Gospel & Universe 🍏 Starting Points

Horizons

The Magic Apple - On the Fence - Iconoclasts - Fiction & Non-Fiction

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In Gospel & Universe I explore agnosticism, which I see as a wide-ranging philosophy of doubt and as a way of thinking and feeling that’s open to all possibilities.

In its most basic definition, agnosticism lies between theism and atheism, between believing there’s a God and a spiritual realm and believing there’s no God and no spiritual realm. Agnostics respond to both possibilities with the question, How can we possibly know if there’s a spiritual realm of deities, demons, miracles, numinous forces, angels, spirits, omniscience, infinity, and eternity? These things may exist, but who has given us even one iota of proof? Those who say they have experience of the spiritual realm, from the gnostic to the fakir and the sadhu, give us very different accounts.

In making my arguments about agnosticism I don’t aim to change the minds of religious believers, nor to change the minds of skeptical non-believers. Instead, I aim to show doubters that there’s nothing wrong with doubting.

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On this first page, 🍏 Horizons, I’ll propose that agnosticism isn’t just an indecisive sitting on the fence, with religion on one side and science on the other. Rather, it’s an expansive and unpredictable journey. I’ll also outline in brief the types of approaches I’ll take in Gospel & Universe. On the next page, 🍏 A Philosophy of Doubt, I’ll argue that agnosticism has a deep tradition behind it. It’s far more grounded historically, philosophically, and theologically than many might think.

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On the Fence

If we want to see agnosticism through the metaphor of sitting on the fence, I’d suggest that we extend the metaphor to walking on a fence, and from there allow the metaphor to take a number of directions, from walking to spinning, like a dervish, and from walking to doing pirouettes on a balance beam. Agnosticism is a very active thing; it’s less like sitting in one place and more like running along the fence onto other fences, which have any number of things on either side: a stadium, a mosque, a green field, a rose garden, a back alley, or a mountain with goats climbing to the peak. Or it’s like finding yourself between two rock fences, walking up an island to a prehistoric site:

~ the ruins of Dun Aengus lie southwest of Galway, on the western cliff of Inishmore, a green and rocky island battered by the Atlantic Sea ~

As an agnostic, I dislike confining metaphors, especially ones that create false dichotomies, as if the physical world studied in the sciences didn’t give rise to the mind that ponders the religious notions of Heaven, reincarnation, and an infinite God. Agnostics are liable to cry out, “To heck with fences!” or “Don’t fence me in!” They’re liable to leap down from the fence, drive like a maniac on the autostrada or linger in a café. Or they might make a pilgrimage between two rocky fences in Ireland. They might follow the lines of piled rocks that lead to somewhere very specific on Inishmore Island — but also to a nebulous immensity:

I’m especially fond of this picture I took in 2016. If you look very carefully, you’ll see some people sitting on the far right. This is a small group of French tourists, their feet dangling a hundred metres above the crashing waves. And they really were French. I’m not just making this up, so that the photo goes nicely with the following French quotes, on the subject of Pascal’s terrifying void that can only be filled by God, and Camus’ beautiful infinity that lies beyond our grasp:

The agnostic walks between Irish rock fences, and stands on the greater rock that towers above the powerful sea. He then walks down into a wide field where tourists are scattered here and there. Irish, English, French, Canadian, whoever. He looks up into the wide blue sky:

He sees two streaks of white. Airplanes. A different way to travel.

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The agnostic hops back up onto the fence, and continues his journey across city and farm. Looking for hours on both sides, he looks up again and sees that the fence is lost on the horizon. It’s difficult to say what’s on this side and what’s on that.

He looks below him and the wooden divider is gone. He’s in an open field looking at the stars. The wooden line is back again, but this time it’s a pier sticking into the Caribbean. Now a footpath over the Ganges.

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Iconoclasts

In Gospel & Universe I hope to show that agnosticism is neither a stasis of indecision nor a philosophy that lacks historical depth. On the contrary, it has deep roots, strong reasons, and an endless number of applications. Few knew this better than Byron, whose meandering epic Don Juan (1824) champions doubt in many of its form. Upending the structure of the epic, he says he’ll write 12 books (like Homer), yet continues past 16; he says he’ll tell the secrets of the afterlife (like Homer and Dante), yet does no such thing. In Canto 9, stanza 17, he argues that because our understanding of reality is so uncertain, the thing that most closely corresponds to our experience is doubt. In this sense, doubt is more certain than doctrine, proof, or certainty.

There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain
     As any of Mortality's conditions;
So little do we know what we're about in
This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.

