Gospel & Universe
Preface
Situating Agnosticism
Doubt - Grace - Historical Bearings - A Middle Position
🪐
Doubt
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.
— Byron, Don Juan 9.17 (1823)
In Gospel & Universe I explore agnosticism, which is a philosophy of doubt that lies between theism and atheism.
My exploration doesn’t aim to make theists or atheists reject their belief systems. Rather, it aims to help those who already doubt by illustrating that doubt isn’t some weakness or defect. Instead, it’s a strength that comes from a loose yet powerful, time-honoured tradition.
We see doubt in the oldest great works of literature and philosophy — in the epic of Gilgamesh, in the Rg Veda, in the Ajñana school of Indian philosophy, in the writings of Zhuangzi, and in the skeptics, stoics, and epicureans of Classical Greece and Rome. In the Middle Ages we see versions of doubt in the critical thinking of the Hindu Mimansa school and in the hedonism of Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1131):
~ from Fitzgerald’s 1859 translation of Khayyam’s Rubáiyát ~
Khayyam’s poetry helps us get at the nature of agnosticism, for while agnostics agree that no one knows about the afterlife, they don’t agree that ideas about it are necessarily lies. And while revelations may be “stories,” they aren’t necessarily but or only stories. Agnostics would argue that religious ideas may be true. How are we to know?
I see agnosticism as an attempt to see life for what it is, without rejecting the realities of science or the possibilities of faith. My position is fairly close to that of Marcus Aurelius when he urges us to see reality and not just what we want to see. He also urges us to be open to whatever Mother Nature has in store for us:
Nature gives all and takes all back. To her the man educated into humility says: ‘Give what you will; take back what you will.’ And he says this in no spirit of defiance, but simply as her loyal subject.
The time you have left is short. Live it as if you were on a mountain. Here or there makes no difference, if wherever you live you take the world as your city.
— Meditations 10:14-15, trans. Martin Hammond
Like the Daoists, Aurelius is fairly optimistic about a bigger Plan or Order in the universe, as if Nature were more like a mother and less like the indifferent, mechanical force of the late 19th century Naturalists. Aurelius sees Nature as the expression of the universal mind, just as Daoists see Nature as the instrument through which the transcendent Force of the Dao operates.
Agnostics hope this is the case, yet they remain doubtful. They’re more like Keats, who stands on the peak of Ben Nevis and concludes, “all my eye doth meet / Is mist and crag, not only on this height, / But in the world of thought and mental might!” In “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” Keats laments that he might never obtain fame, but then he realizes that fame isn’t as important as living the moment with the woman he loves, just breathing by her side. Keats’ Romanticism prefigures existentialism here, in that phenomenology — living or being in itself — trumps grand abstract notions. Keats concludes his poem: “then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”
I borrow from Keats in the following poem, which argues that the Grace of religion would be a wonderful thing, yet it isn’t a sure thing:
🪐
Historical Bearings
Doubt pops up in all sorts of ways throughout history, and in literature it pops up in deep and consistent ways. This is natural, since literature tends to mirror human nature. During the English Renaissance, Shakespeare writes that drama shows “virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (Hamlet 3.2). Because literature reflects reality, and because reality is always changing, the writer tends to come up with provisional statements rather than eternal truths. In Ancient Greece, Heraclitus said that we never step into the same river twice. The agnostic in any Age merely has to look up into the stars to see what he doesn’t know. He can imagine it’s heaven, or infinite space, but until humans reach a place ten trillion light years from home, he’ll hold off making claims about the nature of the universe.
While we can see doubt in the distant past and in literature in general, the Western version of agnosticism starts to gain focus in the Renaissance, when humanism and science urge a re-think of the Medieval doctrines of the Church — for instance, in the irreverent novels of Rabelais, or the astronomy of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Galileo completed the heliocentric argument begun earlier by Copernicus, and Bruno hypothesized that outer space went on without end. Bruno even speculated that stars might have life-sustaining planets of their own. Yet Galileo and Bruno didn’t operate in a free world, but in one where dogma was still tyrannizing science: Galileo was forced to recant what was in fact true, and Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.
