Atheism & Agnosticism Defined or, Why Christians are Agnostic, & Atheists Should be Too (With Diagrams!)

Atheism and agnosticism are both terms that are thrown around quite loosely and sometimes even interchangeably. Because of this, discussions between professed members of either group, or between theists and members of either, can be remarkably unfruitful.

One sadly typical battle between theists and atheists is that fought over which position requires more faith. This interaction usually features the atheist deriding the theist for holding beliefs without sufficient evidence and the defensive believer replying that the atheist requires even more faith because an atheist is alleged to be someone who claims to know so much about the universe that they are able to confidently rule out the existence of a God or gods.

First off, this is a bad tack to take because the theist here is granting the premise that faith has something inherent about it to be avoided. Not a good strategy for a believer to take in the long run. Second, and more importantly, hardly any atheists really occupy this rather sophomorically rejected position. (Some of our crop of 'new atheists' might be exceptions, but we'll leave that alone for now.)

To properly define these terms would require a lot of background definitions like, for example, of belief, knowledge, faith and doubt etc. etc. Upon these definitions rest those for the isms for atheists, theists and agnostics. Since I must here skip over that background work I will begin by provisionally defining theism as the holding of a belief in God or many gods who in some meaningful way transcend the created universe, including - essentially here - human ways of knowing. (In most of what follows, though I will discuss theism generally, I am primarily concerned with Christian theism. That Christian beliefs about the God revealed in Christ.)

Based on this definition, I take atheism to mean simply someone who lacks such a belief. So atheism's definition is purely negative, saying only what the atheist does not believe, and nothing about what they actually do believe. In other words, to be precise: an atheist doesn't believe there is no god, they just don't believe there is a god. The difference is subtle but important.

It seems here that the very language we speak expresses the assumtion that most people hold some kind of belief in a god such that the exception is denoted by negation. This fact is also recognized by the rather silly spin campaign of Dawkins, Dennett and others to rename people who share their perspective, 'brights' in a self-conscious imitation of the homosexual community's appropriation of the term gay. (I say the campaign is silly because of how fatuous the term 'bright' is in itself and of how unlikely any change in useage actually is, given the aforementioned preponderance of believers.)

The lines thus far, though sometimes treated sloppily are fairly clear. We can still talk about what counts as a theistic belief - what kind of G/god is needed to be the subject of the belief - but we know ahead of time that an atheist won't believe that that god exists.

Agnosticism, being the new kid on the block, is where things get really muddy.

The term agnosticism didn't even exist until it was coined in the 19th century by the famed bulldog of Darwin and debater of Bishop Wilberforce, T.H. Huxley. By his own description, Huxley intended agnosticism to denote something opposed to the certainty with which others seemed to hold their metaphysical views. In other words, to Huxley, believers and atheists seemed to be claiming to know a lot more than they could reasonably be expected to.

The problem with this opposition is in the implicit assumption that the only knowledge that counts is certain knowledge such that anything that can be doubted is not really knowledge. There is a huge philosophical conversation behind this, but suffice it to say that this is to set the bar for what counts as knowledge incredibly high. (Just to note in passing another thread this could follow, I believe part of the reason knowledge had become almost equivalent with certainty was an essential change in philosophical assumptions in the modern period.)

So in the world as sketched out by the Huxleyan agnostic, there would seem to be basically three options on the table based upon one's answer to two basic questions. (See Fig. 1) For the agnostic one must first decide if knowledge (taken to be certainty) of something like God is possible, then if it is, come to a conclusion about whether there is or is not something actually in existence to be named God. If agnosticism, as Huxley seems to set it up, is a live option, one who answers "no" to the first question is labeled agnostic, one who answers "yes", becomes either an atheist or a theist based on their answer to question number two.

Being skeptical about our ability to answer big questions like the existence of God wasn't invented in the 19th century. What Huxley really did was define a firm position wherein decision is withheld indefinitely on any serious question, the answer to which can be doubted.

Agnosticism is often described as the position that certain questions are undecidable. What I want to question is the degree to which belief one way or the other can just be withheld because one feels like it. So what if you've decided that knowledge of the divine is undecidable! Does that somehow free you from having any opinions leading you one way or the other, just an inkling perhaps? Maybe opinions and inklings don't count as beliefs, but how strong of an inkling would a Huxleyan agnostic have to have to be counted as actually believing or disbelieving that there is a god?

