Following Socratesbecause he thought it threw human beings onto a consciousness
of what lies beneath and above them. When discussing whether
things are good because a god says so, or whether the god says
they are good because they are good in themselves, the direction
the inquiry takes him is not to question whether the gods are
necessary to morality but to show how little humans understand
about moral good – and how important the good is, no less.
Socrates was a sceptic of the humble sort. He accepted that just
because he could not understand something, did not mean there
was not wisdom to be had in ancient traditions, and religious
traditions in particular. At their best they, like him, were engaged
in the big questions of life. After all, it was an oracle, an utterer
of mysteries, that kick-started his philosophical life. Socrates’
religiousness also comes across as an expression of the way his
philosophy engaged him heart and mind. His ration al brilliance
was accompanied by an inner daemon that conveyed inarticu-
late mysteries to him. He was called a philosopher because of
his great love, not because of any wisdom he possessed. He was
religious because it was wonder that drove him, and led him to
toy at the most profound levels of his being with the religious
injunction, ‘Know thyself!’
With Socrates, we saw how the religious milieu of ancient
Athens provided him with an immediate context to develop the
agnostic spirit. The question is whether the spiritual and scien-
tifi c milieu that we fi nd ourselves in today can provide some
similar basis from which to develop a contemporary equivalent.
I hope so. With science, an agnostic will be led to an attitude
of appreciative and critical wonderment – the sense that, at the
limits of a scientifi c understanding, the human imagination is
thrown onto other ways of seeking meaning, value and knowl-
edge. And with religion there is a fi nal piece to say now.
John Caputo has written a short book which is very helpful in
this respect, called On Religion. In it he argues that, on the one
hand, many people who might think of themselves as religious
because they go to church are, in fact, not religious, because what
they seek from church is certainty. Then, on the other hand,