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One of the criticisms I hear about agnosticism is that it’s a soft option. That despite agnostic rhetoric regarding the search for truth and so on, most agnostics aren’t searching very hard.
There’s certainly an element of truth in that. I don’t know any agnostic whose entire life is devoted to the search for truth.
But then, I don’t know anyone else whose life is either. After all, if you’re atheist or a theist, you believe that you already know the truth (despite the lack of any verifiable proof). Why would you need to keep searching for it when you already know it? (Particularly if you’ve got this fun double-standard to apply.)
And even if you did struggle with it in making that decision, if you had doubts about your faith before you committed to it, or you committed to your faith and then had doubts about it later, the odds are that you spent less time in that search for truth than an agnostic the same age as you has.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that agnostics are like Argus, with an unsleeping gaze that misses nothing. We’re human. We have our failures, misunderstandings and lazinesses like the rest of you.
But what we don’t have is the close-mindedness necessary to reject new claims or new evidence out of hand. Agnosticism no more requires nothing but searching than theism requires nothing but prayer. It does require an open mind, one that does not race to judgement, and one that admits to and corrects error when it occurs.
The most common characterisation of agnostics that I’ve come across, from both theists and atheists, is that agnostics are simply indecisive. (Rather amusingly, Richard Dawkins mentions this in “The God Delusion” – it seems that this is the one part of the Christian dogma he was taught in school that he has inexplicably failed to subject to his normal heroic scorn.) There is an overall sense that agnostics are somehow weak-willed, pusillanimous folk who really just need to show some backbone.
As if standing up to this pressure from both sides to make a decision – any decision being better than none, apparently – did not require considerable backbone.
We’re all familiar with managers and politicians who need to be seen to be making decisions, leading to an endless and pointless stream of changed decisions. The usual cure proposed is that they should make up their minds once and for all. (The idea that persisting in an error might well be worse than not making a decision – Iraq, anyone? – seems just a foreign.)
Let me ask you something: Why?
Why is it so important to make a decision, now, today, before all the facts are in? Generally speaking, in this life, anyone who wants you to do that is selling something – and hiding some nasty surprises in the small print. That’s what I would assume about any salesman or politician who tried to it on – why should I assume any differently just ‘cos it’s a preacher talking?
But let’s assume good faith (so to speak) on the part of those pushing us to make this decision.
I think they suffer from a failure of the imagination.
They don’t seem able to see that there might be more information on which to base decisions later on. They don’t want to admit that there will probably be more options to choose among if the decision is delayed (despite the fact that even the most cursory glance at religious history will show that there will most likely be some new splinter faith formed in the next five minutes or so).
Most insultingly, they don’t seem willing to acknowledge that choosing not to choose is a valid (or in extreme cases of this narrow-mindedness, a possible) choice.
The long and the short of the book is this: Jacobs attempts to live by the rules in the Bible as directly and completely as possible. In fact, it’s subtitled “One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible“, and that is a fairly accurate boast. The state of biblical interpretation being what it is, this is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in some time. How many people are willing to up-end their entire life, at least potentially, not what they do believe in, but for what they don’t?
| Jacobs, it becomes clear from the earliest pages of the book, is my kind of agnostic. In fact, he’s the kind of agnostic I’d be if I were more inclined to biblically literalist pranks (and considering how inclined in that direction I am, that’s saying something).
His own scepticism prevents him from really committing to the task insofar as having faith is concerned, but that’s what interests me (and him) most: his willingness to test his lack of faith, and how it changes over the course of his year. This is mad scientist experimenting on himself territory. Think of a ‘Super Size Me’ styled experiment conducted on a man’s soul rather than his digestive system, and you’re getting close to the idea. |
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Kudos are due to Jacobs both how thoroughly he throws himself into this research, how honestly he reports its effects on him, and how good a job he does avoiding the easy cheap shots against fundamentalists of all stripes.
All in all, this is a fascinating book that any agnostic (and anyone else, I would think) should find an interesting and thought-provoking read.
It is both pleasing and infuriating to me that today, in a number of UK cities, busses carrying a variety of self-proclaimed ‘atheist’ slogans are out doing the rounds. You can read atheists patting themselves on the back about it all over.
And to be fair, it is a worthy achievement, and one I support with but one reservation. That one reservation, though, is not far short of being a deal-breaker for me. Because the slogan that’s getting the most play is this one:
There’s probably no God.
Continue reading On The Busses »
It’s probably unfair of me to regard many atheists as being in denial. But I don’t think it’s at all unfair to think that many of them (and indeed, a great majority of all people, whatever they may or may not believe) are insufficiently rigourous in their exercise of logic and their application of semantics.
(I’d say I was a terrible snob, but that’s not true – I’m really very good at it  )
Continue reading A Question of Semantics »
As the title suggests, it doesn’t have a lot to do with agnosticism – although it does treat doubt with more courtesy and respect than Dawkins seems capable of. It’s a fascinating read, too, which again scores it above “The God Delusion” – and it has some interesting ideas about both faith and doubt, and the historical context of both.
But I feel it misses the point of its own arguments.
Continue reading Review: “The Twilight of Atheism” by Alister McGrath »
So after yesterday’s Blessay, I got to wondering what a chapel designed for the use of agnostics would be like. Here’s what I came up with:
Continue reading The Agnostic Chapel »
One of the things about Intelligent Design – one of the ones that its proponents kinda sorta want to cover up, but only when it’s being used against them in debate – is that if you accept the basic hypothesis that the universe is a designed artifact, you can infer certain things about the nature of the designer and its intelligence from a close study of said artifact.
Given that the universe, as we understand it, seems to be more or less optimized for human habitation (or, as evolution says, humans are optimized to inhabit the universe), one has to assume that the intelligence of the designer is not so very dissimilar from that of humanity.
There are several possibile candidates for who the Intelligent Designer (or Designers) might be:
- an alien race
- our own descendants, who have mastered the science and/or magick of time travel
- God (you know, that dude from the Bible)
And, of course, one other possibility.
Continue reading Intelligent Designs »
So I’ve been reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins.
Which I’ve got to say, is among the most insulting books I’ve ever read.
Naturally, I speak here as an agnostic – which so far as Dawkins is concerned, makes me a side issue at best. I can only imagine how insulted you’d be by it if you actually had faith.
Continue reading Richard Dawkins: Got Delusion? »
There’s a number of common misconception about many systems of polar opposites.
The most prominent of these is to conceive of all pairs of opposites as purely binary, a philosophical hangover dating back at least as far as Aristotle, and still absurdly prevalent in our culture today – see any discussion of US politics, for example. In our heads, we know it’s not really that way. We think of night and day as opposites, but most of us are aware that there are periods of twilight at the transition between them. But in our hearts, there’s something satisfying about the simplicity of Us and Them – satisfying, but ultimately inaccurate , reductive and destructive.
Another, less well recognized one, is the idea that the middle ground of any argument consists only of the precise middle. It works in mathematics to think this way, but real life is somewhat messier. In fact, the best example of it I can think of comes from that messiest of all parts of real life: human sexuality.
Continue reading 98% Middle »
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