Consciencebound

Is Agnosticism Self Refuting?

It is often stated that agnosticism is a self refuting position. There are different varieties of agnostics out there so it does depend on what form you are talking about. There are those who just throw up their hands and say that THEY do not know about God or absolute truth or whatever and so they call themselves an agnostic. They are being honest about the fact that they do not have the cognitive faculties to make a determination or if they do have properly working cognitive faculties, there is just too much information out there that they cannot get a handle on from their finite perspective so they cannot make any kind of definite determination.

Then there are the Agnostics who say that NOBODY can know about God or absolute truth or whatever. The point that is brought up against this position is that they are making a knowledge claim that is in fact absolute and are therefore refuting their own claim. If you cannot know things about God or absolute truth, yet you are making the statement that you cannot know ANYTHING, you are claiming to have knowledge about God, namely, that you cannot know. This is often all that is necessary for most people to simply dismiss the agnostic as being a hopeless wretch who cannot think himself out of a wet paper bag.

As I think about this, it seems that there is more to the agnostic’s claims that is actually true than most people will allow. I think that most thinking agnostics that I have come across myself or have read are a bit of a combination between the two forms that I mentioned above. They have a healthy dose of humility in that they have begun to study or maybe have been studying for all their lives, and they have come to grips with their own finiteness and have seen that the amount of necessary knowledge that CAN be gained in the universe is enormous and they are simply saying that they cannot honestly expect to get a handle on all of that possible and important knowledge. They also might make the claim as an inference that NOBODY can know these things since it seems that we all are plagued by the same smallness of mind in comparison to the amount of data that is “out there”.

I think that there is some grounding for this position and a friend of mind used an analogy that really made sense to me in this context. The analogy goes like this, we CANNOT know how many grains of sand there are on this planet. We certainly COULD know in theory, in that we could devise of a number high enough to be able to count the number of grains of sand. But practically, we do not have, nor does it seem possible to ever have, the ability to both gather and separate ALL of the grains of sand from all parts of the world including all that are in the oceans. We can make an educated guess, but really how educated could it really be? It is simply knowledge that a human just does not have access to. It could maybe even be said that it is a physical impossibility although theoretically possible.

This is the way that I think that agnosticism has merit. There is a lot of things that we can seem to know(a lot of sand that we can count) in that we can test that knowledge every day. We seem to have a level of certainty about mathematical equations and that certainty is taken from the fact that we can make a calculation and then test that calculation over and over and over again. It may be that there will be something in the future that will cause the equation not to be true and we can be open to that possibility, but for now it seems that as far as we can tell, it is true in an absolute sense. The things that it seems that we cannot know though(the sand that we cannot count)is knowledge about possible deities, whether certain moral truths are right in all situation and in all times and places and so forth. We can make educated guesses based on the available data(the countable sand) but how educated can it really be given the size of the universe and the seemingly insignificant position and size of our planet? We are left to speculation, to hope, to dreams but really we are left to what we can actually see, count, test, experience etc. We have to make determinations about religious truth based on the available evidence that is out there. We can take what it seems that we know about the world and test and see whether in fact there does seem to be a God or not.

This issue in relationship to God is compounded even more by the fact that there are so many competing claims to knowledge about God. It seems that the way this would be solved would be for God to communicate directly with us humans and tell us from His infinite wisdom about this universe that is so huge, and about the many things that we cannot get our little minds around. But who’s claims of direct revelation from God do we listen to and believe? Surely one should stand out above the others. There must be one that is able to make a strong case about how we can KNOW that their scriptures or traditions are the true ones. And if there is a God who is all powerful and who loves his creates, you would think that he would see to it that this knowledge of him is communicated in an unequivocal way for all to see and understand. It seems however, that most, if not all, religions have serious problems that come with their revelations which put us right back in the same place that we were before we heard their definite and dogmatic claims. We just don’t know. We can make our guesses, be they educated or not and then we have to just live our lives. How wise is it to be unwaveringly dogmatic on things that require such seemingly unattainable knowledge? And if God does exist and is merciful and gracious as many would have us believe, wouldn’t he want us to be a little more gracious ourselves towards people who are of the opinion that we just cannot know these things?

JL

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