What is agnosticism?

Gnosticism is the ancient system, which dared to pry into God's nature by human speculation, affecting to soar above revelation. Agnosticism is the modern infidelity, which, abandoning revelation as unreal or impossible, professes that God, heaven, hell, and man's future state, if such there be, are unknowable. Of this apostate ignorance some, alas! are proud, as ancients were of impious Gnosticism.

For "Agnostics" (whose high priest was Herbert Spencer: see his "First Principles," chapters 3, 5), not denying the existence of God, but saying that He is unknowable (cf. Exposition, p. 429), DUTY takes the place of God, and so Ethical Societies have sprung up with their "Ethical Religion" (Mill's "Religion of Humanity"), a protagonist of which is Dr. Stanton Coit.* As to the relation of morality to religion, see Wentscher, pp. 146 f., and Achelis, "Ethics," p. 42 ff.

Thus the moral reason is not constructive, but destructive only; and destructive of (alas) the very power which would sustain a man through life, or at the stake if need be. Strangely enough, the thoughtful and sincere are they who must pay the penalty of renouncing what Mr. Greg calls "this strengthening and ennobling grace." That is one of the "Enigmas of Life," as he understands life: an enigma one might have thought essentially atheistic, but which is only "Agnostic," appertaining, that is, to a philosophy which without venturing to say, There is no God, simply affirms that He cannot make Himself known to His creatures, — that they know enough about Him to know that The certainty of uncertainty as to all it most imports to know is what the painful toil of centuries of research has at last achieved.

Is it not significant that the wisest men of the world, — leaving revelation aside and dependence upon the living God, which faith is, — have not one gleam of light as to the origin of all we see about us! They can tell you how things are formed by natural growth, how they have apparently developed; but when they come to propound a theory, God is not there. He is left out. As a matter of fact, it is understood that the greatest proof of wisdom as to the relation of God with His creation is to reach the point where men confess they know nothing; so the name that has become familiar with them is "Agnosticism," (knowing nothing). And it tells the truth; they know nothing of God, for without faith you cannot know Him. That is what our scripture tells us: "Through faith we understand." Faith receives the knowledge that is imparted; and if you close your eyes and ears to what God has to reveal, there is absolutely nothing that you can know.

According to the advocates of another theory, the wisest thing is to be ignorant of everything except what the senses or the higher affections teach. As to whether there is a Being in any higher position than man, or any future existence for man, they know nothing, and there is, they say, no means of knowing: it is all unknown. The key to their ignorance of God (which they call Agnosticism) is that they do not want to obey, or to know Him.

We must remember that, unlike man, God never has to experiment, or amend, or improve, in any revelation He makes. It is perfect from the outset, and if men attempt to add to it or subtract from it they do so to their own ruin. These first century "antichrists" were known as "Gnostics," — the "Knowing-ones" — the opposite to the Agnostics of our days, who confess that they do not know and who even aver that nobody can know.

But has God left us in the dark? To assume that He has so is not the way of the wise, for they assume nothing. To commence by assuming that God cannot or will not reveal Himself and His thoughts to us is to beg the entire question, and is therefore the height of folly. Many, also, pride themselves on the name of "Agnostics," or "those who do not know." They say that they know nothing of the unseen world around. Did they stop there, sympathy and pity might be felt for them, but they do not. In nearly every case they do not content themselves with saying, "we do not know," but they go on to say "you do not know, and no one can know that which we ourselves do not know." Where is the consistency of this? If a man confessedly knows nothing of the unseen, how can he tell what another may know? By saying that no one else can possibly know that which he has not learnt himself he has left the ranks of the wise, and done that which he so heartily condemns in others, viz. made a most tremendous assumption without the least particle of proof. If he be a real agnostic let him stop when he says, "I do not know," and let him admit his ignorance as to what any other person may have learnt, otherwise he only condemns himself by the position he takes up.

Every one that cares may know that Prof. Huxley puts inquiries of this kind on the same level with "lunar politics," and that to make the little corner of the world in which one lives a little less miserable and ignorant, as his duty is, "it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the cause of events. Each of these beliefs," he says, "can be verified experimentally, as often as we like to try." Beyond this, he conceives we have but the Maya of the Buddhist — illusion. And a writer in The Westminster Review generalizes this as the conviction of the scientific man, of whom he says, "Above all things, he is silent in the presence of truths (or falsehoods) which he has ascertained to be beyond his reach. And he commands equally, in respect of these, silence on all others of mankind."

Thus it is very clear how a board of such directors would extinguish the theologians. And the very ignorance as to all that it imports man most to know, and of what in general he craves most to know, that very ignorance which pleads so strongly for the need (and so the fact) of revelation, is made the all-sufficient argument against it. The learned scientists of the agnostic school — in plain English, the school of ignorance — know, by reason of their own ignorance, that while all other instincts are provided for, this one, as strong as any, has and can have no provision made for it. And the One whom they have decreed to be the Unknowable, by that very decree they declare they know so well as to know that He cannot (or will not) reveal Himself to man! For if He be the Unknown, they cannot even pronounce Him the Unknowable and if He is not the Unknown, then the Unknowable He cannot be.

The day of manifestation is coming, and God is not in haste to justify Himself. The darkness is the discipline of faith, but in the face of Christ is glory without a vail. If the question put to Himself, "Lord, are there few that be saved" brought no direct reply, can we force an answer to a very similar question? "Secret things belong unto the Lord our God:" we may not rob the future of what is to be revealed by it, when at last every eye shall see what faith unseeing knows and rejoices in, that "the Lord is righteous in all His ways." Where agnosticism means, not unbelief, but faith, — where it is the confession of nothingness, and the refusal to be wise above what is written, is it a reproach to be thus far agnostics?

Not that the Agnostic excludes the study of origins like the Positivist; but he is averse to the Originator, and severs cause from will and intention, because it points to a First Cause, and this a Person. They are alike guilty of the fallacy, that "because a phenomenon is a thing, a thing is a phenomenon" (ib. 184), as with many others counted philosophers, who see not different orders of "laws" for different orders of agents, physical, moral or spiritual, temporal or everlasting." So far from regarding that which transcends phenomena as the All-Nothingness, I regard it as the All-Being. Everywhere I have spoken of the Unknowable as the Ultimate Reality in the sole existence: all things present to consciousness being but shows of it. Mr. Harrison entirely inverts our relative positions. As I understand the case, the 'All-Nothingness' is that phenomenal existence in which M. Comte and his followers profess to dwell" (Sp. in Nineteenth Cent. No. 89, p. 6). Mr. A. says justly, "Positivism, to make man all in all, makes God a chimera, a fiction; Agnosticism, to make an Ultimate Reality an unknowable power all in all, makes man and nature a mere show, an All-Nothingness; Christianity makes God all in all, with nature a real world around man and under God … Mr. Spencer formally rejects any imputation of intending his religion to call us to worship, or to bring in either spiritual comforts or moral strength. His expectation of making this supplant Christianity is grounded on his being able to make it appear that God is not a living Creator and Ruler of men, men, but that all things are mere shows of one being, itself a stream, an energy, a power, a substratum, or anything, so long as you admit that it has not personality or intelligence, or any of the attributes usually assigned to God."