We Are All Agnostic

When it comes to God, we are all agnostic. And I think I mean that quite literally.

The word comes from the Greek agnosis [α-γνωσις] which simply means “not knowing.”

Is there a God? Is there no God? We simply don’t know, if by “know,” we mean, “are certain about the scientific facts.”

I am not sure why this is a
scandalous thing to say. It seems quite biblical to me. In fact, the famous
passage on faith in Hebrews 11 seems to say that faith can only
exist for those who are agnostic.

“Now faith is confidence in what we
hope for and assurance about what we do not see. ² This
is what the ancients were commended for. ³ By faith we
understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that
what is seen was not made out of what was visible . . . ⁸ By
faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his
inheritance,obeyed and went, even though he did not know
where he was going . . . ¹³ All these people were still living
by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised
. . .”

If we believe that our Christianity consists in what we know then you will not be able to accept what I am saying here. But if our Christianity consists of how we live, then what I say may be more palatable.

What makes one an agnostic, a
Christian, or an atheist, is not whether or not we “know,” it is what we do
with our “not knowing.”

Or, as I have become accustomed to saying, our faith is not in our “certainty” but in our “confidence,” and the difference between those two terms is trust. 

So, then, for me, those who claim
agnosticism are perhaps the most honest but the least courageous of all. They
acknowledge something important about the human condition but also something
largely uninteresting. “I am agnostic. I don’t know if there is a God or not.”
Okay. Welcome to being human. What else ya got?

Of course, what they generally mean is, “and so I will choose to stay as detached as possible from the whole conversation. I will hedge my bets.” And I find that to be an uninteresting mode of living. The atheist and Christian then are like the woman who knows that she cannot know for sure if she will get hit by a car today, but goes out to live her life anyway. The agnostic is like the man who knows that he cannot know for sure if he will get hit by a car today, so he stays home.

The atheist and Christian may calculate the odds differently, but they still go out.

And in this way, the Christian and
the atheist are more alike than different. We are all agnostic. But it is only
the Christian and the atheist who are willing to take a risk. They both
courageously make an existential stand when no conclusions are available.

Perhaps the Christian is the most
imaginative and courageous of them all (as Hebrews 11 attests). Or, perhaps we
are the most delusional and stupid. There’s typically a fine line between
those. The Christian thrusts her agnosticism onto God, not knowing, but
believing, not understanding, but trusting. Instead of living by the rules of
others, out-rationalizing the rationalists, out-sciencing the scientists, the
Christian ought to celebrate her ability to create, to out-imagine those
without imagination. And this is not because we have more knowledge, it is
because we have more trust.

I understand this may not be the Christianity that most Americans are used to.

In fact, everything I have said might sound downright anti-Christian. And maybe it is. I just don’t know.