lines of “revealed knowledge”. The gnostic would be one who knows, or has received knowledge. By the 19^th century, Thomas Huxley required a term for conversational usage which could sum up the combination of this initiation – akin to rites such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries – with an attendant skepticism which had been present almost as long as the idea of gnosis. What if you cannot obtain gnosis because you doubt? What does that make you?

Huxley’s philosophical salon, the Metaphysical Society, was a group of like-minded, Victorian, Kantian, English gentlemen who met to exchange opinions and papers on various contentious subjects. One of these was, as one might expect, religion, and Huxley felt he needed a new term, if only to use with his fellows, which suited his epistemological requirements when it came to considerations of deity. And so, with the addition of the alpha-privative, “gnostic” becomes “agnostic”, one who has not received knowledge.  (We still use the alpha-privative from time to time in English. Sneezing, for example, is typical of someone suffering from the common cold. The patient presenting red spots, however, is atypical). So, what became of Huxley’s neologism? When the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary, it had a distinct flavor of Kantianism about it:

“Agnostic. One who holds that the evidence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and unknowable”.

Agnosticism has had a strange philosophical ride, and is not the simple cop-out it appears to be, a theological abstention. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor tells Ivan about the ladder of belief, on which true belief is the top rung. But atheism is not at the bottom, it is the second rung from the top, the bottom rung being reserved for agnosticism. There is an echo of this in Chesterton’s famous line that “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He’ll believe in anything”. At least the atheist has belief, and the theist can always change that to suit his own requirements, the Grand Inquisitor implies. He just has to estimate how many people will take Pascal’s Wager.

Pascal’s Wager is a famous philosophical conundrum, and it is aimed squarely at the agnostic. If God either does or does not exist, Pascal suggests, then choosing to be a theist or an atheist is akin to a 50-50 bet, such as that made on a coin-toss. Better to bet on God’s existence, because if he doesn’t exist it makes no difference to you, so why bet on a horse-race with no runners and riders? You die. You just cease to live, and off you go into the eternal night. But if God does exist, and you bet against him, then it’s punishment in the afterlife for you rather than the eternal reward you could have had if you had bet on the deity. It’s good as far as it goes, but roulette is more fun because you can see the wheel. Pascal’s punter is betting not only on God’s existence, but also on the existence (although there isn’t too much of this mentioned in the Bible) of an attendant afterlife with one of two destinations. Three, counting purgatory. If theism is represented by a divine afterlife, and atheism by an infernal one, perhaps purgatory is an analogue for agnosticism, a metaphysical waiting-room for those who just cannot make up their minds.

The criticism of agnosticism from the traditional Church was always that it is not any different from atheism. That was the charge levelled against Hume when he was turned down for the only academic post he ever applied for, that he was an atheist dressing up in the livery of philosophy. Hume hardly mentions God in in A Treatise on Human Nature, written when he was just 25, but whatever he did say must have made the examining board uneasy enough to dismiss his application.

So, as far as the Church was concerned, “agnosticism” had been tried as a concept and was just a different word for the same thing, that thing being atheism. (Things will have changed radically now, the Anglican Church having somewhat shed its metaphysical concerns and dumped them for Pride paraphernalia). Here is the verdict; If you are agnostic, then you don’t believe in God, in which case you are an atheist. It is sound reasoning, but instead of concentrating on the poles of theist/atheist, what of the agnostic as a philosophical position? Albert Camus was reputed to have wished that there were a political party for people who think that they may possibly be wrong. Agnosticism is the theological wing of that party.

The first way in which agnosticism differs from either theism or atheism is that it seeks to answer a question by stating that the question cannot be answered. If the question is, “Is there a God?”, then the theist ticks the “Yes” box, and the atheist ticks “No”.  But the agnostic is wanting to tick a box marked, “Don’t know”. Is this an answer? It is certainly a response. The theist and the atheist believe their argument to be protected by the law of excluded middle – it’s an “either/or” question – but agnosticism is that excluded middle. Classical Aristotelean logic has already been outflanked. The second and more philosophical relationship between the three positions, what William James (who wrote at length on agnosticism) might have termed “varieties of religious experience”, is that neither theism nor atheism have any room for skepticism, Kryptonite for their respective positions (tests of faith for the religious notwithstanding), whereas agnosticism not only involves skepticism, it requires it.

