How To Be An Agnostic
quiet sense of wonder. The metaphor of warfare, to characterise
the relationship between science and religion, is at best only par-
tially accurate. It’s as if human beings cannot but help detect more
than meets the eye, which might be called the spiritual – and not
just because to do so serves some obscure, deluded evolutionary
instinct. Rather, the success of science is linked to the modesty of
its ambition. For, by strictly affi rming only what is empirically veri-
fi able, it highlights the fuller panoply of human experience that is
no less real, just beyond its scope. This partly becomes clear when
posing the biggest scientifi c questions: what is consciousness, how
do we perceive things as good or beautiful, whence the laws of
nature, why is there something not nothing? But it also springs
quite naturally from discussions of science itself. It’s present in
Darwin’s famous last sentence from On The Origin of Species:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to
the fi xed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved.If science has affected the terms of debate, it has also given
new impetus to natural theology, or what we’ll explore here
as ‘cosmic religion’. Can it satisfy the yearnings Socrates
identifi ed? Interestingly, other philosophers of his time
thought so. So the loss of confi dence in traditional religious
practices – church-going and the like – does not mean that
homo religiosus has become an endangered species. The evidence
is that many regard themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’,
another facet of the agnostic landscape we’ll critique.
Wisdom’s lovers
In Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus, the eponymous friend of
Socrates asks the founder of Western philosophy a question.