How To Be An Agnostic
God is ‘immortal’ doesn’t mean anything positive about God,
but just that ‘whatever God is, God is not mortal.’ Notice the
‘ whatever’.
A practice of waiting This can be associated with Pyrrho of
Elis, the ancient Greek sceptic, for whom scepticism was not
a descent into a relativistic void, but was a way of maintain-
ing the search – ‘sceptic’ coming from the Greek for enquirer.
He suggested that this can be done by suspending your beliefs
about the big questions, and waiting on what is revealed to you.
Unexpectedly, he also found that the practice brought a pro-
found sense of tranquility too. It’s a bit like one understanding
of mindfulness meditation, about which Pyrrho may well have
known, as the attempt to let new insights in as a result of letting
go of old insights, to which we tend to cling.
A practice of wonder This can be associated with many of the
scientists of the modern world, like Robert Hooke, who could
look down a microscope, at a common fl y, and exclaim, ‘The
burnished and resplendent fl y!’ Coleridge’s thought is helpful
here too: following Aristotle, he noted that philosophy begins
in wonder, a wonder that stems from ignorance, and that it
ends with wonder too, though now the wonder has become
‘the parent of adoration’. It’s the joy of not knowing, the thrill
of sensing the sublimity of nature. On one account, it reveals
the limits of the human capacity to grasp it. On another, it
reveals the amazing possibility that we can get a grip on it at
all. Within both accounts is the sense that wonder expresses
something of the value of nature that is intrinsic to it. The
ancient philosopher Longinus expressed this connection well
when he wrote:
For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the
hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment
always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant.
This is because persuasion is on the whole something we can
control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible
power and force and get the better of every hearer.