Agnosticism
Ignorance is bliss
What is agnosticism? To simply put, agnosticism (from the Greek a, meaning "without" and gnosis, " knowledge", translating to unknowable) is the philosophical view that the truth behind certain claims, particularly religious claims about the existence of a God or an afterlife, is unknown and cannot be known. The term itself was famously coined by the famous English biologist
Thomas Henry Huxley who claimed to have invented the word "to denote people who, like [himself], confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence." There exists different type of agnostics and among those even more different type of religious agnostics some leaning more into believing than others but they all come down to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, we cannot know.
Since then, they've been far more philosophers aligning themselves with that belief but they were not the first. Earlier philosophers were immediately classified as atheists if they didn't believe in a deity but a lot of them would've been better identified as agnostics. For example, Epicurus who pushed forward the theory of materialism- that the only things that exist are bodies and the space between them- thought that gods
might exist (but that if they did they did not have anything to do with humans). Lucretius is another 'atheist' philosopher that did not deny the existence of gods but felt that humans' ideas of gods combined with their fear of death made us unhappy. Lastly, there was also Protagoras, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, who might just be the first openly agnostic philosopher, that began one of his work "
On the gods" with a bold and provocative
statement: "About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the things preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life."
Modern-day agnostics are far more common amongst them some very famous ones
such as : Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Ingersoll. The latter, known as "The Great Agnostic" was an influential American Politician in the late 19th Century who popularized and justified his agnostic position in his lecture 1896 "Why I am an Agnostic." In the conclusion of the speech he simply sums up the agnostic belief as: "
We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know". A possibly more youth-friendly agnostic is Bill Nye "the science guy" who goes as far as to claim that we are all agnostic; both atheists and believers CAN'T know whether or not there is a giant being running the show or not.
But why be an agnostic? Personally, I believed being an agnostic is simply being honest and humble in our ignorance and accepting it. It also goes beyond theological beliefs. There are people out here obsessed with aliens and focused on researching UFOs and other signs of extraterrestrial life convinced of their existence. There are others who waste time arguing with them about how futile it is because created only us in his image. Conflicts and discussions that could all be avoided if we simply embraced the fact that there is no way for us to know if we are indeed alone or not, at least as of now. Believing firmly in hypothetical claims in absence of proofs can only lead to disappointment and/or disillusions. Ignorance is bliss!
What is agnosticism? To simply put, agnosticism (from the Greek a, meaning "without" and gnosis, " knowledge", translating to unknowable) is the philosophical view that the truth behind certain claims, particularly religious claims about the existence of a God or an afterlife, is unknown and cannot be known. The term itself was famously coined by the famous English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley who claimed to have invented the word "to denote people who, like [himself], confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence." There exists different type of agnostics and among those even more different type of religious agnostics some leaning more into believing than others but they all come down to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, we cannot know.
"there is no way for us to know" -- it may well be true that we have no way of knowing about the existence of god(s), and never will. But strictly speaking, as I've understood the term, agnostics do not claim that such knowledge is in principle forever impossible. To be agnostic is to observe one's own present inability to resolve the question. Likewise, atheists need not commit to the claim that there are no gods. They merely contend to BELIEVE there are none. That was Russell's position, for instance, when he said that for all he knew there might now be a teapot in solar orbit between Earth and Mars. His point was that he had no good reason to believe that there is, and so he was an atheist about teapots. Same line of thinking extends to gods, he thought, and that makes him an atheist. But he's not claiming to know there are no gods. He's very clear on what he does and doesn't believe, however, and that distinguishes him from the agnostic.
ReplyDelete“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”