Roots of Agnosticism

Knowing God in Times of Ignorance

By John Taylor; 2008 Jan 07, 08 Sharaf, 164 BE;

The question of atheism, agnosticism and the proofs of Deity is a huge topic. This is the first time for a while that I have tried to do something like full justice to what I am researching; I normally avoid this because every time I am soon buried under a mountain of data, and, as now, if I try to say anything my literary mouth emits only a silent scream.

My daughter (13 years old) has aspirations to write a novel herself, and spends most evenings writing. She can whip off a comic book in less time than it takes me to churn out a paragraph of ordinary text. Lately she has come to see my own unpublished status as a bad precedent, an implicit threat to her own hopes for success as a scrivener. What a bad example I am! On Saturday night she was in tears, biting and kicking me and running off to hide in the bathroom, utterly furious that I never even tried hard to publish a book. The next morning she took the initiative of doing it for me, all by herself; she logged on the Net, went onto the Badi' Blog and collected several essays, then put them into a large document which she called, "John's Big Book of Philosophy and Religion."

 "Send that to a publisher," she admonished.

 Ruefully, I tried to assuage the frustration and console her with the thought that I am trying, I am researching atheism and the proofs of God, that God may confirm my efforts some day, that these things are the will of God, and so on. After a time I persuaded her to go back to her own novel, and I returned to another dry morning, producing nothing. At the end my service was crowned with another migraine attack, the worst in months. Undoubtedly, she was feeling the same weather trigger that a few hours afterwards set my brain ablaze.

 This morning I set out to write about the terminology of the proofs of Deity, but I got no further than the latest term to enter the lexicon, agnosticism. It seems extraordinary that men and women could talk about God for thousands of years, yet never feel the need to coin a word for this concept. Not that the meaning without the word occurred to nobody. The sophist philosopher Protagoras (481-411 BCE) is said to have written a book called Peritheon (On the Gods), which started off saying:

 "As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life."

 Protagoras's Peritheon was burned and he was banished from Athens, perhaps the first recorded instance of persecution by believers of an agnostic, though of course since the word did not exist he was accused not of agnosticism but atheism. Most of Peritheon was lost, but his philosophy was treated with great respect by Plato in his dialog named for Protagoras. Protagoras's was a complete epistemological agnosticism. He said, "Man is the measure of all things; or what is, that it is; of what it is not, that it is not." That is, the world is our perceptions of it, there is nothing beyond the cognition of an individual's mind. His principle,

 "makes it equally impossible to deny as to confirm the existence of the gods outside the impression or conviction of the individual." <http://www.stenudd.com/myth/greek/protagoras.htm>

 Through the centuries after Protagoras many other skeptics were agnostics in all but name, including Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire and David Hume. Without exception they held that we cannot know God, and that was thought of by their enemies as tantamount to atheism. Nor, for all their eloquence did these eminent thinkers see a need for a word to describe their beliefs or distinguish them from theism. Both sides thought: You either believe or you do not. However much their enemies accused them of being deniers, these agnostics evidently considered their beliefs about God to be as valid as anybody's.

 Who was right? Were they atheists because they denied that an almighty God has the power to reach into the world or touch our lives? It might be wise for us all to be agnostic not about God but about what other people believe about Him, or what they are capable of articulating about what they believe. I am reading a book about the relationship between Hume and Rousseau called "Rousseau's Dog," and there is no doubt that Rousseau believed that God exists. In fact he was looked down upon by the atheistic Philosophes for persisting in this belief. Nor is there any doubt that Voltaire accepted that a Supreme Being is out there somewhere, though the existence of evil, brought to a head by the Turin earthquake and tsunami, turned him into another new term at the time, a deist. Yet consider what the Master said about them,

 "Furthermore, every nation is proud of its great men and heroes even though those great ones may have been atheists or agnostics. ... They say, `Voltaire was ours,' although Voltaire was an atheist. `Rousseau was a great man of this nation,' and yet Rousseau was irreligious. France is proud of these great men." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 414)

 Presumably the Master could have called Voltaire a deist, and Rousseau an impious, lapsed believer in God, but He did not. Draw your own conclusions, but I am inclined to think that He is implying that you either believe in God or you do not. A deist, from the point of view of religion, is tantamount to atheism. After all, what kind of might does an Almighty have who is incapable of moving the world, or our hearts, or changing lives?

 Still, He does use here the word "agnostic," and at the time it had only been in use for a little over twenty years. In fact the fellow who coined it, Thomas Henry Huxley, said that he first got the idea in the Spring of 1869, right after most of the letters from Baha'u'llah to the kings had been sent out. The theory of evolution was spanking new, and Huxley had just begun getting the reputation that gave him the nickname, "Darwin's Bulldog." The word first entered print, according to an article called "The Origin of the Word Agnostic," (Bill Young, at: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/reason/agnosticism/agnostic.html), in 1870, in a Spectator article called, "Pope Huxley,"

 "In theory he [Huxley] is a great and even severe Agnostic -- who goes about exhorting all men to know how little they know, on pain of loss of intellectual sincerity if they once consciously confound a conjecture with a certainty ... He is ... labouring to preach to us all the gospel of suspense of judgment on all questions, intellectual and moral, on which we have not adequate data for a positive opinion." (Ibid.)

 According to this article it was later, in 1879, in a book called "Hume with Helps to the Study of Berkeley" that Huxley used the word "agnostic" in print for the first time, calling Socrates "the first agnostic." Later on, Bertrand Russell tried to bring Socrates onto the side of atheists as well. Both attempts are utterly preposterous, though it is true that it is easy to say just about anything you want about a thinker like Socrates (and Jesus) who did not write down his ideas for himself. Still, it is significant that Baha'u'llah in the Hikmat went out of His way to bring Socrates onto the monotheist side of the debate.

 Huxley considered the word "agnostic" to be his trademark, but later he admitted that he got the idea from the "unknown God" mentioned in the following speech given by Paul upon his entry into Athens. Could that monument have had anything to do with Protagoras? Unlikely, since he was booted out of there for his  agnosticism. Anyway, let us end it with that for today.

 

 Paul and the unknown God. (Acts 17:21-33, WEB)

 Now all the Athenians and the strangers living there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing. Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said,
 "You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: 'TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.' What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I announce to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, dwells not in temples made with hands, neither is he served by men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things. He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
 'For in him we live, and move, and have our being.'
 As some of your own poets have said,
 'For we are also his offspring.'
 Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold, or silver, or stone, engraved by art and device of man. The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all men everywhere should repent, because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained; whereof he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead."
 Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, "We want to hear you yet again concerning this."
 Thus Paul went out from among them.