The classic idea of the agnostic is of a person who is indecisive and cannot commit to any one belief. Some interpretations (not those made by actual agnostics) are based on the idea that agnostics are forbidden to believe.

That’s an oversimplification. Agnostics are not forbidden to believe – we simply choose not to believe without proof. Now, if your entire belief system is based on belief without proof, I can see where this is a fine distinction that may seem unimportant to you. But the story of St Thomas is an excellent illustration of how important it can be.

Thomas is mentioned only one time each in the Gospels of Luke (3:18), Mark (6:15) and Matthew (10:3) – and in each of them, it is in a listing of the calling of the twelve apostles. Only in the Gospel of John does he get much time on stage.

His first mention is in John 11:16, when he persuades the other apostles to go with Jesus to resurrect Lazarus. Interestingly, it’s Jesus who in this story wants the apostles to witness the miracle so that they will have proof.

Next, in John 14:5, Thomas tells Jesus that despite his assurances to them, the apostles do not know what will happen to anyone after death. Jesus responds with a complex explanation of how the afterlife works, and no more is said on the subject. (In Australian political terms, Thomas fed Jesus a dixer here.)

Finally, in chapter 20, there is the story for which Thomas is best known, when Jesus begins appearing to people after his resurrection, and Thomas keeps missing him. It would qualify as a running gag if it were better told. Thomas refuses to believe that Jesus has come back from the dead – not an unreasonable position, although given that he has already seen Jesus resurrect Lazarus, and the lack of any history showing the apostles playing practical jokes on each other, his doubt is somewhat obdurate. One gets the impression it has less to do with rigid adherence to proof and more with feeling left out.

In any case, Jesus finally appears, and tells Thomas to examine his scars – and how I love that every analysis I can find makes a point of mentioning that it is not clear whether or not Thomas touches the scars, because touching scars is, y’know, icky and all. Thomas does, and is convinced, and Jesus reverses his earlier position on proving resurrections, telling Tom that he should have believed without proof.

So, given all this, why do I think Thomas can be seen as an agnostic? First, he wants to see the miracle for himself when Lazarus is resurrected. Next, he is the only one to point out that no man knows what the afterlife is like. And finally, of course, he demands proof of the resurrection of Jesus. In the first and third cases, it’s made clear that he believes after seeing. In the second, it’s less clear what he believes, but the fact that Jesus successfully predicted his own return to life surely lends credence to his other remarks on the subject.

And despitethe remarks made by Jesus about belief without proof, it’s clear that requiring proof for one’s beliefs is no disqualification for sainthood. St Thomas may not be the most popular of the saints, but there is still no shortage of churches named for him. By implication, the church does have a place for those who adhere to a higher standard of evidential proof – although there’s very few Christian sects who’d come out and say so.

There is, and need be, no contradiction between doubt and belief – they can be seen as the absence and presence of proof, respectively – and as such, I think it’s no great stretch to claim St Thomas the Doubter as a proto-agnostic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Which, you know, is a fine, worthy and appropiately qualified thing to say.  What it’s not, however, is an atheist thing to say.  It’s an agnostic statement – the atheist equivalent of it would be There is no God.  Atheism, after all, is the belief that there is no God.  Not the assertion that there may be no God.

But it appears that Richard Dawkins may be a more corrosive influence than I previously realised, and that his enormously hypocritical willingness to distort facts, statistics and language in the service of his goals (which I’ve already ranted about previously) is becoming a tactic as common to atheists as it is to their fundamentalist opponents.

Being an agnostic among atheists is a little like being in a relationship with someone obsessed with appearances – they really only want you around for show, so that the thing looks better and bigger than it is.  Under no circumstances should you ever open your mouth, let alone do so in order to call them on their bullshit.

So.

Agnostic slogans on the side of busses.  A victory of sorts, but a one tainted by the dishonesty of the victors.   Maybe next time.

(I’d say I was a terrible snob, but that’s not true – I’m really very good at it   )

The key point that I’m leading up to here is that the general atheist statement regarding God:

I do not believe there is a God

seems to me to be functionally equivalent to the statement:

I believe there is no God

Indeed, if I were construct these two sentences in formal logic, there would be a difference only in where the negation was placed, and not at all in the meaning.

Now, this may seem like hair-splitting, but it seems to me that an atheist does believe – they believe in the non-existence of a thing in the absence of conclusive proof in its non-existence.

That’s still a belief, as I see it.  As I’ve said before here, absence of proof does not constitute a disproof.  That’s why an agnostic (or at least, this agnostic) would phrase the statement as I do not know if there is a God.  (One could add  or not at the end, but there’s no need to – it means the same thing either way.)

Atheism often presents itself as a fearless search for truth – Greta Christina, much as I love her writing, often falls into this trap in her writings on the subject (as here, for example) – but it’s not truly fearless or searching if the truth you’re looking for is pre-determined at the outset.

To say that God cannot possibly exist, since we cannot find any proof of his existence using all the instruments of modern science is ludicrous.  Science never stands still – tomorrow’s instrument will detect something that is theory today and was unsuspected yesterday.  If some newly invented instrument did detect God, today’s atheists would find themselves in the position of those who denied the existence of microscopic life before the microscope proved it existed.

Of course, I don’t think it is at all likely that God will suddenly be detected tomorrow – but I cannot rule out the possibility without committing that cardinal sin of science, speculating in advance of the data. If only atheists brought the rigour of their science to their faith…

But I feel it misses the point of its own arguments.

McGrath argues quite convincingly that modern atheism is very much a product of its Enlightenment roots.  He reaches from this to say that now that the project of the Enlightenment either has been achieved or has failed (he does try it both ways), atheism has lost its way and serves no further purpose.

