The Universal Truth Of Agnosticism

Thoughts on belief, knowledge, God, and the importance of words

“Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the “bosh” of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

I was born agnostic, as were you. This is not unusual, in fact it is universally true. As we were learning to crawl and toddle around we made no judgements about whether “God” or any other abstract concept was true. If something caught our eye, we crawled towards it, and that was our entire philosophy of life. We existed purely in the moment. Before long, however, our hungry minds were filled with linguistic terms and intentionally overlaid with the approved thought structures of our society. Words like “good”, “bad”, “happiness”, “danger”, “love”, “truth”, and “religion” began to form the unique scaffolding of our individual realities. It wasn’t until our parents or elders told us that there was such a thing as “god”, or that there wasn’t, that the idea even entered our minds. Unless you were raised by wolves or agnostics (equally unlikely), this was the basic story of your introduction to spirituality.

Although I am now fiercely non-religious, I grew up identifying as a Muslim of mixed ethnicity in the American midwest. Suffice it to say, being misunderstood is something I have considerable experience with. That unusual childhood taught me a lot about how people’s preconceptions and perceptions of certain identifying words can instantaneously shape their entire opinion of everything about you. Certain words are inextricably tied to whole constellations of character judgements that vary from person to person, city to city, country to country.

While the little details may differ, this general impulse to categorize and chop up reality into easily processed “symbols” is true for everyone, as is the need to rapidly form intuitive judgements and then strengthen our belief in them, aka confirmation bias. These impulses help us make snap decisions about complex situations, and bolster our confidence in dealing with a fast-paced and uncertain existence. Let’s face it, we all need some amount of certainty just to set foot outside our front door. Certainty generates courage. Uncertainty generates fear. Agnosticism is an embrace of profound uncertainty, and so it requires profound courage. That’s why the concept of agnosticism is so horribly offensive to so many people, because it is terrifying to be uncertain.

So why does agnosticism resonate with me so strongly?

To answer that, let’s detour into a quick thought experiment: Lets say you walk into your local bookstore and see the newest best seller. You decide to read the first page and see if it hooks you. Now let’s imagine that on that very first page the main character is described as Jewish, or gay, or black, or Arab, or Republican, or Atheist, rich or poor, etc. If your powers of perception are intact then you will immediately have a vague sense of certain things that are likely to be true about the character. You might even have strong intuitions about what the story will be about, based on just one or two identifiers. If the intuitions you formed don’t please you, then that the book will end up right back on the shelf. I sympathize with that imaginary book.

See, when I was younger, forging friendships was truly everything. My family moved across the country several times when I was a child, and I had to start from scratch every time. I noticed that when new people heard I was Muslim before getting to know me, well lets just say they put me right back on the metaphorical bookshelf. I quickly learned to save that reveal for a much later chapter. Identifying with that word in the midwest was especially fraught, basically social suicide. All because the myriad falsehoods in their definition of a word influenced their definition of me. That chapter of my life helped me realize the power of words, and how the words I applied to things shaped other’s beliefs, and even shaped my own beliefs.

It’s a powerful truth to learn young: Any word you apply to a thing fires up assumptions, which triggers confirmation bias, and then it's off to the races in your own personal reality tunnel. Every word in the English language can be a slippery slope.

In realizing the power and perils of words, I became committed to using them cautiously, especially when it came to my own search for truth. There can be no truth without properly defined words to describe it.

So now that my reverence for words has been established, what about that “G” word?

Well, obviously we first have to define what is meant by the term “God”. How do you define it? Unfortunately there is no universal definition, and the commonly used definitions are all intentionally vague. If you mean the bearded white guy in the clouds type, then no, I don’t believe. If you mean any sort of creator who would be so short-sighted as to write confusing books thousands of years ago, distribute them to various tribal peoples, and then expect them to deeply resonate with people in all cultures across vast expanses of time, then, again, no way. I don’t believe in the God of classical religions, plain and simple, but could that term be getting at something else, something deeper? I think it could, and should, and does.

When I think of the term “God”, I think of something abstract and mysterious and beautiful. Something that I would like to believe is true, even though I have no clue what it is. To me it represents the deepest mysteries of the universe. It hints at the interconnectedness of all things. It reminds me of the endless marvels of consciousness and how it seems to interact with reality at every level. It reminds of the absolutely incredible fact that the universe even exists in the first place, and that every question science answers about it leads to a Pandora’s box of new questions. It calls to my attention that there often seems to be a sort of intelligence and intentionality that is mysteriously woven into the fabric of how things work. Astrophysicists have acknowledged that the universe might well be infinite, and if it is infinite, than infinite things are possible, and maybe some form of God is among the infinite list of things that exist. There are as many things pointing towards the possibility of a universal intelligence as there are that clearly point away from it. Those ideas are my deities and holy spirits. My God is all the mysterious eternal truths and questions of the multiverse rolled into one. It is the sum total of everything that exists, and doesn’t exist (whatever existence turns out to be). My God is the answer to all the questions we have yet to ask. My God is a concept that deserves a name that hasn’t been invented yet for a concept that hasn’t been imagined or discovered yet.

It should go without saying, perhaps paradoxically, that I am not a Theist, because that word implies a belief in a god or gods in some traditional sense. I simply don’t believe that… I can’t. It’s just silly. But to repeat myself, there just isn’t an official definition of what God is or could be that I could latch on to, even though I’d love to. Thus it would be dishonest to say I believe in it. I want to believe in an infinite being that has big plans for me, but I see no rational reason to bank on that being true. It seems like a waste of time and resources to dwell on the concept of God, let alone argue or go to war over it.

So why don’t I identify as an Atheist? Being an “atheist”, in the broadest sense, simply means I lack belief in the existence of a god or gods of any sort. Technically speaking, this term CAN actually mean that I don’t necessarily disbelieve either, just like Agnosticism does, but that isn’t how the term is generally used or understood by the vast majority of people, and that is crucially important. As an identifying term, how it is understood is everything. Trust me on that, if nothing else. When people use the term Atheist, they are usually saying that they are convinced that there could not possibly be a god, or anything even remotely similar, and that nothing supernatural, “above nature”, could conceivably exist. I can not honestly say that I am convinced of that, because, once again, no two people define God or the supernatural in the same way. Some definitions I am lukewarm towards, and most just make me chuckle, but others describe God in similar terms to what I’ve described, and those unconventional definitions resonate. While I certainly don’t believe a god of the Old Testament variety could exist, I do believe it’s possible that a deeper, vaster, more nebulous form of all encompassing intelligence might.

So there it is, to identify as either a theist or an atheist feels like grasping onto stale, pre-packaged, mass-produced thought structures that are cobbled together with poorly defined terms and silly assumptions. It is picking a side in an imaginary and unnecessary conflict that the opposing sides don’t even know how to describe. Someday, if our knowledge of the Universe improves such that we can prove that there is intelligence of some sort that underlies the fabric of the universe, then I would probably consider that the discovery of “God”, but I don’t think we are anywhere close to being able to do so definitively.

Ultimately, I embrace agnosticism because I embrace the ultimate truth of uncertainty. I think it is the highest of virtues for people to have the humility to acknowledge that there are things we simply do not know, and to refrain from forming false beliefs or making false statements about such things. This is the basis of agnosticism. It is a position of courageous humility. It is the only frame of mind with which to approach not only science and religion, but life itself, with any true sincerity. I am agnostic because I am unafraid to admit there are things that it is simply impossible for me to be certain of, and the existence of “God”, whatever that word means, is one of them.