An Agnostic Query. — Why trouble ourselves about matters — such as God’s existence— of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing and can know nothing?” (Aldous Huxley.)
If a man tells me he knows nothing about God, I can believe him, because he is supposed to know the state of his own mind; but if he tells me that nothing can be known about God I wonder at the hardihood of the assertion and feel that I have a right to ask him to prove the proposition. But proving propositions is not a role familiar to agnostics as such.
What is an agnostic?
An agnostic is one of a class of thinkers who disclaim any knowledge of God or of the ultimate nature of things.
Agnostics, generally, profess to know nothing about God; some maintain that there is no convincing evidence of His existence; others go so far as to aver that no such evidence is possible and that God, if there is a God, is forever unknowable.
Agnosticism takes shape in individual minds according to their several habits and dispositions. One form of agnosticism assumes lightly and after little or no reflection that it s impossible to get at a knowledge of God or of man’s final destiny. It is generally one of the fruits of indifferentism, which makes it a matter of small concern whether a man has any religious belief or not, so long as he does nothing to compromise his honor or his reputation. Another agnostic attitude of mind is the result of promiscuous though one-sided reading accompanied, perhaps, by a modicum of reflection — though its real root often lies deeper and must be sought in the moral nature of the reader. But there is a higher kind of agnosticism which wears more of a scientific air. It goes the whole length of asserting that all knowledge is confined to phenomena or appearances.
Observation and experiment, we are told by this class of agnostics, report to us the existence of phenomena which are, or may be, manifestations of realities lying beyond them, but of these realities nothing is known and, according to some agnostics, nothing can be known. Hence God and the human soul and all the essences and principles of things, placed as they are beyond the reach of experience, cannot be objects of human knowledge.
One type of agnosticism, elaborately expounded by Herbert Spenser,[1] does not reject religion, but starves it out of existence. It acknowledges a First Cause of all things and holds that it appeals to the emotional element in man and thus begets religion; but the nature and attributes of the First Cause, it regards as unknown and forever unknowable: the First Cause is to us simply the First Cause and nothing more.
Now it should be plain to anyone who has a grasp of the idea of religion that the First Cause, merely as such, does not appeal to the religious sentiment and cannot inspire religious acts. True, the idea of a First Cause does contain in germ the basis of all genuine religion; for the human reason can deduct from the notion of the First Cause the idea of an infinite and eternal God and of a Creator and Sovereign Lord, to whom praise, thanksgiving, adoration, and service are due — and these are real acts of religion; but the agnostic will not permit us to draw any such deductions; for, according to Herbert Spenser, “the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly in scrutable.’’ Thus, the only pabulum supplied religion is a knowledge of a First Cause as such.
What single act of religion can an agnostic of this type suggest as being rational in one who only knows that there is a First Cause? Wonder and a sense of awe are indeed feelings which may well be awakened by the thought of a First Cause of all things; but is the indulgence of a feeling of wonder or of awe a religious act? As well might we say that an atheist is paying his morning devotions when he stands wondering at the power of Niagara. Will such meager knowledge inspire an act of praise or of thanksgiving? We are not supposed to know whether the First Cause is deserving of praise or of thanks, for the agnostic will not permit us to know anything about Its (or His) attributes — to know, for instance, whether It (or He) is free, bountiful, or merciful. The same is true of adoration and dedication of will. The only act left would be that of exclaiming, ‘‘Oh, First Cause!” or “Ah, First Cause!”
Our purpose just here is not to prove that God is knowable or that He exists; that we have endeavored to do in the article entitled “God’s Existence.” We are only making a little study of the agnostic frame of mind and of the intellectual behavior of agnostics. One of the most notable points in agnostic ways of thinking and speaking is the downright dogmatism of the agnostic. If the attitude of agnosticism were one of simple ignorance or of doubt, or if its followers simply admitted their inability to see the force of the arguments in favor of theism, agnosticism would be less irrational. But for the most part agnostics are nothing if not dogmatic. They assert positively that the Absolute is unknowable; but in doing so they show an attitude of mind which is anything but scientific and one that runs counter to the spirit of inquiry which is the boast of the age. Scientists of our day, whether consistently or not, profess an open-mindedness which makes them accessible to truth, no matter in what quarter it presents itself, and which tends rather to widen than to contract the domain of possible knowledge.
These remarks are particularly applicable to agnostics who devote their energies to the physical sciences. Immersed in science and for the most part narrowed in their empathies by early education, they simply have no patience for examining the claims of any source of knowledge but the one that is familiar to them. The following extract from Huxley’s “Physical Basis of Life” will illustrate this pseudo-scientific frame of mind. Commending Hume’s agnostic achievements, he remarks:
“So, Hume’s strong and subtle intellect takes up a great many problems about which we are naturally curious, and shows that they are essentially questions of lunar polities, in their essence incapable of being answered, and therefore not worth the attention of men who have work to do in the world.…. Why trouble ourselves about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing and can know nothing We live in a world which is of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to make the little comer he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.’’