Skepticism is both a school of thought in Ancient Greece and a methodology found consistently throughout Western philosophy. René Descartes most famously uses “universal skepticism” as a staging-post on the way to the indubitability of the cogito in the Discourse on the Method, as indeed St. Augustine did before him in what is called the “proto-cogito argument” in City of God. I can doubt all my experience, claims Descartes, except for this one unassailable thought; I think, therefore I am. The agnostic is also skeptical, not of the veracity of experience, but of the existence of God. It is worthy of note, of course, that he also doubts that there is no God. That is a logical implication which agnosticism has either to face or quit the game, and it is the paradox of agnosticism. The agnostic’s inevitable inability to find firm philosophical ground for his belief (or lack of) is his philosophical ground. The theist and the atheist have already made a metaphysical choice, whether they know it or not. But have they made a properly philosophical choice? Religious belief concerns faith as well as reason, a different rabbit-warren. However, it might be argued that only the agnostic is properly philosophical about the question of God’s existence, and that is precisely because he is a skeptic concerning what is said to be true.

The difference between belief in God and atheism has as its center of gravity truth, which, in philosophical terms, is big-game hunting. But it should be noted that truth is not a one-size-fits-all outfit designed for our convenience. Truth has different functions, and these differing functions effectively make truths true in different ways. It is an unassailable fact that 2 plus 2 is equal to four, and also that there are four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Both are true statements – good luck with being skeptical about either – and even involve a common mathematical denominator in “4”. But they are true in very different ways, they represent veridical modalities which are congruent but not identical, like two equilateral triangles of different sizes. And the truth or falsehood behind belief in God is, potentially, susceptible to skeptical opposition not just as a matter of faith, upbringing, or choice, but as a result of philosophical and linguistic analysis. This is the methodology of the Vienna Circle, for example, for whose members language has no meaning if it cannot be verified from experience – like an epistemological checklist – and therefore God becomes questionable not because atheists say so and march around saying so, but because the internal logic of language says so. “I fear we have not got rid of God”, writes Nietzsche, “because we have not got rid of grammar”.

Skepticism concerning the existence of God can also be expressed philosophically by counter-hypothesis. Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher and mathematician, was famously an atheist, and was also an expert in thought-experiments. There is a rather playful philosophical conundrum concerning the physical world, for example, for which Russell’s answer is as thought-provoking as the question. Waking up one morning, how do you know that everything in the world – yourself included – has not doubled in size? It is deceptive because it privileges the visual sense, but Russell answered it by taking into account physical but invisible forces such as gravity and barometric pressure. Were everything suddenly twice its original size, Russell said, Bumble-bees would be unable to fly, and water would boil at a different temperature. There were other spoilers, too, but the answer shows a prehensile and inquisitory mind loaded with back-up in the form of scientific awareness, and it is worth noting one of Russell’s arguments not against God, but against the likelihood of God.

What if, suggested Russell, I claim that between Earth and Mars there exists a teapot, orbiting elliptically like a planet? It can’t be seen, even by our most powerful optical instruments, because it is too small. Therefore, my postulation cannot be disproved, however unlikely it might seem, and that is not a strong positive argument when applied in support of the existence of God. This surreal scenario seems just that, until you recall that we believe in electrons as building-blocks of the physical world, but we can’t see them either. Not even electron microscopes are designed to see electrons. You can’t do that. They use a stream of electrons – still simply assumed to exist, like the medieval deus absconditus – to see other very small things. So, Russell’s orbiting teapot has as much claim to existence as the electron, simply because he says it does, ex cathedra, and yet we believe in the latter but not the former. Russell claims that proof of God’s existence is just as tenuous.

Philosophers and scientists have something of a track record of believing in things which, although not able to be proved to exist, cannot be disproved. Locke’s primary quality, Riemannian geometry, Kant’s noumenon, Lepton spin, Fermi gases, the Freudian unconscious; all of these are “undisprovables”. You can posit them, and no one can refute you. This is Hegelian synthesis without either thesis or antithesis, the answer to a mathematics question without the workings. The “dark matter” of the cosmologists is a perfect example. Dark matter is just that, matter which cannot be seen. We cannot access it via our “senses five”, just as with the other “undisprovables” noted. But, cosmologists claim, dark matter has to exist because what we can observe is a range of effects inexplicable without the presence of dark matter. It seems a little like Descartes’ ontological proof of God’s existence, a weak argument probably published to deflect the attention of the Catholic Church after Galileo’s imprisonment. God is perfect, writes Descartes, and non-existence is an imperfection. Therefore, God cannot have non-existence as an attribute, and therefore exists. It is begging the question on a cosmological scale.

So, where does that leave today’s agnostic? I have framed this overview of agnosticism (as theological skepticism) in religious terms, and discount (not disprove) neo-philosophical areas such as simulacrum theory, which claims we all live in a Matrix-like simulation, and intelligent design (which just looks to me like deism with a new coat of paint). These are entertaining ideas, like incredibly convincing sci-fi novels, hi-tech Platonism. The Dawkins/Harris school of atheism seem to proselytize every bit as vociferously as the most vulgar American televangelist, but there seems no safe space for the poor agnostic.

What would happen if good old agnosticism made a comeback? Or what if it went the other way? What if the Church Militant made its return, spurning both atheism and agnosticism, or the strange packet-mix that the modern world seems to have made from the two. There is a good, short sketch here by the English comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, in which a sinister vicar berates a pair for their apparent spirituality in the face of old-time (Anglican) religion. When the young lady counters his traditional stance on religion with her “internet assembled philosophy”, this Luther-like priest defends himself:

“I stand with hundreds of years of darkness, bafflement, and hunger behind me!”

Nietzschean comedy, perhaps.

My personal religious beliefs are agnostic because I don’t see any other option. Perhaps I have painted myself into a corner by overdoing the philosophy for half a century. Ultimate truths don’t detain me particularly. I prefer the minutiae and detail of philosophy. I forget where Nietzsche writes that life is not a puzzle to be solved but, if he has a point, God is out of a job. In the end, God may or may not exist, but he is equivalent to the hardest puzzle ever devised.

Anyone who was living in London in 2008 will have seen one of many red buses with a large advertising slogan reading: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. The buses appeared in various cities, the campaign having been funded by The British Humanist Association. Richard Dawkins was involved in the promotion. The curious thing is that the media – always in need of a handy catch-phrase – began calling them “atheist buses”. They may not have been aware of what this term implied in terms of theology, but they took the same line the examining board took with David Hume; If you are an agnostic, you are effectively an atheist. The ads read, “There is probably no God”, whereas an “atheist bus” would have carried the slogan, “There is no God”.

As for God himself (even we agnostics will grant him provisional existence for a thought-experiment, something atheists are unable to do lest they convert and become agnostics), does he watch all this conceptual wrangling with great amusement, or perhaps think he had better think things out again? My greatest fear, given the existence of God, would not be that he was a jealous god, or wrathful in his constant smiting, or the most high and mighty and therefore a touch autocratic, but rather that he might just be that great engineer implied by Aristotle’s causa prima. What if he designed, built and started the engine, and now it is running away from him, like a “galloping” diesel engine from which boat engineers run and hide? Or what if he wants to re-design that engine?

A short personal reminiscence. I attended a freedom of speech rally in London years ago which culminated in Trafalgar Square. One of the speakers was the head of the British Secular Society and, as he spoke into the afternoon, huge thounder-clouds began to roll in overhead and from behind him, over the beautiful National Gallery. An electrical storm was clearly imminent. If lightning had struck that man at that moment, you would have seen a nation convert overnight. They would have had to build a lot more churches. You don’t need reason to believe in God. There are no atheists in a foxhole, they say, and I would guess there are no agnostics either.

Dave Allen, a great Irish TV comedian famous in the 1970s, particularly for his jokes about the Catholic Church, used to close his TV show with a signature catchphrase; “Goodnight, and may your god go with you”. But what if you don’t have a god, what if your skepticism won’t allow you to have one? Perhaps we should remember the line from the 1995 movie, The Usual Suspects, and it might be something for agnostics everywhere (including me) to ponder; “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him”.