How To Be An Agnostic
much which prevents knowledge, the unclarity of the subject
and the shortness of human life.Protagoras veiled the gods with uncertainty. He also raised the
prospect that human knowledge is relative: ‘The measure of all
things is man, for things that are that they are, for things that
are not that they are not.’
Plato seems to have taken a more conservative view of what
we would now call religious beliefs. In the Laws, he writes:
Nowadays some people don’t trust in gods at all, while others
believe they are not concerned about mankind; and there are
others – the worst and most numerous category – who hold
that in return for a miserable sacrifi ce here and a little fl at-
tery there, the gods will help them to steal enormous sums of
money and rescue them from all sorts of heavy penalties.He objects to the wilful derision and self-centred trivialisation
of religious practices because of the arrogance associated with
both. He basically thought that respect for spiritual matters
was good. At worst, it encouraged an attitude conducive to the
virtue of humility. That said, he struggles at many points in his
dialogues with what a proper conception of the gods might be.
‘It is diffi cult to fi nd out the father and creator of the universe,
and to explain him once found to the multitude is an impos-
sibility,’ Timeaus says to Socrates in the dialogue called Timaeus,
continuing: ‘If, then, Socrates, we fi nd ourselves in many points
unable to make our discourse of the generation of the gods
and the universe in every way wholly consistent and exact,
you must not be surprised. Nay, we must be well content if we
can provide an account not less likely than another’s; we must
remember that I who speak, and you who are my audience, are
but men and should be satisfi ed to ask for not more than the
likely story.’
Socrates too is presented as being in between the extremes of
methodological atheism and superstitious belief, though in a