How To Be An Agnostic
Rather it is your lack of passion – that complex of personal tem-
perament, history and obstinacy. The charge is that the agnos-
tic, and the atheist, do not allow their hearts to speak to them;
Pascal might agree that it would be nice if reason could decide,
but, given that it cannot, that is no reason to block out one’s
feelings.
We have a clear indicator of what Pascal’s feelings told him.
On the night of 23 November 1654, the feast of St Clement,
he had a vision. ‘From about half past ten in the evening until
about half past midnight. Fire,’ he wrote on a piece of paper,
now known as ‘The Memorial’. He subsequently sewed it into
his clothes. In what followed these fi rst phrases he articulated a
distinction that mirrors the role of reason and feeling in matters
of religion. The distinction is between the God of the ‘philoso-
phers and scholars’ and the ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God
of Jacob’. The implication is that the former divinity does not
live, whereas the latter God does. One can easily imagine that
for Pascal, far from being the beginning and end of religion,
apophaticism is only a prolegomenon to faith. After all, no one
could worship the deity of the philosophers. It is the God loved
by the community of faith that is worth seeking.
Pascal’s implicit accusation is that of deism – the belief that
God can only be known through reason not revelation. Pascal
can be taken as saying that the agnostic may be open to God-
talk but is not open to the ways in which God may actually talk
to us.
The charge is serious. Is it not reasonable to assume that if
there is a God, that God would make himself known to us, one
way or another? Doubly so if God is a God of love. For what is
the point of a God who may have written the rules of nature,
and even given the universe its fi rst nudge as those rules kicked
in, to be subsequently effectively absent. As T.H. Huxley power-
fully observed:
Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be made to
agree with the statements as to matters of faith laid down in