When was agnosticism founded

For elaboration of these points, see Zenk Rowe, a friendly atheist himself, contrasts friendly atheism with unfriendly atheism and indifferent atheism. Unfriendly atheism is the view that atheism is true and that no sophisticated theistic belief is justified.

In spite of its highly misleading name, this view might be held by the friendliest, most open-minded and religiously tolerant person imaginable. Perhaps an even more interesting distinction is between pro-God atheism and anti-God atheism. A pro-God atheist like John Schellenberg who coined the term is someone who in some real sense loves God or at least the idea of God, who tries very hard to imagine what sorts of wonderful worlds such a being might create instead of just assuming that such a being would create a world something like the world we observe , and who at least partly for that very reason believes that God does not exist.

Such an atheist might be sympathetic to the following sentiments:. It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty.

On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument—their intellect—which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence.

It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education.

For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously. Strawson By contrast, anti-God atheists like Thomas Nagel — find the whole idea of a God offensive and hence not only believe but also hope very much that no such being exists. Also, in none of those senses is one required to be an atheist in order to be an antitheist, so antitheism is not a variety of atheism. He said that he originally. He argued that, since neither of those beliefs is adequately supported by evidence, we ought to suspend judgment on the issue of whether or not there is a God.

For example, it might be identified with any of the following positions: that neither theistic belief nor atheistic belief is justified, that neither theistic belief nor atheistic belief is rationally required, that neither belief is rationally permissible, that neither has warrant, that neither is reasonable, or that neither is probable.

Yet they have faith that God exists and such faith at least in some cases involves belief. Thus, some fideists are extreme agnostics in the epistemological sense even though they are not agnostics in the psychological sense. More likely, though, what is being claimed by these self-identified agnostic atheists is that, while their belief that God does not exist has positive epistemic status of some sort minimally, it is not irrational , it does not have the sort of positive epistemic status that can turn true belief into knowledge.

Hopefully, context will help to disambiguate. This makes a huge difference to the issue of justification.

Consider, for example, this passage written by the agnostic, Anthony Kenny 84—85 :. I do not myself know of any argument for the existence of God which I find convincing; in all of them I think I can find flaws. Equally, I do not know of any argument against the existence of God which is totally convincing; in the arguments I know against the existence of God I can equally find flaws.

So that my own position on the existence of God is agnostic. That view would, of course, come in two flavors: theistic gnosticism—the view that theism is known and hence atheism is not —and atheistic gnosticism—the view that atheism is known and hence theism is not. Jeanine Diller points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist.

Indeed, many atheists are only vaguely aware of the variety of concepts of God that there are. For example, there are the Gods of classical and neo-classical theism: the Anselmian God, for instance, or, more modestly, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good creator-God that receives so much attention in contemporary philosophy of religion. There are also the Gods of specific Western theistic religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism, which may or may not be best understood as classical or neo-classical Gods.

There are also panentheistic and process theistic Gods, as well as a variety of other God-concepts, both of Western and non-Western origin, that are largely ignored by even the most well-informed atheists.

Philosophically sophisticated theists, for their part, often act as if refuting naturalism establishes the existence of the particular sort of God in which they believe. Diller distinguishes local atheism, which denies the existence of one sort of God, from global atheism, which is the proposition that there are no Gods of any sort—that all legitimate concepts of God lack instances.

Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify Diller 11— Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities. Global atheists might object that, even if atheism and metaphysical naturalism are not identical, a belief in the former can be based on a belief in the latter; in other words, if one has good arguments for the view that nature is a closed system, then that removes any burden to consider each God-concept separately, so long as all legitimate concepts of God imply that God is a supernatural entity—that is, an entity that is not natural, yet affects nature.

This is no easy task, especially given recent work on naturalist forms of theism e. The crucial point, however, is that no one has yet made that case. Concerning the issue of what exactly counts as a legitimate or religiously adequate concept of God, various approaches might be taken. See, for example, Le Poidevin 52; and Leftow 66— In some religions, especially but not only certain Western monotheistic ones, worship involves total devotion and unconditional commitment.

To be worthy of that sort of worship if that is even possible when the pool of potential worshipers are autonomous agents like most adult humans requires an especially impressive God, though it is controversial whether or not it requires a perfect one. For example, even if the ancient Egyptians worshipped the Sun and regarded it as worthy of such worship, the global atheist need not deny the existence of the Sun.

Instead, the global atheist can claim that the ancient Egyptians were mistaken in thinking that the Sun is worthy of religious worship. If we examine, without prejudice, the ancient heathen mythology, as contained in the poets, we shall not discover in it any such monstrous absurdity, as we may at first be apt to apprehend.

Where is the difficulty in conceiving, that the same powers or principles, whatever they were, which formed this visible world, men and animals, produced also a species of intelligent creatures, of more refined substance and greater authority than the rest? That these creatures may be capricious, revengeful, passionate, voluptuous, is easily conceived; nor is any circumstance more apt, among ourselves, to engender such vices, than the license of absolute authority. And in short, the whole mythological system is so natural, that, in the vast variety of planets and world[s], contained in this universe, it seems more than probable, that, somewhere or other, it is really carried into execution.

Hume [] 53, emphasis added. There is much debate about whether Hume was an atheist or a deist or neither, but no one uses this passage to support the view that he was actually a polytheist.

Perhaps this is because, even if there are natural alien beings that, much like the ancient Greek and Roman gods, are far superior in power to humans but quite similar in their moral and other psychological qualities, presumably no one, at least nowadays, would be tempted to regard them as worthy of religious worship.

One possible flaw in the proposed account of global atheism is that it seems to imply overlap between deism and atheism. Of course, not all deists would count as atheists on the proposed account, but some would. For example, consider a deist who believes that, while a supernatural person intentionally designed the universe, that deity did not specifically intend for intelligent life to evolve and has no interest whatsoever in the condition or fate of such life.

