Gospel & Universe 🪐 Preface

Paradox

A Logical Trap - Mortality’s Condition - Apostasy - Freedom of Thought

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A Logical Trap

The very notion of the river of constant change presents us with a problem, if that is we want to find a singular meaning — something that agnostics never really expect to find. If the symbol of the river means everything always changes, then the very notion of constant change becomes logically impossible. If everything changes, then so does the notion of constant change.

Yet the logical impossibility here is a trap, shaped by words and concepts. Experience can set us free from this trap, by simply taking a walk and watching the river as it flows by. Walking along the river, we see that time and river are different, just as time and space are different yet inhabit the same time-space continuum. Contradiction and impossibility become paradox. Constant rivers (the channel through which the water flows) and changing rivers (the water flowing through the channel) are different concepts, conjured by using similar mental images and vocabularies.

What operates here on the level of language also operates on the level of meaning. Agnostics argue that we can free ourselves from the philosophical conundrums of ontology (the study of being) and epistemology (the study of meaning) by using phenomenology, which isn’t so much one way of thinking as it is an exploration into different ways of being.

Phenomenology and agnosticism have the potential to free us from fixed positions, be they philosophical schools of thought or the polarity of religion vs science, theism vs. atheism. If we insist on seeing one side of this polarity in terms of the other, we’re bound to find an inextricable conundrum. We then retreat to the one with which we feel most comfortable, and in so doing create the well-known chasm between religion and science, theism and atheism. Yet if we see the two as different aspects of the same larger reality, we can enjoy both, seeing their coexistence as a paradox, not as a contradiction. For instance, both attempt to describe reality, and who says that reality has to be one or the other? It may be both.

Atheists argue that the notion death is inevitable is a constant, yet the notion the soul never changes is moot since there’s no such thing as a soul. Agnostics agree that death is a constant, yet they also argue that the jury’s still out on whether or not the soul exists, and on whether on not the soul (if it exists) is eternal. Therefore the concept of soul isn’t moot at all. It co-inhabits the world of changing things.

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Mortality’s Condition

Agnostics believe that to stop doubting is, from both a scientific and a philosophic point of view, to ignore the fact that certainty doesn’t seem to exist. In Don Juan, Byron asserts that to embrace uncertainty may be to embrace a paradoxical 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. (Canto 9)

Byron puts this in a compact, cagey manner: he questions (using the present tense verb I doubt) the notion that doubt as a philosophy (the noun doubt) is the same as being in doubt (doubting). In other words, doubt in a general sense and as a philosophy is more certain than the act of doubting. Byron wrote this decades before Thomas Huxley coined the term agnosticism, yet he admirably compresses Huxley’s core belief: doubt is more solid (or certain) than the certainty of the theists and atheists. Byron’s triple use of the word doubt is all the more impressive because his universal statement is prefixed by uncertainty, as if to say, I’m not sure, but it seems that my lack of certainty is the most certain thing in the world.

This type of playfulness and ambiguity is helpful in getting at the agnostic paradox of believing in doubt and yet doubting this belief. Byron also mocks philosophers, with their endless tautologies and abstruse convolutions. He makes a serious philosophical point and yet undermines his own exaggerated authority. In my own way, I hope to do this throughout Gospel & Universe.

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Apostasy

The way I see it, agnosticism is perhaps the most paradoxical of belief systems: one can believe in it, yet it undermines fixed patterns of belief at every turn. As a result, agnostics are willing to explore the alternatives, without worrying that they’ll stray in some way from agnosticism. So what if they stray? In fact, straying is the name of the game. If you have a religious revelation, great, stop being agnostic and believe in it. Conversely, if you’re finally convinced that there’s no inkling of a soul or a God, fine, stop being agnostic and become an atheist.

The hard agnostic might say, “Wait! Don’t you see that this revelation is an elaborate illusion? And don’t you see that atheism is just another type of illusion? You can’t know either to be true! Everything changes, so who are you to stop the flow of the river and say exactly what is what?”

Yet open agnostics wouldn’t get too excited about it. Calmly, they’d observe, “Rivers are made of water. Who’s to say if the river will stay just where it is, if we can even say that it’s ever just where it is? Perhaps it’ll flow over its bank and sink into the fields. Perhaps it’ll dry up like a raisin in the sun. Perhaps the river is really the same thing as the water, and perhaps the water is by now fifty feet downstream. Perhaps it’s already lost itself in the sea. Ands perhaps Laozi is right when he says, Water is the highest good. It benefits the myriad creatures yet exacts no gratitude.”

For open agnostics there’s no such thing as a sin of apostasy. If fellow agnostics want to embrace religious belief, or if they want to swear off belief altogether, open agnostics aren’t bothered either way.

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Freedom of Thought

What they are concerned about, however, is that people have the option between belief or disbelief. In this, the open and hard agnostic are on the same page. Here agnosticism connects to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill: the full exercise of philosophic freedom requires a free press, free enquiry, freedom of expression, and the freedom to do what you want as long as your actions don’t harm others. I’ll touch on this political point throughout Gospel & Universe, and deal with it most specifically in my chapters on Locke, Dickens, and Rushdie (⛱Señor Locke 🦖 At the Wild & Fog, and 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt).

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Agnostics believe that something as complex as the relation of theism to atheism shouldn’t be taught as a false dichotomy, where there are only two choices. Agnosticism is neither Evangelical nor New Atheist; it doesn’t urge you to accept or reject religion. Rather, it offers a flexible, powerful, freedom-defined method of exploring belief and disbelief. From my point of view, this exploration may influence us to believe that “There’s no such thing as certainty,” yet I hope it also urges us to consider that there may in fact be such a thing.

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Next: P. O. V. 1: Family

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