Ideas
Your right not to know
Published 09 April 2007
In an uncertain age, writes Mark Vernon, we need to question our beliefs
Muslim veils, Christian crosses, God delusions, reason's triumph. Here is a plea for a different voice in this cacophony: that of the passionate agnostic. Even if the rising verbal violence between muscular believers and conviction atheists were not evidence enough for its importance, I think it is one that matters.
The idea of agnosticism sounds strange only in a culture with a lust for certainty. Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term. This other "Darwinian bulldog" never lost sight of the fact that science has its limits. His neologism was a rebuke to all those who peddle their opinions as facts in the name of religion or science.
"The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true," opined Oscar Wilde, neatly summing up the more rigorous argument of the philosopher Karl Popper, that any intellectual system which cannot doubt itself is suspect. The more the militants of the mind dominate debate, therefore, the poorer they leave us all.
Socrates might be thought of as the godfather of the agnostic spirit. The key to wisdom, he argued, is not how much you understand, but is appreciating where the limits of your understanding lie: reason does not reveal all things; it questions all things. He spoke out when he saw the democracy of ancient Athens under threat. Perhaps we would gain from the same insight.
Take religion. Its true spirit - "faith seeking understanding", in Saint Anselm's phrase - is being eroded by a lust for religious certainty. Saint Augustine argued that to be human is to be "between beasts and angels". He means that we are not pig-ignorant like the beasts, but we are also far from wise like the angels. Religion for Augustine was about entering this cloud of unknowing - and, conversely, not about fleeing from it in the shallow certainties that belief can deliver.
Science is similarly reduced by a lust for empirical certainty that presents it as the exclusive path of progress. The methods of science are astonishingly successful in certain parts of life, but of limited value in others: science can heal us but not make us whole; it can entertain us but not make us happy.
Then there is the agnostic spirit and our political well-being. A first point was well made by Daniel J Boorstin: "It is not sceptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress." Second, consider the so-called politics of fear. It transforms politics into a question of who can better deliver an illusion of certainty via the exercise of control, as seen in the increasingly macho posturing of home secretaries. What we need is not fear and control, but an ability to understand risks and a capacity to live freely with them. Without a committed and passionate agnosticism, religion will become more extreme, science more utopian, and our politics increasingly driven by fear.
Mark Vernon is the author of "Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life" (Palgrave Macmillan, £18.99). http://www.markvernon.com
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