How To Be An Agnostic
It’s at this point that Plato’s philosophical way of life comes
close to the spiritual impulse that lies behind religion. To know
Socrates was tantamount to a religious experience, to realise
something in the deepest part of your being that an encounter
with him, the midwife, would reveal as true. It’s illuminating to
note that Socrates is portrayed by Plato as a messenger from God.
But there’s that ‘G’ word again: God. It is the crux issue to
which we must now turn. It’s forced its way back into the quest,
if you buy the recognition that to be serious about the spiri-
tual is ultimately to let go and wait on the transcendent. We
concluded as much in our discussion of cosmic religion: science
of itself isn’t spiritual, since it seeks to understand that which
is within its comprehension, though it may inspire a spiritual
response with the realisation that it can’t understand every-
thing, particularly in relation to the big questions. I’ve argued
now that non-theistic spiritualities seem problematic since, in
the West at least, they trip up over our robust notions of indi-
viduality which, when stoked by an inward self-concerned
turn, doesn’t save us from ourselves but traps us in ourselves.
As Nietzsche put it, after the death of God, Man can’t avoid
trying to make himself into God – the locus of meaning, value,
wellbeing. Only that’s too small for us. It turns spirituality into
self-help or a contemplative withdrawal from the cultural nexus
that makes us, thereby leaving us with a depleted not a fuller
humanity.
So if you’re still with me, we’re now at this point. A spirituality-
inclined agnostic is like being a believer to this extent: we are
individuals who think that God is not a silly question, as the
conviction atheist must have concluded, but rather one that our
experience demands we keep asking. To put it more concisely:
for us, God is not the answer, but the pressing spiritual question.
But can God still be thought of as the question, in a mystery-
dissolving age of science and certainty? It depends on what you
mean by God.