How To Be An Agnostic
forgetfulness about the ultimate unknowability of God, then
that is a price worth paying. So, strange as it may seem, papal
infallibility is as much a product of the scientifi c revolution as
neo-Darwinism. It is surely no coincidence that the doctrine
was formulated in 1870, just 11 years after the publication of
On The Origin of Species.
Other fundamentalisms
My discussion has focused on Christianity, and Western
Christianity at that, refl ecting my own experience. Western
Christianity is, arguably, particularly prone to the infl uence of
science because, although it has a fantastically rich, if increas-
ingly forgotten, mythological heritage, it has always been
the case that what makes someone a Christian is assenting to
creedal statements. In this way, it is unlike the other religions of
the book – Islam and Judaism – within which what one does, as
well as what one believes, counts. For them, orthopraxis – the
correct performance of rituals – has always counted alongside
any orthodoxy in determining faithfulness.
However, the culture of certainty is radically shaping contem-
porary Judaism and Islam too. In Islam, it is Wahhabism that
is the parallel to fundamentalism and that sets the tone. As the
Muslim scholar Reza Aslan says in his book, No God but God: The
Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam, Wahhabism should have
been ‘a spiritually and intellectually insignifi cant movement in
a religion principally founded upon spiritualism and intellectu-
alism’; ‘it is not even considered true orthodoxy by the major-
ity of Sunni Muslims’. Yet its ideological certainty has an appeal
that is seriously compromising what Aslan takes to be Islam’s
historic pluralism.
Islam is and has always been a religion of diversity. The
notion that there was once an original, unadulterated Islam
that was shattered into heretical sects and schisms is a his-
torical fi ction. Both Shi’ism and Sufi sm in all their wonderful