Huxley was a feverishly busy man during the greater part of his life. His business was chiefly concerned in extending the bounds of physical science. His philosophical reading was one-sided and his survey of the field of philosophic inquiry superficial; so that it ill became him to pronounce so decidedly on what could or could not be known in sciences which he had not mastered.
The physical sciences are not the only legitimate occupants of the field of knowledge. Psychology and natural theology are sciences no less, nay even more, than physics, chemistry, and biology; for the latter sciences, when they have got beyond a certain number of laws which may easily be verified, deal very largely in pure hypotheses. The rational sciences, on the other hand, are concerned with ultimate truths, at which the experimental sciences must stop short. The processes of thought followed are, to say the least, as rational as those of the physical sciences. When the rational psychologist argues from the spiritual operations of man to his possession of a spiritual soul, or when the theologian argues from the order observed in the universe to the existence of a Supreme Intelligence by whom that order was conceived and brought into being, or when the metaphysician argues from the finite and the conditioned to the Infinite and the Unconditioned, he argues as rationally, to say the least, as one who would conclude from the presence of smoke the action of combustion.
And yet the reasonings and conclusions of the rational sciences have been brushed aside by the agnostics and positivists of our day, but in many cases by men who have not hesitated to reason away the human mind itself. Hume, who set the pace for all such destructionists, regarded the mind as only a series of conscious acts. He removed the blackboard from the figures described on it and left the figures standing in the air. When a man has reached that stage of intellectual degeneracy, he may be tempted to deny anything, even his own existence.
Metaphysics and theology have unfortunately fallen into disrepute in an age that boasts so much of its ‘‘positive” knowledge; for both sciences are accused of building airy fabrics of thought on little or no foundation of reality. Well, there may be a species of metaphysics or of theology answering that flattering description, but we challenge the judgment that affixes any such stigma to the writings of the great scholastics. The reasonings of an Aquinas, a Scotus, or a Suarez are not to be rated as puerilities. These names may suggest a remote age and things no less remote from our interest, but the cream of the scholastic philosophy is given in the higher course of studies in every Catholic collage. Had our scientific agnostics been put through the discipline involved in those studies the world would know little of dogmatic agnosticism. As to the theology that deals with revelation, it is based on evidence as positive as any that furnishes the groundwork of the physical sciences. The historical evidences of Christianity have won the assent of countless brilliant minds in every century — the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not excepted. Pasteur towered above all the other scientists of the nineteenth century, and yet he accepted the teachings of Catholic theology.
We believers do not contend that our knowledge of God is perfect. We claim to possess an imperfect yet true knowledge of God. If we cannot comprehend His attributes, we can at least form some conception of them and give them their right names. The Infinite transcends experience and is necessarily wrapped in mystery to the finite mind; but we can know it as a fact, incomprehensible though it is. When we say that God is infinite we mean that He possesses all conceivable perfections — a perfectly rational proposition and one within the range of human thought.
The illogicality of the agnostic mind when it makes a serious attempt at philosophizing is brought into strong relief by the writings of Herbert Spencer. Though an agnostic, he arrives at the conclusion that behind phenomena there is an unknowable Something — the Absolute, the Unlimited, the First Cause. Is it not strange that such a Being is deemed unknowable when we know so much as that about Him? And must we be forbidden to advance a step farther and deduce from those primal attributes other attributes which are logically contained in them?
It borders on the ridiculous to see a philosopher of Herbert Spencer’s reputation shrinking from concluding that the Great First Cause is intelligent, because, forsooth, if we attribute to It intelligence, it must be finite intelligence, as that is the only kind of intelligence of which the mind can form a conception. In dealing with an argument of that description we can clinch the matter by means of a dilemma: The Great First Cause is either intelligent or nonintelligent. Is It non-intelligent? Spencer cannot say Yes, for amidst all his vagaries he has a grasp of the principle that an intelligent piece of work — such as the universe — proves intelligence in the worker. Therefore, in some way the Great First Cause must be intelligent. The intelligence we thus predicate of God need not be a limited intelligence; for we may take the notion of intelligence and negative all limitation and imperfection in it and apply it to God. We cannot bring home to our limited understandings how any being can be infinitely intelligent, nor can we find in our experience anything analogous to it, but our reason points to it as a fact — a mysterious fact, but a fact all the same.
If we now add intelligence to the list of God’s attributes, God is more known than He was before; and if we add, one after another, all the attributes which a sound philosophy has deduced, we shall have built up the science of natural theology, and Herbert Spencer will be left wandering about in the curious labyrinth which he has been at such pains to construct.
We need not shrink from all manner of philosophizing on arriving at the confines of the Absolute; because although we are only scratching on the surface of things, nevertheless, by the aid of the God-given instrument we employ, we are enabled to discover at least a few solid ingots of genuine knowledge.
[1] Herbert Spencer (1820 –1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist.