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The Sense and Morality of Agnosticism

I CAN SAY WITH RELATIVE CONFIDENCE (because what I’m saying, at least it would seem, has to be true) that there is only one necessary religion that has any merit to the people who inhabit this earth, and that’s the Golden Rule: “Do unto others what you would want them to do unto you” (from the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 7:12]). To treat others as you would want them to treat you is the highest, most noble form of human behavior and the basis of all morality. No matter what some papal encyclical says; no matter what some bishops’ conference says; no matter how many sacraments of the Catholic church there are, or chapters and verses in the bible, or thick and complex books by theologians, or Sunday school classes and sermons by pastors; no matter how many heated arguments there are about God, Jesus, and religion; no matter how many pilgrimages there are to Mecca, Jerusalem, and other holy places; no matter how many thousands of hours Jewish scholars struggle over the meaning of the Torah; no matter how many multimillion-dollar churches and synagogues and grand cathedrals to Christ are constructed, nothing can ever change that simple reality.

“When I do good, I feel good,” Abraham Lincoln said. “When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”

What can any church, religion, priest, minister, rabbi, theologian, seminary, religious book, or college course teach you beyond the Golden Rule that has any value? Anything else has to be man-made piffle.

If we must have religion, the seminal test as to the value and merit of any religion worth its salt has to be not what you believe, but what you do—that is, how you treat your fellow man. Yet in the thousands upon thousands of books, and billions upon billions of words that have been written, particularly about Christianity and the bible, what percentage of these books do you think are devoted to the only thing that counts—the Golden Rule?

The second reality is that if there is a God and a heaven after our life on earth, no God who demands of those whom he created that in order to get to heaven they do something here on earth different from leading a life of the Golden Rule is worth spending one second in heaven with, much less eternity. If his main requirement for getting to heaven is not that we treat our fellow man fairly and decently, but we be born-again Christians who accept Jesus as our savior and that we love him more than anyone else with all of our being, then, as indicated earlier, who in the hell would want to spend eternity or even one second with someone who is so unbelievably self-centered and vainglorious? That type of God is not worth a tinker’s damn.

The word faith is a euphemism for hope and speculation. Indeed, the definition of faith is belief in the unknown. And if I may borrow a clichéd term, I, for one, have never had much faith in faith. Since faith is an acknowledgment that the truth is unknown, it is nothing more than wishful thinking, and the wish is no evidence of anything beyond itself. Yet so many religious people take their wishes for reality. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, faith is the first refuge of an idle or apprehensive mind, and though it may perhaps be mentally and emotionally nutritious, it is not intellectually sustainable.

When devout Christians feel inadequate, in conversation or debate, in justifying their belief in God, they very frequently retreat by saying, “You have to have faith,” saying this in the sense that faith is something that one should have, as if it’s the proper and right thing to do. But I wonder if they have ever stopped to ask themselves why. If they are truthful with themselves, is it because they need there to be a God to give purpose to their life and mitigate their fear of death? But if so, is that really an intelligent justification for believing there is a God—merely wanting or needing him to exist to make them feel better?

I certainly do not mean to denigrate the value of faith. Faith has lit candles of warmth and softened pangs of fear and despair throughout human history. As nineteenth-century German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine said, “Human misery is too great for man to do without faith.” Tolstoy went so far as to proclaim that “faith is the force of life.” It’s just that the comfort and solace, even strength, of faith should never be confused with the existence or nonexistence of the object of that faith. Faith and its object bear no relation to each other, though if one were to believe the great religions of the world, faith in God and God should be listed as synonyms in the dictionary. Religion even goes so far as to say that faith is itself virtuous. But under what conceivable theory?

Christianity, since its origins, has tried to infuse faith with a substance it does not have, calling it something it is not in a transparent attempt to change its nature. But as Lincoln pointed out, calling, for instance, the tail of a dog a leg doesn’t change the number of legs a dog has from four to five. This is why the apostle Paul only succeeded in revealing that he knew faith is as substanceless as the froth of a vapor when he felt the need to come up with this embarrassing articulation in his letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1). But we know that faith is only the dream of things hoped for, the imagining of things unseen.

How or why should someone have faith in something for which there is no evidence? But if we must have faith, shouldn’t we have faith only in that which does not do violence to our common sense and reason ? Why should we want to see, by faith, what the eye of reason rejects?

Being as helpless and impotent as we are in understanding the meaning of our existence, the majority of mankind turns to organized religion for answers, while a much smaller number of humans turn to learned religious writers and theologians. But all we ever get from any of these sources is unintelligible and/or absurd answers to insoluble mysteries. God, if there is a God, would have all the answers. But he is waiting for us, if at all, outside the reach of our minds. Our finite minds cannot comprehend that which is infinite (or as Einstein put it, “The problem is too vast for our limited minds”), and that is why the effort of religion and theology to define and explain God is inherently futile. Thus, my agnosticism.

Is the conclusion of agnosticism no more than an intellectual exercise ? Can it have any value to the human condition? Perhaps. I believe there is an ethical dimension to agnosticism that has the potential, to the degree it is embraced, to make man more honest. We know that untruthfulness, dishonesty, deceit, hypocrisy, and pretense are so much a part of life that we almost expect these things in our daily living and find it refreshing when we see their absence. And it’s not too likely this will ever change. But if man can ever at least hope to reduce the level of dishonesty in his existence, there perhaps is no better place to start than in his relationship with God.

Thomas Huxley, who gave the doctrine of agnosticism its name, wrote in his Essays upon Some Controverted Questions (1889) that “a foundation for morality” away from the affliction of “lying” would be “to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.” In other words, once you deceive yourself, all deceit is easy after that.

But, you might say, even if agnosticism will make a person more honest, if there is a God, how will this agnosticism help me with God, a God who demands that I worship him?¹

The great religions of the world believe that God created man. In creating us, he gave us, among other things, a mind, as well as our ability to reason with it. And since he gave us our mind, we can assume he wanted us to use it. (Can any Christian, Jew, or Muslim be heard to say, “No, God did not want us to use the mind he gave us”?) If in using the mind he gave us to reason with, we come to the erroneous conclusion that he does not exist, if God is a reasonable God, why would he forever punish us for our innocent lack of belief? If he would, then he is not reasonable, and we should not have any desire to spend eternity with him. In other words, if God demands that we sacrifice our reason, which has been described as the highest attribute of man, to be with him, shouldn’t our reason tell us he is not worth our time? Moreover, if God is worth anything, shouldn’t he want us to reach him through our reason rather than unthinkingly through blind faith? Wouldn’t that mean more to him?

But if our reason leads us away from him, is it a situation where, as referred to, God denies us his eternal presence but we don’t care since we have no use for him? Not necessarily. Although the bulk of the New Testament makes it very clear that if we don’t accept Jesus as our savior, we’re toast, surprisingly, though rarely cited—understandably, because Christianity would have every reason not to do so, and atheists don’t believe in God in the first place, so the issue would be moot—there is some authority in the bible for the proposition that we’ll be just fine with God. In the first epistle of Paul to Timothy, he writes that “I used to scoff at the name of Christ. I hunted down his people, harming them in every way I could. But God had mercy on me because I did it in ignorance and unbelief ” (1 Timothy 1:13). More powerfully, in a discussion of “spiritual blindness” in John 9:35–41, Jesus said, “I have come to judge the world. I have come to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind.” When the Pharisees, who always challenged Jesus’ divinity, said to Jesus, “Are you saying we are blind?” Jesus responded, “If you were blind, there would be no sin in that. ‘But we see,’ you say, and your sin remains.” And didn’t Jesus say on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” (Luke 23:34; see also Romans 11:25, 32, and Luke 12:48).

If I could draw a parallel in the criminal law, two elements must be present to constitute a serious crime: actus reus (the criminal act) and mens rea (the criminal state of mind). An example of the latter is an intent to steal, a necessary element of the crime of theft. If a person takes the personal property of another erroneously thinking it is his property, he is not guilty of theft.

Agnosticism, per some thinkers, is based on empiricism, that all knowledge is derived from experience; that is, sense observation, and because no one has actually experienced God, we should be agnostic on the matter. I reject this notion because it neuters and emasculates the mind as a needless appendage to our cognitive senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. If agnosticism acquired its intellectual virility from empiricism, then of course we’d have to be agnostic since no one has experienced or seen God, though some may believe they have. I’m an agnostic because my mental faculties tell me the existence of God is beyond human comprehension, not just beyond human cognition, which of course it also is and which is too simplistic. Because God and the meaning of our existence seem to be unknowable and impenetrable mysteries, I will go so far as to say that agnosticism is the only intelligent, strong position one can take on the question of God’s existence.

Even if we were to hypothesize that whether God exists is not unknowable, doubt is divine in that it impels a search for the truth. It opens the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. Indeed, while one is under its spell, faith anesthetizes the desire to seek knowledge and truth. And as knowledge increases, faith recedes.

Even though I don’t feel that a belief in God (theism) or disbelief in him (atheism) is unintelligent, I do feel that a certitude about either of these two positions, even a strong belief in them, which is so extremely common, is, perforce, unintelligent. Put another way, since the depth of a belief should be in proportion to the evidence, no sensible person should be dogmatic about whether there is or is not a God.

The whole matter of God can perhaps be distilled down to this: Is there a God who created the world? Or is God merely a word we use to explain the world? In either event, God should only be a question.