~ statue of Bruno in Campo de’ Fiori, Rome ~
Doubt also crops up in Montaigne’s simple question What do I know? — Que sais-je? — and in Hamlet’s phrase “perchance to dream,” written in 1600, the year Bruno was burned at the stake:
To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
This simple phrase — “perchance to dream” — subtly yet powerfully puts into doubt the religious claim of the afterlife. Hamlet’s point is that the “sleep of death” may or may not contain dreams. That is, we may or may not have an existence after death.
Shakespeare’s perchance or perhaps gets magnified in the following centuries, making it ever-harder to believe in the literal truth of biblical history and epistemology. Slowly, the foundations of dogmatic certainty get swept away in the wake of humanism, the Enlightenment, and the rise of science and liberal thinking —
in the 17th century astronomy of Galileo, the physics of Newton, and the empiricism of Locke;
in the 18th century Deism of Voltaire and the geology of Hutton;
in the 19th century Romanticism of writers like Byron and Keats, the evolutionary theory of Darwin (On the Origin of Species, 1859), the liberalism of John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859), the agnosticism of Huxley, and the decipherment of cuneiform;
and in the 20th century decoding of DNA, the astronomy of Hubble, and the existentialism of Sartre and Camus.
One of the great facilitators of Western doubt is the free thinking that open societies encourage. In this sense it’s no coincidence that Bruno writes about infinite space, and Galileo about geocentrism, immediately after the Italian Renaissance. Nor is it a coincidence that Huxley defines agnosticism in the two decades after 1859, the year Darwin publishes his radical theory about life on Earth. 1859 is also the year Mill publishes his view on liberalism, a view that has inspired free societies for the last 150 years.
My arguments about the origins of doubt explore Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Indian perspectives, yet they explore most closely Western, English, and Victorian perspectives. This is because mid-19th century England was the historical moment when astronomy, geology, genetics, evolutionary theory, and philology came together to challenge religious doctrine, offering instead a realistic and verifiable way of seeing life on Earth. It was also the time and place Huxley coined the term agnosticism.
🪐
A Middle Position
Agnosticism lies between theism and atheism, yet it also overlaps with both, especially in ecumenicalism and mysticism (on the religious side) and in astronomy, geography, neurology, and history (on the secular side). Agnosticism also overlaps in many ways with comparative religion, comparative philosophy, and comparative literature & culture.
Comparison is crucial, since it’s only among options that there can be choice and doubt. This brings us back to Mill’s On Liberty, which argues against coercion on both the political and personal level. If an individual isn’t allowed to know and to freely explore other ways of thinking, feeling, and believing (or not believing), then agnosticism becomes less possible, in the sense that it has no or little practical relevance.
🪐
Sitting in a middle position, agnostics are well-situated to explore all types of thinking around them. They even look seriously at the doctrine of fundamentalists (who believe that religion trumps science) and at the doctrine of positivists (who believe that science trumps religion). Yet agnostics generally have more in common with stoics & skeptics, mystics & aesthetes, philosophers of science, and globetrotters in the expanses of comparative religion, literature, and culture.
Agnostics also share a great deal with existentialists and phenomenologists. They share the notion that being, or existing as a human being, trumps abstract and theoretical concepts about living. While there’s a close relation between existentialism and phenomenology, there are some differences. Existentialism, as its name suggests, emphasizes our existence in the physical or practical world, as opposed to our essence in the metaphysical or spiritual realm — at least according to Sartre’s definition, which is the one I use. Phenomenology on the other hand, covers the spectrum from religion to atheism in all ages. It focuses on ontology, on being, on what we are, regardless of our philosophic, religious, or anti-religious persuasion. Citing Sokolowski, Wikipedia’s introduction to “Phenomenology” defines it in this way:
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality (more generally) as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.
Citing Dan Zahavi, the introduction also notes:
different branches of phenomenology may be seen as representing different philosophies despite sharing the common foundational approach of phenomenological inquiry; that is, investigating things just as they appear, independent of any particular theoretical framework.
Agnosticism shares this ubiquitous sense of exploration, this trepidation about categories that clarify yet can also constrain. Yet agnosticism puts more emphasis on the notion of doubt. It’s also more specific in its positioning: it straddles the line, fills the gap, and negotiates the differences between theism and atheism.
