How To Be An Agnostic

Christian Agnosticism

positive sense that God is? Does not someone who makes such
a prayer need to ask ‘to feel thou art’? Kenny writes:

No, the prayer need not assume the truth of that; only its

possibility is needed. An agnostic’s praying to a God whose

existence he doubts is no more unreasonable than the act of

a man adrift in the ocean, or stranded on a mountainside,

who cries for help though he may never be heard, or fi res a

signal which may never be seen. Of course the need for help

need not be the only motive which may drive an agnostic to

prayer: the desire to give thanks for the beauty and wonder

of the world may be another.

It is Kenny’s last comment that saves the via negativa for the
agnostic, that preserves a sense of radically unknowing silence
with integrity. Like thoroughgoing uncertainty which regards
existence as a mystery and therefore maintains the possibility
that it is gift, the possibility that God ‘is’ – and that the whole
experience and quest of the agnostic seems to require that pos-
sibility – is the minimal requirement which keeps the search
via learned ignorance from spinning out of control. God is a
question and a living question. That possibility means that the
agnostic can return to the things that are said about God, and
their negations. It is only if God ceases to be regarded as a pos-
sibility to be treated seriously that the apophatic quest loses its
raison d’être. But then, that is to become an atheist.
This implies something else too: the agnostic is tied in a relation
with the believer. Their search is parasitic on faith – though by
engaging with faith from the outside, the agnostic contributes to it
too, not least by emphasising the apophatic and the risks of ready
assertion. It’s like the relationship between the prophets and the
priests in the Hebrew Bible. The agnostic historian of Christianity,
Diarmaid MacCulloch, catches the mood well when he talks of his
‘candid friendship’ with Christianity. It’s in the agnostic’s inter-
ests that religious traditions thrive, for they live within them too,
if from the outside of faith. Conversely, the atheist may be glad