Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren fog obamb Here. It's called the
Speaker 1: rise of the nuns, the rapid increase in the number
Speaker 1: of Americans who claim to have no religious beliefs that
Speaker 1: has taken place in the last decade or so. When
Speaker 1: Pew's Religious Landscape study came out in it showed that
Speaker 1: the percentage of atheists in America had doubled from one
Speaker 1: point six in two thousand seven to three point one. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the percentage of agnostics had just about doubled from two
Speaker 1: point four to four point Oh but these terms agnostic
Speaker 1: and atheists are often confused. Let's unpack them. People choose
Speaker 1: to identify as religiously agnostic for a variety of personal reasons, philosophical, psychological, theological,
Speaker 1: or even political. But it's not that agnostics are spiritual
Speaker 1: fence sitters, unwilling to state whether they believe in God
Speaker 1: or don't. A true agnosticism, it turns out, has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with belief at all. The term agnosticism was
Speaker 1: first coined by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who lived
Speaker 1: in the mid to late eighteen hundreds. He was a
Speaker 1: fierce defender of Charles Darwin against religious critics who accused
Speaker 1: him of denying God's role in creation. As a scientist,
Speaker 1: Huxley didn't concern himself with beliefs. He sought after facts,
Speaker 1: and the fact of any proposition, for example, that God
Speaker 1: created the vast diversity of nature or that it evolved
Speaker 1: from natural selection, could only be proven by the evidence.
Speaker 1: Huxley stated that agnosticism itself wasn't a creed or a
Speaker 1: set of beliefs, but a principle, namely quote that it
Speaker 1: is wrong for a man to say he is certain
Speaker 1: of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can
Speaker 1: produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. The word itself
Speaker 1: was a combination of the prefix a meaning against or opposite,
Speaker 1: and gnosticism, which comes from a Greek word meaning knowledge.
Speaker 1: Gnosticism was a religious movement that flourished in the first
Speaker 1: and second centuries CE, and held that, among other things,
Speaker 1: the spirit world was good and the material world was evil.
Speaker 1: And although the principle of agnosticism doesn't exclusively apply to
Speaker 1: the question of God's existence, you can be agnostic about
Speaker 1: any proposition. It's been wrapped up in religion since the beginning.
Speaker 1: Huxley wrote a friend in eighteen sixty, I neither affirm
Speaker 1: nor deny the immortality of Man. I see no reason
Speaker 1: for believing it. But on the other hand, I have
Speaker 1: no means of disproving it. Give me such evidence as
Speaker 1: would justify me in believing anything else, and I will
Speaker 1: believe that. So that's agnosticism. But what about atheism. Atheism,
Speaker 1: according to its classical definition, is the lack of belief
Speaker 1: in God. Whether that God is the Biblical Judeo Christian
Speaker 1: God or some other higher power is a separate issue.
Speaker 1: The opposite of atheism is theism, the belief that God exists.
Speaker 1: Atheism and theism are thus both metaphysical claims because they
Speaker 1: as certain answer to a question about the nature of reality. Agnosticism,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, doesn't take a position on whether
Speaker 1: God exists. Instead, it takes a position on whether or
Speaker 1: not we can know if God exists. This is thus
Speaker 1: a physical or epistemological question, epistemology being the study of knowledge.
Speaker 1: Agnosticism claims that we cannot know if God does or
Speaker 1: does not exist because there's no compelling evidence that either
Speaker 1: proposition is true, at least not yet. You might think
Speaker 1: that agnosticism is nothing more than a handy way to
Speaker 1: dodge the question of whether you believe in God. Instead
Speaker 1: of saying yes or no, the agnostic chooses a third position, neither.
Speaker 1: But this is where things can get Harry. We spoke
Speaker 1: with Paul Draper, a professor at Purdue University who specializes
Speaker 1: in the philosophy of religion. He's witnessed his fair share
Speaker 1: of arguments between atheists and agnostics. He said, people get
Speaker 1: so angry about this. The atheists will say, you call
Speaker 1: yourself an agnostic, but you're really an atheist. And you
Speaker 1: can see the atheists point at face value. It seems
Speaker 1: there's a razor thin line between saying I don't see
Speaker 1: any evidence that God exists and I don't believe that
Speaker 1: God exists. But the friends is that you can be
Speaker 1: an agnostic and an atheist, just as you can be
Speaker 1: an agnostic and a believe in Christian or Buddhist or Muslim.
Speaker 1: That's because agnosticism, at its core is separate and unrelated
Speaker 1: to questions of faith. Let's explain, agnostics are nearly always
Speaker 1: lumped together with atheists as a type of nonbeliever. The
Speaker 1: Pew Research Center defined religious nuns as being either atheists, agnostics,
Speaker 1: or not affiliated with any particular religion. But agnosticism isn't
Speaker 1: itself a belief system. One could believe on faith that
Speaker 1: God exists, but still ascribed to the agnostic position that
Speaker 1: God's existence cannot be proven by physical evidence or rational arguments.
Speaker 1: Such a person would be an agnostic theist. There's even
Speaker 1: a school of theology called apophatic theology that claims that
Speaker 1: God is inherently unknowable. Thomas A Queenas, the thirteenth century
Speaker 1: philosopher and theologian, wrote, now we cannot know what God is,
Speaker 1: but only what God is not. We must therefore consider
Speaker 1: the ways in which God does not exist, rather than
Speaker 1: the ways in which does. According to Pew, of religious nuns,
Speaker 1: the group that does include atheists and agnostics do believe
Speaker 1: in a higher power. However, while it's technically true that
Speaker 1: you can be both an agnostic and a faithful believer,
Speaker 1: it's perhaps more common for agnostics to doubt the existence
Speaker 1: of God as such. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician,
Speaker 1: wrote a treatise on agnosticism in which he explained why
Speaker 1: the agnostic and atheist positions often overlap. He said. The
Speaker 1: agnostics suspends judgment, saying that they are not sufficient grounds
Speaker 1: either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time,
Speaker 1: an agnostic may hold the existence of God, though not impossible,
Speaker 1: is very improbable. He may even hold it so improbable
Speaker 1: that it's not worth considering in practice. In that case,
Speaker 1: he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude maybe
Speaker 1: that which a careful philosopher would have towards the gods
Speaker 1: of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that
Speaker 1: Zeus and Pside and Inhera and the rest of the
Speaker 1: Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss
Speaker 1: to find conclude of arguments. An agnostic may think the
Speaker 1: Christian God as improbable as the Olympians. In that case,
Speaker 1: he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.
Speaker 1: As we said at the beginning, the reasons for identifying
Speaker 1: as agnostic are myriad and different for every person. Draper,
Speaker 1: who has participated in high profile debates with Christian philosophers,
Speaker 1: calls himself a local atheist and global agnostic. He explained,
Speaker 1: I'm an atheist about the all powerful, all knowing, all
Speaker 1: good God, I'm agnostic about God in a broader sense.
Speaker 1: Is there some being that qualifies for the title God?
Speaker 1: There could be such a thing. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other philosophical topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And
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