Like epicureans — and Byron — agnostics strive to live in the moment, even to relax into it. They want to savour the fluid truth of living naturally, spontaneously, and authentically. They refuse to live in fear of cracking the golden frame of an icon someone nailed to their wall.

Yet agnostics differ from atheists in their iconoclasm — that is, in their breaking of icons. This is because they question both revelation and reason. They’re not afraid to break the doctrines of either, figuring that if these doctrines are truly solid they can’t be broken. In sounding the depths of reason and revelation, they go as deeply as possible into both. They refuse to worry about being called unreasonably emotional or coldly rational. They aim to leave that name-calling behind, and instead follow the moment’s slippery truth, whether they glimpse it in the academy of the scientist, the temple of the priest, or the imagination of the poet.

Agnostics also question their own philosophy. At times, they even accuse themselves of setting up an impossible ideal of infinite exploration, much as theists set up an unchanging and invisible Truth, and atheists set up repeatable verification according to the scientific method.

The agnostic notion that we can simply go on thinking and feeling without deciding on a particular truth may seem impractical to some, undesirable to others. Yet this is what agnostics believe: we can keep stretching our emotional and intellectual horizons, as if we were walking towards the horizon on a planet that grows larger every day.

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Fiction & Non-Fiction

In Gospel & Universe I stray into many overlapping disciplines and fields. For the sake of convenience, one might divide these fields into two types: non-fictional and fictional. To an agnostic, these two types of field are — like science and religion — attempts to get at truth, reality, the nature of things, the puzzle of being, and the gospel of the universe.

First, there are the non-fictional fields of history, geography, natural science, astronomy, philology, politics, and philosophy. For instance, in 🔭 The Sum of All Space and 🔬 Science & Mystery I look at how astronomy and science approach the notions of doubt and infinity. In 🔬 Three Little Words I look at the development of skepticism, focusing on Montaigne’s three little words, which aren’t I love you, but What know I? or Que sais-je? In 🌎 Many Tribes and ♒️ The Currents of Sumer I look at the history of religion, and at how Judaeo-Christianity has borrowed from, and, all too often, belittled other philosophies and cultures, including the Mesopotamian civilizations from which it largely derived.

Second, there are the more abstract, subjective, or fictional fields of theology, culture, music, art, literature, and autobiography. While much of my exploration of agnosticism is focused on non-fiction (history, geography, etc.), seven of the twenty chapters focus on creative writing, literary criticism, and autobiography. For instance, I use my own creative writing on specific pages, such as Parma, Nothing in Damascus, and The Return of Enlil. I also use creative writing in two chapters: in 🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma I imagine a Parisian priest struggling with evolution and cuneiform, torn between the doctrine of the pulpit and the scholarship of the Collège de France; in 🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon I imagine Moses developing a new religion while trying to fight off the competition of merchants from India and Persia.

I use literary criticism in four chapters. In 🦖 At the Wild & Fog I argue that Charles Dickens is a sort of proto-agnostic, and that his novel Bleak House is a powerful reflection of the years immediately prior to Huxley’s coining of the term agnosticism. In 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid: Existential & Then Some I explore the mix of existentialism and mysticism in the lyric “A Lighter Shade of Pale.” In 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt and 💫 Believing in the Mystery I look at how the mysticism of Whitman and Zhuangzi includes doubt, and at how the skepticism of Rushdie includes mysticism.

I also use autobiography on many pages (Family, Man’s Best Friend, The Scoundrels of Theology, etc.) and also throughout the chapter, ⛱ Señor Locke. In this chapter, I borrowing Locke’s empirical theory of the mind to illustrate the relation between belief, doubt, and sense impressions. Drinking coffee in a colourful square in Guanajuato, Mexico, I wonder how unbiased my thinking about religion can ever be, having been abused by a counsellor at a so-called ‘Christian’ camp. I also wonder if I can ever be free from fear, having been robbed at knifepoint in Mexico City and held captive briefly in Istanbul. Have such experiences made me less open to belief, or more willing to try new forms of belief?

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While Gospel & Universe doesn’t have a fixed setting, tone, genre, or style, it does have a constant focus: the many-sided, untameable beast of agnosticism. As I see it, agnosticism is dogged by probabilities & improbabilities, arguments & counter-arguments, ifs & buts, maybes & perhapses, conundrums & coincidences, ambiguities & paradoxes. These are only part of the endless tryst with reality that characterizes agnosticism.

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Next: 🍏 A Philosophy of Doubt

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