How To Be An Agnostic

Christian Agnosticism

Neither is this religious silence like the inarticulacy of brute
ignorance. The brute ignorant are silent about what they do not
care about, not just about what they do not understand. Their
silence is not humbled and considered, but is arrogant and
thoughtless.
Another sort of silence that this religious silence can be dis-
tinguished from is the vacuum that emerges when mature reli-
gions depart. This is the space highlighted in the comment,
widely attributed to G.K. Chesterton: ‘When men stop believing
in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.’
In other words, there is, perhaps, a brief moment of metaphysi-
cal silence when people stop believing in God. But like nature,
people abhor vacuums, and so struggle to fi ll the emptiness with
something else – superstitions and the like.
It is possible to speak more positively about religious silence
too – using another theological method, this time of analogy.
One example of a silence that has an awesome, religious quality
is the silence associated with wonder. Again, science can elicit
this. I remember the news coverage of a capsule called Stardust
returning to earth. The probe had travelled to a comet and back,
a round trip of nearly three billion miles. At its rendezvous, in
deep space 240 million miles from Earth, Stardust took photo-
graphs and grabbed some of the material from the comet nucleus.
These particles, roughly one-hundredth the size of a printed full
stop, have remained unchanged since the solar system formed
4.6 billion years ago. The whole trip took seven years.
Needless to say the scientists were tearful at the press con-
ference, when announcing the mission’s success. It was a truly
remarkable feat of technology, vision and nerve. And one can
talk about it as a purely human achievement, which it is. But
there is, somehow, more going on too. This probe had ridden a
small but impressive stretch of the vast empty seas of space, and
returned to tell the tale. One could look at the potholed, char-
coal grey casing of the capsule and glimpse indirectly what that
otherwise inconceivable journey might be like. I watched it on
the TV – in silence.