How To Be An Agnostic
can achieve in theology because, for the divine to be divine,
it must be beyond comprehension. He is not an agnostic
though. He tends towards fi deism, the belief in God by faith
and faith alone. Cleanthes’ complaint is that this is practi-
cally atheism since it allows nothing to be said about God’s
relationship with the world: ‘How do you mystics,’ he says,
‘who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity,
differ from sceptics or atheists, who assert that the fi rst cause
of all is unknown and unintelligible?’ Perhaps, they are fi deists
without knowing it.
I think our discussion so far provides answers to Cleanthes.
For one thing, the atheist makes an assertion which the agnostic
leaves as a question: the atheist says that God is not only not
known or unintelligible, but is, further, non-existent. A second
reason comes from something that all positions – theist, atheist
and agnostic – can initially agree on, namely, that the world
exists. As mentioned in the previous chapter, there are three
responses to this existence. The atheist says that existence is a
problem that may or may not be explained, but ultimately it is
just a fact. The theist may or may not say that existence can be
explained, but they will say that ultimately it is a gift. The agnos-
tic says that existence is not just a problem, but a mystery, for it
can never be explained away. They may also regard it as a gift.
So, in this way, once again, the agnostic differs from the atheist.
Third, one can point to the different attitude that atheists and
agnostics have to the mystics. For atheists, the apophatic is mostly
gobbledegook. They may concede that some interesting insights
about existential matters have been elicited by those operating on
the margins of thought, but those gains to rationality are made
at the unnecessary cost of an otherwise wilful obscurantism. For
the agnostic, though, the apophatic not only has an integrity of
its own but also is part of the valid search for ultimate things and,
moreover, is an excellent embodiment of the Socratic wisdom of
learned ignorance.
The second charge against the agnostic is more challenging. It
is that they lack the prior commitment to faith in God, and so