Agnosticism Defended

Just for the record, in case no one's really figured it out by now, I consider myself, for lack of a better term, agnostic. Years of cautious and earnest moral inquiry have put me in a position where I find it impossible to reconcile the idea of a loving and benevolent creator with the inconsistencies that seem so apparent to me in the dogma of religion. That's not to say I haven't tried; when you're raised in the church, I think the hardest thing you'll ever have to do in your life is to admit to yourself that maybe it isn't exactly the perfect answer to everything that you grew up believing it was. It's far easier, really, to look for the loopholes in your own objections that will reinforce what you really want to be true. Religion simplifies your life. It codifies morality. It provides a social support system that, sadly, the secular world seems to be lacking. The idea of admitting the possibility - while by no means the certainty - that it might not be true is horrifying at best, because doing so also takes away that structure and the certainty, however misguided it has the potential to be, that there is meaning in life. Of course I miss those things. I dislike feeling like an outsider in my family because I hold a different belief system. And sometimes I yearn for the simplicity of having an entire world viewpoint already laid out in front of me. But if I am honest - an attribute we normally credit to morality, so a lack of effort toward that end would seem counterproductive - I have to admit that I simply cannot accept a dogmatic, monotheistic religion, no matter how convenient or comforting it may be. A complete explanation of the reasoning behind this would be pretty elaborate and take more space and time than I have for this post. For the time being, I'll simply say that I think by and large human beings take themselves far too seriously. What could possibly possess us to think, should an omnipotent and omnipresent being actually exist, that we would in any way pretend to comprehend his/her/its nature? Or at least that we would be able to do so to the point that we were so sure of ourselves that we were willing to kill for our beliefs? Do we really believe that those who believe the way we do are the only people endowed with any sort of capacity for the discernment of truth, and that those who believe in other religions are somehow spiritually stunted? And if so, what would possibly possess a supposedly benevolent creator to create the majority of the world to be what would essentially amount to a mass of spiritual retards?

By the same token, though, I have a great deal of difficulty swallowing the idea of atheism. The belief that there is no god is still a belief, and one that in my view has an equally small body of supporting evidence as does theism. I'll admit that the atheist's viewpoint seems slightly more logical to me at the moment (a stance which I reserve the right to change as life experience warrants it), but that in no way means that I'm prepared to make the staunch and unwavering assertion that there is no god at all.

There's been a slew of books in the past couple of years out of the atheist/secular humanist camp, written by intensely intelligent people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. The most recent is a book called God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, which I just today finished reading. I think the trend and the growing popularity behind it is largely a backlash against the fundamentalist right, and what might have been relegated to the fringes of heretical left-wing society a few years ago has become a major movement as more and more people are growing disillusioned by the idiocy that inflexibility often tends to bring about. (God is Not Great, for instance, has raced onto the bestseller list in the short time it's been on the shelves; walking in downtown Seattle yesterday I saw no fewer than three people reading it as they waited for the bus). And by and large I agree with the general principle behind what these men are saying: religion, and its underlying attitude of I'm-right-and-you're-wrong, often does more harm than it does good, and if you're interested (which most of my readers probably aren't), these books are chock full of historical and modern-day examples. But the problem I see is that, for all of their railing against the evils of religion, they offer little in the way of an alternative. Building a belief system on the disproving of another belief system seems oddly circular and hollow to me. Alright, educated liberals, we know what you're against. But what are you for? It seems to me that we're pulling away the rug and not replacing the floor paneling underneath. Eventually we're going to fall through the hole.

What is wrong with not knowing? Maybe not even "not knowing" so much as admitting the possibility, however small, that we might not know? Is it simply too frightening to admit that we don't know completely what's going on around us, and that that lack of knowledge basically amounts to a lack of control? Maybe we're afraid of what happens after we die. Fair enough, but if I were God I really wouldn't want a mass of people following me - and killing and proselytizing in my name - with no motivation other than fear. Maybe we think that morality can only come from religion. But kindness to others seems to lose some of its moral weight when it's borne of coercion, supernatural or otherwise. When we force a child to share his toys, we are merely passing along proper rules of social interaction so the whole of society doesn't end up going to pot. When we see a child share his toys out of his own volition, we are watching real kindness, the kind that comes from nothing other than simply wanting to love another person. Do we really believe that there is no moral difference between the two?

My question is this: why can't kindness be enough? Why can't we simply teach that loving our fellow man is the pinnacle of morality, and leave it at that? Why do we need religion to reinforce the idea with dogma on one side, and the theory of self-interested altruism on the other? Doing so really just robs us of the satisfaction of loving other people because loving other people is a good thing to do and cheapens the idea of kindness for kindness' sake. One might argue that human nature prevents this kind of utopic idea from taking shape. But I can't help but wonder how much of this idea of human nature has been pounded into us by religion in the first place. We're constantly being told that people are bad, that they tend toward evil more often than good. Our media is constantly showing pictures of murderers and thieves. But do we really believe that these people are in the majority? Isn't it possible that we simply have our cameras pointed the wrong direction? And then we have to ask ourselves who created the conditions under which these "bad" people's personalities were shaped. I'd be willing to place money on the idea that what we refer to so condescendingly as "human nature" ultimately owes far more to human nurture, or lack thereof. Might we not fear other people simply because we fear what's inside of ourselves? And wouldn't that fear be mitigated if we could convince ourselves that we are capable of the kind of altruism that goes beyond self-interested motivation? Can we create a "religion" that is founded on nothing more than the belief in the good in people? This is, after all, the one thing in life that I've seen more than my share of evidence for.