WEBVTT - What Is Agnosticism? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:04.320 Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, 0:00:06.240 --> 0:00:09.840 Hey brain Stuff, Lauren fog obamb Here. It's called the 0:00:10.000 --> 0:00:12.720 rise of the nuns, the rapid increase in the number 0:00:12.760 --> 0:00:15.320 of Americans who claim to have no religious beliefs that 0:00:15.360 --> 0:00:18.160 has taken place in the last decade or so. When 0:00:18.239 --> 0:00:21.800 Pew's Religious Landscape study came out in it showed that 0:00:21.840 --> 0:00:24.440 the percentage of atheists in America had doubled from one 0:00:24.480 --> 0:00:29.400 point six in two thousand seven to three point one. Meanwhile, 0:00:29.440 --> 0:00:32.239 the percentage of agnostics had just about doubled from two 0:00:32.280 --> 0:00:36.240 point four to four point Oh but these terms agnostic 0:00:36.280 --> 0:00:41.080 and atheists are often confused. Let's unpack them. People choose 0:00:41.120 --> 0:00:47.159 to identify as religiously agnostic for a variety of personal reasons, philosophical, psychological, theological, 0:00:47.280 --> 0:00:50.840 or even political. But it's not that agnostics are spiritual 0:00:50.880 --> 0:00:53.400 fence sitters, unwilling to state whether they believe in God 0:00:53.479 --> 0:00:56.880 or don't. A true agnosticism, it turns out, has nothing 0:00:56.920 --> 0:01:00.840 to do with belief at all. The term agnosticism was 0:01:00.880 --> 0:01:04.120 first coined by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who lived 0:01:04.120 --> 0:01:06.399 in the mid to late eighteen hundreds. He was a 0:01:06.440 --> 0:01:09.680 fierce defender of Charles Darwin against religious critics who accused 0:01:09.720 --> 0:01:13.080 him of denying God's role in creation. As a scientist, 0:01:13.160 --> 0:01:17.080 Huxley didn't concern himself with beliefs. He sought after facts, 0:01:17.600 --> 0:01:21.040 and the fact of any proposition, for example, that God 0:01:21.040 --> 0:01:23.759 created the vast diversity of nature or that it evolved 0:01:23.760 --> 0:01:27.039 from natural selection, could only be proven by the evidence. 0:01:27.920 --> 0:01:30.920 Huxley stated that agnosticism itself wasn't a creed or a 0:01:30.959 --> 0:01:34.240 set of beliefs, but a principle, namely quote that it 0:01:34.360 --> 0:01:36.199 is wrong for a man to say he is certain 0:01:36.240 --> 0:01:38.920 of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can 0:01:38.920 --> 0:01:44.120 produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. The word itself 0:01:44.160 --> 0:01:47.640 was a combination of the prefix a meaning against or opposite, 0:01:47.880 --> 0:01:51.640 and gnosticism, which comes from a Greek word meaning knowledge. 0:01:52.280 --> 0:01:54.840 Gnosticism was a religious movement that flourished in the first 0:01:54.840 --> 0:01:58.080 and second centuries CE, and held that, among other things, 0:01:58.320 --> 0:02:01.680 the spirit world was good and the material world was evil. 0:02:02.600 --> 0:02:06.240 And although the principle of agnosticism doesn't exclusively apply to 0:02:06.280 --> 0:02:09.120 the question of God's existence, you can be agnostic about 0:02:09.160 --> 0:02:12.440 any proposition. It's been wrapped up in religion since the beginning. 0:02:13.280 --> 0:02:16.720 Huxley wrote a friend in eighteen sixty, I neither affirm 0:02:16.800 --> 0:02:19.680 nor deny the immortality of Man. I see no reason 0:02:19.720 --> 0:02:21.880 for believing it. But on the other hand, I have 0:02:21.960 --> 0:02:24.800 no means of disproving it. Give me such evidence as 0:02:24.840 --> 0:02:27.320 would justify me in believing anything else, and I will 0:02:27.360 --> 0:02:33.360 believe that. So that's agnosticism. But what about atheism. Atheism, 0:02:33.360 --> 0:02:36.360 according to its classical definition, is the lack of belief 0:02:36.400 --> 0:02:39.359 in God. Whether that God is the Biblical Judeo Christian 0:02:39.400 --> 0:02:42.440 God or some other higher power is a separate issue. 0:02:43.040 --> 0:02:46.520 The opposite of atheism is theism, the belief that God exists. 0:02:47.000 --> 0:02:50.840 Atheism and theism are thus both metaphysical claims because they 0:02:50.880 --> 0:02:55.720 as certain answer to a question about the nature of reality. Agnosticism, 0:02:55.760 --> 0:02:58.040 on the other hand, doesn't take a position on whether 0:02:58.080 --> 0:03:00.799 God exists. Instead, it takes a position on whether or 0:03:00.880 --> 0:03:04.239 not we can know if God exists. This is thus 0:03:04.280 --> 0:03:08.880 a physical or epistemological question, epistemology being the study of knowledge. 0:03:09.320 --> 0:03:12.240 Agnosticism claims that we cannot know if God does or 0:03:12.280 --> 0:03:15.079 does not exist because there's no compelling evidence that either 0:03:15.120 --> 0:03:19.560 proposition is true, at least not yet. You might think 0:03:19.560 --> 0:03:21.880 that agnosticism is nothing more than a handy way to 0:03:21.919 --> 0:03:24.480 dodge the question of whether you believe in God. Instead 0:03:24.480 --> 0:03:27.880 of saying yes or no, the agnostic chooses a third position, neither. 