He goes on to propose that there is a cyclical movement from belief to atheism and back to belief again, without stopping to consider what his own choice of metaphor implies, i.e. that the cycle will only continue.  Interestingly, he does note in an offhanded remark that there will be some people who will choose agnosticism as a means of breaking free of this cycle – but the idea that as the cycle continues throughout history, those people will only grow in number (as each iteration of the cycle makes the pointlessness of the whole thing ever more obvious) is also one he cannot reach for.

Ultimately, this is a book that makes some very interesting points about the origins of atheism – points I have yet to see any atheist address, I might add – but which is a little too willing to engage in wishful thinking in drawing its conclusions, or indeed, in thinking that the argument between belief and disbelief will ever be concluded.

There would be no particular sense of orientation to it.  No door at one end, altar at the other.  I suspect that there would be multiple doors and no altars. The floor would all be at the same level, unless there was a conversation pit.

The design would not centre around concepts of shriving minimalism (there’s nothing to abase ourselves for or before), but neither would it be overly decorative (there’s nothing to glorify).  In fact, the colour schemes and such would aim for soft neutrals, and the roof, I think, would be clear glass panels.

There would be seats.  An assortment of them, not necessarily all the same.  They’d all be movable, so that they could be arranged as circumstances and numbers dictated. And they’d all be comfortable, if utilitarian.

There would be no priests, and thus, no need for any of their secretive chambers out the back.  In fact, the only side rooms would be toilets.

Along the walls would be bookshelves filled with thought-provoking stuff – no set syllabus, just whatever someone got a kick out of and wanted to share with others.  The shelves would alternate with desks, and the desks would be well-stocked with pens and paper, and perhaps some computing facilities too.  The whole place, of course, would be a wireless hotspot, and one that was open to the world.

The emphasis of the whole place would be towards polite conversation, although quiet contemplation would also be encouraged.

Well, that’s what I got.  How about you?

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.

True agnosticism requires an open mind. Ideally, one should strive to be as close to impartial and objective as possible in evaluating any claim – and especially those of faith.So when it comes to evaluating various creation stories, well, none of them seem terribly plausible to me. They all involve an uncreated creator of some description, although to be fair, the Big Bang theory suffers from the same flaw. (I once heard it described as “In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.” It’s an over-simplification, but one with a certain charm, I think.)

But there are degrees of plausibility. The Big Bang theory – and cosmology in general – is the best developed theory, and the only that features a continuous narrative or any real account of what predates creation.

The idea that the world was created in any of the creation myths of various religions and cultures on the other hand, usually begins with the assumption that there were always oceans, and something or someone rose up out of them. And it’s here I part company with the atheists.

It’s easy to poke holes in the creation story that appears in Genesis, not least because there are actually two contradictory accounts of the creation in the first three chapters of that book. But I think that’s missing the point.

To me, the real problem is the idea that a world as complex and contradictory as ours was created by a single individual, regardless of their level of power and insight.

To assert instead that the world was created by a squabbling committee of less powerful (although still divine) beings seems far more sensible.

Don’t get me wrong, I regard both explanations as highly improbable, just as I do all other variations on Intelligent Design. But talking generally, polytheistic explanations, on balance, seem just a little less improbable than monotheistic ones.

I mean, if our creators (and other gods) are, as they often seem, largely projections of ourselves writ inordinately large, then surely a highly politicised and endlessly disagreeing committee of partial powers is more likely than the kind of renaissance-man omni-power that the People of the Book believe in?

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.

I mostly read this book to find out what he had to say about agnostics in it. Unsurprisingly, it’s the same old fence-sitting garbage to begin with. I’ve dispensed with that in previous installments, so I won’t go into it here. But then he goes somewhere completely unexpected, claiming that a number of famous agnostics were ‘really’ atheists. He (deliberately, so far as I can tell) confuses agnosticism on different matters, claiming that all varieties of agnosticism are the same.

In fact, Dawkins’ definition of atheist includes at least part of the territory that is usually considered to be that claimed by agnostics. He claims not to have met very many atheists at all who are dogmatically convinced that God definitely does not exist, which strikes me as odd, seeing as this is the common or garden variety atheist as far as I can tell. Instead, anyone who has doubts but chooses to assume that god is not real, is classed as an atheist. Presumably, Dawkins does not use any definition of atheist I could find in a dictionary – although whatever definition he does use is remarkably flexible and rather suspiciously not to be found in his book.

Although he acknowledges the great work of T.H.Huxley, who first formulated modern agnosticism (and incidentally, coined the terms agnostic and agnosticism), he immediately goes on to distort the words of the man. Although Dawkins (correctly) states that Huxley’s definition of agnosticism was as a process, not a state, Dawkins then proceeds to argue as if agnosticism is in fact not a process, but rather, a fixed system of beliefs that requires absolute adherence to its dogma. In Dawkins’ fractured calculus, you’re only an agnostic if you believe that the arguments for and against a proposition are precisely equal. You know, just like you’re only a bisexual if you’ve had precisely the same number of sexual experiences with each sex.

Dawkins gives an example of a fatuous statement which he claims is agnostic in nature – a statement of Augeste Comte’s which had already been proved false when Comte made it (although not to Comte’s knowledge, a point Dawkins conveniently fails to mention). The statement is reproduced, and is clearly not an agnostic statement,since it is in the form “I believe” – not that this matters to Dawkins. Throughout the book, Dawkins argues his case as if atheism is a true and noble search for the truth, as opposed to a pre-emptory and logically ill-founded claim of ‘game over, I win’ – and neglects to mention just exactly how much he’s prepared to distort the truth in his feckless pursuit of victory.

If this is the best that atheists can offer, they’re in serious trouble:

You really don’t want a man who can’t recognise a joke when he’s touched by its noodly appendage as your standard bearer…