How To Be An Agnostic

Christian Agnosticism

being able to get on with life in the face of terrible events is quite
as shocking as the mother in Dostoevsky who can forgive the
torturer of her child. As it happened, I was in Thailand during
the spring of 2005, a few months after the tsunami, albeit in a
coastal area that was not as badly damaged by the wave as some.
I did indeed fi nd that silence was the only fi nal response after
asking and hearing about what had happened.
I have been advocating silence. It is silence of a particular
sort, since it only comes after everything has been said about
the problem in hand – be that the question of God, or the
problem of evil. Being thrown into silence in this way is a pro-
foundly agnostic process. It stems from God being taken as a
question, and the requirement to learn and relearn ignorance
of the divine – the great insight of the mystics. Of course,
believers are the chief guardians of this tradition, since they
preserve the writings, liturgies and ways of life that embody
it. Which is again to say that the Christian agnostic needs the
Christian believer: it is, after all, hard to imagine a world of only
Christian agnostics in which prayer would last, let alone fl our-
ish. However, there is also a sense in which the believer needs
the agnostic. The religiously minded but deliberately undecided
agnostic can ensure that the central affi rmation of the faith is
not reifi ed. If, as I have argued, much Christian practice today
cannot stomach this mystery, because it is antithetical to the
desire for an orthodoxy that can supply spiritual certainties and
peak experience, the religiously-minded agnostic has a particu-
lar role to play. Paradoxically, it is their committed uncertainty
that might revivify the fi rst and last commitments of the reli-
gious quest: God is unknown. God comes as a question.

Wagering on God

The truth of this lies behind another argument that is frequently
rehearsed in debates between theists and atheists – namely,
Pascal’s so-called wager. Like the ‘proofs’ of God, it is routinely
misunderstood.