How To Be An Agnostic
Indeed, there are times in life, notably at momentous
moments – such as birth and death – when religious stories and
traditions hold the excess of feeling that comes to us then better
than anything else. ‘We are haunted, we need somewhere to put
certain bits of our humanity and there’s nowhere else except reli-
gious language and imagery,’ Rowan Williams, Archbishop of
Canterbury, has noted. ‘The piles of fl owers that you see on the
site of road accidents are the most potent symbols of a society
haunted by religion and not clear on what to do about it. The
church is still a place where people have got the emotions that
won’t go anywhere else.’ I can’t help but agree.
Stories and the like that speak from the messiness of life are
of immense value, therefore. They move beyond the reductive,
Faustian accounts of what we are because they can address the
complete range of ourselves as persons; they help shape us as
moral beings. Moreover, the best stories represent an ethics that,
in a sense, transcends us: we don’t understand ourselves fully,
for all the advances in knowledge we make. As Socrates put it,
we are the in-between creature. Aristotle expressed it like this in
the Nicomachean Ethics:
We must not heed those who advise us to think as human
beings since we are human and to think mortal things since
we are mortal, but we must be like immortals insofar as pos-
sible and do everything toward living in accordance with the
best thing in us.If we are not to restrict what we might become, by imagining
ourselves as information-processing machines or grape- preferring
monkeys, we need a way of shaping how we live that remains
open to that excess.
Diminishing humanity
Agnostics may, at this point, be feeling nervous. They may go
along with the argument that science provides an inadequate