0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:32.600 But this is where things can get Harry. We spoke 0:03:32.600 --> 0:03:35.840 with Paul Draper, a professor at Purdue University who specializes 0:03:35.840 --> 0:03:38.880 in the philosophy of religion. He's witnessed his fair share 0:03:38.880 --> 0:03:42.600 of arguments between atheists and agnostics. He said, people get 0:03:42.680 --> 0:03:45.360 so angry about this. The atheists will say, you call 0:03:45.400 --> 0:03:48.720 yourself an agnostic, but you're really an atheist. And you 0:03:48.760 --> 0:03:52.120 can see the atheists point at face value. It seems 0:03:52.160 --> 0:03:54.800 there's a razor thin line between saying I don't see 0:03:54.800 --> 0:03:57.960 any evidence that God exists and I don't believe that 0:03:58.000 --> 0:04:01.120 God exists. But the friends is that you can be 0:04:01.160 --> 0:04:03.840 an agnostic and an atheist, just as you can be 0:04:03.880 --> 0:04:07.720 an agnostic and a believe in Christian or Buddhist or Muslim. 0:04:07.840 --> 0:04:11.480 That's because agnosticism, at its core is separate and unrelated 0:04:11.520 --> 0:04:16.359 to questions of faith. Let's explain, agnostics are nearly always 0:04:16.400 --> 0:04:19.520 lumped together with atheists as a type of nonbeliever. The 0:04:19.600 --> 0:04:23.760 Pew Research Center defined religious nuns as being either atheists, agnostics, 0:04:23.839 --> 0:04:27.960 or not affiliated with any particular religion. But agnosticism isn't 0:04:28.000 --> 0:04:31.400 itself a belief system. One could believe on faith that 0:04:31.400 --> 0:04:34.400 God exists, but still ascribed to the agnostic position that 0:04:34.400 --> 0:04:38.800 God's existence cannot be proven by physical evidence or rational arguments. 0:04:38.800 --> 0:04:41.680 Such a person would be an agnostic theist. There's even 0:04:41.680 --> 0:04:44.400 a school of theology called apophatic theology that claims that 0:04:44.440 --> 0:04:49.440 God is inherently unknowable. Thomas A Queenas, the thirteenth century 0:04:49.440 --> 0:04:53.960 philosopher and theologian, wrote, now we cannot know what God is, 0:04:54.160 --> 0:04:57.080 but only what God is not. We must therefore consider 0:04:57.080 --> 0:04:59.360 the ways in which God does not exist, rather than 0:04:59.360 --> 0:05:04.839 the ways in which does. According to Pew, of religious nuns, 0:05:04.960 --> 0:05:08.039 the group that does include atheists and agnostics do believe 0:05:08.080 --> 0:05:12.560 in a higher power. However, while it's technically true that 0:05:12.600 --> 0:05:14.800 you can be both an agnostic and a faithful believer, 0:05:15.160 --> 0:05:17.920 it's perhaps more common for agnostics to doubt the existence 0:05:17.960 --> 0:05:21.920 of God as such. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician, 0:05:22.120 --> 0:05:24.960 wrote a treatise on agnosticism in which he explained why 0:05:25.000 --> 0:05:29.359 the agnostic and atheist positions often overlap. He said. The 0:05:29.400 --> 0:05:32.640 agnostics suspends judgment, saying that they are not sufficient grounds 0:05:32.680 --> 0:05:36.080 either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, 0:05:36.120 --> 0:05:39.520 an agnostic may hold the existence of God, though not impossible, 0:05:39.839 --> 0:05:43.040 is very improbable. He may even hold it so improbable 0:05:43.080 --> 0:05:46.279 that it's not worth considering in practice. In that case, 0:05:46.400 --> 0:05:49.560 he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude maybe 0:05:49.640 --> 0:05:52.400 that which a careful philosopher would have towards the gods 0:05:52.400 --> 0:05:55.000 of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that 0:05:55.080 --> 0:05:57.039 Zeus and Pside and Inhera and the rest of the 0:05:57.040 --> 0:05:59.400 Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss 0:05:59.400 --> 0:06:02.800 to find conclude of arguments. An agnostic may think the 0:06:02.839 --> 0:06:06.159 Christian God as improbable as the Olympians. In that case, 0:06:06.240 --> 0:06:09.200 he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists. 0:06:10.680 --> 0:06:13.080 As we said at the beginning, the reasons for identifying 0:06:13.080 --> 0:06:16.719 as agnostic are myriad and different for every person. Draper, 0:06:16.720 --> 0:06:19.880 who has participated in high profile debates with Christian philosophers, 0:06:20.120 --> 0:06:25.279 calls himself a local atheist and global agnostic. He explained, 0:06:25.600 --> 0:06:28.440 I'm an atheist about the all powerful, all knowing, all 0:06:28.560 --> 0:06:31.960 good God, I'm agnostic about God in a broader sense. 0:06:32.560 --> 0:06:35.119 Is there some being that qualifies for the title God? 0:06:35.600 --> 0:06:43.240 There could be such a thing. Today's episode was written 0:06:43.240 --> 0:06:45.960 by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:48.039 is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. 0:06:48.360 --> 0:06:50.600 For more on this and lots of other philosophical topics, 0:06:50.680 --> 0:06:53.360 visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And 0:06:53.440 --> 0:06:55.680 for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I 0:06:55.720 --> 0:06:58.440 heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to 0:06:58.440 --> 0:07:08.200 your favorite shows.