The agnostic atheist

When Thomas Huxley coined the term "agnostic" in 1869 he did it to make a point.

A member of the "Metaphysical Society", a monthly discussion group of liberal churchmen, deists, Unitarians, positivists and the occasional atheist, Huxley found himself confronted with people who "were quite sure they had attained a certain 'gnosis,' – [who] had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence."

Huxley was "quite sure" that he had not reached any such resolution and, indeed, "had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble." Looking for a term that would free him from such certainties – and from accusations of atheism and materialism that were regularly, if inaccurately, levelled at him – he coined the word agnostic.

Huxley's neologism was not some arbitrary midway point between theism and atheism, as it has subsequently been treated. The "-theism" suffix is deliberately absent.

Instead, it was a deliberate reversal of gnosticism, the religious movement that reached its apogee in the early Christian centuries, which emphasised a special knowledge from and about God. The word, according to Huxley, was "suggestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant."

Somewhat ironically, Christianity was – and remains – rather anti-gnostic. Christ's mission was a public affair, open to all in society, even (especially) the poor, ignorant and marginalised; not some private revelation transmitted directly into the minds of learned mystics.

Accordingly, later New Testament letters appear to criticise early gnostic teaching, the canonical gospels are a world away from the gnostic ones of the second century, and church fathers, such as Tertullian and Irenaeus wrote keenly against the gnostics.

His historical inaccuracy aside, however, Huxley's point remained valid (as the word's rapid adoption testifies). A-gnosticism was originally a stance against certainty, against those who would admit no doubt, who believed their theism or atheism was incontrovertibly true, and that those who disagreed with them were either damned or irredeemable. In this it was not so much a position as an attitude, a stance of intellectual humility in the face of the most important questions of life; an adjective rather than a noun.

Whether it was an adjective that was appropriate to Huxley himself is somewhat questionable. His account of its creation is apologetic and emollient in a way that the man himself rarely was. Darwin's Bulldog was not known for his humility or uncertainty.

And that points us to a difficulty with agnosticism. Attitudes are fine but they need to be about something. Adjectives need nouns. If Huxley was indeed an agnostic, he was an agnostic atheist, tending away from the divine but unwilling (so he claimed) to be too dogmatic about it.

Thus understood, we all need a dash of agnosticism – of appropriate intellectual reserve in the face of the big questions. The dogmatic alternative, familiar to us as "fundamentalism", is neither appealing nor helpful.

But we should not imagine agnosticism is a complete and sufficient metaphysical position. The question is not simply whether you are an agnostic, but what kind of agnostic you are.

by Nick Spencer

reposted from:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/20/atheism-agnosticism-thomas-huxley