An Atheist with a Tall Hat

Humanist magazine posted an article called An Atheist with a Tall Hat On: The Forgotten History of Agnosticism. The opening argument is that atheism and agnosticism are the same.

One sometimes gets the impression that religious and nonreligous people alike consider agnosticism a more rational and sophisticated creed than atheism. On the contrary, agnosticism differs from atheism in name only. The distinction between the two is really about class and politics, not substance.

The article continues with some accurate background on agnosticism before it makes a false comparison to atheism.

To maintain his hard-fought respectability, Huxley unveiled the term in 1869 at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society, an eclectic group of leading believers and nonbelievers in Victorian Britain. He argued that Christians and atheists both shared a belief in the certainty of their views and that this certainty was unjustified. For Huxley, rather than claiming special knowledge, to be agnostic was to profess one’s lack of knowledge.

This seems a novel position only if one understands “atheism” to mean a positive defense of God’s nonexistence. But this wasn’t the meaning that many nineteenth-century atheists accepted.

This is where the writer strays when he says agnosticism is only a novel position if atheism is a positive defense of God's nonexistence. Claiming agnosticism says no such thing about atheism. Atheism is and can continue to be a rejection of God's nonexistence as simply not proven. The burden of proof is on the believer making those claims so atheism doesn't serve as a positive defense with or without the existence of agnosticism.

This part of atheism isn't wrong as it relates to specific gods. Atheism is disbelief and makes no real statements regarding a first cause to this universe and our existence. Atheism simply responds to belief with disbelief. The importance of the agnostic word to me is to respond to belief with a statement that we lack knowledge. The question of belief is best refuted with a response about knowledge.

Today, agnosticism continues to hold connotations of sophistication and nuance, in contrast to the supposed crudeness of atheism. Indeed, religious critics of atheism often patronizingly suggest that atheists should really follow the example of their more rational counterparts, the agnostics. Reza Aslan, for example, criticizes the polemical nature of New Atheists, writing smugly that “[t]his is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. …Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Henry Huxley or Herbert Spencer.”

There is a nuance and I think it's really important because atheism argues about belief as if it matters. Belief is entirely unimportant in comparison to knowledge as verifiable truths. I could claim atheism but disbelief in specific gods doesn't matter to me. The limit of human knowledge is the real discussion worth having and worthy of my personal label regarding gods, creation, and a first cause.

Alister McGrath, the Oxford theologian and frequent sparring partner of Richard Dawkins, similarly writes, somewhat disingenuously, about the impossibility of resolving the atheism/theism debate: “The belief that there is no God is just as much a matter of faith as the belief that there is a God. …The jury is out on this one: final adjudication on the God question lies beyond reason and experiment. Maybe T. H. Huxley was right: agnosticism is the only credible option here.”

I generally agree with the sentiment above but reject the "God" part of this. The theologian speaks of God as a specific being which is unproven. That God requires faith and belief to exist. The God of the Bible is seemingly impossible based on a honest intellectual examination of it. The name of God needs to be replaced with a "supernatural first cause" for it to be discussed as a possibility even though such a thing is likely well beyond anything we could ever understand.

Again, this idea that agnosticism is somehow the more rational option has its roots in the respectability politics of Victorian Britain. The definition of “atheism” as a positive denial of God’s existence is a convenient one for religious people because it seems to make the atheist position impossible to prove. But this ignores other definitions, like Bradlaugh’s, that argue the burden of proof does not lie on the atheists at all, but on the theists.

The burden of proof is rightfully on the religions since they're the ones making claims of knowing things they don't. I agree atheism has no burden of proof for rejecting belief claims. However, in that rejection there is a burden to keep swatting down various claims when they try to point to specific physical evidences. Agnosticism shares in that responsibility but the agnostic view already starts from a position of knowledge which implies application of the scientific method instead of arguing about belief and disbelief.

In reviving this forgotten history, it is my hope that those calling themselves agnostics will throw the label off, and all the historical baggage (and tall hats) that come with it.

On the contrary, I would humbly suggest atheists embrace agnosticism. It would hopefully shift the discussion from belief/disbelief to knowledge and the scientific evidence required to back up any truth claims. We have to admit we don't know the true first cause for the universe and existence. It's something well beyond our present understanding and we may never understand it. It's an amazing mystery and the mystery of our existence shouldn't be rejected or dismissed.

The first cause could be some amazing miraculous thing and "it" could have some traits we associate with a singular being possessing something resembling an intellect. It doesn't make sense but it's not proven to be false. We honestly don't know today. The first cause is most likely beyond the limits of our simple intellect to ever understand.

In the end, belief solves nothing. Our knowledge and the pursuit of verifiable truths is the real path to find the origin of existence if there is one. The answer is best found through knowledge. That path is best described as agnosticism instead of the rejection of belief we call atheism. Freethinkers and unbelievers should engage theism to admit their lack of knowledge under agnosticism or defend their claims of knowledge as gnostics instead of letting them rest on belief and faith to support their claims.