According to one relatively modest form of agnosticism, neither versatile theism nor its denial, global atheism, is known to be true. Robin Le Poidevin 76 argues for this position as follows:. This probability depends solely on a priori considerations like the intrinsic features of the content of the proposition in question e. Le Poidevin defends the first premise of this argument by stating that, while intrinsic probability plausibly depends inversely on the specificity of a claim the less specific the claim, the more ways there are for it to be true and so the more probable it is that it is true , it is impossible to show that versatile theism is more specific or less specific than its denial.

This defense appears to be incomplete, for Le Poidevin never shows that the intrinsic probability of a proposition depends only on its specificity, and there are good reasons to believe that this is not the case see, for example, Swinburne 80— Le Poidevin could respond, however, that specificity is the only uncontroversial criterion of intrinsic probability, and this lack of consensus on other criteria is all that is needed to adequately defend premise 1. One way to defend the second premise is to review the relevant evidence and argue that it is ambiguous Le Poidevin chapter 4; and Draper Another way is to point out that atheism, which is just the proposition that theism is false, is compatible with a variety of very different hypotheses, and these hypotheses vary widely in how well they account for the total evidence.

Thus, to assess how well atheism accounts for the total evidence, one would have to calculate a weighted average of how well these different atheistic hypotheses account for the total evidence, where the weights would be the different intrinsic probabilities of each of these atheistic hypotheses. This task seems prohibitively difficult Draper and in any case has not been attempted, which supports the claim that there is no firm basis upon which to judge whether the total evidence supports theism or atheism.

The agnostic, however, might reply that this sense of the divine, unlike memory, operates at most sporadically and far from universally. Also, unlike other basic cognitive faculties, it can easily be resisted, and the existence of the beliefs it is supposed to produce can easily be explained without supposing that the faculty exists at all.

Thus, the analogy to memory is weak. For the argument also contains two inferences from steps 1 and 2 to step 3 and from step 3 to step 4 , neither of which is obviously correct. Almost all well-known arguments for atheism are arguments for a particular version of local atheism. One possible exception to this rule is an argument recently made popular by some New Atheists, although it was not invented by them. Notice the obvious relevance of this argument to agnosticism.

According to one prominent member of the agnosticism family, we have no good reason to believe that God exists and no good reason to believe that God does not exist.

Clearly, if the first premise of this argument is true, then this version of agnosticism must be false. Can the no arguments argument be construed as an argument for global atheism? One might object that it is not, strictly speaking, an argument for any sort of atheism since its conclusion is not that atheism is true but instead that there is good reason to believe that atheism is true. But that is just a quibble. Ultimately, whether this argument can be used to defend global atheism depends on how its first premise is defended.

The usual way of defending it is to derive it from some general principle according to which lacking grounds for claims of a certain sort is good reason to reject those claims. One objection to this principle is that not every sort of thing is such that, if it existed, then we would likely have good reason to believe that it exists. Consider, for example, intelligent life in distant galaxies cf. Morris Perhaps, however, an even more narrowly restricted principle would do the trick: whenever the assumption that a positive existential claim is true would lead one to expect to have grounds for its truth, the absence of such grounds is a good reason to believe that the claim is false.

It might then be argued that i a God would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of Her existence and so ii the absence of such evidence is a good reason to believe that God does not exist. This transforms the no arguments argument into an argument from divine hiddenness. It also transforms it into at best an argument for local atheism, since even if the God of, say, classical theism would not hide, not all legitimate God-concepts are such that a being instantiating that concept would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of its existence.

The sort of God in whose non-existence philosophers seem most interested is the eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent i. The Metaphysical Society was founded in by James Knowles as a theological society for discussing religious issues with the impartiality and open-mindedness of scientific discussions. One of its early members, Thomas Henry Huxley, coined the term agnosticism to contrast his own uncertainty with the claims of the gnostics to privileged knowledge.

The opposition to, and defence of, agnosticism is examined, as is the nature of scepticism, and the influence of Kant and Hume is explained. Access to the complete content on Very Short Introductions online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription. Please subscribe or login to access full text content. If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us. Very Short Introductions online. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction. Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous proponent of atheism today. His view of agnosticism is that it is a bit wishy-washy — at least religious believers have the courage of their convictions.

Clearly, modern Britain is uncertain about its religious beliefs. However, although Huxley coined the word himself, the first modern agnostic might be said to be Auguste Comte Comte was a French philosopher, and was especially influential in the development of sociology and positivism. It was from his positivism that he has been thought of as the first agnostic. Positivism, influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is a philosophical doctrine that elevates the scientific method as the only arbiter of truth.

Knowledge consists of those things which are empirically verifiable — that is, things which can be proved or disproven through the senses understanding tools such as microscopes or MRI machines as simply extensions of the senses. It is beyond the limits of our knowledge, and to consider the truth or falseness of such things is essentially meaningless.

This is an attack on metaphysics — on everything beyond the immediate physical world. In this light, to be an agnostic is not so much a middle position, directly between theism and atheism, belief and un-belief, but rather a clarification of un-belief.

Bertrand Russell , a towering figure of twentieth-century British philosophy, and the quintessential analytic philosopher, himself expressed such a view. This reduces agnosticism to a sort of philosophical specificity. Indeed, he goes on to say that, strictly speaking, he is also agnostic about the existence of the gods of Ancient Greece.

Although some things are more probable than others, and there exist degrees of certainty, it is often felicitous to remind ourselves that there are no such things as certainties. He finishes the piece warning of the dangers of dogma and persecution — here he must have had in mind both the religious persecutions of the past and the atheistic intolerance of the Soviet Union in his own day.