How To Be An Agnostic
absolute principle that would underwrite human beliefs, guar-
antee meaning in life, and determine what everyone would do
in the future. Conversely, it is divinity as inviolate moral will,
punishing those who do wrong, and patting on the back those
who do right. In other words, Fearn’s theology says more about
his atheism than it does about the question of God. It is a mirror
opposite of the beliefs of a fundamentalist. Such believers cer-
tainly exist. But they can hardly be taken as the best of the com-
munity of faith, or even typical. Their theology might be sure
but it is trite. It is a reactionary conception of God.
God unknown
So what is it that atheists are missing? What would it be to have
a reasonable conception of the divine? What idea of God might
they have that any decent theology would not deny too?
Thomas Aquinas, the giant of medieval philosophy, provides
the key. For any normal subject of human investigation, he
says, there are two steps to take. First is to identify what the
matter in hand is about, and second is to defi ne its nature and
scope. Hence, biology is about living things and its domain
is the material world of the animal and plant kingdoms. Or,
physics is about the natural world and its domain is the funda-
mental constituents of the universe. However, theology is differ-
ent. It can say what it is about – God. But God is not like other
things in nature and scope. If God could be investigated like
living things or the natural world then God would not be God.
Aquinas wrote, ‘since we cannot know of God what he is, but
[only] what he is not, we cannot inquire into the how of God,
but only into how he is not’. Aquinas is, in this sense, radically
and insistently agnostic about God. ‘It is extremely diffi cult for
readers of Aquinas to take his agnosticism about the nature of
God seriously,’ wrote Herbert McCabe:
If he says ‘Whatever God may be, he cannot be changing’
readers leap to the conclusion that he means that what God