Since I have already discussed why most atheists are actually atheistic-agnostics. I'll now briefly discuss why the Christian variety of theists are really theistic-agnostics. (Again, a similar argument could be made for theists generically but I am less interested in that grouping, and further am less able to characterize the nature of any god other than the Christian God.)

There are basically two reasons why the orthodox Christian position should be recognized as agnostic. Most basically, we could just rest our argument on the simple assertion that for the Christian believer faith is always part of the mix. If faith is involved in one's belief, and the Huxleyan definition of agnosticism as being a lacking in certainty is granted, then clearly the Christian is an agnostic. Christians seek assurance, they cannot attain certainty the way Huxley thought of it. If you try to believe what a Christian believes, then you will inevitably have your doubts. Jesus certainly did.

Another way of putting this is to say that for the Christian, belief in God is also recognized as undecidable. The difference is that the Christian recognizes that a decision must be made on a matter that is at the same time undecidable. Christians, despite all evidence to the contrary, are not primarily about believing in God but in following Christ. Christ called us to follow him and the problem with a callinlg is that one does not first decide that a call should be responded to, one just responds, even if the response is to ignore the call. The disciple called by Jesus cannot wait for all the data to come in before deciding, he either follows or he does not.

This is why faith is a leap not a conclusion. If beliefs were easily decidable, the results would be as obvious as two plus two equals four. Arithmetic sums are not decisions, they are calculations and inevitably reached. For something to even count as a decision in the first place there must be some element of risking making the wrong decision. Anytime a decision is made, faith is there. If faith is there, then doubt is too. Faith, it must be said, is never inevitable.

The second point is just to point out that in simple historical terms the orthodox Church Fathers were those specifically opposed to the varieties of groups who called themselves, or were called by others, gnostics. As before, we should expect that those lacking what one group claims to have could be safely labeled using an alpha privative. Thus the orthodox believers opposed to gnosticism become: agnostics.

Now note, that this is all granting Huxley's characterization of a kind of binary choice between certainty and non-certainty. When I say that Christians are agnostic I only mean on these terms and in no way imply that Christian faith imparts nothing that could be called knowledge. I believe there is much that counts as knowledge that falls short of certainty, including specifically Christian beliefs. The gnostic opponents of orthodoxy weren't just advocating that Christians know things in the everyday way we use the word. Gnostics were those who presented the possibility of a kind of direct, unmediated experience or certain knowledge of God.

(This is as true now as it was then as the temptation to discard faith is constantly with us. Philip Lee wrote a very fascinating book, Against the Protestant Gnostics, that is both entirely engrossing and at times quite chilling. In it he writes about the areas contemporary protestants, especially evangelicals, share many emphases with the gnostics and are in danger of repeating the mistakes of those ancient heretics. This area of the interaction of modern philosophy, Protestantism and gnosticism is just crying out for more attention.)

Because I believe that both Christians and those we would usually call atheists share a sense of agnosticism, I would argue for keeping four options on the table, with a possible fifth for the really faint of heart. In my mapping (see fig. 2), the two questions are the same as before. If one answers "no" to question number one, thinking that certainty is not attainable in these matters, one might try to cling to position number five by not thinking about it at all, but one who is honest with oneself must admit that they either tend to believe there is no god or that there is. They are thus either an atheist, simply lacking belief in a god, or a theist, a believer who has their doubts at times. If one answers "yes" to being able to know about the existence of God with certainty, one is labeled, depending on their answer to question number two, either an incredibly (scarily) confident atheist or just some nutty sort of theist strongly resembling a gnostic. This last option could only be called heresy in a Christian light.

In short, agnosticism is either a position of epistemological false humility when presented as a distinct option or else it is already just a part of the make-up of the majority of your average red-blooded atheists and theists and most certainly what any reflective Christian should recognize themselves as.

I'm afraid that agnosticism as a stand-alone term causes much more confusion than it is worth. My apologies Thomas, you'll always have that debate to be remembered by.