Gospel & Universe 🧩 Introduction
Types of Agnosticism
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Given the amount of cultural, artistic, historical, and intellectual variety found in religious traditions, and given the depth of 21st century science, it’s not surprising that a philosophy which negotiates between religion and science also has a great deal of variety. The following interviews with David Attenborough, Bill Nye, Neil Tyson, and John Searle give an idea of the range of agnostic thinking — from soft agnosticism, which sees religion in terms of its potential wonder and community, to hard agnosticism, which sees religion as a delusion that’s illogical yet impossible to disprove.
Attenborough, Nye, and Tyson display aspects of soft agnosticism, also referred to as weak, open, or temporary. Attenborough’s reverence for Nature borders on the religious, but he notes that there’s no reliable consensus in the various accounts of religion. Any one religion might be true, but it’s impossible to say which one. As a result, he restricts his reverence to Nature itself. Nye emphasizes the positive aspects of religious community, yet he displays aspects of hard or permanent agnosticism when he asserts that all of us are agnostics by default, because no one really knows whether or not God exists (soft agnostics say that they don’t know, but someone else might). Tyson takes a slightly different tact, arguing that there’s no strict division between science and religion. He notes that 40% of scientists in the US believe in a personal God. His agnosticism encourages critical thinking and avoids reducing people to labels.
Searle’s hard agnosticism (also called strong, closed, or permanent) is nearest to atheism, since it comes only from the inability to disprove God. Searle doesn’t appear to have a poetical or metaphysical sense of religion, or to have any experience of a personal God (he does, however, say that belief might be less impossible if religion didn’t contain Abrahamic notions of literalism and historical accuracy). Searle’s fundamental point about the absence of proof is shared by other agnostics, although soft agnostics tend to see God more as a possible reality than as a non-sensical fantasy.
In this exploration of agnosticism I admit that I don’t know if there’s a God or not, yet I allow for the possibility that some one might know and that the intuitions people have about religion aren’t necessarily delusions. I doubt that anyone knows these things, but who am I to make final judgments? Instead, I focus on an open agnosticism in which the possibilities of religion are taken seriously, rather than being discarded because they don’t fit logically into an empirical or rational worldview. If I were pushed to make a hard decision — which I resist — I’d say that no one knows whether there’s a God or not. Yet I would add that the various attempts to understand God may be like that of cavemen trying to understand sunlight. One caveman may have a strange intuition that it flies in tiny waves, and that the source of these waves, the sun, isn’t in fact travelling across the sky. But the other cavemen vote him down and tell him to stop writing poetry on the cave walls.
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