How To Be An Agnostic
with confi dence, lives so as to examine what he feels about
these things.
Are agnostics atheists?
RUSSELL: No. An agnostic suspends judgement ... At the
same time, an agnostic may hold that the existence of God,
though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold
it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice.
SOCRATES: No – but not because it is not worth considering
in practice. I do fi nd many of the things people say about
gods unlikely, but I am very drawn to what you call theol-
ogy no less; at the very least, examining someone’s God-talk,
for or against, often exposes the assumptions they make not
about God, but about what it is to be human.
Since you deny ‘God’s law’, what authority do you accept as a
guide to conduct?
RUSSELL: An agnostic does not accept any ‘authority’ in
the sense in which religious people do. He holds that a man
should think out questions of conduct for himself.
SOCRATES: We should certainly try to think out questions of
conduct for ourselves, or perhaps a better way of putting it
is to say we should cultivate those virtues within us that align
us with what is good. But that does not exclude respecting
any higher authority – the resources of what wise people have
discovered before. Sometimes we must accept on authority,
for we cannot decide everything afresh for ourselves.
Does an agnostic deny that man has a soul?
RUSSELL: The question has no precise meaning unless we are
given a defi nition of the word ‘soul’. I suppose what is meant
is, roughly, something non-material which persists through-
out a person’s life and even, for those who believe in immor-
tality, throughout all future time. An agnostic is not likely to
believe that a man has a soul.
SOCRATES: I do not understand this objection to the idea of
a soul – though it is no doubt hard to pin down. My pupil
Plato, and his pupil Aristotle, used to argue endlessly about
it. But that only goes to show it’s worth talking about, for