How To Be An Agnostic

Christian Agnosticism

Genesis – whether the Gospels are historically true or not –

are matters of comparatively small moment in the face of the

impassable gulf between the anthropomorphisms (however

refi ned) of theology and the passionless impersonality of the

unknown and unknowable which science shows everywhere

underlying the thin veil of phenomenon.

There are several things to say about this. First, the agnostic
spirit I am exploring is not denying that people might feel that
God speaks to them, or that God is revealed through processes
of scripture, incarnation and prayer. Indeed, inasmuch as it is
serious about engaging with religious traditions, it pays atten-
tion to such manifestations. However, the agnostic does so
without the certainties of faith. Probably the most powerful
argument for adhering to this position, which is another version
of Huxley’s ‘impassable gulf’, is that even if God did want to
make himself known, that would have to happen within the
limits of human understanding. So whatever it may be that
would signify that this ‘making known’ was divine, its divinity
would be lost in its reception. Like Hamlet, who cannot decide
whether the ghost is the spirit of his father speaking truth or
the phantom of a demon telling lies, how could one know this
communication was of God and not of the human imagination?
Such is the human predicament.
Where I think Huxley goes too far is in suggesting that this
casts the agnostic adrift. There is another distinction to draw
here. Although the divine is unknown in itself – even to the
extent of its existence – that is not to say that we can know
nothing about divinity, as concept and perhaps as reality.
Whatever God may be, we can say what God is not. Trivially, we
can say that God is not, say, the golden calf that my neighbour
may erect in their back garden to fall down and worship. More
interestingly, we can say that God is not the idea of the divinity
presented by many atheists, or indeed theists. This is the whole
point of the apophatic tradition, the negations and then nega-
tion of negations, that not only can be said of God but must be