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Systems of Religious and Spiritual
Belief
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The word agnosticism was first publicly
coined in 1869 at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in London by T.H.
Huxley, a British biologist and champion of the Darwinian theory of evolution.
He coined it as a suitable label for his own position. "It came into my
head as suggestively antithetical to the 'Gnostic' of Church history who
professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant." |
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Huxley's statement brings out both the
fact that agnosticism has something to do with not knowing, and that this not
knowing refers particularly to the sphere of religious doctrine. Etymology,
however, and now common usage, do permit less limited uses of the term. The
Soviet leader Lenin, for instance, in his Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism (1908), distinguished the extremes of true Materialism
on the one hand and the bold Idealism of George Berkeley, an 18th-century
Idealist, on the other. He recognized as attempted halfway houses between them
the "agnosticisms" of the Scottish Skeptic David Hume and the great
German critical philosopher Immanuel Kant--agnosticisms that here consisted in
their contentions about the unknowability of the nature, or even the existence,
of "things-in-themselves" (realities beyond appearances). |
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The essence of Huxley's agnosticism--and
his statement, as the inventor of the term, must be peculiarly
authoritative--was not a profession of total ignorance, nor even of total
ignorance within one special but very large sphere; rather, he insisted, it was
"not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous
application of a single principle," viz., to follow reason "as far as
it can take you"; but then, when you have established as much as you can,
frankly and honestly to recognize the limits of your knowledge. It is the same
principle as that later proclaimed in an essay on "The Ethics of
Belief" (1876) by the British mathematician and philosopher of science W.K.
Clifford: "It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe
anything upon insufficient evidence." Applied by Huxley to fundamental
Christian claims, this principle yields characteristically skeptical
conclusions: speaking, for example, of the Apocrypha (ancient scriptural
writings excluded from the biblical canon), he wrote: "One may suspect that
a little more critical discrimination would have enlarged the Apocrypha not
inconsiderably." In the same spirit, Sir Leslie Stephen, 19th-century
literary critic and historian of thought, in An Agnostic's Apology, and Other Essays (1893), reproached those who
pretended to delineate "the nature of God Almighty with an accuracy from
which modest naturalists would shrink in describing the genesis of a black
beetle." |
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Agnosticism in its primary reference is
commonly contrasted with atheism thus: "The Atheist asserts that there is
no God, whereas the Agnostic maintains only that he does not know." This
distinction, however, is in two respects misleading: first, Huxley himself
certainly rejected as outright false--rather than as not known to be true or
false--many widely popular views about God, his providence, and man's posthumous
destiny; and second, if this were the crucial distinction, agnosticism would for
almost all practical purposes be the same as atheism. It was indeed on this
misunderstanding that Huxley and his associates were attacked both by
enthusiastic Christian polemicists and by Friedrich Engels, the co-worker of
Karl Marx, as "shame-faced atheists," a description that is perfectly
applicable to many of those who nowadays adopt the more comfortable label. |
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Agnosticism, moreover, is not the same
as Skepticism, which, in the comprehensive and classical form epitomized by the
ancient Greek Skeptic Sextus Empiricus (2nd and 3rd centuries AD), confidently
challenges not merely religious or metaphysical knowledge but all knowledge
claims that venture beyond immediate experience. Agnosticism is, as Skepticism
surely could not be, compatible with the approach of Positivism, which
emphasizes the achievements and possibilities of natural and social
science--though most agnostics, including Huxley, have nonetheless harboured
reserves about the more authoritarian and eccentric features of the system of
Auguste Comte, the 19th-century founder of Positivism. |
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It is also possible to speak of a
religious agnosticism. But if this expression is not to be contradictory, it has
to be taken to refer to an acceptance of the agnostic principle, combined either
with a conviction that at least some minimum of affirmative doctrine can be
established on adequate grounds, or else with the sort of religion or
religiousness that makes no very substantial or disputatious doctrinal demands.
