How To Be An Agnostic
said in any decent theology. God-talk is not empty; the silence
is full.
For the same reason, the agnostic stance need not be deist.
There is nothing in agnosticism that relegates God to the
margins of creation – its beginning and, if it has one, its end.
In fact, I suspect that idea is itself mistaken. If the fundamental
mystery in life is existence itself, why there is something rather
than nothing – and one does not share the non-belief of the
atheist, that existence itself is just brute fact – then the quest for
God is potentially provoked every waking moment of the day.
(One could also say an agnostic could not be a deist, for deism
is a positive belief about God.)
Rather agnosticism manifests itself best as an attitude. It is a
way of life driven by the desire for ultimate things. It is a deter-
mination, in the way that philosophy was a love of wisdom
for Socrates. It is a ‘passionate commitment’ to a certain form
of life. What marks it out is a confession of ignorance – a
confession both in the sense of an admittance and in the sense
of a conviction.