If these two varieties of agnosticism be admitted, then Huxley's original
agnosticism may be marked off from the latter as (not religious but) secular and
from the former as (not religious but) atheist--construing "atheist"
here as a word as wholly negative and neutral as "atypical" or
"asymmetrical." These, without pejorative insinuations, mean merely
"not typical" or "not symmetrical" (the atheist is thus one
who is simply without a belief in God). |
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Huxley himself allowed for the
possibility of an agnosticism that was in these senses religious--even
Christian--as opposed to atheist. Thus, in another 1889 essay "Agnosticism
and Christianity," he contrasted "scientific theology," with
which "agnosticism has no quarrel," with "Ecclesiasticism, or, as
our neighbours across the Channel call it, Clericalism"; and his complaint
against the latter's proponents was not that they reach substantive conclusions
different from his own but that they maintain "that it is morally wrong not
to believe certain propositions, whatever the results of strict scientific
investigation of the evidence of these propositions." The second
possibility, that of an agnosticism that is religious as opposed to secular, was
realized perhaps most strikingly in the Buddha (Gautama). Typically and
traditionally, the ecclesiastical Christian has insisted that absolute certainty
about some minimum approved list of propositions concerning God and the general
divine scheme of things was wholly necessary to salvation. Equally typically,
according to the tradition, the Buddha sidestepped all such speculative
questions. At best they could only distract attention from the urgent business
of salvation--salvation, of course, in his own very different interpretation. |
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It is convenient to distinguish the
antecedents of secular agnosticism from those of religious agnosticism. |
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The ancestry of modern secular and
atheist agnosticism may be traced back to the Sophists and to Socrates in the
5th century BC; not, of course, the "Socrates" of Plato's Republic--the
would-be founding father of an ideal totalitarian state--but the shadowy
historical Socrates supposedly hailed by the oracle of Apollo's Delphi as the
wisest of men--who knew what, and how much, he did not know. But the most
important and immediate source of such agnostic ideas was surely Hume, while
Hume's successor Kant may well be seen as the prime philosophical inspirer of
religious reactions against them. |
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Huxley, as noted above, demanded that a
thinker recognize and accept the limits of his knowledge. In taking it that
these limits do not include either the findings of a general positive natural
theology or the contents of a particular special divine revelation, Huxley was
accepting a Humean critique. (It is significant that Huxley's study of Hume was
the most sympathetic appraisal to be published in the 19th century.) Hume's
critique is found in his Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding (first published in 1748 under another
title), which attempts, in the manner of Locke and later Kant, to determine the
limits of man's possible knowledge, and in his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). |
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Two sections of the Enquiry refer directly to these limits: "Of a Particular
Providence and of a Future State" and "Of Miracles." In the
first, Hume starts from his basic Empiricist claims: that, generally,
"matters of fact and real existence" cannot be known a priori (prior
to and apart from experience); and that, particularly, one cannot know a priori
that any thing or kind of thing either must be or cannot be the cause of any
other thing or kind of thing. These considerations dispose of all the classical
arguments for the existence of God other than the argument to design--that the
structure and order of the universe and its constituents implies a design and a
designer. But here, Hume urges, argument from experience can find no purchase
because both the supposed effect, the universe as a whole, and the putative
cause, God, are essentially unique and incomparable. Later, in his Dialogues,
he develops the suggestion--which he acknowledges as stemming from the
3rd-century-BC philosopher Strato of Lampsacus, next but one after Aristotle as
head of his Lyceum--that whatever order man discerns should be attributed to the
universe itself and not to any postulated outside cause. |
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In the section "Of Miracles,"
Hume takes his stand on the agnostic principle: "A wise man . . .
proportions his belief to the evidence." He then argues that no attempt to
appeal to the alleged occurrence of miracles--conceived as authoritative
endorsements by a power beyond and greater than nature--can succeed in
establishing the truth of a claim to constitute special divine revelation.
Hume's distinctive contribution here is methodological: the contention that the
principles and presuppositions upon which the critical historian must rely, in
first interpreting the remains of the past as historical evidence and in then
building up from this evidence his account of what actually happened, are such
as to make it impossible for him "to prove a miracle and make it a just
foundation for any such system of religion." |
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In this two-phase attack, Hume
challenged what was in his day, and long remained, the standard framework for
systematic Christian apologetics. Indeed, the contrary contentions--of the
possibilities, both of developing a positive natural theology and of
establishing the authenticity of a supposed revelation by discovering endorsing
miracles--were defined as essential and constitutive dogmas of Roman Catholicism
by decrees of the first Vatican Council of 1869-70. |
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In view of the future history of Western
thought, it must be emphasized that Hume's position, like Kant's, was
(officially) that knowledge in this area is practically impossible. This thesis
is stronger than that of those who simply confess that they just do not know: |
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The God-men say when die go sky |
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Through pearly gates where river flow, |
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The God-men say when die we fly |
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Just like eagle, hawk and crow-- |
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Might be, might be; I don't know. |
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(Aboriginal song from the Northern
Territory, Australia.) |
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Yet Hume's thesis was, on the other
hand, weaker than that of his 20th-century neo-Humean successors, the logical
positivists of the Vienna Circle, who held that any talk about a transcendent
God must be "without literal significance." This view was presented
brilliantly, and in an uncompromisingly drastic form, by A.J. Ayer in his Language,
Truth and Logic (2nd ed., 1946). Similar conclusions were reached less
high-handedly by several contributors to New
Essays in Philosophical Theology (ed. by A. Flew and A. MacIntyre, 1955). |
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Looking backward, it is possible now to
see what Hume himself did not know--that his attack on the possibility of a
positive natural theology had to a considerable extent been anticipated by
14th-century Christian Scholastics: generally, by William of Ockham; and, with
particular reference to the lack of a priori knowledge of causal relations, by
Nicholas of Autrecourt. |
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The claims of Hume and Kant--and,
indeed, those of the logical positivists and their successors--about the
practical, or theoretical, impossibility of such knowledge should also be
compared with the long traditions of "negative theology." Such a
theology maintains that the nature of God passes so far beyond the comprehension
of any creature that God must be characterized largely or entirely by
indirection--as Infinite, as Incomparable, and so on. Thus Thomas Aquinas, the
foremost Scholastic of the 13th century--who contrived on other occasions to
tell his readers as much as his most practical church could wish about the
deeds, plans, and demands of the Ineffable--nevertheless had his agnostic
moments as well. But he did elaborate a doctrine of so-called analogical
predication designed to show how it is possible for finite creatures to say and
to understand something positive about God by means of comparisons with known
entities or qualities. By contrast, the 12th-century philosopher Moses
Maimonides, often dubbed anachronistically "the Jewish Aquinas," had
been much more drastic than his successor, "the Christian Maimonides,"
in his insistence that everything that can be truly said about the Creator--not
excluding the proposition that he exists--has to be construed as purely
negative. |
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Although it is clearly possible to speak
of a religious agnosticism without self-contradiction, the foregoing
considerations suggest the difficulty of intermingling religious and agnostic
concerns. The easiest case is that in which the religion is altogether without
metaphysical content: thus, one of Huxley's biographers reports that the
19th-century Scottish sage Thomas Carlyle "taught him that a deep sense of
religion was compatible with an entire absence of theology." The next
simplest case is that in which worship is combined with a total noncommitment
about the attributes of the object of worship: |
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He is not a male: He is not a female:
He is not a neuter. |
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He is not to be seen: He neither is nor
is not. |
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When He is sought He will take the form
in which |
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He is sought. |
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It is indeed difficult to describe the
name of the Lord. |
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(Poem from the Telugu, inscribed on a
cult |
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object in the Royal Ontario Museum.) |
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In its original setting this expression
of a Hindu piety has power and charm. Yet its intellectual inadequacy becomes
manifest when the doctrine of the Unknowable in the broad synthetic system of
Herbert Spencer, a late-19th-century evolutionary philosopher, is recalled. For
to affirm, as Spencer did, the existence of a being about whom absolutely
nothing else can be said is a rather comical hypostatization (taking of an
abstraction as real), which is surely indiscernible from affirming no being at
all. Nor, perhaps, is it any great improvement to aver that much else can indeed
be said about him, but only in words that here must bear an extraordinary
meaning--unless, of course, those meanings can be specified. It was the
suggestion that the goodness of God might thus be goodness in a quite unusual
sense--what would elsewhere be called badness--that provoked the ire of John
Stuart Mill, a mid-19th-century Empiricist, against certain developments from
Sir William Hamilton's "Philosophy of the Unconditioned." Mill wrote:
"I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that
epithet to my fellow creatures." |
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The third, and surely the most
promising, way in which the reconciliation may be attempted is by essaying some
distinction between the essence or the internal nature of God and his external
relations with the creation. It may then be suggested that, whereas man's
knowledge of the former must be at least exiguous and at worst simply lacking,
he can nevertheless know as much as he needs to know about the latter. As to the
rest, he should be reverently agnostic. |
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What cannot, however, by any means be
squared with agnosticism in Huxley's sense are attempts to transmute the very
limitations of human knowledge into grounds for accepting some wholly
unevidenced faith. Such transmutations have been made in the interests of many
mutually irreconcilable systems, and they apparently remain perennially
attractive to thinkers with a different understanding of the ethics of belief. |
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St. Augustine of Hippo, near the end of
the 5th century, felt the challenge of classical Skepticism in Cicero's Academica
and De natura deorum ("On the Nature of the Gods") and gave
his response in Contra academicos ("Against
the Academics"). Skepticism, he thought, can be overcome only by
revelation. The orthodox Muslim philosopher and mystic al-Ghazali
(late 11th century) deployed Skeptical arguments similarly, as a propaedeutic,
or study preparatory to the acceptance of his rival revelation. With the
rediscovery in the 16th century of the works of Sextus Empiricus, a course of
Skepticism became commonly a preliminary to fideist commitment. Fideism is the
thesis that truth in religion is accessible only to faith. The course persuaded
the inquirer that reason cannot attain truth; yet certainty in true religious
belief was still thought absolutely necessary for salvation. Martin Luther was
speaking for his times (first half of the 16th century) when he thundered
against the extremely cautious and restricted agnosticism of Desiderius Erasmus,
foremost figure of the northern Renaissance: "Spiritus sanctus non est
Skepticus" ("The Holy Spirit is not a Skeptic"). |
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The only resort was, it seemed, faith:
whether the easygoing Roman Catholic faith of the 16th-century Skeptic Michel de
Montaigne; the polemical Counter-Reformation fervour of his contemporary Gentian
Hervet, veteran of the Council of Trent and Latin translator of the Adversus
mathematicos (1569; "Against the Pundits") of Sextus Empiricus;
or, one century later, the vestigial Huguenot loyalty of Pierre Bayle--stocker
of a great arsenal of secular argument, the Dictionnaire
historique et critique (1695-97). |
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The decisive objection to any and every
such rationally unfounded flight into faith was posed by John Locke, the
17th-century British Empiricist, who set a tone of coolly unfervent Anglicanism
for the following century: |
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We may as well doubt of our being, as
we can whether any revelation from God be true. So that faith is a settled and
sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no room for doubt or
hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine revelation, and that we
understand it right: else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of
enthusiasm, and all the error of wrong principles . . . (An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Book IV, ch. xvi, 14). |
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Many thinkers have agreed that it is all
very well to depreciate the potentialities of unaided natural reason and to
insist that if man is to have any knowledge of God this must depend largely or
wholly upon whatever special steps God may have taken to reveal himself; and
they have also agreed that, if man's commitment of faith is not to be arbitrary
and frivolous, then he clearly must have some good reason for believing, first,
that there is a God who has so revealed himself, and, second, that his preferred
candidate--and not one of its innumerable rivals--truly is that revelation. |
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These points are crucial--both for the
appreciation of the history of ideas and for a reasonable contemporary
understanding. Clearly, they were upheld by Aquinas, who in the Summa
contra gentiles--before proceeding to present his own reasons for accepting
Christianity, rather than Islam, as the authentic revelation--applied
that same word frivolous to any such unsupportable commitment. Again, Judah
ha-Levi, an early 12th-century Jewish poet and philosopher, has been
authoritatively described as "concerned to bring men to a mystical and
non-rational appreciation of religious truths" by his Skeptical attacks on
the established Aristotelian natural theology. Yet ha-Levi's main work, entitled
Kuzari: The Book of Proof and Argument in
Defence of the Despised Faith, does in fact offer rational evidences of the
truth of Judaism. |
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Skeptical propaedeutics to faith are now
out of fashion. But the same challenge applies to all of the various responses
to Kant's famous invitation: "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge
in order to make room for faith" (Preface to the Critique of
Pure Reason). Natural theology may, indeed, for Hume's reasons as reinforced
by Kant, be impossible. The way of religious discovery may indeed be mystical
experience, personal encounter with the divine Thou, or whatever else. But there
is, and can be, no substitute for a man's having some sound grounds for
identifying his experience not only as really mystical but also as experience of
the real God; for holding his faith in some putative revelation not only to be
real religious faith but also to be faith in a genuine revelation of the Real;
and so on. |
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Anyone who insists on the foregoing
touchstones may still be agnostic as well as religious. What cannot consist with
agnosticism is a calculated commitment to faith seen as altogether without
evidential warrant. The classic example of such commitment was provided in the
17th century by the Wager Argument of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal,
who assumed, for the sake of the argument, that "reason can decide nothing
here" and then urged that the only sane bet is Roman Catholicism; for we
have nothing but this one short life to lose, and all eternity to win. |
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Pascal's Wager Argument is unsound
because, on its own stated assumption of total and inescapable ignorance, the
gambler is not entitled to limit the betting options to two--and to one
particular two, at that. A similarly parochial inattention to the variety of
candidacies for belief has characterized most fideists. Thus Søren Kierkegaard,
an influential mid-19th-century Danish lay theologian, happily glorified the
essential irrationality of religious faith, while taking it always that faith
will, of course, be Protestant. Elsewhere, Pascal himself did notice, and tried
to meet, some of the competition; his neglect here is the more remarkable
because his wager was originally imported into Christendom from Islam
(see Miguel Palacios, Los precedentes de
Pari de Pascal). What makes it a landmark is that it constituted a direct,
reasoned rejection of the agnostic principle--a rejection in which the reason
proposed for believing was explicitly a motive for self-persuasion rather than
some evidence of truth. Thus, when William James, a pre-World War I American
psychologist and philosopher, in The Will
to Believe, developed the best known systematic attack on that principle it
was, rightly, Pascal whom he hailed as his first inspiration. James
distinguished those hypotheses that, for any individual, represent
psychologically "live options" from those that do not, and he urged
that, when evidential grounds are lacking, the choice may properly be determined
by one's passional nature. For men often have to act on some unproved
hypothesis, and sometimes such firm commitments may help to make the belief come
true. Consider, for example, some belief that a man is trustworthy. The
objections are that belief in the existence of God is clearly not of this case,
and generally that to act decisively on some hypothesis does not require the
agent to believe it as a known truth. (A.G.N.F.) |
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